Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday,
Speaker 1: July twenty seventh, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host
Speaker 1: of the show Doctor Kara Santa Maria, and as I
Speaker 1: mentioned last week, I am traveling right now with the
Speaker 1: sgu the other podcast I work on, The Skeptics Guide
Speaker 1: to the Universe. We are visiting Sydney, Australia, the North Island,
Speaker 1: kind of all over of New Zealand, and then christ
Speaker 1: Church on the South Island and making appearances at conferences
Speaker 1: in both Sydney and christ Church. So I'm recording this
Speaker 1: in advance, and I'm not going to give a shout
Speaker 1: out to the patrons this week because I don't know
Speaker 1: if my list will be up to date, but we
Speaker 1: will continue that once I am back at my computer,
Speaker 1: so I say we just get into it. This week
Speaker 1: I had the opportunity to chat with doctor Valerie Friedland.
Speaker 1: She is a professor of linguistics in the English Department
Speaker 1: at the University of Nevada, Reno. She also writes a
Speaker 1: language blog on Psychology Today called Language in the Wild
Speaker 1: and did a Great Courses series, So for those of
Speaker 1: you who love the Great Courses, you can look her
Speaker 1: up there. She also previously wrote a wonderful book called
Speaker 1: Like Literally Dude, Arguing for the Good in Bad English.
Speaker 1: But we're going to talk today about her newest book,
Speaker 1: Why We Talk Funny, The Real Story Behind Our Accents.
Speaker 1: This is a really fun one. So, without any further ado,
Speaker 1: here she is doctor Valerie Friedland. Well, Valerie, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Of course, I'm so excited to be here in chat
Speaker 2: with you.
Speaker 1: So we're going to be talking about your work and
Speaker 1: of course your new book, Why We Talk Funny The
Speaker 1: Real Story Behind Our Accents. I'm so excited to have
Speaker 1: this conversation. I am obsessed with accents. I love them.
Speaker 1: I find them fascinating. I'm also really obsessed with just
Speaker 1: like regional colloquialisms and all the different ways that individuals
Speaker 1: who share a similar language still have subcultures within it.
Speaker 1: But first, before we get into the book itself, I
Speaker 1: want to talk a little bit about you, about your scholarship.
Speaker 1: So you're a professor of linguistics. Is linguistics usually in
Speaker 1: an English department, you.
Speaker 2: Know it varies. Linguistics is usually in whatever department we
Speaker 2: feel most safe that will survive the budget cut so
Speaker 2: wry to say it. So typically it's sort of in
Speaker 2: traditional linguistics departments, they've been separate departments, but in the
Speaker 2: last twenty or so years they often go on the
Speaker 2: chopping block because they tend to be pretty small departments.
Speaker 2: So a lot of linguists have found refuge in English departments.
Speaker 2: So it is not uncommon for there to be a
Speaker 2: separate program in linguistics in English departments, but it's not
Speaker 2: necessarily the standard either.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, And so you know, really probably it's important to
Speaker 1: drill down on what linguistics actually is. How is it
Speaker 1: different than what most people think of when they think
Speaker 1: of English or English class.
Speaker 2: I think that's a great question, because most people think
Speaker 2: of a number of different things when they hear the
Speaker 2: word linguist, and it's typically not either the same thing
Speaker 2: as an English professor or an English teacher, nor as
Speaker 2: sort of the common folk understanding of what a linguist
Speaker 2: is or memes. So first, just to discriminate between sort
Speaker 2: of the traditional Grammarian English teacher and the linguist that
Speaker 2: might happen to be an English department, we're really more
Speaker 2: the social science version of someone who studies language. So
Speaker 2: we're actually interested in the principles, both articulatory and cognitive,
Speaker 2: that drive our ability to speak as humans human beings.
Speaker 2: We're not really interested in any kind of prescriptive rules.
