The California Accent | Valley Girl Talk to Surfer Slang
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- čas přidán 7. 06. 2024
- The California Accent | Valley Girl Talk to Surfer Slang
In this video you will learn all the ways we speak in my home state of California. You will learn various ways to achieve the stereotypical valley girl accent, made famous by Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, and new vocabulary words used by chill Californian surfers.
I will also provide a brief history about how our accent developed and teach you how our accent compares to the rest of the US and the UK.
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The Californian Accent:
- Valley Girl Talk
-Creaky Voice/Vocal Fry
-Upspeak
- 6 Pronunciations of 'T'
- Rhotic R
California Vocabulary:
1. Awesome
2. Totally
3. Dude
4. Sick
5. Hella/hecka
6. Like
Geography + Abbreviations:
1. LA (Los Angeles)
2. SD (San Diego)
3. OC (Orange County)
4. SB(Santa Barbara)
5. SLO (San Luis Obispo)
6. SF (San Francisco)
7. norcal + socal
8. Yosemite (pronunciation)
Sources:
"The Californians" skit from Saturday Night Live:
• The Californians: Stua...
Using "like" as a filler word: Clueless RSVP Video
• Clueless | "whatever" ...
Dude + Totally from Finding Nemo:
• SQUIRT - Finding Nemo ...
US Map:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
I AM a Valley Girl!! I grew up in Granada Hills. the valley was my stomping grounds. I thought I invented that way of speaking. I'm 66 now
I wanna add that Californians put like emphasis on words in a sentence after a pause. They say things like: "Dude, we went to the BEACH and we saw a lot of SHARKS on the coast, so we were like totally scared to SWIM" or "I'm sorry, I can't DO that right now, you know? I'm HELLA busy"
Totallllly 😉
Like Nick Cage. Lolol
Great presentation. I'm an 83 year old linguist, 3rd generation Californian. Very accurate summary of our styles of speech here. Thanks forvyour contribution.
Thank you teacher for the explanation about the californian accent.
I love this! My kids grew up in Northern CA and of course say "hella" all the time (my students do, too!), but one thing that I think is interesting is how people use hella in a variety of functions in the sentence. For example, just last night my son said "I"m gonna study hella," meaning "I'm gonna study a lot"!
Oh yes! I forgot about the “a lot” meaning- great point! 😄🫶🏼
@@YourFavoriteEnglishTeacher I love how that word is an example of flexibility -- how speakers can play with the language! :)
West coast Canadian here. My friends and I say, "Hella," all the time.
I totally love this awesome video ❤ thanks a bunch !🙏
Hehehe thank you!! I’m so glad you found it SICK 😆
You best teacher i never had!
Aw it’s an honor! Thank you 🙏🏼
Native Californian here, and never heard anyone who really speaks like the people in the SNL Californian sketches.
True- they really exaggerate it 😄
Native Southern Californian and sure, it's exaggerated, but you can still see the origins of it
It's extremely exaggerated and I was lost when I first heard it. There is a small kernel of truth to some of it though.
Orange Country and Santa Cruz is closer to this.
We did in the 70s
The best video on CZcams about California accent 🔥
I appreciate it, thank you! I put a lot of time and effort into this one and am glad you think so.
Thank you, Cali. That was a totally awesome English lesson
I’m so glad you enjoyed it! 😄
Actually quite informative--but you also have an underlying accent that perhaps may be from the upper Midwest. You say example as if it were "exampil", and you also have a bit of the "iya" sound, as in "Hi--I'm Kiyathee" (Cathy). Anyway, it's all fascinating--and thanks for sharing!
Nice one dear Amy. Thank you so much.
Glad you liked it Gyan 🥰
Thanks Amy good to see you again😊
Hi!! Thanks for watching 👩🏼🏫☺️
Merry Christmas to you🎄🎄
May your holidays be full of warmth and cheer 🎄🎄🎁🎁
did i write correctly?
You toadally explained whyyyy the accent that Paris HilTon uses annoys the daylighs out of meeee, awesome! Thaaank youuuu !!
Loved it, thank you dear Amy. Gyan
You’re welcome Gyan ☺️ happy to share about my home state!
Merry Christmas to you.🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄
You too! 🎄☺️
I am going to California soon so I want to learn the local dialect. This is very interesting. Thank you.
Awesome! Tomorrow, I am posting the pronunciation of popular cities- stay tuned!
Amy is a Cali valley girl for sure. Hella awesome video.
Thanks
I LOVE this video! I need a Californian accent for a role for a musical.
