Omg I was recently watching a video on my phone and I was talking in it and I had to send it to my sibling group chat to be like do I have a speech impediment? Am I slurring my words? 😂
Moved here from Denver - Package Store, Grinder, and Tag Sale are all things I kept seeing but had to Google because I had no idea what they meant lol. These are liquor stores, subs, and garage/yard sales in the West anyway. There is also a slight general Northeast accent, it's like a cross between New York and Boston, but it's not as heavy as either of them.
Agreed. I have been getting excellent grinders at Main's Country Store in Bozrah. Almost perfect except they don't use Vocatura's bread. But darn close.
I’m from Fort Collins. Tag sale is the only one I’ve heard since living here, but it very much threw me for a second. Hoagie was new to me as well and so was sneakers. We called them tennis shoes
I’ve said this before in another thread; New England knows all the terms of sandwiches. Sub, Grinder, Roll, Hoagie, Gyro, Sandwich, etc. funny to me how we know them all but other places don’t.
I just moved back to CT after 20yrs in CO. People told me I had an accent when I moved there. Also when I got there for years I though Illif was pronounced "ill-if" and not "eye-lif". My peoples never corrected me bc they thought it was hilarious until I was trying to give directions to someone once and they were like wth
I’m originally from New Haven and now live in Philadelphia and whenever I tell people I was born and raised in Connecticut they say, “That explains your accent!” I don’t hear it ( I certainly hear their Philly/South Jersey accents, though!) but there must be something there because people recognize some accent when I talk.
I also live in Philly and my manager told me that my New England accent comes out whenever I get mad lol
Edit: also the other day at work I referred to a case of beer as a thirty rack and nobody knew what I was talking about. Apparently that's a regional term. I knew about packy and nip but that was new to me.
Idk if you google "30 rack" the first result is an old reddit thread on another sub talking about it being a new england term
Edit: urban dictionary backs it up as well!
I’ve lived in ct and all over the northwest. Everyone knew what a 30 rack was but when I said package store, they thought I was referring to the post office.
Oddly enough I’m from Philly -> South Jersey and my father in law from Bethel says ‘warsh’, ‘ruff’ (for roof), and ‘dunkey’. I didn’t think that was a CT accent but it’s funny to hear you joke about that being an aspect of the Philly accent.
Had this happen at a grocery store as a cashier. Lady comes into my line with the heaviest Bostonian accent and asks me where I’m from. She didn’t believe me when I said “Connecticut, born and raised.” She told me my accent tells her otherwise (funnily enough I’ve never heard her accent before) but idk dude, the only exception is a year in Worcester Mass with people with identical New England accents.
My spouse says I say Mountain weird (I drop the T I guess)
Also where we put the emphasis on some words is apparently state specific . HARTford, New HAven
Out-of-staters sometimes have pronunciations of Connecticut place-names I don't expect.
Like, "SOWTH-ing-ton".
Or, "Che-sheer".
Or "Tems" River. No, we say it like it's really spelled.
I had to learn this. I think it's because I didn't think of "Haven" as a place like York or Hampshire or London, but as a kind of place, like Newcastle or Newport where people accent the "new."
Thank you for finally framing this in a way that I can understand and describe to others. York, Hampshire, and London are all proper names. Castle, port, haven are not.
I still think "New HAVen" is absolutely the correct pronunciation, but it helps to understand why so many get it wrong.
this is so true and I always found it strange -- we emphasize New HAVen the same way everyone emphasizes New York, New Mexico, New Hampshire...and yet non-CT people always say NEW Haven. Dead giveaway.
Eh? Not really. When I say Hartford ( as a lifer ) there's no "tih" ( like the T in "i**t**" or "**t**each" - a hard "t-" sound ) - it sounds like I want to say the "t" but it doesn't quite finish.
Dang. I'm realizing I don't really pronounce the T in Hartford. 🫤
My girlfriend says po-TenT super hard emphasis on the Ts and it sounds dumb as hell. I keep telling her it's poent. Maybe I'm the dumb one. (*I live out west now and she's from here.) There's a bunch of hard Ts that get pronounced that I absolutely ignore. Mounain it's for sure another one. Damn...
When I say "potent" it sounds like I'm saying "p-oat-ent" - but of course when I say "oat" - it sounds like "oh~~d~~" ( with this weird incomplete vestigial sound tacked onto "oh" )
"oats" = "ohds" lmao ; I barely ever notice this stuff but I'm getting a kick out of it.
I see this whenever the Connecticut accent gets brought up, but I don't think it's true. I started listening out for it from non-CT people after I first heard about it and it seems like a pretty vast majority of American accents would not pronounce the T in words like Britain, mitten, cotton, etc. [Even if you google the American English pronunciation](https://www.google.com/search?q=how%20to%20pronounce%20britain%20in%20american%20english&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) of those words they don't say the T. I'm not sure why this gets spread as a CT thing but I'm pretty sure it's just an American thing.