Speaker 2: So the social rules that get attached over time to
Speaker 2: the way that we're supposed to write English, and then
Speaker 2: often that leaps off the page to the way we're
Speaker 2: supposed to speak. So the type of experience you have
Speaker 2: in English class where you're learning about nouns, verbs, and
Speaker 2: you know those person, place, thing kind of thing. There
Speaker 2: certainly is some linguistics in that, because the categories that
Speaker 2: we call nouns are linguistically real to us. Babies recognize
Speaker 2: nouns first before other things, so those do have some
Speaker 2: linguistic legitimacy. But the idea that there are a person, place,
Speaker 2: and thing, for example, is kind of a description rather
Speaker 2: than an actual rule of how those distribute, or the
Speaker 2: rules like don't set in a sense with a preposition
Speaker 2: those kinds of things. Those are not real rules in
Speaker 2: terms of cognitive rules for language. Those are social rules
Speaker 2: that arose in the eighteenth century. So that's the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that you get in English class. What you
Speaker 2: would get if you take a linguistics course in a college,
Speaker 2: which is usually the first time you experience it. Is
Speaker 2: also different than the layman conception of linguist, which is
Speaker 2: really someone who speaks a lot of languages. I speak
Speaker 2: really one, and that sometimes badly, which is English. But
Speaker 2: I know a lot about the structure of other languages.
Speaker 2: So though I really probably can't order a beer in
Speaker 2: most of them or do anything useful when traveling there,
Speaker 2: I can tell you about sort of their relationship to English,
Speaker 2: the kinds of structures they tend to have, how they
Speaker 2: differ where they're similar, What kinds of principles drive all
Speaker 2: human language, How our brain perceives language. What are the
Speaker 2: sounds that you're more likely to be able to hear
Speaker 2: versus others that aren't. What are most common sounds across languages.
Speaker 2: Those are the kinds of things that linguists like me,
Speaker 2: which are called theoretical linguist study. And then, to even
Speaker 2: drill down a little more, I'm what's called a socio linguist,
Speaker 2: which is a tongue twister to basically say, someone who
Speaker 2: studies the linguistics of social life. So how are the
Speaker 2: groups that we identify with the places we grow up
Speaker 2: the class we belong to, the nations that we pledge
Speaker 2: allegiance to. How are those things influential on the way
Speaker 2: that we will sound now and in the future. And
Speaker 2: those are the kinds of things I study. Most of
Speaker 2: the questions people have about language are really in the
Speaker 2: realm of socio linguistics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost like the psychology, sociology, and
Speaker 1: cognitive science of language.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's very closely aligned with psychology. So you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of linguistics stems from both linguistic anthropology but
Speaker 2: also social psychology. So I'd say it's a really a
Speaker 2: melding of sociology, social psychology, and also some anthropology. But
Speaker 2: then some linguists do a lot more cognitive psychology work
Speaker 2: as well, so it's you know, kind of an overlapping field.
Speaker 1: I love it all right, Well, we'll see if my
Speaker 1: doctorate in psychology is at all helpful.
Speaker 2: Will see.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm pretty clinical, so I'm like on
Speaker 1: a one, very extreme end of psychology, but maybe we
Speaker 1: will see. So what made you want to sit down
Speaker 1: and write this book? Is it your first or no,
Speaker 1: it's not. You've actually written another big book before, like
Speaker 1: literally dude.
Speaker 2: Yes, I wrote a book on all the speech Habits
Speaker 2: We Love to Hate, which was like literally dude, as
Speaker 2: you can see from the title what it might be about.
Speaker 2: And then this was really the book that was closest
Speaker 2: to the type of work I do in my research,
Speaker 2: and also the experience I had growing up because I
Speaker 2: grew up in the South, which a lot of people
Speaker 2: probably can't hear from my voice, but sometimes people will
Speaker 2: pick up a little trick or two that I have
Speaker 2: that's southern. But I also had parents that were not
Speaker 2: from the United States. They were both native French speakers,
Speaker 2: and so growing up in the South at the time
Speaker 2: I was growing up, I'm not going to admit how
Speaker 2: long ago it was, but it was a while. With
Speaker 2: non native parents was certainly an experience, and it made
Speaker 2: me aware at a very young age the power of accent.
