Alumni After Hours:
California Dialects - How One Region Shaped Modern American English
This session is part of the Alumni Council’s Alumni After Hours initiative. California has its own set of dialects, and they’ve been influencing the sound of contemporary English for decades. In this presentation, we’ll unpack what’s genuinely linguistic variation, what’s just a stereotype, and how to recognize these features in real conversation.
What we’ll cover:
A quick map of the landscape.
How California’s linguistic environment developed and why the state became home to so many varieties of English.
Three major California dialects.
A breakdown of their defining characteristics and how they differ from one another.
Feature-by-feature comparison.
Intonation, pace, vocabulary, social context, and the common misconceptions that shape how listeners perceive California speech.
Who this meeting is for:
Alumni who want to better understand authentic speech.
Teachers looking to deepen their sociolinguistic background.
Anyone curious about U.S. cultural linguistics and regional identity.
Speaker:
Irina Falkovich - Master of American Studies, specialist in English and German dialectology, and founder of LangMode, a project dedicated to exploring English language and culture.
Register:
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