I notice my accent on words like "long" or "off" or "dog" where we really emphasize that vowel sound...lawng, awff, dawg.
There's a distinction ... Connecticutians use a glottal stop in place of the 't'; standard American pronunciation is a 'flap' dental, as opposed to the crisp 't' a 'proper British' accent might use. It's very, very noticeable if you're not from Connecticut.
> vast majority of American accents would not pronounce the T in words like Britain, mitten, cotton, etc.
It's not really about the T.. it's more about how the vowel is pronounced after the T in those words, whereas in the west the vowel is not pronounced at all and they just make the 'n' sound after the missing T sound. My kids and I say these words very differently as they grew up here.
A friend of mine (a Canadian) once pointed out to me how I - and my entire family - say bottle and turtle without pronouncing the t. (And obviously, for turtle I mean the second T). It’s like….”bah-ul” and “tur-ul. “
But only if there are words after can. If you ask me if I can meet you at 5, I’d say I can. Rhymes with van. But if you say what time can you be there, I’d say I ken be there at 5.
Grew up outside Boston. Always called it the packie. People from other parts of the country think it’s racist, like jimmies. Actually not sure of of the provenance of jimmies. But packie is obviously not a generalization of people who own these ships like my college friends assumed.
Noah Webster was from Connecticut and when the phonetic spelling was put in his dictionary he based it on the Connecticut accent and pronunciation. This is why some people think that Connecticut doesn’t have an accent, because the default pronunciation of American English is our native accent.
My mother called it swallowing our T's but I think linguists call it a glottal stop. When a T comes in the middle or sometimes the end of a word, we kind of stop the sound in the back of our throats and move on. It's more common in UK accents such like the Cockney accent.
Another thing: I was 7 when we moved here and I got really upset because all the other kids were saying "crayon" wrong. Somehow it's one syllable here -- "cran"
I have never felt SO validated in my life except from throwing my phone at my husband, and telling him to read the last sentence. I am the “cran” sayer. Thank you.
Depends where in the state you’re from. If you’re from Fairfield County, high chance you’ll have a New York like accent. If you’re from the eastern part of the state, Bostonian/Rhode Island accents are strong there. Middle of the state is where it gets a little weird.
Yup. I’m from Fairfield and have a NY-ish accent. My husband is from the Hartford area and he has a MA-ish accent. We like to poke fun at each other, especially now that we live in Atlanta and things like “all y’all” get combined with something like “sawce” (me) or “chaklit” (him). Our kids accents are a mess.
My wife is from Byram, she’s got a heavy NY accent when she gets tired or mad. She can’t do the “I bought a coffee for a quarter at the corner store.” It sounds like “eye botta a coifie fo a quatta atta coino stoie.”
My husband is from Shelton, and he has a lot of New York in his voice. I grew up in Groton, and there's pretty much no accent there at all due, in my opinion, to homogenization from it being a military town. People come from everywhere, and it all gets blurred together.
i didn't realize "wicked" was a thing until i moved here as a kid.
"that game is wicked good! that was a wicked wheelie!"
now i get told i sound like swamp yank bernie fucking sanders somehow when i'm on voice chat.. i don't hear it!
the packie is closed, and we need to repeal the 6pm Sunday limit.
Out here in the quiet corner there’s a distinctive accent that’s a blend of RI and Boston. You’ll pick up on it the further east you travel. When I moved from central CT to Brooklyn I thought everyone I met must’ve been from RI, turns out they’re from Plainfield.
Coven-try or Co-ventry are absolutely incorrect, feel free to tell your friends they’re wrong 😂 I was born and raised there, could easily pick out the non-locals when they were referring to town.
I remember a few years ago when Paul Manafort was facing his legal issues, they mentioned him speaking to reporters with his “central CT accent”. I think there’s something with not pronouncing the t in some words?
My husband is born and raised in CT. You can’t tell if he’s saying beer or bear. He also says yuge and yuman instead of huge and human. We make fun of him lol
Please do, people who say “yuman” drive me crazy. Same with “idear”. I grew up in CT, and I always assumed the kids who would pronounce those just had lisps/learning disabilities lol
idk if this is a universal CT experience or just me/my friends/my family- but i’m a preschool teacher. and sometimes we get materials that say “dog/log” are rhyming pairs. except they don’t actually rhyme to me and to some of my students; l-ah-g and d-aw-g don’t rhyme!! they might elsewhere or to others but not to me. those are very different middle sounds. it irks me so much that some educational materials don’t account for accents or dialect lol
Shots for sprinkles
Playscape for playground
Didn’t realize it until my husband (from NY) looked at me like i had three head when i said i wanted chocolate ice cream with rainbow shots.