Speaker 2: And you know, even though I had no idea at
Speaker 2: eight i wanted to be a linguist, I probably was
Speaker 2: thinking more like astronaut or doctor, you know, something more standard,
Speaker 2: it did really interest me and fascinate me. The power
Speaker 2: that the way that I spoke, the way that my
Speaker 2: parents spoke, the way that I heard my friend speak,
Speaker 2: had over the way that we reacted to each other.
Speaker 2: And so in college, when I took a linguistics class,
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, it was like the curtain was
Speaker 2: pulled back on why and how, And that really drove
Speaker 2: my interest in both pursuing linguistics as a field and
Speaker 2: then finally unpacking that for non linguist audiences, because there
Speaker 2: are a lot of mes in this world that have
Speaker 2: that experience but didn't go on to get a doctorate
Speaker 2: in linguistics that really wonder why their accents make them
Speaker 2: stand out, or why they think of other people in
Speaker 2: the ways they do with their accents, or even maybe
Speaker 2: believe they have no accent at all. And part of
Speaker 2: that is because we really have a dearth of linguistic information.
Speaker 2: And so that kind of drove this book. I wanted
Speaker 2: to unpack it for general audiences.
Speaker 1: I love that so much because you're right. I loved
Speaker 1: it when you said there's a lot of mes. Everybody
Speaker 1: out there has their own kind of origin, and then
Speaker 1: the culture or the pressures that they had as they
Speaker 1: were growing up. Some people were in one place most
Speaker 1: of their lives. Other people traveled quite often. My own
Speaker 1: little anecdote that I have to share having also grown
Speaker 1: up in the South and people telling me all the
Speaker 1: time that I don't sound like I'm from the South
Speaker 1: until I say words like insurance an umbrella, then it
Speaker 1: comes out real heavy. But hearing my parents speak or
Speaker 1: even my sisters speak and being like, how are you
Speaker 1: from the same family. I remember when I first moved.
Speaker 1: I moved from Texas to New York and then to
Speaker 1: LA and I've been in LA since. I remember working
Speaker 1: as an adjunct professor at City University, New York, and
Speaker 1: we had a lot of students from Long Island and
Speaker 1: one of my students saw my Texas tattoo and she goes, Professa,
Speaker 1: you don't have an accent at wool Oh, this is currieus.
Speaker 2: And what's so fascinating about that is it really reveals
Speaker 2: a lot about the power dynamics behind accent. Because everybody
Speaker 2: has an accent, we often don't hear our own accents,
Speaker 2: and typically the people that don't think of themselves as
Speaker 2: accented or believe in the sort of myth of non
Speaker 2: accent are those that are from groups in society that
Speaker 2: have the most power, and therefore their form of speech,
Speaker 2: their style of speech, their accent, is the norm, and
Speaker 2: that way because they don't deviate from that norm, they
Speaker 2: think of themselves as having no accent. But if you
Speaker 2: leave your country of origin and you go to Britain,
Speaker 2: for example, or of Australia, you do have an accent.
Speaker 3: So all of us do.
Speaker 2: And there are also little things in everybody's speech that
Speaker 2: who they are. And I think one of the things
Speaker 2: that we haven't done a good job with as linguist
Speaker 2: is getting the word out that accents are not just
Speaker 2: about place. There are about anything social about us that
Speaker 2: leads to fractures in social space. And sometimes that's geography.
Speaker 2: So if we're divided by mountains or lakes or oceans,
Speaker 2: that will lead to differences in the way we speak.
