Talk:Maine accent

Contested deletion
This article should not be speedy deleted as having no substantive content because I am currently working to develop further content. It should be completed by Tuesday, May 19.


 * Hi. Even with your tag, I figured you can just create the article when you have content for it. In the meantime, it consists of three links, all of which are possibly inappropriate in a Wikipedia article under the guidelines for external links. —Largo Plazo (talk) 18:36, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

Rename to "Maine accent"
Are other editors still in agreement with the rename idea to "Maine accent" as discussed on Articles for deletion/Maine dialect? We can discuss below. Wolfdog (talk) 16:33, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 31 October 2015

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: moved. History swap performed to preserve the old history. Jenks24 (talk) 06:22, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Maine dialect → Maine accent – The Atlas of North American English identifies (at least the modern-day) Maine variety as a subset of the Northern/Eastern New England dialect, as much of its phonology and vocabulary show: "Northeastern New England [NENE] is the r-less area with the low back merger, a sizeable area centered about Boston and extending into New Hampshire and Maine" (p. 225). The second paragraph of also verifies this. Also, "Maine accent" is by far the more common name anyway, as a quick Google Scholar search can show. Down East Maine accent also appears to be somewhat common (and maybe more specific), though still not as common as "Maine accent." Wolfdog (talk) 13:54, 31 October 2015 (UTC) Relisted. Jenks24 (talk) 10:35, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Relisting comment. The target page has a significant history that will have to be dealt with, so I'm relisting this to make sure there is no disagreement with moving. Jenks24 (talk) 10:35, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Support. The issues here are basically the same as in the "English in New Mexico" RM. We need to put these state dialect article titles in a standard format of some kind. Linguists don't classify language by state and it is misleading to title articles as if they did. I see that DARE has divided Maine into six languistic regions. Gulangyu (talk) 00:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

IPA for "corner" and "squaretail"
Re, please explain how those are wrong or 'unhelpful'. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 18:24, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh jeez. No, we can leave it. (Wouldn't corner have the NORTH vowel though?) Wolfdog (talk) 23:16, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Nope, it has FORCE (it's in AAVE). Wells seems to have mistranscribed it with  in the LPD (for AmE, he gives  as the second option in FORCE words). Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 07:33, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Source? Wolfdog (talk) 12:04, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
 * - can't find anything else ATM. Listen to how he says "corner". Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 12:25, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think we can use a music video as evidence. 1. Rap notoriously bends and stretches rhymes. 2. The horse-hoarse merger, while less robust in AAVE, is still common. 3. There's no certainty that horse-hoarse distinctions are consistent across dialects as different as AAVE and ENEE. Wolfdog (talk) 12:38, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
 * We can be certain that the horse-hoarse distinctions are not consistent across all dialects. I've listed an example below. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 12:43, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
 * That's not a mistranscription, Wells is recording the dissimilated variant (K&K). Corner seems to belong to the NORTH set: . Nardog (talk) 12:33, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Strange. I've changed the IPA, but perhaps it's better to remove it. After all, it's unsourced and we can't be sure whether corner doesn't have FORCE in Maine. For example, in Port Talbot in Wales, forceps, fortress, important and importance have FORCE instead of the etymologically correct NORTH . Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 12:40, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

and
At the risk of another two-person ramble, why are we adding somewhat extraneous information? The sentence As in RP, the symbols ⟨ɜ⟩ and ⟨ə⟩ used elsewhere in the article denote a difference between stressable (long) and unstressable (short) schwas (according to the old IPA value of ⟨ɜ⟩ as a 'variety of ⟨ə⟩'), not a consistent difference in quality. supposes that <ɜ> is used elsewhere in the article when it isn't -- just the chart. I think the whole sentence is redundant. Wolfdog (talk) 22:03, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It will be should anyone decide to expand the article. I've removed In word-final positions, / can also differ in quality from by being more open (as it usually is in other dialects), so that the final vowels in cypher and alpha  are often lower,, in addition to being shorter than the final vowel of transfer (as a noun). instead, it's so obvious that anyone that knows a bit about English phonetics will figure that out by themselves. Sol505000 (talk) 22:21, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Hm, a bit odd to prepare a small article for what might happen to it in the future, but alright. Wolfdog (talk) 22:38, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

"Nippy" etymology
The etymology given for "nippy" being "cold enough to stiffen one's nipples" is incorrect. "Nip", in the sense of "bite", has been used to describe cold weather for centuries, and is not specific to Maine (though it is commonly used there). The reference given is a humorous article which substitutes the phrase "a tit nipply" for "a bit nippy". Admittedly, this joke phrase is also commonly used in Maine, but is understood to be humorous. Akuweal (talk) 17:55, 6 June 2023 (UTC)