East LA Has Its Own Accent, Literally

A great story from The Los Angeles Times this week breaks down the complexity of the Mexican immigrant-powered accent particular to people who grew up near or in the East LA area. Having spent time there and knowing people from there, it seems to me that the story, which is based on interviews with Pitzer College Linguistics Professor Carmen Fought, that a lot of it is spot-on.

Here are a few parts that seemed particularly salient to me:

The tell-tale signs: the drawn-out vowels in the first syllables of his words.

“Together” became “TWO-gether” instead of “tuh-GE-ther.”

Then there’s this:

The East L.A. accent is marked by a higher vowel sound at the end of words, so that “talking” is often pronounced “talk-een.”

Many speakers pronounce the “eh” sound before the letter L as an “ah” — as in “ash” — so that elevator becomes “alavator” and L.A. becomes “all-ay.”

In a slightly Canadian-sounding twist, some people will add “ey” to the end of a sentence, in a vaguely questioning tone: “Someone’s on the phone for you, ey.”

The word “barely” is often used to indicate that something just happened, as in: “I barely got out of the hospital.”

Then there are things like saying “homes” or “watcha,” a regional version of the use of the word “ay” and more I’m sure isn’t documented on the story. What really struck me about this story is how similar this accent is to the way people speak along the border, especially the use of “watcha” and more of an “eh” than an “ey.”

Did this remind you of a place not mentioned here?