Speaker 2: But a lot of the power of speech changing over
Speaker 2: time is driven by other types of social distance that
Speaker 2: forms between us. And that can be someone that is
Speaker 2: from a different ethnicity and maybe there's less contact or
Speaker 2: hostility between different ethnic groups and so they will sound different.
Speaker 2: Or it can be class. Even in the same location.
Speaker 2: A lot of times we can recognize someone who might
Speaker 2: have more working class features and more middle class features.
Speaker 2: Those are all accents too. It's not just about geography.
Speaker 1: It's so fascinating to think about, because in LA, my
Speaker 1: exposure is wildly different than it was in North Texas.
Speaker 1: Right in North Texas, all my friends had shades of
Speaker 1: something similar unless they were sort of their parents or
Speaker 1: they themselves were first or second generation American. But most
Speaker 1: everybody who was like multi generation living in the South,
Speaker 1: they kind of sound. There's like a Dallas sound, you know,
Speaker 1: and I was from the urbs of Dallas. But living
Speaker 1: in LA, it's like got you never know, you don't
Speaker 1: know where anybody's from. And when somebody's like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: a Native Angelino, you're like, what you exist?
Speaker 2: I know. Yeah, in those big cities right a lot
Speaker 2: of times, especially on the West coast because it's a
Speaker 2: relatively young region, it does feel like that. Even in Nevada,
Speaker 2: where I'm from, where I'm not from, but where I
Speaker 2: live in Reno, it's very surprising to find someone who's
Speaker 2: actually from here or from here for more than one generation.
Speaker 2: And you know, I think that's partially just being Western.
Speaker 2: It's also this sense of you know, urban urban life
Speaker 2: that's relatively recent, so you know, it hasn't been that
Speaker 2: long that most of us lived in urban centers. That's
Speaker 2: a relatively recent development in American history, and that radically
Speaker 2: changes the people we come into contact with. And interaction
Speaker 2: is really the bread and butter of accent. So it's
Speaker 2: not necessarily the place you grew up or even the
Speaker 2: way that your family speaks that will determine the way
Speaker 2: you sound. It's the people that you interact with the
Speaker 2: most and that sort of represent this goal or identity
Speaker 2: that you want to have. And you know, you mentioned
Speaker 2: that you don't sound like your sister, and we wondered,
Speaker 2: you know, how are we from the same family. Well,
Speaker 2: in earlier research I did with my colleague who's was
Speaker 2: at Duke, we looked at the same family that had
Speaker 2: ten children and we ran different types of statistical simulations
Speaker 2: on their speech. And we do this through you know,
Speaker 2: we use instrumental analysis of their vowels, so it's technical.
Speaker 2: We have numbers that basically go in there that measure
Speaker 2: their acoustic wave forms. And we found that they were
Speaker 2: no so more similar to each other than any other
Speaker 2: ten random people.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: So while they all had Southern accent, so they did
Speaker 2: were more similar to people from the South, they were
Speaker 2: not that similar to each other more than some other
Speaker 2: random Southerner, and that tells us that it's not the
Speaker 2: people you're born to that really have the biggest impact
Speaker 2: on your speech. It's the people you hang out with.
Speaker 2: And so peer groups are really vital in the speech
Speaker 2: and the accent that we will inhabit in later years.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting too, one of the things that
Speaker 1: you mentioned when you were talking about how it's not
Speaker 1: always you know, the region, it's not necessarily the family
Speaker 1: of origin, but all of these other influences that you have.
Speaker 1: I think if I didn't, I didn't make a note
Speaker 1: with my pen, but I think you said something along
Speaker 1: the lines of like and who you sort of choose to.
Speaker 1: Maybe you didn't say emulate, but be near or like
Speaker 1: a model.
Speaker 2: That an identity you want to have, the one you
Speaker 2: want to project, the one that you kind of look
Speaker 2: to as something that is a style leader for you
Speaker 2: is especially what we find.
