A New Accent Is Developing in Southwest Kansas

[KAMSPioneer]

Whoa, I never thought an article about Liberal would be on HN. I'm a Liberal, KS resident since about 2005, and now that I think about it...people here do have a kind of unique accent, but I don't know if it's really as striking as the article makes it out to be. I don't know, maybe I've just gotten used to it.

I was shocked when I opened the article and saw our welcome sign. Hahaha

[CodeCube]

fwiw, I grew up in Miami, and I 100% thought that me and my friends did not have an accent of any kind whatsoever ... because for whatever reason, there weren't really a lot of people born and raised in miami in popular media (at least that I was aware of, days before Pitbull, etc).

Well, I moved away to central florida (very different demographics) at 17 ... and it wasn't until a few years later when I went back to visit, that I realized just how distinct (to my ears at least) my friends sounded. Nowadays, I can hear someone start to speak, and within a few minutes of listening can tell that they were raised in Miami. It's a few subtle clues that thus far have almost always been right

[acobster]

Listening to the audio, it's subtle but it definitely sounds unique to my ear. :)

[dopamean]

What do you do there? Why'd you move there in 05?

[exabrial]

Ah, an article about my home state. It's worth pointing out how isolated this town is... Interstate doesn't even run through that part of the state, and the nearest 'big city' is hours away.

[baxtr]

Isolation is probably an important factor for the development of an accent

[paddy_m]

I was playing around with PostGIS recently and figured out the most remote city/zip in each state. I was looking at the distance to the nearest city with at least 100k people. For Kansas I came up with Rexford(north west KS) is closest to Aurora (pop 345k, 219Mi away), there are 23k people within 50 miles of Rexford. Rexford does have I70 running through it.

  zip  | state |  primary_city   | substring  |  cls_st  |    cls_city     | population | pop_50_m  | dist_100k 
 67753 | KS    | Rexford         | Thomas Cou | Colorado | Aurora          |    345,803 |    23,108 |   219.145

[KAMSPioneer]

It is worth pointing out. I'm a Liberal resident and the geographical isolation can be a pain. It's getting better as the town grows, but at the end of the day we're still very alone out here.

[colordrops]

Interesting. The "spanish influenced" accent described in the video sounds like standard English in southern california.

[baxtr]

Yeah, I get the feeling they make a big fuzz out of it. In the video she’s mentioning the different ways an “a” is pronounced. If you look at England, every other towns has a different accent (that’s what I’ve heard)

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the-differ...

[yathern]

Agreed. The samples sound identical to how many of my friends in Southern California speak. Some with hispanic heritage, some without. A slightly more open 'a' vowel, and a slightly different stressings on some syllables. I wouldn't say this is a new accent at all. The only thing peculiar is that it's Kansas, where you might not expect that same latin influence.

[hahamrfunnyguy]

Yeah, I would have guessed the speaker was from SOCAL. Every region in the US has it's own variation subtle as it maybe: speed, intonation, word choice etc...

[felideon]

Same as in Miami.

[joshuaheard]

As someone who grew up in Southern California and the "surfer" and "valley girl" cultures and dialects, I was hoping this article would provide some insight into the formation of such things. However, the biggest takeaway seemed to be the surprise that this was happening in the middle of Kansas. It was interesting that the Hispanic population quadrupled there recently, but no conclusions were drawn by the author.

[danielhanlon]

Strange-the pronunciation changes that she demonstrates with "hand" seem to be bringing the accent closer to RP English!

[asveikau]

Yeah even among US accents I felt in the video she was really exaggerating Midwestern US accents when saying the "normal" version of "hand". On the coasts this "strange" pronunciation is not so uncommon.

[petecox]

Yes, I noticed the sounds in hat and hand still weren't identical but perhaps she's exaggerating an 'RP-like' sound to emphasize the distinction with general nasalized American English.

[peterburkimsher]

Dialects are interesting. While it's still mutually intelligible, it's an accent. I wonder whether the Liberal accent will develop into a separate language like Louisiana Creole?

I made some graphs about the status of languages in Windows/macOS/Ubuntu/Google Translate/Facebook/Wikipedia/IB, and included a section about dialects of Chinese.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17344466

[gammarator]

The visual style of this map is overwhelming, but it's a great map of US dialects with links to native speakers: http://aschmann.net/AmEng/

see also https://www.daredictionary.com/

[rnernento]

Is there any audio of people speaking with the accent available somewhere?