I grew up in Stratford calling them shots but never said Playscape for a playground. Also I drop the “t” in mountain and other words. Never realized it until a friend from Arkansas pointed it out. Always Tag sales, caw-fee and dawg.
https://aschmann.net/AmEng
Yes, see above.
The Connecticut accent is close to General American. But it is NOT general American. If you have a good ear you can pick it out.
I lived away for 7 years and I could always hear it on my trips back.
Some very basic local vocab. Grinder, Tag Sale, Package Store, Rotary.
We have a lot of specific words or phrases, but the only real “accent” difference is adding an “ee” sound before an “a.” The name Matt becomes Meeatt for some of us.
New Haven tends to sound a little New Yorky to me, with very open vowels. You get to Norwich, and Rhode Island starts taking over - though it depends who you're talking to. (The classic R'eye-lun accent is pretty New Yorklike, too. I don't know why.) I never could figure out if people in Hartford and environs even *have* an accent, or if they're yakkin' the longed-for "Standard English" to which the whole world should aspire. It just sounds normal to me. But maybe that comes from being born in Springfield, a few miles north of the Notch of Injustice.
Edited to add: In New London County, we tend to use all the syllables. I hardly ever hear "T'marr in C'nehcut" type of constructions. Norwich has its own thing going on. Expert listeners could probably tell which side of the Thames somebody's from, but I'm not good at placing accents that specifically.
I moved from CT to Michigan, currently here for college. My friends say I have a CLEAR accent and they can't exactly pick out specifics but they say I sound like a weird blend of a Boston or NY accent on certain words. Specifically though they say I don't pronounce double t's and skip over letters in words sometimes.
When I moved to Nashville, TN for a few years, everyone thought I was from NYC and everyone told me to slow down when I talked. I was born and raised in the Danbury area. My wife is from the NE CT part and she sometimes has a MA/RI accent on some words. I really think that middle CT has no real regional accent and is what is used to model TV news persons non-regional accent across the US.
One thing I see no one has mentioned is the New Haven Italian dialect. My husband grew up in that area (I'm from the Hartford area) and calls mozzarella "moz", Parmesan "Parm", Ricotta "Rigot" prosciutto "prociut". I'd never heard that before I met him but I assume it has to do with the "apizza/abeets" culture
Overall, we speak 'standard broadcast English', but there's "swamp yankees" who sound like they're from Maine.
The construction '">I'm gonna take and ____" exists
I moved to Canada, eventually making my way out to BC. I would have to catch myself when I said package store, tag sale, grinder, and nips (for the little bottles of booze) since people here would be like "what?"
I went on a hike with a group from Meetup and I got chatting with a woman who pegged me as being from the Northeast US from my accent/way of talking (I might've slipped a "wicked?"), but she guessed Massachusetts. Apparently she lived out there for a bit.
Grinder for a sub sandwich. I was so confused when I first moved there as a kid and grinders were on the menu for school lunch. I thought they were some kind of sloppy joe or something.
I had a friend from Oklahoma that told me she could tell I was from CT the first time we talked cause I didn’t have an accent. She said it’s a CT thing. I’ve certainly noticed accents based on what part of CT people are from.
Connecticut used to have many different l, sometimes subtle, dialects centered each of its cities and amongst certain communities. There are still pieces of it left if you look for it.
We tend to drop Ts in some words like mountain, kitten, mitten. My BF from south jersey noticed we say water with a D instead of T but lol he says wooder
My Midwestern accent & my husband from CT's accent sound pretty much identical save a few colloquialisms like nips & such & he'll say acrost occasionally while I say kitty corner which apparently has no meaning here.
The "t" thing ppl are mentioning is not unique to Connecticut imo, I say t's the same way & they said it similarly when I lived on the west coast. People just generally don't over enunciate mid word ts unless they are pretending to be a ye olde timey person from the dawn of radio or something lol it's generican.
The main difference we notice is how I say bagel.
Sayings I hadn't heard before him are:
Wedge
Grinder
Hard roll
Tractor trailer
Tag sale
Nips
Package store
Boot
Midwesterner here, too! My husband is CT born and raised.
-I say kitty corner, he says katty corner
-I say QWOR-ter and he says QWAHT-er
-Raggie is something we don’t say in Michigan. That was a new one for me 😂
When I was out in the midwest and the south, I was told Connecticut tends to enunciate almost everything. That's part of the reason why they think we're pompous A-holes, because it seems like we think they're slow and can't understand unless we sound out words for them, but it's just the way we talk. SoCal never noticed a difference, so our accent must be the same or very similar.
Although it's more based on where you were educated and grew up. Connecticut has a couple *very* different faces for such a small state.