Speaker 1: I love it because I think about I had a
Speaker 1: partner once and he grew up in a region of
Speaker 1: Jersey and he has you know, that sort of what
Speaker 1: lots of people would describe as the non accent accent
Speaker 1: or the neutral accent or the whatever, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of educated what is it like mid Atlantic. I don't
Speaker 1: even know how.
Speaker 2: And we'll get into that New Jersey depends on which
Speaker 2: side of New Jersey you're on, whether you constitute a
Speaker 2: mid Atlantic or more northern accent.
Speaker 1: But yes, well he did say that. When he was
Speaker 1: growing up, he would say things like woulda and like
Speaker 1: walk the door.
Speaker 2: Yes, so he had the mid Atlantic because that's more
Speaker 2: near the Philly accent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then he had to kind of teach himself
Speaker 1: to not talk like that by choice, like he chose
Speaker 1: to do that. Whereas when I was growing up in Texas,
Speaker 1: from all evidence I have from my folks, from looking
Speaker 1: at videos and listening to recordings, I always kind of
Speaker 1: just talked like this, even though the people around me,
Speaker 1: well the people are me did too. I'm sure my
Speaker 1: peer group did, but my sister and my parents didn't.
Speaker 1: And so I always was asking myself, did I make
Speaker 1: it conscious or maybe it was an unconscious choice to
Speaker 1: lean into certain styles of speech.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, it's really an interesting question of how
Speaker 2: conscious it is. But we don't really actively monitor our
Speaker 2: speech that often, especially when we're young children. You know,
Speaker 2: we might when we go into a job interview, or
Speaker 2: even when we're at work. But you know, if we're
Speaker 2: hanging with our friends at the bar, we're probably not saying, oh,
Speaker 2: how am I going to pronounce this vowel? It doesn't
Speaker 2: It just doesn't work that way. And also it's hard
Speaker 2: to understand how intricate the system of language is. I
Speaker 2: don't think generally people understand that when we speak, it's
Speaker 2: incredibly rual governed. So if I do something with my
Speaker 2: ad vowel in one case, I will do it with
Speaker 2: the ad vowel in every case. I say with that
Speaker 2: vowel every word that it occurs with. Typically unlass, I
Speaker 2: have a very unique dialect region like the mid Atlantic
Speaker 2: that actually has some even funkier rules about it. So
Speaker 2: how would I even know where to put on an accent? Consciously?
Speaker 2: I wouldn't, So it's probably a subconscious motivation or desire
Speaker 2: we have to sound like certain people. But this starts
Speaker 2: very young, so we're probably doing this as soon as
Speaker 2: we hit kindergarten and get a peer group. And it's
Speaker 2: called vernacular reorganization when we start to adjust our system
Speaker 2: towards those around us from that of the home language
Speaker 2: or dialect or you know, form our style that we
Speaker 2: grew up with up to about age five. The other
Speaker 2: thing I will say is, I don't know whether your
Speaker 2: sister is older or younger than you. Older she's older,
Speaker 2: I would so that's interesting and we don't have to
Speaker 2: reveal anybody's ages here. But there has been a really
Speaker 2: big trend in the South, and I'm of the generation
Speaker 2: where it started and where we find that every generation
Speaker 2: since has had less and less of the Southern accent
Speaker 2: in urban areas in the South. This is not true
Speaker 2: of the rural areas of the South, but in places
Speaker 2: like Dallas and Memphis where I grew up. In Atlanta
Speaker 2: and Raleigh, massive amounts of Northern immigration is one of
Speaker 2: the big reasons why this is the case. But also
Speaker 2: just a relocation of many Southerners to those urban areas
Speaker 2: that kind of orients people there to a different kind
Speaker 2: of accent that's more external to the South has reduced
Speaker 2: the southernness of Southern speakers there. And that's Generation X
Speaker 2: where we see the first step on that road to
Speaker 2: less accent.
