Washington DC accent - yes, there is one, says linguists

Last week, I heard a radio story on NPR that caught my eyes, - um - my ears. The local station, based here at AU, has a series called "What's with Washington?" in which people can write in questions, the reporters/editors choose some, research and present some answers. So someone asked whether DC has an accent. 

When I mention this question to friends, family, and colleagues, their first reaction is surprise and a touch of confusion as they contemplate it. When one thinks of US accents, DC doesn't come to mind - I think New England, Boston, Chicago, NYC, Texan, Southern, CA, Baltimore....but not DC.

image from: https://www.mimicmethod.com/best-accent-learn/

The radio story calls attention to the difficulty in identifying a DC accent: it's a very transitory community with many people moving into and moving out of the area, which means that we can hear a lot of different accents in the city. The story also calls attention to the socioeconomic nature of our ideas of accent in a geographic region (think who move$ in and out), and it discusses issues of identity and language variation. This radio story discusses accents through examples of people on-the-street plus input from linguists - including AU's own WLC Professor Chip Gerfen!

And, yes, there is a DC accent. In order to find it, the story presents linguists who present information about accents generally, and - through a doctoral linguistics student at Georgetown who talks about light bulbs on a light board - specifically.

So what is the accent?

The D.C. sound comes from ... vowel centralization, R-lessness, and monophthongization

Whaaaa?! Well, read the story if you want to know those three terms for increasing your linguistic jargon vocabulary. But, really, listen to the story to hear the accent and discussion. https://wamu.org/story/16/07/07/is_there_a_washington_dc_accent/