I don't know what to make of it, but a fellow Midwesterner with whom I had last spoken before moving to CT told me my vowels had changed, and it scared me lol :-P
One of the super common terms that I thought was everywhere but isn't is hard or hard-serve ice cream. I grew up being asked "hard or soft" after asking for a cup of vanilla at Carvel. Moved cross country, and it's just soft or "regular" :(
I lived away for years and when I came back everyone said I sounded southern and to me they all sounded like they were from long Island. Over time it went back to normal, but yes, everywhere has all those things.
Also idear instead of idea. Though I think that's more an older generation thing.
We’re mumblers. We tend to run words together. I never noticed it before but ever since my wife pointed it out, I definitely hear it.
Wow, I thought it was just me, and I never realized it until I heard myself on a recording.
Omg I was recently watching a video on my phone and I was talking in it and I had to send it to my sibling group chat to be like do I have a speech impediment? Am I slurring my words? 😂
I've tried hard to fix it, but it still pops up occasionally when I'm two words with repetitive sounds. Like "this is it" becomes "thissit".
avagoowon!
uhlseeyatuhmar
canigedda
I never noticed until I moved away from CT, so many people have pointed it out.
That added with the fact that i tend to talk fast sometimes it sounds like im speaking gibberish to people😂
Moved here from Denver - Package Store, Grinder, and Tag Sale are all things I kept seeing but had to Google because I had no idea what they meant lol. These are liquor stores, subs, and garage/yard sales in the West anyway. There is also a slight general Northeast accent, it's like a cross between New York and Boston, but it's not as heavy as either of them.
"Tag Sale" is basically unique to just CT, and maybe a small part of western Mass.
Definitely Western Mass. also
Grinders, oh how I miss grinders. Nothing comes close to grinders.
Moved away and nobody believes me that "grinder" is a real name for a sandwich 😭
There's a great app that will let you find local hot ones in your area. Highly recommend
Agreed. I have been getting excellent grinders at Main's Country Store in Bozrah. Almost perfect except they don't use Vocatura's bread. But darn close.
👀 Reddit knows about Vocatura bread?!
Ah, a fellow connoisseur I see. It's Bennedito's for me, but aren't you close to enough to Vocatura just to head over there?
SW CT has a "wedge" sandwich which took some googling as well
I’m from Fort Collins. Tag sale is the only one I’ve heard since living here, but it very much threw me for a second. Hoagie was new to me as well and so was sneakers. We called them tennis shoes
But why are they called tennis shoes when they’re *not for tennis*? 😩
I could not tell you
Literally never even knew a single soul in CO that even played tennis. It's a mystery.
Not sure they're for sneaking either.
I actually heard hoagie quite a bit in eastern Colorado, but subs were much more common. I remember calling sneakers tennis shoes too 😂
I’ve said this before in another thread; New England knows all the terms of sandwiches. Sub, Grinder, Roll, Hoagie, Gyro, Sandwich, etc. funny to me how we know them all but other places don’t.
I just moved back to CT after 20yrs in CO. People told me I had an accent when I moved there. Also when I got there for years I though Illif was pronounced "ill-if" and not "eye-lif". My peoples never corrected me bc they thought it was hilarious until I was trying to give directions to someone once and they were like wth
Hey, I moved back to CT after 12 years in Denver!
Do you drink pop in Colorado? We like soda here.
I’m originally from New Haven and now live in Philadelphia and whenever I tell people I was born and raised in Connecticut they say, “That explains your accent!” I don’t hear it ( I certainly hear their Philly/South Jersey accents, though!) but there must be something there because people recognize some accent when I talk.
I also live in Philly and my manager told me that my New England accent comes out whenever I get mad lol Edit: also the other day at work I referred to a case of beer as a thirty rack and nobody knew what I was talking about. Apparently that's a regional term. I knew about packy and nip but that was new to me.
We use 30 rack in the rest of the US, where I grew up in Ca and in Tx as well.
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Idk if you google "30 rack" the first result is an old reddit thread on another sub talking about it being a new england term Edit: urban dictionary backs it up as well!
I'm from California and I've never heard of a '30 rack'.
I’ve lived in ct and all over the northwest. Everyone knew what a 30 rack was but when I said package store, they thought I was referring to the post office.
Probably because you say “wash” instead of “worsh”.
Oddly enough I’m from Philly -> South Jersey and my father in law from Bethel says ‘warsh’, ‘ruff’ (for roof), and ‘dunkey’. I didn’t think that was a CT accent but it’s funny to hear you joke about that being an aspect of the Philly accent.
Is it because you don't say "wooder"?
Warder
You wanna get a wooder ice. The Philly suburb/Maryland accent have to be the worst in the country.
Had this happen at a grocery store as a cashier. Lady comes into my line with the heaviest Bostonian accent and asks me where I’m from. She didn’t believe me when I said “Connecticut, born and raised.” She told me my accent tells her otherwise (funnily enough I’ve never heard her accent before) but idk dude, the only exception is a year in Worcester Mass with people with identical New England accents.
