Jack Davis describes the California accent as warm and passionate.
"It's not hurried, it's not hostile, it's not caustic," said Davis, a Los Angeles native who now lives in Santa Cruz. "It's just people hanging out and chatting and having a good time."
But where Davis hears warmth, Ted Sebern of Burbank hears nothing.
"Californians are basically accent-free," said Sebern. "If you go to the Columbia School of Broadcasting and suggest an accent for a radio broadcasting student, they're going to say we want [it] to sound like California."
Those are just two of the nearly 70 opinions we've collected by Californians about their manner of speech, part of a collaborative project by KQED and KPCC in Los Angeles. The undertaking was inspired by a story from The California Report on Voices of California, an effort by Stanford researchers to record the state's accents.