How Strong Is Your Buffalo Accent? [QUIZ]

If you’re a Western New Yorker born and raised, you may not even realize how strong your Buffalo accent is.

When you’re a Buffalo transplant, the accent is a bit more noticeable, and there’s a bit of a quiz you can use to determine how strong your Buffalo accent truly is. 

The Buffalo accent has strong traces of European dialects, including Polish and German, but also Italian/Scilian. One language professor identified a handful of attributes from the Buffalo accent, including:

• the “flat a”
• “hard a” 
• other variations in our speech, including the drop-down of central vowels 
  • For example, “bed” may sound like “bad.”

There are even traces of a bit of a “valley girl” accent in Buffalo, too, but that is more of an intonation thing.

One sentence will reveal just how strong (or weak) your Buffalo accent is.

" Frank and Joanne ran down Transit from Amherst to Lancaster."

People with a Buffalo accent will have a hard long A in words like Frank, Ran, Lancaster.

A lot of out-of-towners have said that the accent in Western New York sounds like a combination of a New York and Canadian accent. 

You can also hear the Buffalo accent in these other familiar words and statements.

So…how strong is your accent? :)