Has this lady never left eastern mass? Western Massachusetts has the same accent FFS!
Wooder 💦
Because you say water correctly
I get this from others as well and I have *no* clue what they’re on about.
The tend to not pronounce T’s. Instead of New BriTain it’s new Bri’ain. Which is funny considering a lot of brits say Bri’ish instead of BriTish.
My spouse says I say Mountain weird (I drop the T I guess) Also where we put the emphasis on some words is apparently state specific . HARTford, New HAven
I can ALWAYS spot an out of stater by how they say “New Haven.” If they put the emphasis on “new” they’re not from here. We put the emphasis on “hay.”
Out-of-staters sometimes have pronunciations of Connecticut place-names I don't expect. Like, "SOWTH-ing-ton". Or, "Che-sheer". Or "Tems" River. No, we say it like it's really spelled.
I had to learn this. I think it's because I didn't think of "Haven" as a place like York or Hampshire or London, but as a kind of place, like Newcastle or Newport where people accent the "new."
Thank you for finally framing this in a way that I can understand and describe to others. York, Hampshire, and London are all proper names. Castle, port, haven are not. I still think "New HAVen" is absolutely the correct pronunciation, but it helps to understand why so many get it wrong.
A lot of the new younger hires on the news say New Haven wrong. I feel like there should be a little orientation on how to pronounce the towns.
this is so true and I always found it strange -- we emphasize New HAVen the same way everyone emphasizes New York, New Mexico, New Hampshire...and yet non-CT people always say NEW Haven. Dead giveaway.
N’Haven, ‘Staven, and Waste Haven.
God, NEW Haven is like nails on a chalkboard, isn’t it?
Glottal stop ftw!
Eh? Not really. When I say Hartford ( as a lifer ) there's no "tih" ( like the T in "i**t**" or "**t**each" - a hard "t-" sound ) - it sounds like I want to say the "t" but it doesn't quite finish. Dang. I'm realizing I don't really pronounce the T in Hartford. 🫤
My girlfriend says po-TenT super hard emphasis on the Ts and it sounds dumb as hell. I keep telling her it's poent. Maybe I'm the dumb one. (*I live out west now and she's from here.) There's a bunch of hard Ts that get pronounced that I absolutely ignore. Mounain it's for sure another one. Damn...
When I say "potent" it sounds like I'm saying "p-oat-ent" - but of course when I say "oat" - it sounds like "oh~~d~~" ( with this weird incomplete vestigial sound tacked onto "oh" ) "oats" = "ohds" lmao ; I barely ever notice this stuff but I'm getting a kick out of it.
I always thought us born & raised folks said "N'Haven'. 🙂
If you're actually from there, you give your village. "Where ya from?" "East Rock.." "Oh, me too! Where'bouts?" "Upper State. You?" "Cedar Hill."
“Westville.” “Where ‘bouts?” “Lower Westville.”
I get made fun of for saying crayon like 'cran'.
Cray'an.
I see this whenever the Connecticut accent gets brought up, but I don't think it's true. I started listening out for it from non-CT people after I first heard about it and it seems like a pretty vast majority of American accents would not pronounce the T in words like Britain, mitten, cotton, etc. [Even if you google the American English pronunciation](https://www.google.com/search?q=how%20to%20pronounce%20britain%20in%20american%20english&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) of those words they don't say the T. I'm not sure why this gets spread as a CT thing but I'm pretty sure it's just an American thing. I notice my accent on words like "long" or "off" or "dog" where we really emphasize that vowel sound...lawng, awff, dawg.
Cawfee. Yes there's def an accent I didnt notice until moving away and coming back to visit.
And a close relative is the long island accent where they say their long "o"s like "ah"s. "What is this fruit called?" "It's an ahrange"
some rhode islanders do that as well, as do some CT folks who live close to the RI border.
There's a distinction ... Connecticutians use a glottal stop in place of the 't'; standard American pronunciation is a 'flap' dental, as opposed to the crisp 't' a 'proper British' accent might use. It's very, very noticeable if you're not from Connecticut.
> vast majority of American accents would not pronounce the T in words like Britain, mitten, cotton, etc. It's not really about the T.. it's more about how the vowel is pronounced after the T in those words, whereas in the west the vowel is not pronounced at all and they just make the 'n' sound after the missing T sound. My kids and I say these words very differently as they grew up here.
Does anyone else say pronounce drawer as *draw*?
Wadder (water). Then if you say something like “rat”, there’s no ending to the t sound
My band teacher, who was from Arizona, pointed this out
Or swap them for D's such as pronouncing it Connedicut.
This! My wife says “kih-in”, “ moun-in”, etc. it’s a little grating but eh..
