The Pacific Northwest is a dialect region thus far largely understudied by linguists. Also, the Japanese-American community in the American Pacific Northwest, although a minority population, has been a salient part of the region’s history since the late 1800s. This study both draws on recent prior linguistic research and examines the speech of two second-generation, Seattle-born Japanese-American sisters in order to answer the following questions: First, do these two sisters express differently their experiences with each the Japanese, Pacific Northwest, and Japanese-American communities? And second, to what extent do Japanese-American speakers and Caucasian-American speakers similarly articulate the vowels in words such as "bag" /æ/ and "beg" /ԑ/? A conversational interview, a reading passage task, and a word list reading task were recorded for both sisters. This interview, in which both sisters participated, was transcribed and tagged for metalinguistic themes. Tokens of both vowels were taken from the individually recorded reading tasks for each sister and were measured in Praat for the formant frequencies of F1 and F2. The trends revealed in plots of each sister’s formant data are linked to the connectedness of each sister to the Pacific Northwest community. Through these collective data, this study seeks to show two things: that perceived negative experiences with a culture to which a person has ties are correlated with increased expression of disconnectedness from that culture; and that perceived positive experiences with a culture to which a person has ties are correlated with increased expression of connectedness with that culture. Finally, by drawing on recent prior research of Caucasian speech patterns in the Pacific Northwest and comparing it to the Japanese-American data in this study, this study seeks to show that Japanese-American speakers and Caucasian-American speakers show similarity in the articulation of the vowels /æ/ and /ԑ/.