Do Californians have an accent?

Do people from the southeast or the midwest or the east coast
discern a California accent? I'm from California and I have had
many people who DO have accents say that we have no accent.

The Canadians definitely have a different way of speaking but
probably to Europeans, they sound no different from Americans
(western, anyway). Which infuriates the Canadians!!

I pronounce "been" as "ben," though I think it really should
be pronounced to rhyme with "seen." Even the English don't
appear to pronounce it that way.

Yes: every speaker of English has an accent, even if it's supposedly pure General American or British Received Pronunciation; and more in answer to your question, there are some distinct Californian features that tend to distinguish the dialect from General American. The main one is what's known as the California Vowel Shift, which consists of an opening of the KIT, DRESS and TRAP vowels, a fronting of the GOOSE and GOAT vowels and a rounding of the LOT vowel . (See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA .) This shift is exemplified (in its most progressive form) by the so-called Valley Girl accent; but from what I can tell, it's common (with varying degrees of progressiveness) throughout California.

There's also the fact that Californians have the low-back merger (also commonly known as the cot-caught merger), in which words like "father, cot, caught" all use the same vowel. This is a broader, older and more firmly entrenched shift that's predominant throughout the West and many other areas, with perhaps 40% of Americans being merged.

As for "been", I think the pronunciation "ben" is more common in the Western US, with "bin" being the most common in the country as a whole. In England and Canada there are a lot of people who use the more traditional pronunciation rhyming with "seen", but many of them do pronounce it as "bin".

Some addenda:

- I forgot to say, the shift also includes a fronting and unrounding of the FOOT vowel.

- Californians tend to possess a general West Coast feature in which words like "king" shift from using the KIT vowel to using the FLEECE vowel. They also tend to have a related shift in which the vowel in words like "rang" shifts from the TRAP vowel to the FACE vowel; but this second one is more widespread throughout North America, and thus less distinctive.

I think the complete shift from DRESS to FACE in pre-velar-nasal environments is quite distinctively Californian. What is widespread in North America as a whole, is {-tensing, which makes the TRAP vowel something like E:, E{, E@ or e@, but usually not e:

I am Californian, and if I try to say "king" with the same vowel as "seen" it sounds different from the way I normally say it. I can't positively say it's the same value as in "kit" either though.

"Do Californians have an accent?"

Yes.

Next question please.

Sorry, in the above it should be "from TRAP vowel" not "DRESS vowel" of course.

Just as a language family is made up of different languages, a language is made up of different dialects. Truly "standard" or "accent-less" American English sounds silly or cartoonish to most (Christian Bale's accent in "American Psycho" is usually used as the quintessential 'accent-less' American dialect).

I'm originally from Dallas, and, yes, I do say "ya'll." Aside from that, I would say my accent is more "standard" than most of my friends in San Diego, where I used to live (SDSU class of '07!).

Just some things I can think of that my friends do that's not "standard" American... The pronunciation of words like "leg" and "egg" with an /e/ instead of /E/. Californians also have a higher degree of vowel fronting than most other American dialects.

''Californian accent'' is something very vague.
There are many Californian accents.
Conservative accent of Northern California is very close to a neutral Western US Accent.

''Californians also have a higher degree of vowel fronting than most other American dialects.''

This is not true at all. The frontest accents are the Great Lakes accents.

Still more than most.

<<This is not true at all. The frontest accents are the Great Lakes accents.>>

My second inclination is to dismiss the notion of a "fronter" or "less front" dialect as being hopelessly over-simplistic.

But my first inclination is to ask, What on earth are you talking about? The Northern Cities Vowel Shift includes a centralizing or fronting of /A:/, yes, but aside from that it consists of a raising and diphthongization of /{/, a centralization of /E/ and /I/, a backing of /V/ and an unrounding of /Q:/. It's indisputable that the California Vowel Shift contains more fronting processes, with /u:/, /o:/ and /V/ being affected.

>>''Californians also have a higher degree of vowel fronting than most other American dialects.''

This is not true at all. The frontest accents are the Great Lakes accents.<<

Have you ever *heard* anyone from the Upper Midest? Aside from marked fronting/diphthongization of historical /oU/ amongst *some* scattered younger people here, the only vowel that is generally fronted at all relative to most other English dialects is historical /A:/ here. Aside from some allophonic diphthongization of high and mid back vowels after coronals to central-to-back or front-to-back diphthongs, historical /u:/, /oU/, /O:/ and stressed /@/ are quite firmly back vowels here, and historical /U/ is less centralized than in many other English dialects.

/{/ is both raised and fronted in the Inland North, and /O/ is both lowered and fronted, as per "The Atlas of North American English." Nonetheless, you are right that other vowels are backed in the Shift. However, the vowels that are backed are later stages of the shift, and are not necessarily shifted back in all speakers, but only in the more advanced dialect speakers. Hence, it seems to listeners that the dialect is more fronted, although when one takes into account all aspects of the Shift, it is not more fronted, and /o/ is certainly not more fronted on average in the Inland North.

The fronting of historical /O:/ is really only in that it is being lowered (and thus physically has to be fronted to some degree, even though it still lies at the back of the usable vowel space). At least around here in southeastern Wisconsin, historical /O:/ is either [Q] or [A] (with [A] tending to be favored more the further south one goes) and is unfronted (aside from the actual physical configuration of the possible vowel space). And as for historical /u:/ and /oU/, their backing has nothing to do with the NCVS and rather is likely due to outside substratum influence preceding the NCVS, unlike the backing of historical /E/ and /I/.