But further study in recent years has determined that California features a number of dialects shaped by ethnicity and geography. For a long time, the field of linguistics settled on just one broad category for the accent spoken by people in the Golden State: California English. In the spirit of summer, I set out to figure out why this style of speech has become so encoded and satirized in American pop culture, whether in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure or a random City Council meeting. “I wouldn’t say I have an accent, but people comment on it all the time.” “We all kinda talked like this when I was growing up in Malibu, man,” YouTube personality, surfer and bowl-cut expert Hamish Patterson told me earlier this year. Thing is, the few people I know with a genuine surfer drawl aren’t sure of where it comes from. That drawn-out surfer-bro voice is tightly associated with Southern California culture, but it’s fairly rare to actually encounter a local with an accent so unironically thick. It was a pitch-perfect rendition of the slightly ditzy, super-stoked surfer bro, packaged for viral consumption on the internet, and it brings a smile to my face every time I remember it. “Then, after that, you drop in and just ride the barrel and get pitted, so pitt-hed, like that.” ![]() ![]() “You smack the lip - whaaaa-pak! Drop down, sma… bwaahhhhaaa!” he told the camera, using slaps of his open hand to punctate the scene. Using a combination of words, hand gestures and sound effects, Peasley told a tale of surfing nirvana. In 2002, a young man named Micah Peasley stood in front of a local TV news camera and delivered perhaps the greatest ode to riding a wave uttered by man.
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