Speaker 1: Interesting and I would be considered an elder millennial while
Speaker 1: my sister would be a Gen X there. But also
Speaker 1: I think there's some weirdness about where she went to
Speaker 1: college and then got married and moved to Arkansas and
Speaker 1: then moved to New Orleans and you know, kind of
Speaker 1: probably re developed some of these quirky Southern styles of
Speaker 1: speech that I never did that, And it's just, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just so fascinating thinking about out the uniqueness. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's quite the right word, but the
Speaker 1: the variables that are obvious to us versus the ones
Speaker 1: that fly under the radar, Like there are things I
Speaker 1: think that we don't even notice about how most people speak,
Speaker 1: those small variations that just sound generally American or maybe
Speaker 1: a little more regional. And then out of the blue,
Speaker 1: you have people like my partner now, who is from Michigan,
Speaker 1: who has the most Midwestern and he says things like milk.
Speaker 2: Uh, yeah, he has something called the northern city shift.
Speaker 1: Obvious to be fair.
Speaker 2: Milk is actually also you can find it in Toronto,
Speaker 2: so you know it's not just Michigan or Chicago also
Speaker 2: has that feature. But he does he also say things
Speaker 2: like the word job more like jab I got a jab.
Speaker 1: I think it does more like sacks sacks, And he
Speaker 1: says pajamas instead of pajamas. That's a big one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that actually you find more widespread the pajama
Speaker 2: pajama distribution. But for Southerners it's pajama. And so when
Speaker 2: I moved to the west, that was something I noticed
Speaker 2: a lot of people hear say, I can't it feels
Speaker 2: wrong to say it, but jamas, it's.
Speaker 3: So wrong, that's right.
Speaker 2: So if that's your see, this is where your southernness
Speaker 2: is there, because that is something that Southerners tend to say.
Speaker 2: That's you know, people we've moved. So it's not only
Speaker 2: something Southerners say now because you know we're contagious.
Speaker 1: But it also made me laugh when you said Nevada,
Speaker 1: because anybody from Nevada or lives in Nevada calls at Nevada,
Speaker 1: but so many people call it Nevada.
Speaker 2: If you're east of the Mississippi, you tend to call
Speaker 2: it Nevada. And in fact, being from the South, I
Speaker 2: also called it Nevada until I moved to Nevada. And
Speaker 2: I think within the first day of being here, I
Speaker 2: was told, under no uncertain terms, if I wanted to
Speaker 2: stay here, I would learn how to correctly pronounce the
Speaker 2: state name. And it's been so drilled into me now
Speaker 2: that it hurts to say it the other way.
Speaker 1: That's amazing, do you know I have to I just
Speaker 1: love the examples. I have to come up with one
Speaker 1: that people can tell where I live in two seconds
Speaker 1: if we start to talk about traffic, and it's not
Speaker 1: even accent thing, but it is linguistic in that in
Speaker 1: southern California, and apparently only in southern California, we put
Speaker 1: the word the before the freeway names.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, say take one, one.
Speaker 1: Oh one, the two, the five, And it's just I
Speaker 1: didn't even notice that I was doing it, and whenever
Speaker 1: I'm outside of home, it blows people's minds.
Speaker 2: Yes, that is a very typical California trait, Southern California exclusively.
Speaker 2: So it's sort of like saying Hella, you're that's a northern.
Speaker 2: That's an if you're from the California area, you know
Speaker 2: that Hella is a northern and the one oh one
Speaker 2: is southern. So it's a it's sort of a you
Speaker 2: know what, we call it, a shibboleth thing that really
Speaker 2: automatically identifies where you're from from the way you pronounce something.
Speaker 2: You know, the interesting history behind the one oh one
Speaker 2: pronunciation or the sticking the the in there. I believe
Speaker 2: it has to do with when it was first constructed.
Speaker 2: There weren't other options, and people would call it the
Speaker 2: one oh one, and that just sort of stuck around.
Speaker 2: It has something to do with its earliest construction history.
Speaker 2: I can't remember the exact story, but it's quite interesting
Speaker 2: if you want to dive into that. But yes, it's
Speaker 2: absolutely a Southern California feature.
Speaker 1: It's it's so I mean, it reminds me of and
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know all about it. I wonder if
Speaker 1: you worked with it before that massive project that was
Speaker 1: I think published for like users through the New York Times.
Speaker 1: It was like you use guys and y'all or something
Speaker 1: that crazy quiz that would tell you exactly where you
Speaker 1: grew up.
Speaker 2: I think that was a graph biographics editor. I think
Speaker 2: his name was Josh Katz, and it was based on
Speaker 2: the Yale Diversity Project. So it was a professor at
Speaker 2: Yale's sort of linguistic atlas work which he had done
Speaker 2: with his students for many, many years and compiled a
Speaker 2: huge amount of data that that this graphics editor used
Speaker 2: to generate those different you know.
Speaker 3: Word models. Tricky now, because.
Speaker 2: That was actually I don't know ten fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2: While our massive connectedness now through social media boundary crossing,
Speaker 2: and also our mobility which has really moved people around
Speaker 2: and into new areas and into urban areas from rural
Speaker 2: areas at massive rates this century has made it so
Speaker 2: it's much harder to use those kinds of clues to
Speaker 2: where people are from. But there are certainly big ones.
Speaker 2: You know, it's hard to pinpoint someone to a little
Speaker 2: city or something, but there are certainly big ones like
Speaker 2: pajama and pajama is on That is a good example.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were that could really pinpoint you. I think like, like,
Speaker 1: what do you call a drive through liquor store? And
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, it's a beer barn. Oh my
Speaker 1: friends are like, what is even have one of those?
Speaker 2: Right? Yes? I mean Tennessee, Yes, no drive through liquor stores.
Speaker 2: So I remember when I saw that. I was one
Speaker 2: of the have no idea what the heck you're talking
Speaker 2: about on that thing. And then I married someone from
Speaker 2: Ohio and he.
Speaker 3: Was like, yeah, obviously.
Speaker 2: Here all the time. So yes, there are certain things
Speaker 2: that stick around because you don't have them elsewhere. And
Speaker 2: there are certain ones like water that are very tied
Speaker 2: to very specific places. So you know, that's a very typical,
Speaker 2: well known Philly trait. So you know, there are certainly
Speaker 2: still those that stick around, but a lot of young
Speaker 2: people in Philadelphia don't say that anymore, although they would
Speaker 2: still recognize that over someone from California and someone from
Speaker 2: la probably has no idea about that. So it's a
Speaker 2: really fun survey. The problem with like with words being
Speaker 2: the focus is words are fairly easy to pick up,
Speaker 2: so there are sort of superficial measures of differences between us. Now.
Speaker 2: A lot of those are historically based, and so those
Speaker 2: have become entrenched in regions in ways that are pretty
Speaker 2: good determinists. So I don't know if you'd heard of
Speaker 2: it before, but one I love on that one which
Speaker 2: I had heard growing up in the South, is when
Speaker 2: you have rain on a sunny day, so.
Speaker 1: That I remember that one, and I didn't. I had
Speaker 1: never heard of a sunshower or whatever. I mean, there
Speaker 1: were other options. I was like, I don't, I don't
Speaker 1: know what that is. But apparently a lot of people
Speaker 1: do use those words.
Speaker 2: Yes, And in the South, especially rural areas of the South,
Speaker 2: it's very typical to say the devil's beating his wife.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's what it's not right.
Speaker 2: So when when when the sun is out and it's raining,
Speaker 2: it's because the devil is beating his wife. Oh I
Speaker 2: here in Nevada, I always do a regional dialect survey
Speaker 2: on the first day we start dialect talk in class,
Speaker 2: and that one kills them every time because they're just
Speaker 2: they are disbelief that that could exist. Then really it's
Speaker 2: an archaic form. You don't hear very often anymore, and
Speaker 2: certainly no one under the age of fifty probably says it.