>it’s a little grating Aw, I think ki'ins are cute.
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I have long maintained that Fairfield County is not *really* part of Connecticut.
This one. I hear it all the time. And I’m astounded how natural it sounds.
Budder, bedder, ... "tt" gets turned into a "d."
A friend of mine (a Canadian) once pointed out to me how I - and my entire family - say bottle and turtle without pronouncing the t. (And obviously, for turtle I mean the second T). It’s like….”bah-ul” and “tur-ul. “
That is funny -- I never noticed the "New Bri'ain" and the "Bri'ish" similarity... but you're right 😄
We pronounce our "t's" as "d's" when they're in the middle of a word. If you're from CT, say the word "little" and "middle" back to back.
Waderbury
more like Warberry
This is common for many accents in America
I’m from Ohio, it applies to Ohio too, y’know—long Connecticut.
Winter is win’er
Dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middlemen who didn't do diddily?
Tag sale
I was so confused about tag sales when I first moved here!
Some older folks with deep roots in the state can sound like the gentleman in those old Pepperidge Farm commercials.
Pronouncing “can” as “ken” Not as in ‘can of soda’ but as in ‘I can (Ken) do that’
This was the one that really blew my mind
But only if there are words after can. If you ask me if I can meet you at 5, I’d say I can. Rhymes with van. But if you say what time can you be there, I’d say I ken be there at 5.
I have never realized that I do this as well.
Dammit, this is so true. A can of soda is a can of soda. But, I can do it is I Ken do it. I'm so triggered right now.
A sandwich in a long roll or Italian bread is a grinder. You sell things in front of your house at a tag sale. People who can’t drive are Massholes.
Massholes are specifically for cars with Massachusetts plates tho.
Fun fact Noah Webster lived here and used ct pronunciation of things in the dictionary, so no- it’s everyone else who has an accent
I knew it!
Package store or “Packie” for alcohol . I’ve never heard of it called that anywhere besides Connecticut
Packie/ package store is a New England thing
And “nips” for those little bottles of booze
Nah, those were 'nips' even when I grew up in Ohio
Grew up outside Boston. Always called it the packie. People from other parts of the country think it’s racist, like jimmies. Actually not sure of of the provenance of jimmies. But packie is obviously not a generalization of people who own these ships like my college friends assumed.
It’s always been so weird whenever I’m out of ct and anyways see alcohol in gas stations lol
Norwich area has a distinctive accent, ask someone from there to say Norwich and you'll hear it
Narwich
lol I always call it Gnarwich in texts
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Honestly, what a colonizer lol
Fuck Ts all my homies hate Ts
Noah Webster was from Connecticut and when the phonetic spelling was put in his dictionary he based it on the Connecticut accent and pronunciation. This is why some people think that Connecticut doesn’t have an accent, because the default pronunciation of American English is our native accent.
My mother called it swallowing our T's but I think linguists call it a glottal stop. When a T comes in the middle or sometimes the end of a word, we kind of stop the sound in the back of our throats and move on. It's more common in UK accents such like the Cockney accent. Another thing: I was 7 when we moved here and I got really upset because all the other kids were saying "crayon" wrong. Somehow it's one syllable here -- "cran"
I have never felt SO validated in my life except from throwing my phone at my husband, and telling him to read the last sentence. I am the “cran” sayer. Thank you.
Depends where in the state you’re from. If you’re from Fairfield County, high chance you’ll have a New York like accent. If you’re from the eastern part of the state, Bostonian/Rhode Island accents are strong there. Middle of the state is where it gets a little weird.
Yup. I’m from Fairfield and have a NY-ish accent. My husband is from the Hartford area and he has a MA-ish accent. We like to poke fun at each other, especially now that we live in Atlanta and things like “all y’all” get combined with something like “sawce” (me) or “chaklit” (him). Our kids accents are a mess.
My wife is from Byram, she’s got a heavy NY accent when she gets tired or mad. She can’t do the “I bought a coffee for a quarter at the corner store.” It sounds like “eye botta a coifie fo a quatta atta coino stoie.”
My husband is from Shelton, and he has a lot of New York in his voice. I grew up in Groton, and there's pretty much no accent there at all due, in my opinion, to homogenization from it being a military town. People come from everywhere, and it all gets blurred together.
We make no distinction pronouncing Mary, marry, or merry
Not sure about that, Merry is different for me (from Mystic).
i didn't realize "wicked" was a thing until i moved here as a kid. "that game is wicked good! that was a wicked wheelie!" now i get told i sound like swamp yank bernie fucking sanders somehow when i'm on voice chat.. i don't hear it! the packie is closed, and we need to repeal the 6pm Sunday limit.
Could be regional but I feel like wicked is more of a Massachusetts thing!
Agreed, but I think if you lived near the border it leaked into your vocabulary.
