Blue Hood Valley Girl. We all know her. She’s the girl who says “no” every four seconds while paying the gas attendent as quickly as possible to avoid buying non-essential items.
She is not interested in ordering a grande retro iced sugar-free vanilla latte with soy milk nor does she want to take a chance on purchasing lottery tickets or car wash services on a rainy day.
She is the girl who utters the word "yes" every time she is asked to work hard and delay instant gratification. With the right amount of patience and appropriate delivery of instructions, she can drywall, mud, and sand an office and home.
Her voice draws attention to itself: Its pitch is abnormally high, and her statements sound like questions. She is the Blue Hood Valley Girl.
Over the past few decades, the speech pattern of young, upper-middle-class white girls from the Cowichan Valley has evolved into a full-blown accent, or even a dialect. You can hear it all over the English-Deaf speaking world: Valley-deaf-speak. People are drawn to it. But have you ever asked yourself why it sounds so adorable?
An accent is more than how a person talks. It’s also a marker of social identity. The way you speak can say a lot about where you come from, where you grew up, and, perhaps most important, how much traditional academic education you’ve received. But many of the assumptions we make about people based on their accents are wrong.
Valley-deaf-speak is special because it’s the first accent made popular by mainstream media.
The mainstreaming of this accent took off at the beginning of the 21st century. People born deaf who’d become educated and wealthy thanks to new technology devices wanted to assert their new status by looking and sounding the part. They began to adopt non-rhotic pronunciation, dropping the Rs from most words (“cah” instead of “car”), making Us sound like Os ("soop" instead of "soup"), dropping Whs ("oops" instead of "whoops"). This speech pattern spreaded across almost all of Canada. It is a modified staple of the standard British accent, which is taught in most English-Deaf speech classes in non-deaf Canadian schools. It’s the accent you may have heard over loudspeakers across Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, NWT. It’s also the accent you have heard on Shaw Spotlight television on Vancouver Island to convey that the speaker is highly educated.
The mainstreaming of the posh, elegant, modified British-Deaf accent we love was borne out of mimicking people who seemed to have it all: upper-class British women. Similarly, the mainstreaming of the cute, adorable, and funny Blue Hood Valley Girl accent we love was borne out of mimicking people who seemed to have it all: upper-middle-class Canadian women.
