The linguistic traits that flourish throughout the Pacific Northwest attest to a culture that transcends boundaries. Historically, this hearkens back to the early years of colonial expansion by the British and Americans, when the entire region was considered a single area and people of all different mother tongues and nationalities used Chinook Jargon to communicate with each other. Until the Oregon Treaty of 1846, it was identified as being either Oregon Country or Columbia. Linguists immediately after World WarII tended to find few patterns unique to the Western region, as among other things, Chinook Jargon and other "slang words" were pushed away in favour of having a "proper, clean" dialect. Several decades later, linguists began noticing emerging characteristics of Pacific Northwest English, although it remains close to the standard American accent.
Phonology
Commonalities with both Canada and California
Pacific Northwest English has all the phonological mergers typical of North American English and, more specifically, all the mergers typical of Western American English, including the cot–caught merger.
Younger speakers of Pacific Northwest English also show features of the Canadian/California Vowel Shift, which move front vowels through a lowering of the tongue:
* is retracted toward almost ; toward almost ; and toward almost. Therefore, among younger speakers, hick can sound like heck, heck like hack, and hack like hock.
* is backed and sometimes rounded to become. Most Pacific Northwest speakers have undergone the cot–caught merger. A notable exception occurs with some speakers born before roughly the end of World WarII.
Traditional and older speakers may show certain vowels, such as as in boat and as in bait, with qualities much closer to monophthongs than diphthongs as in the rest of the country.
There are also conditional raising processes of open front vowels. These processes are often more extreme than in Canada and the North Central United States.
* Among some speakers in Portland and southern Oregon, is sometimes raised and diphthongized to or before the nasal consonants and. This is typical throughout the country.
*, and, in the northern Pacific Northwest,, become before the voiced velar plosive : egg and leg are pronounced to rhyme with plague and vague, a feature shared by many northern Midwestern dialects and with the Utah accent. In addition, sometimes bag will be pronounced bayg.
**While raising is present in both Canadian and Pacific Northwest English, differences exist between the groups most commonly presenting these features. raising is more common in younger Canadian speakers and less common in younger Washingtonian speakers.
Commonalities with California
Back vowels of the California Shift: The Canadian/California Shift developing in Pacific Northwest English also includes these additional features only reminiscent of California English, but not Canadian English :
* In speakers born around the 1960s, there is a tendency to move the tongue forward in the first element of the diphthong. This is reminiscent also of Midland, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern U.S. English. This fronting does not appear before and, for example, in the wordhome.
Absence of Canadian raising: For most speakers, both and remain lax before voiceless obstruents, although some variation has been reported. This likens the Pacific Northwest accent with Californian accents, and contrasts it with Canadian and some other American dialects.
Miscellaneous characteristics
Some speakers perceive or produce the pairs and close to each other, for example, resulting in a merger between pen and pin, most notably in Eugene, Oregon and Spokane, Washington.
Consonant phonology is more conservative, as with other varieties of English.
Lexicon
Several English terms originated in or are largely unique to the region:
