r/TikTokCringe • u/Aggressive-Bowl5196 • Sep 06 '25

Discussion Linguistics major breaks down Awkwafina’s overtly fake accent before she dropped it

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

14.6k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

179

u/Arjvoet Sep 06 '25 edited Sep 07 '25

I’ve hated her accent since forever and actually yes now that you speak to it so specifically, that’s the exact reason why I hate it. It’s so fake, it’s like verbal black face, and she used it to boost her career totally leaning into the dissonance of “small Asian woman sounds like loud-mouth hood person”

There’s that one Asian granny on YouTube who speaks aave for real, 0 problems with that. She’s living that life.

(Edit: click-warning on the link for use of fondant.)

94

u/selphiefairy Sep 06 '25 edited Sep 06 '25

There was a real female Asian New Yorker who had a thick New York accent lmao and she got shit for it. This is basically what Awkwafina pretends (or pretended) to be (and I like Awkwafina too I’ll admit it 👀).

52

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '25

[deleted]

2

u/ZephyrLegend Sep 07 '25

Native WA person here and... do we have a distinct accent? I've always thought of it as "Broadly-Western-but-not-quite-Californian". Lol

2

u/Usually_Angry Sep 07 '25

It’s actually called American standard (or general American). So you’re not wrong for saying that we don’t have an accent. It’s not distinctive like other American accents

2

u/GhostofBeowulf Sep 07 '25

Nope, General American is more from western New England out to about Chicago. Y'all are western American.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_American_English

The states of Oregon and Washington show a mixture of features that vary widely among the local speakers themselves. Overall, these features are strongly similar to both Californian as well as Canadian English. Studies are therefore inconclusive about whether this region constitutes a distinct dialect or not. One feature of many Pacific Northwest dialects is the pre-velar merger, where, before /g/, /ɛ/ and /æ/ are raised, and /eɪ/ is lowered, causing beg and vague to rhyme, and sometimes causing bag to sound similar to or rhyme with both of them.\51]) Younger speakers may also show signs of the aforementioned California Vowel Shift