I honestly feel called out and attacked. Haha I’m born and raised in SoCal and grew up going to the Grapevine (or Central Valley) where there’s more of a southern dialect, but I’ve don’t almost all the stuff you talked about and I don’t know if I like that. 😂😂 thanks for sharing!!!
Glad you enjoyed it! It was so funny making it and hearing myself doing all the things I was explaining 😆
Hi Amy. Thank you so much for making this video. I learned vocab abbreviations as well. In Iran we have also different accents. Omid🙌🙌😁😁😁😁
I’m so glad you enjoyed the video Omid!
Oh dear, you are totally sick and awesome in this video... Btw, those words like 😅 totally, awesome, sick, Hella, hecka, dude are my life savers and a mighty thanks to you for teaching me those words and moreover that I had survived last two years in my daily conversations largely due to those few words... 😂
Love those cute little turtles as well and they are as awesome as you are my dear.... 😍
I also liked how you pronounced "totally taco", in here and that accent was 😂 just intriguingly cool and interesting as well , wished that you could have had pronounced more like that in your Videos.. 😂🤩
So, have a good day my Cali, I called "cali" cause you liked calling "Cali" right and have a quiet and sweet good night my dear teacher...
Hugs.xoxoxo
Gams ❤️
Tooootally 🤣 I’m glad you liked the video Gams!! And I love those little turtles from Finding Nemo too- so funny 😁
I went to jr. high and high school in a suburb of Seattle in the late 90’s/early 2000’s and we all said hella. I never knew it was considered NorCal slang! I still say it all the time, though I notice younger generations don’t really use it as much. Something else I noticed watching this is that, even though I was born in socal and moved to Washington state when I was 10, I say the words totally, rad, awesome, dude, and like way more than my coworkers and friends. Like, hellllllla more.
How funny “hella” was used in Seattle! I’ve never heard that before 😄 thanks for your comment and have a totally awesome day 😎 😉
I heard hella a lot in NJ back in the late 90s/00s.
as a gen z person hella was used a lot around the mid 2010s, now it’s not used as much anymore. i’m from nevada and because of the internet it was probably used all over the country because of it
"May your Christmas be merry" 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎅🎅☃️☃️🍪
Interesting! Born & living in Nor CA, I hadn't thought of how I say things. I guess I say 'maa-ann' for 'man' alot- "Awe maaann, really? Look at this traffic, just, why??" Kind of "I wasn't expecting there to be this much traffic right now." I tend to say, "noo way, for real?" If Iam suddenly hearing something surprising- perhaps if weather will be very hot or really cold etc.
I agree with 'The City' for SF, or simply, SF. I tend to say 'Iam from CAL' , never cali. or Iam more specific- 'NorCal'.
Nice vid, fun to watch! Since I have family in TX I tend to say y'all sometimes .... its amusing how people react to it here in CA- 'y'all enjoy the rest of this nice day!' 😉
Hello! You are great, love you. I am from Brazil. I need to improve my English. God bless you.
Aww thank you so much! Greetings from California 😄
"May this Christmas be merry and your home be filled with peace and bliss" 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎅🎅🎅🎁🎁🎁
Please forgive me if there is a mistake in writing.😊
Happy Holidays Merry Christmas you. Did you make Christmas cookies🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🎉
Yeah I totally love CA accent , I use to live in TO!
Aww Thousand Oaks? Great area! ☺️
Which sort of dress do like to wear in the beach when the weather is really hot, Amy? 🤗
Usually a bathing suit with a dress over it! And I definitely need sunglasses! 😎
like totally awesome dude
Totally! 😎
Heyyy, are you realky from Californis???? What part???? I love your Accent!! It is the Best!!!
Yes! Born and raised in CA 😄 it’s totally awesome here!
You should listen to this video again. You use vocal fry a lot more than you might be aware of.
I’m aware 🙈
Dude, totally, awesome, sick, like I’d say have been totally commonplace nationwide since the early 80s and are not any more common in CA than elsewhere since then. Perhaps the use of some of those lessened in some areas since then but I mean in NJ all four are still in like so totally beyond routine usage to this day, granted I think 80s talk and styles hit NJ and the general tristate region extra hard. NJ did have heavy mall culture too. Val/surfer talk and styles spread super fast nationwide, although some stuff like tubular, grody to the max and especially gag me with a spoon I don’t think spread nearly as universally and I don’t think were used a lot in many areas routinely.
In recent years I've noticed that most Americans, especially younger ones, men included, (sadly) began to speak like valley girls. This is a great video deconstructing the valley speak!
I’m glad you enjoyed it! ☺️
Haha not in recent years. Almost everyone was already talking like that in US highschools by the early to mid80s. Well other than for fry and creaky voice which I think became a lot more emphasized perhaps not until 00s.
@@rtp5768 I mean it's me who noticed that in recent years because I don't live in the US and only learn about it from CZcams. But thank you for interesting information.
Pretty much all of the video seems spot!
Other than perhaps for the stuff about vocal fry. The other stuff seems to fit what I recall of Valley Girl speak as it spread across the US in the early 80s. The extreme fry reminds me more of almost two decades later though. So I do wonder about this fry aspect a lot. Something about that section feels like way off to me.
Are you sure that such extreme vocal fry is really a part of actual true Valley Girl speaking? I could swear that the actual Valley Girls (late 70s/80s era San Fernando Valley, especially from richer areas and focused around the Galleria) sometimes didn't use fry at all and when they did it was usually a lot less pronounced than what I hear promoted on all the various recent videos on youtube. I could almost swear that the extreme vocal fry like demonstrated at the start of this video (and a number of other recentish ones) didn't really get going until the late 90s and 00s which was like almost two decades after the Valley Girls became a thing. I think this form of fry might actually have been popularized by posh LA/posh NYC raised Paris Hilton. I'm not sure it even came out of val speak at all? I mean there were different early pockets of Valley Girl talkers around SoCal so maybe a pocket or two was like that back in the 80s?? But I feel like that probably wasn't the case. I'm not sure if Paris Hilton made it up herself, as a few stories seem to imply, or maybe picked it up from over hearing some new generation 90s valley talking LA girls who had adopted much stronger fry. I'm pretty shaky on exactly how, where, exactly when the extreme constant, deep fry aspect started. I just don't seem to recall it having been a major part of actual Valley Girl talk when the talk originated from girls actually living in the SFV. I thought they did it way less and somewhat differently.
Anyway, while the slang and uptalk and extended vowels all quickly spread across the country in the early 80s, I don't recall any sort of extreme fry like that being used much in the Northeast back in the 80s. Even among those who even put on the full accent when saying stuff like "sooo bitchin'" I don't really seem to recall doing tons of drawn out, deep vocal fry from them. I think it was usually just the last word in a sentence and not drawn out or super dramatic at most and sometimes even going higher pitched and more squeaky. I know my mom commented on all the uptalk GenX was doing in the 80s but don't recall her commenting on vocal fry until probably the 00s? I guess I could always be wrong, but I just feel like this form of val speak with ultra fry is a sort of altered new 2.0 val speak and not really Valley Girl.
I feel like what many of the various videos of the last few years on youtube referring to fry and Valley Girl and the Kardashians and such maybe really mean SoCal 2.0/New Millennial SoCal 2.0 rather than Valley Girl and to something that began with Millennials in the 90s rather than GenX in the late 70s/early 80s (which was the era of the actual SFV/richer Encino Valley Girl)? Sort of a Millennial take on the original GenX val speak where a ton more fry was added and some words like rad and bitchin' were used less and a few new words were added and some of the original 80s accent was altered a bit?
It might take a little while to track down good real life videos from back then, but just taking a look at these two, the fry is not as extreme and often not there at all:
czcams.com/video/Qb21lsCQ3EM/video.html (and since they meant this as a bit of a parody you'd think the long, deep extended fry would be made very clear if extreme forms were actually common back then, she certainly goes full on with the Valley Girl general accent and doesn't hold back)
czcams.com/video/uhH9ewIEbnU/video.html (granted this is a movie and they don't always get things like this right, but I feel like this one was maybe not too bad)
Scot’s have a rhotic r too. By the way there’s no such thing as a generic ‘British’ accent just like there’s no generic ‘American’ accent. The UK is composed of different countries (Scotland, Wales and England) as well as the Province of Northern Ireland. They all have very different accents and regional differences within each country too just like in the US. There are different pronunciations for words, different phrases and slang in usage in the English language that are typical to the UK or to the US. Ditto SA, Ireland, NZ & Oz. It’s a language that enriches itself all the time and uses influences from other languages too. 🙂
Great points! Thanks for sharing ☺️
❤️❤️❤️
☺️
I was so lost the first time I saw that skit, aside from how we talk about directions and highways. I realized there's some truth to how we speak though. I always called it "lazy tongue" and sounds just come out how they come out. There's definitely a mush mouth sound too. Not "What are you doing here?" but more like "Wha aryu doing ere"
Bay Area and NorCal are slightly different. There is no highway talk like us, and much less vocal fry.
Helloooooooo! A duuuuude who grew up in SoCal 1967-1978. Like did you know the Aussies do the same thing? Since like, foreveer, Kinda like the Irish who've got that quaint lilt?
i would like to know when the pronounciation of words like "kitten" started being pronounced "keh-en." It used to be "kit'n."
