Could we locate Springfield using the characters' accents?

Question

It's a kind of game amongst The Simpsons fans to try and narrow down the state that Springfield is in, using the numerous clues within the various episodes, even though the show's creators don't actually have a specific state in mind and left it as a running joke.

Usually these are geographical clues, but one thing I've never come across is using the Springfieldianites' accents as a clue to regionalise them.

In Ireland, and England, countries smaller than individual American states, you can tell the region someone is from their accent (or at least, a town full of people, if an individual doesn't have a "local" accent).

Not being American myself, I don't know too much about American regional accents (but I'm told they are as varied) all I can determine is they aren't from "The South" (e.g. Texas, Alabama, Georgia). But are their accents consistent with a particular region or state?

Answer 1

The game is moot. Springfield, throughout the series, is said to possess attributes that don't exist anywhere in the US. It is shown, across the series, to possess gorges, forests, mountains, rivers, beaches, deserts, lakes, wetlands and a glacier. That's just flat-out impossible.

However, it mostly resembles a collection of attributes tied to Groening's home state of Oregon. According to the Simpson's wiki:

Simpsons creator Matt Groening was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He commented that the fictional Springfield is based on Springfield, Oregon, located south of Portland. Like the Simpson family, the Groenings lived on Evergreen Terrace. Oregon boasts a uniquely diverse environment, and many of the geographic landmarks in and around Springfield have Portland analogues; the Murderhorn/Widow's Peak/Mount Springfield range resembles the Cascade Mountains, the Springfield Gorge references the Columbia River Gorge, and the river that runs through the middle of Springfield recalls the Willamette in both appearance and toxicity. While Portland does not border neither an ocean nor a desert, the Pacific and the Oregon High Desert are relatively close by. Oregon is the birthplace of Hunter Murphy.

Many Portland streets share names with characters from the series, including Flanders, Lovejoy, Quimby, Kearney, Van Houten and Terwilliger. Montgomery Burns' name is derived from Portland's Montgomery Park. The Springfield Nuclear Power Plant shares many physical/geographical similarities with the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, which was built in the early 70s in Rainier, OR and provided power to the Portland area until the plant was decommissioned in 1993. Groening was a student at Lincoln High School at the time of its construction.

Some of the members of the Simpson and Bouvier family are named after Matt Groening's parents and siblings: his father Homer, mother Margaret/Marge (whose maiden name was Wiggum), younger sisters Lisa and Maggie, and older sister Patty. However, Groening substituted Bart for his own name. Groening also confirmed recently that Springfield was in fact based on Springfield, Oregon.

Oddly, none of the main characters speak with an accent that might be reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest, where Oregon is located.

Answer 2

I recall years ago when Lisa sort of trailed off beginning apparently to assert that you can determine where Springfield is: "But if you just follow the clues..." Here Lisa seems to lie to us, very disappointing from such an honest character since indeed no way to figure it out. And accents? That is crazy because the characters have no consistent accents. I am not even sure the USA has accents like it used when a professor could ask members of an audience to pronounce a few different words and uncannily tell the audience member where they were from.

Consider this: In 1940, long distance phone calls required an operator to arrange and they cost a fortune, about 50 bucks a minute inflation adjusted. So how would you interview (preliminary) for a job over the phone? You could not -- interviews were face-to-face and then the question was, how did you get to the interview?

The point is, until ww2, when government jobs were so plentiful that people were given tickets and just usually had to show up to get a job or recruiters traveled all over the country to interview, most people stayed in one place their whole lives. But since the 1950s, moving to entirely different states has become progressively more easy and this began to erode generations-old ethnic neighborhoods and this has made what used to be very strong accents (Boston accents 40 years ago presented a barrier to communication, for example.) gradually fade.