Identify my dialect of American English!

[YoungScholar]

I'm a native speaker of American English, from New York City, and I'm trying to figure out my dialect! I've had people in the past tell me that I have a General American accent but I've also had people tell me that I have a valley girl accent, and that seems sort of contradictory. Is my dialect just zoomer General American or can it be pinned down to something more specific? Do I somehow speak a regional dialect of a region that I'm not from?

Sample of my spontaneous speech from a relatively recent video

More details:

Mergers: cot-caught, mary-marry (but not merry), wine-whine, father-bother, have-halve, prince-prints, pour-poor, ant-aunt
Unmerged: pin-pen, hull-hole, bag-vague, fool-full (hurry-furry: natively unmerged, but someone corrected my pronunciation of "hurry" when I was a kid and now I merge them. egg-vague: natively unmerged, but the merged pronunciation of "egg" is more fun for me to say.)

variation outside of Standard American English: occasional use of "ain't," use of habitual "be" in fixed phrases only ("it really do be like that"/"people be ___"), occasional use of "shall" outside of fixed phrases and questions (nonstandard for American English), use of "could" instead of "can," sometimes using the regular past tense form for past participles ("I've ran," "I've swam," "I've sang"), common but not overwhelming use of Gen Z slang.

Negative concord is absent in my natural speech and I have only ever used it emphatically. I also consistently use "try to"/"by accident"/"couldn't care less" instead of "try and"/"on accident"/"could care less," so I follow the formal standard for those phrases as well.

variation within Standard American English: y'all/you all (uncontracted)/folks are basically interchangeable and all natural to me. "None of __" takes the plural for me in "none of us/none of them are" but sometimes it takes the singular with other verbs. The "If... were" singular subjunctive is nearly dead in my native speech outside of fixed phrases, though not weird for me to hear from others. My native speech also uses "me and __" in compound subjects. I don't consistently distinguish less/fewer: my native dialect defaults to "less" and only rarely uses "fewer." Of all things, I natively distinguish who/whom.

*I've managed to train myself to use "if... were" in the subjunctive, consistent "less/fewer", and "__ and I" in compound subjects (a teacher corrected me on the compound subjects one!) but that's not really relevant to my native dialect.

I apologize if this post is too long!

 

[probus]

I in turn apologize for not noticing your post earler. I agree with those who say your accent is standard American. Since you are from NYC one might expect a trace of Brooklyn or LawnGuyland, or dawg for dog, a la DJT. But there's none of that.

As to Valley Girl, I've never thought of it as an accent but more a collection of slang such as totally tubular and grotie. Anyway you certainly don't sound like a valley girl to me

 

[SoothingDave]

It's very neutral, but you do trail off with the "so..." with some vocal fry, which is probably where the Valley Girl comment come from.

When I initially read your post, I was wondering how you say "coffee." That's a NYC giveaway word.

 

[probus]

Coffee and dog are standard.
Cawfee and dawg are Brooklyn or Long Island.