Name: Is there a San Francisco accent? This man tried to find out
Brand: sfgate.com
SKU: sfgate-com-12
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Is there a San Francisco accent? This man tried to find out

preview

A few years back, an innocent Facebook post asked, "Was there ever such a thing as a San Francisco accent?"A long, long debate ensued. Many claimed that it absolutely does (or did) and originated in the old working-class "South of the Slot" neighborhood (now SoMa) and sounded a little like "the Bronx with a twist." Others were adamant that the fabled San Francisco accent just doesn't exist.Some and everyone was still confused.YouTuber and San Francisco native Joey Yee&nbsp;(who recently burned a lot of calories in search of ) saw the post and wanted to find out for himself."I knew that S.F. was never known to have a strong regional sound to their speech, but somehow I was always able to identify people from the Bay Area when I heard them talk. I was convinced there's more to it," Yee told SFGATE.Yee on his YouTube channel this week digging into the question.After running some old tape of legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (ruminating on the congested traffic on Market Street in 1967) to hear his inflection, Yee concluded that Caen had a wonderful accent, but it didn't reflect how San Franciscans talk today.Caen himself was actually born in Sacramento and, in another fun linguistic digression, referred to himself as the "Sacamenna Kid.""My grandparents both had that sort of old-school, Herb Caen-style of speech I show in the video. It was kind of a raspy, leisurely delivery with a tiny twang at the end of their words," Yee, who grew up in the city, said.So how do San Franciscans talk today?It's certainly not the voice heard by anchors on local Bay Area news channels every morning, which Yee describes as " a form of English that was invented in the 1930s in order to be as broad, and unaccented and boring as possible."One thing that all linguists and Facebook commenters agree on is that Bay Area folks like to talk fast."We want to get out words and sentences over a quickly as possible," Yee said. "A lot of compound words can get squished together, for example the name of our city, which sounds more like 'Sarnfcisco' than 'San Francisco.'"Similarly speedy shortenings of local place names include "Sanna Rosa", "Annioch" and "San Rafell." Other common phrases are also contracted, like "tryna," in place of "trying to" and "wouja" in place of "wouldn't you."Yee also describes the Bay Area's most famous addition to the American lexicon: "Hella.""'Hella' means ... whatever you want it to mean, most will use it to express the vastness or number of something," he said."There is a hell of a lot of shrimp in this bag" will be shortened to "There's hella shrimp in this bag" by San Franciscans and Oaklanders (there's also a debate raging over which Bay Area city coined the word), making the sentence five words shorter.But what about the old San Franciscan accent so many users referred to in the Facebook thread?This accent is also known as the "Mission Brogue," an allusion to the Mission and SoMa district's working class Irish history, and it can sometimes be confused with a New York accent.Here's some archival footage of a San Franciscan old-timer, "Tough Tony," a city bus driver exemplifying the Mission Brogue in all its lyrical glory.Members of the SFGATE newsroom tell me that veteran Chronicle writer Carl Nolte also has that old S.F. twang. I dug around and found a story from 1984 penned by Nolte himself, which attempted to school readers and newcomers to the city how to speak like a true San Franciscan."Despite everything you've ever heard, there is a distinctive San Francisco way of talking and it is important to make note of it, for the record, before it becomes as dead as Latin. Here's how to talk like a San Franciscan," Nolte implored to Chronicle readers."The first lesson — learned at birth — is never to call it Frisco or San FRANcisco. Most resident tourists have settled on something that sounds like an Anglicized version of the Spanish San Francisco, but natives run the two words together and add a couple of extra sounds, and it comes out 'Sampencisco.'"The tendency for San Franciscans to run words into each other is largely agreed on."It may also be called 'Thecity,' which is one word. It is never called The City, which is two words and tacky," Nolte wrote.KQED recently argued that while this old working-class city accent was indeed common, it's not accurate to call it the San Franciscan accent, but rather one of many in a city that has always been a melting pot of ethnicities&nbsp;from far and wide.Sociolinguist Lauren Hall-Lew ,&nbsp;"Are you honestly meaning to ask: Do the people from Chinatown talk like the Russians in the Richmond, talk like the Central Americans in the Mission? No of course not," she said. "No, what you mean is, probably, is there a way of speaking that we associate with the middle-class white people of European heritage? That's what that question usually means. And that's the problem. That’s not actually representative of the city."Yee says that while there is evidence of an original San Francisco accent, it's largely resigned to history, like the flophouses and factories South of the Slot."Many of the original possessors of that original accent, they're gone, and they've taken that way of speech with them. And with the amount of new people moving into the city ... stirring that linguistic pot, that distinct San Franciscan speech pattern that you're hoping to hear just isn't going to happen," he says. "It's always moving, it's always changing and as the city becomes more diverse the accent becomes more and more elusive, and I think that's exciting."Check out Yee's video below:Andrew Chamings is an editor at SFGATE. Email: Andrew.Chamings@sfgate.com | Twitter: @AndrewChamings

A few years back, an innocent Facebook post asked, "Was there ever such a thing as a San Francisco accent?"A long, long debate ensued. Many claimed that it absolutely does (or did) and originated in the old working-class "South of the Slot" neighborhood (now SoMa) and sounded a little like "the Bronx with a twist." Others were adamant that the fabled San Francisco accent just doesn't exist.Some and everyone was still confused.YouTuber and San Francisco native Joey Yee&nbsp;(who recently burned a lot of calories in search of ) saw the post and wanted to find out for himself."I knew that S.F....

public

Writer. editor at @sfgate. also @theatlantic, @mcsweeneys , @vice, @thebolditalic. dm or andrew.chamings@sfgate.com if you have a story in your brainbox

Andrew Chamings

AndrewChamings

News. Culture. Sports. Opinion. All the journalism that matters from San Francisco & the Bay Area. Newsletters: http://sfgate.com/newsletters IG: http://instagram.com/sfgate

Is there a San Francisco accent? This man tried to find out

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS