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[quote=Anonymous]There most definitely used to be a white DC accent. But dc is so transient with so many new people from all over the country and world, it has mostly died out by the 80s. For a wile there were retirement communities on the Bay where you could hear it.
I grew up in MoCo (but four generations before me from DC) from the 60s to the 80s and I’m sure I had some sort of accent until I got to my teens and started paying more attention to how I sounded, and then lost most of it.  Some older people among my parents friends had distinctive accents. Also a couple aunts.
I don’t know how to describe it, but it was a mid Atlantic accent that sounded different from Baltimore or Philly, but the thing it had in common was it sounded kind of dumb and unsophisticated, which was one reason middle and upper middle class people changed the way they talked as they got older. But because there were so many people from other places, you didn’t know it was just the local accent you were unlearning, you just thought some things sounded dumb and avoided them.
Also, I remember there were a lot of extra r’s, like wershing machine and warder instead of water.
But even the black accent has many influences. Blacks used to be more local from tidewater of Md and Va. After WWII there was a big influx from farther south like from the Carolinas. But also DC blacks have some things in common with black speech in Baltimore and Philly.  Like their own version of jawn (joint in Philly dialect)[/quote]

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