New Jersey has one of the least liked accents

OK, I’m going to get right to the enraging part: in an analysis of Americans’ attitudes toward accents, New Jersey finished below Boston. Boston!? That has to be the most grating accent there is!

Here’s what I’m talking about: a site called Word Tips used an AI algorithm to

analyze how positively Twitter users talk about 165 accents throughout the United States, the UK and 104 other countries worldwide. We also analyzed how positively Twitter users talk about the accents of 66 celebrities whose accents have previously been the subject of discussion on Twitter or in news articles.

They analyzed over 500,000 tweets. The algorithm returns the possibility of a text being positive, negative or neutral. They then calculated the proportion of positive tweets for all tweets about each accent.

Their conclusion was that New Jersey had the 16th most popular American accent (Boston, unbelievably, is ninth).

Here the rankings:

Globally, the favorite accent is Tunisian; I will admit, I have no idea what a Tunisian accent sounds like. Apparently, the Tunisian accent is “shaped by its Arabic vocabulary as well as Berber, French, Italian, Spanish and even Turkish influences.”

The Sudanese accent is second; again, no idea what that sounds like. I would have rated the Irish accent higher, but that’s just me.

For celebrities, the top two are both Brits: Idris Elba and Adele, followed by Rihanna. Thirteen of the top 20 celebrity accents are Brits. The highest American is Matthew McConaughey at #15 and Britney Spears is 20th.

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Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Bill Doyle only.

You can now listen to Deminski & Doyle — On Demand! Hear New Jersey’s favorite afternoon radio show any day of the week. Download the Deminski & Doyle show wherever you get podcasts, on our free app, or listen right now.

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Source: New Jersey has one of the least liked accents

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