[saudioger]

Linked in the body of the article, it's a very subtle variation

[atomicUpdate]

> “But we would find them not only among the Latinx youth but also among many of the white youth as well. It seems like these variants—because Liberal is now a Latinx-majority community—are just becoming the way this community sounds.”

People actually use "Latinx"? Up until now I'd only seen that in discussions about it.

[dmix]

I was surprised to see that as well. I thought it was for particular group, not as a replacement for 'Latinos'.

Similar to people getting upset at using "guys" which the dictionary defines as referencing all genders, and only male when used as "guy". Latinos makes perfect common sense in the same way.

This seems like a bit of activism by the author rather than entirely necessary, especially considering it links to an article about "Gender Inclusivity" from within an article about Kansas accents... Unless I missed the notice that using "Latino-majority community" is no longer correct?

[AdamM12]

Is it an old wives' tale that east coast news stations send reporters with heavy accents to midwest stations to unlearn them?

[toomanybeersies]

Does anyone else find the whole 'Latinx' thing nonsensical?

I understand the reasoning, it's about being gender neutral. But why don't they just knock the vowel off the end and just say 'Latin'?

[skywhopper]

Try googling "why latinx" and reading up on it. It's deeper than just gender-neutrality, and it's not just about being "sensical". Some here will dismiss it because there are political aspects to the choice. But I assume most people who comment on Hacker News under self-determined pseudonyms can respect the desire and the right of people to come up with labels for referring to themselves that make sense to them, whatever the reason is.

[TheCapeGreek]

I agree it is nonsensical, but I'd rather it stay as it used to be.

Through the usual meme grapevine I saw a tumblr post on reddit about this. Being gender neutral/genderless in this case is also actively ignoring Spanish linguistics (and arguably culture). Spanish is a gendered language like many others. It's not some patriarchal conspiracy to say Latino instead of Latina or vice versa, it's just how the language works. If I remember correctly as well, the gender neutral form would still be Latino.

Granted, they're being referred to through English here, which one could argue could benefit from just being 'Latin' (confusion between actual Latin aside). I'm of the opinion to keep loan words as close to the original as possible. Language changes over time but some words are still explicitly from elsewhere. So, keep it as Latino/Latina.

[enriquto]

I find the usage of the word "latin" in the U.S. rather amusing, because they awkwardly use it to refer to people of non-european heritage... as an european, for me it is synonymous with "ancient roman".

[corpMaverick]

It is nonsensical to me.

Latino is a Spanish short cut for Latinoamericano or Latinoamericana. The anglicized version would be Latinamerican or just Latin. So they add the gender, Latino or Latina, and then renege it using Latinx. Why adding the gender in the first place?

[pavlov]

The Swedish letter Å would be useful here:

"Latinå"

Too hard to type on physical keyboards though.

[andai]

How's it meant to be pronounced? Latinks?

[rainbowmverse]

The same reason you use they, them, and their instead of dropping pronouns entirely. It's easier to make language gender-neutral than it is to remove the slot gender occupies entirely.

There are probably other reasons.

[drb91]

Probably because people don’t use “Latin” to describe themselves; people use “Latinx”.

[mintplant]

> Ironically, he adds, it’s a bit of an exclusive phrase itself: “It’s very rarely that I find someone from outside of Liberal using TFTI.”

What? A simple web search will show this is quite common.

[code_duck]

I think he means used in spoken communications.

[huangbong]

Everyone and their mother uses TFTI. This is satire right?

[drchickensalad]

I've been on the internet for 6+ hours a day for the past 15 years and I have literally never seen it.

[hellofunk]

I can disprove your theory in two ways: I do not use this acronym. And, neither does my mother. That’s two people to discredit your hypothesis. And both myself, and my mother, belong to the group called “everyone“.

[graedus]

I've never heard or seen it until this moment.

[pimlottc]

Welcome to the edge of your bubble.

[morganvachon]

Online, perhaps. Not so much in spoken language.

It's also a case of youth driving language changes. People in their 40s and older likely wouldn't use Internet-born acronyms as spoken words, but younger folks might (and frequently do in my experience).

[IncRnd]

Nope. While TFTI as a word may be common in your community, TFTI is not used by everyone.

I'll assume that you meant it sarcastically, though :) Kind of like when you don't get the invite and say TFTI.