Born and raised in Orange county for like 40 years and i hate it when i catch myself doing what i call the "lazy mouthed drawl" where we kind of blur certain vowels and consonants.
It doesn't help that my father is British so i have several pronunciations that i get from him so it's a constant battle
Things I've noticed from this video
All those various T rules I go back and forth on. Usually when I "enunciate" or emphasize certain words I'll violate a lot of those California Ts.
The vocal fry thing only happens in a handful of circumstances.
Hey! I’m originally from OC too 😄👋🏼
@@YourFavoriteEnglishTeacher don't tell me South Orange county.
I'm a placentia/Fullerton native
How do you do the Valley boys sound?
😁
Hello teacher
A friend of mine has a first name Dude. So whenever he walks into a room everyone goes “Dude” his Brother’s name is Pilgrim. So he gets “ how is Pilgrim?
Is this real? 🤣
❤😂
😄
Quaffe for coffee (NY)
Did you prepare for Christmas?🎄🎄🎄🎁🎁🎁🎁🎅🎅🎅
Yes! We’ve decorated our house ☺️
Merry Christmas🎅🎅🎅🎄🎄🎄🎁🎁🎁🎉🎉🎉
16:13 For some reason, in the last 2 years, British adolescents are using LIKE in almost every sentence. I was like, why are all these folk suddenly speaking like me? What's next? Grody? Gnarly?
We’re like taking over the world 😋
That's like siiirrrrrr (so) tubular. @@YourFavoriteEnglishTeacher
you have such a beautiful face !
The 80's variation is different.
True!
Yeah from what I recall way less vocal fry back then. I think that really got going only in the 00s?
I think I’ve heard many words you pronounced in this video through the movie! and never know before that’s the Californians things😂
By the way I love your video so much!❤
It’s so nice to hear from you! ☺️ I’m glad you enjoyed my video!
Hello my dear teacher how are you doing today I am looking from India and I will be thank full of you. I am a new subscriber of you. Please help me. I want English word vocabulary videos. Do you have it. ❤❤
Of course! Here is my c1-c2 vocabulary playlist: czcams.com/play/PL0XBBIkpR9GDz_pJa-eiVMiqBGEK_dg0W.html&si=nIetqncDTLrekofS
And here is a playlist on slang and common expressions: czcams.com/play/PL0XBBIkpR9GB2K2R7mZWIdeuLhFYQyvMj.html&si=-QMw4pT3gKSaAali
Don't say Frisco for San Francisco. If you live in the Bay Area, you can say: I'm going into The City tomorrow. The city is San Fran...
Totally! 😄 I was just talking with someone about this the other day!
I'm from the Bay .. if you from S.F. you say the City... but I'm from the East Bay, we say Frisco...
@@ericyanez2872 With all due respect, Don't use Frisco. San Franciscans hate that term.Just my opinion and nothing more.
Language seems generational. One time I was shopping and I said awesome and the younger guy behind me started laughing. Then he asked me if I said awesome. I've thought about it several times and wondered if it was weird. I was born in San Francisco as a baby boomer and people have commented about my speech choice a few times. Maybe old hippie slang???
Wow 6"T"sounds~
That's why we Aisa people can't speak like American accent!
It’s definitely difficult! ☺️
Finally someone explains why I hate this accent. It helps understand it
You’re welcome 😄
@@YourFavoriteEnglishTeacheri really like this video.My cousin who lives near San Jose uses like as a filler word .At first,i didn't understand why she used like many times.Now,i realize that using like a californian thing.I really like your video.
Duuude! Like, totally awesome vid. No, duh! Rad and totally bodacious. Not bogus like the lame ones (gag me with a Ginsu). Right on. Hang loose, bruh. 🤙
Right on!
Fun fact about California English, "dude" and "bro" are gender neutral and can also be used for objects or as an interjection
Yes! 😄👏🏼
Actually, I thought upspeak was more of a generational thing (Millenials) across the country than a local thing. 🤔
Upspeak in the US as a major thing started with GenX. It’s not a Millennial thing at all. It already spread nationwide across highschools by the early to mid 80s. The Valley Girls of the early 80s popularized it and got it to spread across the country. I actually though that there was a subsection of Millennials who didn't even do it and that it had to come back again, but I could well be wrong about that.
Val speak in general spread nationwide really quickly back then.
The worst are those who combine uptalk, valley girl, creaky voice, overusing “like” with Ebonics…
I think you’re trying to teach the people the sissy accent
Creaky voice IS annoying. And yes. You do it the entire video. You’re basically explaining your own accent. 😂
You are so sweet ❤ Could you find some time for "literary" 😂
6'5, finance, blue eyes...