Philadelphia accent


The Philadelphia accent is the accent of English spoken in Philadelphia and extending into Philadelphia's suburbs in the Delaware Valley and southern New Jersey. It is one of the best-studied dialects of American English due to the fact that Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania is the home institution of William Labov, one of the most productive American sociolinguists. Unlike the dialects found in much of the rest of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia accent shares several unusual features with the New York accent, although it is a distinct dialect region. The Philadelphia accent is, however, in most respects the same as the accents of Wilmington, Delaware and Baltimore, constituting what Labov describes as the Mid-Atlantic dialect region.