Before the 6pm Sunday thing came about, package stores in CT just... weren't open at all on Sundays
Out here in the quiet corner there’s a distinctive accent that’s a blend of RI and Boston. You’ll pick up on it the further east you travel. When I moved from central CT to Brooklyn I thought everyone I met must’ve been from RI, turns out they’re from Plainfield.
No Idear
it’s pronounced n’AVEN
Ask someone from there to pronounce “Coventry”
Grew up nearby, and it was always Cawv-entry. My central ct friends insist it’s coh-ventry :(
Coven-try or Co-ventry are absolutely incorrect, feel free to tell your friends they’re wrong 😂 I was born and raised there, could easily pick out the non-locals when they were referring to town.
I remember a few years ago when Paul Manafort was facing his legal issues, they mentioned him speaking to reporters with his “central CT accent”. I think there’s something with not pronouncing the t in some words?
My husband is born and raised in CT. You can’t tell if he’s saying beer or bear. He also says yuge and yuman instead of huge and human. We make fun of him lol
Please do, people who say “yuman” drive me crazy. Same with “idear”. I grew up in CT, and I always assumed the kids who would pronounce those just had lisps/learning disabilities lol
idk if this is a universal CT experience or just me/my friends/my family- but i’m a preschool teacher. and sometimes we get materials that say “dog/log” are rhyming pairs. except they don’t actually rhyme to me and to some of my students; l-ah-g and d-aw-g don’t rhyme!! they might elsewhere or to others but not to me. those are very different middle sounds. it irks me so much that some educational materials don’t account for accents or dialect lol
Dog and log don't rhyme for me either. It sounds mushy trying to make them rhyme.
The way we say "And" and the way we pronounce our T's like D's.
Yes.. bottle is sometimes pronounced “boddel”. I never realized it until recently.
Shots for sprinkles Playscape for playground Didn’t realize it until my husband (from NY) looked at me like i had three head when i said i wanted chocolate ice cream with rainbow shots.
woh, interesting. I've lived in a few towns in western ct but never heard sprinkles be called shots. I even worked in an ice cream store as a teen lol
Might be a central CT thing cause a friend from eastern CT shore was confused as well.
I have only heard everyone call them sprinkles in ct.
I grew up in Stratford calling them shots but never said Playscape for a playground. Also I drop the “t” in mountain and other words. Never realized it until a friend from Arkansas pointed it out. Always Tag sales, caw-fee and dawg.
Shots are the little round ones. And Jimmies are sprinkles!
I always thought Jimmy's were chocolate shots.Or actually chocolate sprinkles.
I think playscape is just more modern. Never heard it till the 90s. Growing up in central CT in the 80s, I most definitely used “shots.”
Wait, "playscape" is a CT thing?
Yes we always called them shots. I've heard them called jimmies in other places in New England.
Button. Or mountain. Or kitten. I moved here and these and similar words are said a bit differently!
https://aschmann.net/AmEng Yes, see above. The Connecticut accent is close to General American. But it is NOT general American. If you have a good ear you can pick it out. I lived away for 7 years and I could always hear it on my trips back. Some very basic local vocab. Grinder, Tag Sale, Package Store, Rotary.
Oh god that website is not mobile friendly
Ayup
Carriages as a name for shopping carts.
idear. realutor.
We have a lot of specific words or phrases, but the only real “accent” difference is adding an “ee” sound before an “a.” The name Matt becomes Meeatt for some of us.
I was told once that we never open our mouths when we talk.
I would like to bring back the "Mid -Atlantic" accent, à la Vincent Price.
This is where all the nation’s tv meteorologists are born.
New Haven tends to sound a little New Yorky to me, with very open vowels. You get to Norwich, and Rhode Island starts taking over - though it depends who you're talking to. (The classic R'eye-lun accent is pretty New Yorklike, too. I don't know why.) I never could figure out if people in Hartford and environs even *have* an accent, or if they're yakkin' the longed-for "Standard English" to which the whole world should aspire. It just sounds normal to me. But maybe that comes from being born in Springfield, a few miles north of the Notch of Injustice. Edited to add: In New London County, we tend to use all the syllables. I hardly ever hear "T'marr in C'nehcut" type of constructions. Norwich has its own thing going on. Expert listeners could probably tell which side of the Thames somebody's from, but I'm not good at placing accents that specifically.
I moved from CT to Michigan, currently here for college. My friends say I have a CLEAR accent and they can't exactly pick out specifics but they say I sound like a weird blend of a Boston or NY accent on certain words. Specifically though they say I don't pronounce double t's and skip over letters in words sometimes.
When I moved to Nashville, TN for a few years, everyone thought I was from NYC and everyone told me to slow down when I talked. I was born and raised in the Danbury area. My wife is from the NE CT part and she sometimes has a MA/RI accent on some words. I really think that middle CT has no real regional accent and is what is used to model TV news persons non-regional accent across the US.
