California Vowel Shift in pop culture, betch

[Kirk]

I noticed a reference to one of my pet topics, the emerging California Vowel Shift, in another thread and was wondering if anyone had noticed what I believe to be the first widespread pop-culture recognition of the changing vowels in the now-classic Youtube viral video, Shoes.

First, I'll preface this by saying that most people, even younger speakers, don't have vowels this progressive in the CVS. Obviously, it's exaggerated for comical purposes, but it's entirely based upon a real phenomenon. For many younger speakers, the vowels are indeed approaching these realizations. The changes, as so often happens, are being led by young females but males are picking up on it, too (this is what happened with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift).

Quotes from the video:

"What the hal?" /ɛ/ -> /æ/

"Shut up, deck, I'm gonna betchslap, you, shetbaag." /ɪ/ -> /ɛ/ and /æ/ -> /a/

"Let's gat em!" /ɛ/ -> /æ/

"Um, I don't think you're gonna fet, I mean, your feet're...kinda beg." /ɪ/ -> /ɛ/

Having lived in both urban Southern and Northern California, I've heard this vowel shift in the under-35 crowd's speech commonly (though I have met a few people in their 40s with such vowels...early adopters? Or just in tune with how the whippersnappers speak?) in all areas of the state, which isn't terribly surprising given the degree of mobility between the two major urban cores of the state (the San Francisco-San Jose Bay Area and the Los Angeles-Orange County-Inland Empire-San Diego conurbation). It's still not entirely clear how or why it originated, but linguist Penelope Eckert from Stanford (in NorCal) has been doing research on it amongst NorCal residents for several years now (in fact, on her page she calls it the "Northern California Shift" though I definitely heard it living in SoCal, too).

But before the "Shoes" video, I wasn't familiar with it being used in pop culture so that's been interesting. It's still a pretty new (though radical) shift but as it spreads knowledge of its characteristics as a regional accent is likely to spread (just as with what happened in the NCVS---50 years ago before it'd majorly spread in the Northern Cities other Americans didn't generally conceive of the Northern Cities as having particularly remarkable accents, though now such dialects are not uncommonly imitated, exaggerated or accurately, in pop culture).

[Travis B.]

But before the "Shoes" video, I wasn't familiar with it being used in pop culture so that's been interesting. It's still a pretty new (though radical) shift but as it spreads knowledge of its characteristics as a regional accent is likely to spread (just as with what happened in the NCVS---50 years ago before it'd majorly spread in the Northern Cities other Americans didn't generally conceive of the Northern Cities as having particularly remarkable accents, though now such dialects are not uncommonly imitated, exaggerated or accurately, in pop culture).

Heh - I always associated strong CVS with the stereotypical "Valley Girl", well, variety (which is in many ways basically the stereotype of all the most extreme features found in Californian English), even though such still seems to be less strongly associated with such in the popular mind here than the unrounding and fronting of mid and high back vowels (which is quite extreme in the popular perception of said "Valley Girl", uhhh, variety).

As for the NCVS, though, I would not say that all the dialects in the Inland North were necessarily all too unremarkable before it appeared. At least the dialect (as opposed to the localized version of GA) here in Milwaukee has more than enough quite distinctive features that have nothing to do with the NCVS, even though the NCVS has further increased the distance between such and GA proper.