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Dialect of English spoken in California

California English (or Californian English) collectively refers to varieties of American English native to California. As California became one of the most ethnically diverse U. S. states, English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds began to pick up different linguistic elements from one another and also developed new ones; the result is both divergence and convergence within Californian English. However, linguists who studied English before and immediately after World War II tended to find few, if any, patterns unique to California, This helped to define an accent emerging primarily among youthful, white, urban, coastal speakers, and popularly associated with the valley girl and surfer dude youth subcultures. The possibility that this is, in fact, an age specific variety of English is one hypothesis; however, certain features of this accent are intensifying and spreading geographically. Other documented California English includes a "country" accent associated with rural and inland white Californians, which is also (to a lesser extent) affected by the California Vowel Shift; an older accent once spoken by Irish Americans in San Francisco; and distinctly Californian varieties of Chicano English mainly associated with Mexican Americans. Research has shown that Californians themselves perceive a linguistic boundary between northern and southern California, particularly regarding the northern use of hella and southern (but now nationally widespread) use of dude, bro, and like.

One topic that has begun to receive much attention from scholars in recent decades has been the emergence of a vowel based chain shift in California. The image in this section illustrates the California vowel shift on a vowel chart. The vowel space of the image is a cross section (as if looking at the interior of a mouth from a side profile perspective); it is a rough approximation of the space in a human mouth where the tongue is located in articulating certain vowel sounds (the left is the front of the mouth closer to the teeth, the right side of the chart being the back of the mouth). As with other vowel shifts, several vowels may be seen moving in a chain shift around the mouth. As one vowel encroaches upon the space of another, the adjacent vowel in turn experiences a movement in order to maximize phonemic differentiation. For convenience, California English will be compared with a "typical" General American English, abbreviated "GA". is pulled towards (bit and kit are sounding more like bet and ket in other dialects) is pulled towards (wreck and kettle are sounding more like rack and cattle), is pulled towards , and and merge (cot and stock are sounding more like caught and stalk): the cot caught merger. Other vowel changes, whose relation with the shift is uncertain, are also emerging: except before , is moving through towards (rude and true are almost approaching reed and tree, but with rounded lips), and is moving beyond is moving towards (so that, for example, book and could in the California dialect start to sound, to a GA speaker, more like buck and cud), is moving through , sometimes approaching (duck, crust, what, etc. are sounding like how U. S. Southerners pronounce them, or like how other Americans might pronounce deck, crest, wet, etc.). New vowel characteristics of the California shift are increasingly found among younger speakers. For example, while some characteristics such as the close central rounded vowel or close front rounded vowel for are widespread in Californian speech, the same high degree of fronting for is found predominantly among young speakers. The effects of the California vowel shift have been noted in varieties of Californian Spanish, particularly in the Bay Area.

Certain varieties of Chicano English are also native to California, sometimes even being spoken by non Latino Californians. One example is East Los Angeles Chicano English, which has been influenced by both Californian and African American Vernacular English. The coastal urban accent of California traces many of its features back to Valleyspeak: a social dialect arising in the 1980s among a particular white youthful demographic in the San Fernando Valley, including Los Angeles. Boontling is a jargon or argot spoken in Boonville, California, with only about 100 speakers today.

The popular image of a typical southern California speaker often conjures up images of the so called Valley girls popularized by the 1982 hit song by Frank and Moon Zappa, or "surfer dude" speech made famous by movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High. While many phrases found in these extreme versions of California English from the 1980s may now be considered passé, certain words such as awesome, totally, for sure, harsh, gnarly, and dude have remained popular in California and have spread to a national, even international, level. A common example of a northern Californian colloquialism is hella (from "(a) hell of a (lot of)", and the euphemistic alternative hecka) to mean "many", "much", "so" or "very". It can be used with both count and mass nouns. For example: "I haven't seen you in hella long"; "There were hella people there"; or "This guacamole is hella good". The word can be casually used multiple times in multiple ways within a single sentence. Pop culture references to "hella" are common, as in the song "Hella Good" by the band No Doubt, which hails from southern California, and "Hella" by the band Skull Stomp, who come from northern California. California, like other Southwestern states, has borrowed many words from Spanish, especially for place names, food, and other cultural items, reflecting the linguistic heritage of the Californios as well as more recent immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. High concentrations of various ethnic groups throughout the state have contributed to general familiarity with words describing (especially cultural) phenomena. For example, a high concentration of Asian Americans from various cultural backgrounds, especially in urban and suburban metropolitan areas in California, has led to the adoption of the word hapa (itself originally a Hawaiian borrowing of English "half") to mean someone of mixed European/Islander or Asian/Islander heritage. In 1958, essayist Clifton Fadiman pointed out that northern California is the only place (besides England and the area surrounding Ontario and the Canadian Prairies) where the word chesterfield is used as a synonym for sofa or couch.

In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Inland Empire, Coachella Valley and San Diego, freeways are often referred to either by name or by route number but with the addition of the definite article "the", such as "the 405 North", "the 99" or "the 605 (Freeway)". This usage has been parodied in the recurring Saturday Night Live sketch "The Californians". In contrast, typical northern California usage omits the definite article. When southern California freeways were built in the 1940s and early 1950s, local common usage was primarily the freeway name preceded by the definite article, such as "the Hollywood Freeway".