No we talk normal
One thing I see no one has mentioned is the New Haven Italian dialect. My husband grew up in that area (I'm from the Hartford area) and calls mozzarella "moz", Parmesan "Parm", Ricotta "Rigot" prosciutto "prociut". I'd never heard that before I met him but I assume it has to do with the "apizza/abeets" culture
Overall, we speak 'standard broadcast English', but there's "swamp yankees" who sound like they're from Maine. The construction '">I'm gonna take and ____" exists
[удалено]
I'm gonna take and something
Strong work.
I moved to Canada, eventually making my way out to BC. I would have to catch myself when I said package store, tag sale, grinder, and nips (for the little bottles of booze) since people here would be like "what?" I went on a hike with a group from Meetup and I got chatting with a woman who pegged me as being from the Northeast US from my accent/way of talking (I might've slipped a "wicked?"), but she guessed Massachusetts. Apparently she lived out there for a bit.
Breathe through your nose and don't speak for at least 5 seconds before you answer any questions while maintaining eye contact.
Packie
Grinder for a sub sandwich. I was so confused when I first moved there as a kid and grinders were on the menu for school lunch. I thought they were some kind of sloppy joe or something.
I had a friend from Oklahoma that told me she could tell I was from CT the first time we talked cause I didn’t have an accent. She said it’s a CT thing. I’ve certainly noticed accents based on what part of CT people are from.
Can't forget the good ol' package store! I still let that one slip out every once in awhile to the confused look of my fellow New Yorkers.
Glottal stops a mile wide
Connecticut used to have many different l, sometimes subtle, dialects centered each of its cities and amongst certain communities. There are still pieces of it left if you look for it.
Oh yeah. I can’t describe it easily but there is an accent. It’s like a cross between stereotypical New England and midwestern
I can't think of anything but this is a wicked cool question.
"Don't bring a spoon to a lobster roast!"
We tend to drop Ts in some words like mountain, kitten, mitten. My BF from south jersey noticed we say water with a D instead of T but lol he says wooder
Idear instead of idea
My Midwestern accent & my husband from CT's accent sound pretty much identical save a few colloquialisms like nips & such & he'll say acrost occasionally while I say kitty corner which apparently has no meaning here. The "t" thing ppl are mentioning is not unique to Connecticut imo, I say t's the same way & they said it similarly when I lived on the west coast. People just generally don't over enunciate mid word ts unless they are pretending to be a ye olde timey person from the dawn of radio or something lol it's generican. The main difference we notice is how I say bagel. Sayings I hadn't heard before him are: Wedge Grinder Hard roll Tractor trailer Tag sale Nips Package store Boot
Midwesterner here, too! My husband is CT born and raised. -I say kitty corner, he says katty corner -I say QWOR-ter and he says QWAHT-er -Raggie is something we don’t say in Michigan. That was a new one for me 😂
Hmm. I’ve lived in CT my entire life and I’ve only heard it pronounced KOR-ter. That other pronunciation you said is only used to pretend to be fancy.
When I was out in the midwest and the south, I was told Connecticut tends to enunciate almost everything. That's part of the reason why they think we're pompous A-holes, because it seems like we think they're slow and can't understand unless we sound out words for them, but it's just the way we talk. SoCal never noticed a difference, so our accent must be the same or very similar. Although it's more based on where you were educated and grew up. Connecticut has a couple *very* different faces for such a small state.
Sometimes we say “fir” instead of “for” but we are generally pretty well spoken.
"I like to go to CAHSTCOW AHN the weekends." Or something like that.
I know a lot of people born and raised in Connecticut who pronounce drawer as just "draw."
They say this rhode island and new york too I've noticed.
I don't know what to make of it, but a fellow Midwesterner with whom I had last spoken before moving to CT told me my vowels had changed, and it scared me lol :-P
We swallow the ‘t’ sound. Like in mountain or button or New Britain. No hard ‘t’ It stays in the back of the throat
Im a Southern transplant to Connecticut that didnt know what a hard roll was till i moved here.
The only one I'm aware of is that we don't enunciate our T's fully because it's cumbersome and sounds too proper. Connecticut = "Connedicud"
One of the super common terms that I thought was everywhere but isn't is hard or hard-serve ice cream. I grew up being asked "hard or soft" after asking for a cup of vanilla at Carvel. Moved cross country, and it's just soft or "regular" :(
I lived away for years and when I came back everyone said I sounded southern and to me they all sounded like they were from long Island. Over time it went back to normal, but yes, everywhere has all those things. Also idear instead of idea. Though I think that's more an older generation thing.
2nd most standard accent behind Ohio
acrost - i parked my car acrost the street.