Californians have a casual, if not plain, way of speaking, and northerners are known for saying "hella" while southerners have a habit of placing "the" in front of highway references as in. In the south they take "the 5" to Santa Monica, while in the north we take "5" to LA.

But do our language quirks go beyond local slang? Do San Franciscans have an accent?

This question recently came up on the San Francisco Remembered Facebook page and 612 comments later, people are still engaged in a lively debate around the topic.

Historians say San Franciscans once had an accent as thick and heavy as Brooklyn's but it has largely vanished—though many in the thread argue natives still have a distinctive way of speaking that's noticeable to out-of-towners.

"Whereja go-da school?" writes Carlo Guglielmino. "Howya gonna get-dare? I was bornina City and raised ina Sunset, Westwood Highlands and Sunnyside district. I've been asked many many times if I was from the East Coast. Nope, it's call a San Francisco accent."

"I'm born and raised in SF, I run a lot of sounds together," shares Eleanor Nason Mannion. "I would like to think of it as being efficient with my vocal sounds, most of the time it is understood, but every once in awhile someone doesn't understand and I have to be careful to pronounce more clearly.

Many offer guideposts to talking like a San Franciscan.

"We talk hella fast and use hella metaphors too," chimes in Glenn Springston.

"We don't say our Ts. Say Catfish Hunter out loud. You'll see what I mean," adds Chris Courtney.

"All Santa names are sanna," Les Costello says.

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A few in the thread argue the city doesn't have an accent, pointing to the typically clear speech of Californians as proof that we are the standard for the American accent.

"There is no accent," writes Yarrow Lee Kubrin. "I was born and raised in SF. Californians do not do anything to the sounds of the words...no drawl or twang. This is not opinion. In California they used to not hire teachers who had accents because they did not want the children to get accents from other regions. Any accents are incidental, and not from this region."

"I say our non accent is our accent," shared Minda Mac.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte says there once was a predominant San Francisco accent and lingo, and in 1984 he wrote a column detailing its characteristics. He says that speaking fast and running words together are the main components.

They says "dontcha" instead of "don't you," and "Youra" instead of "You are."

It's "Thecity," not "The City," and it's "Sampencisco," not "San Francisco."

San Franciscans of a certain age also answer questions with "yeah," not "yes," they never refer to their city as "Frisco," and you go the "the show" to see movies.

In an email to SFGATE, Nolte confirmed the dialect he described in 1984 is nearly extinct, writing it "has pretty much faded away with the passage of time."

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But many members of San Francisco Remembered recall the accent and say they continue to use and hear it. The group also brings up the accent's multifarious nature, pointing out the different ways immigrant groups and neighborhoods have adapted to speaking in the city.

"Depended upon which neighborhood you came from," writes Lynn Wilson Bilotta. "My dad and Aunt grew up on Army Street - The Mission. They both sounded like they came from either Boston or Jersey. They used terms such as "dees and does" instead of "these and those". My dad said that he did not know he sounded uneducated until he enlisted in the army near the end of WWII."