Garage Sales and Pajamas: How SCV Talks

On Wednesday (You Sound Like You're From Santa Clarita), we took a look at the clever quiz from the NY Times that tells you which US cities match your way of speaking most closely. To the amusement and fascination of many SCV'ers, lots of SCV natives and longtime residents are getting an exact match for "Santa Clarita."

This kind of stuff has been a fascination of mine for a long time. I'm pretty sure that I was one of the 300,000 people that took the (much longer) survey that formed that dataset used for this quiz. When I learned that people were getting Santa Clarita, I couldn't rest until I found out why. We wrestle here as much as anywhere with the duality of being a pretty big city but with a less-defined identity than most cities of the same size.

That's not necessarily an SCV thing, but probably a mega suburb thing. If you look at the largest suburbs in California, most of them are as faceless to us as Santa Clarita is to them. Now we know there's something different and special about this area. But it's tough to put your finger on it. At least I haven't been able to. Much less with speech.

I was surprised a few years back to learn that there was such thing as a "California accent," which is a slightly modified version of a midwestern accent. Then one day, I had a project at work that required me to clean up the spoken words of everyday Californians into something that made sense on paper. This was a shockingly difficult chore, because we're horrible talkers – constantly filling our sentences with "like," "right," "ok," "um," or my personal filler, "ya know." We cut mid-sentence into the next sentence. Then we trail off…

Even still, I've never thought of Santa Claritans has having their own dialectal characteristics. So I did my best to get the attention of the creator of the quiz, Josh Katz. I didn't have any luck, so I dug some more. Then I gave up, and put it aside. A week later, I was determined to get to the bottom of it. So I searched so more, and found the treasure: Dialect Survey Maps. This site has thousands of maps from Katz's academic project at North Carolina State, the project that drove his NY Times Quiz. This was it!

Right away, I went to this map. It shows how similar Santa Clarita is to the rest of the country. Pretty cool, right? As you can see, we'd fit in just fine all over California. It also names the five cities that are most similar and least similar to Santa Clarita. (Funny enough, the 3rd-least similar is my childhood home of Philadelphia, PA, which also happens to be the city I score when I take the quiz)

Elsewhere on the site, I read that the 5-city lists were limited to cities with 200,000+ people. So I went digging a little further and compared Santa Clarita, question for question (of those questions used in the Times quiz), to our closest neighboring cities with results: Los Angeles, Glendale, Burbank, Simi Valley, Palmdale and Lancaster. 

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of similarities. Big roads are freeways, Air Jordans are tennis shoes, glowing bugs are fireflies, and Mary, marry, and merry all sound the same. So does cot and caught. A cake gets frosting, not icing. It's dinner, not supper. Crawfish, not crayfish. We can't decide over "traffic circle" or "roundabout." And we have no word for the night before Halloween, a rainstorm when it's sunny, or for drive-thru liquor stores.

Also interesting: it's "soda" instead of "pop" or something else, but only for 2/3rds of us. And all this time, I thought we like "water fountain" over "drinking fountain," but I was wrong.

Of the cities I looked at, Lancaster talks most like the SCV, followed closely by Palmdale, then Simi Valley, Los Angeles, Glendale and Burbank. The city of Los Angeles is grouped as one, so there's no Van Nuys, Northridge or Woodland Hills, which would have been interesting. While the Antelope Valley is our closest match, Simi Valley speaks to stereotype: it's like Santa Clarita, just more so. If we tilt in a direction, Simi is leaning.

The two terms that distinguished the SCV are actually pretty interesting, One has to do with usage and another with pronunciation: we like "garage sale" over "yard sale" and we prefer to pronounce the second a in "pajamas" like the a in jam instead of the a in father.

At first glance, you might think the divide between "garage sale" and "yard sale" is a regional or cultural divide. In some areas it might be the case. In the map, you can see some areas of the midwest prefer "rummage sale" and SCVTalk reader Julie Olsen informs me that the green "Other" area in western CT and MA is for "tag sale." But in Southern California, it could go either way. We're basically a "garage sale" state, but with a strong "yard sale" contingent. Why might that be?

Santa Clarita's large 2 and 3-car garages stick out pug-faced towards the street. It's usually the most prominent architectural feature of the house, while our front yards are small. In an older city like Glendale and Pasadena, garages might be small and tucked away from the street. If a Santa Claritan has old exercise equipment and Ikea furniture to unload, they'd open their garage and display their unwanted things on the driveway. In Burbank, you're more likely to hold the sale on your yard.

By the numbers, we prefer garage sale 56 to 34, but we have nothing on Simi Valley's 65 to 27. Burbank slightly prefers yard sale 46 to 42, Glendale is 45 to 43. Comparative Google searches show this divide as well.

Look at this map. The pajama line, running from Texas to New Jersey, is one of the best examples of the general divide in dialect in America that Katz mentions in this neat poster. It's a little different because the pajahma of the south is also strong along the Eastern seaboard up to New York City.

California, on first glance, is pajama country. 

But Santa Clarita is split. 52% say pajama and 44% say pajahma. Palmdale, Burbank, Glendale and Los Angeles actually prefer pajahma. 

When I ran the first comparison (with Glendale), I was puzzled over this divide. Not just how it distinguished Santa Clarita, but how divided Santa Clarita was. How is that possible, when California is such a pajama state? Then I noticed those blue streaks around the urban areas, especially LA and the Bay Area. Was that just due to the high number of non-native Californians?

My best guess is yes and no. Maybe it's due to the generations of migrants over the years that prevent some usages from gaining a foothold. I tried out a few hypotheses, but none seemed to stick. If you look city by city in California, a city's preference for pajama seemed to oddly coincide with how Republican that city was. I took a few informal surveys of people who live in Santa Clarita, and it just left me with more questions than answers. None of my best guesses worked.

I invited people on some Facebook groups to answer. I was especially interested in those people who were raised in Santa Clarita. In all, I got 70 responses. This is hardly scientific, but the breakdown, 38 JAMs and 32 JAHMs, matched the proportion in seen in the study. For those from other states, their preferences almost always matched the region where they grew up. But the SCV natives were split! They went 7 to 6 for JAM. SFV natives were 8 to 6. They must get it from their parents, I thought. Nope. Most actually went against the regional preference of where their parents came from. Age didn't seem to make a difference and neither did political party. So I really have no idea. I just know that we're more JAM and other cities are more JAHM, but we're all kinda split. 

When asked to describe Santa Clarita, I've told people that we're like LA, but newer and more suburban, with one foot on the city and another foot in the open space of yesterday. Like many of our neighbors, we're of California, but not necessarily from California. We're both unique and undefined, which one depends on the question you're asking.

That's true of how we live and, it turns out, of how we talk.