Sometimes, you can instantly tell where a person is from by the way they speak. A Southern drawl or a California vocal fry can give someone away.
If you're around it all the time, you might not even hear that you yourself have a distinct speech pattern. So when the idea of an "Arizona accent" was floating around social media, we had to find out.
This week on Valley 101, a podcast by The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, we answer the question: Do Arizonans have an accent?
Peter Joseph Torres, a linguist and associate professor at Arizona State University, joins the show to explain where accents come from and why it's hard for Arizona to prove there is one.
"The problem of developing an accent distinct enough for people to hear is that people are
coming and going," Torres says this week on Valley 101. "And so if people are always leaving or there's a high turnover, there really isn't time for accents to develop and people are bringing in their different accents into this one area."
Listen to the episode
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Reach producer Amanda Luberto at amanda.luberto@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter @amandaluberto.
Catch up on past episodes of Valley 101:
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Apparently, we mumble. Is the Arizona accent real?