Speaker 2: But it is, you know, an authentic difference. But one
Speaker 2: of the ways that we kind of do new dialect
Speaker 2: at list work. And another survey that's very famous was
Speaker 2: the Phonological atlass done by Bill Lebov and his colleagues
Speaker 2: that you pen is by looking at the way vowels
Speaker 2: are pronounced across the various regions and how they're similar
Speaker 2: or different, because those are harder to pick up. So
Speaker 2: if I move to a new place, I can often
Speaker 2: pick up a new word or two, and I can
Speaker 2: actually pick up a new pronunciation in a single word
Speaker 2: or two. But to do that in a very systemic
Speaker 2: fashion for all the vowels that that word effects like
Speaker 2: picking up the whole pin pen merger pattern. If I
Speaker 2: move to the South, that's almost impossible. So studying the
Speaker 2: way that people say their vowels is actually a really
Speaker 2: good diagnostic of regional sort of upbringing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably why Malk stands out so much.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, and that's why, you know, one of the
Speaker 2: traits that is still somewhat present in young Southern speakers.
Speaker 2: I can hear it, especially young African American speakers that
Speaker 2: are maybe really you know, live in the South is
Speaker 2: pin pen, the pin pen merger. That is actually one
Speaker 2: that you can still hear a lot of times when
Speaker 2: people leave the South.
Speaker 1: You still intensely like it just sounds like that she
Speaker 1: says like pin and it sounds we.
Speaker 2: And we went. Yes, it's very strong, and so if
Speaker 2: you're in the South, it's still very strong. But a
Speaker 2: lot of times southers that leave the South, they'll still
Speaker 2: have it years later. It's sort of hard to change out.
Speaker 2: But if I'm moving to the South, I could probably
Speaker 2: start learning. I could learn to say when in that
Speaker 2: one word, but I'm not going to know that it
Speaker 2: also affects words like sense and sense and it's still.
Speaker 1: On those right. You know, my mother does that. My
Speaker 1: mother's Puerto Rican and grew up in New York and
Speaker 1: when she moved to Texas and had us and she's
Speaker 1: been there since, she you know, she had a I
Speaker 1: think a New yor Rican accent. But now she says
Speaker 1: words like owol, like I need to get my oval
Speaker 1: chain right.
Speaker 2: What she's done is she's picked up that Texas that's
Speaker 2: a very sort of typical Texas pronunciation. She's picked up
Speaker 2: certain words with that vowel in them. But if you
Speaker 2: actually measured her vowels more systemically, so you know that.
Speaker 2: What we do is we talk to people and we
Speaker 2: have them speak for an hour, and then we have
Speaker 2: them read certain things and then you kind of pull
Speaker 2: out all occurrences of the same vowel. That's where you
Speaker 2: can really see what they really sound like, because it's
Speaker 2: really hard to know as a non linguist what those
Speaker 2: rules are if you haven't been born somewhere. And what
Speaker 2: we also find is if your parents are from that place,
Speaker 2: that's when you really tend to have a heavier accent.
Speaker 2: So if you move at three, you can pick up
Speaker 2: the accent of the new place you moved to because
Speaker 2: you're still in that formative accent phase. But if you
Speaker 2: if you have parents from that place that moved back
Speaker 2: there with you at three, you're going to acquire that
Speaker 2: accent even more. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've you know, I've noticed that with a lot of
Speaker 1: folks where you'll think something is regional, but maybe it's
Speaker 1: not regional, and then you find out that their parents lived,
Speaker 1: you know, grew up and lived their whole lives in
Speaker 1: a certain area and it sort of made its way
Speaker 1: into their speech. I think an example that I hear
Speaker 1: a lot, and maybe you can help me with this one,
Speaker 1: because I still don't know if this is regional, generational,
Speaker 1: or what. But I have I have friends from Connecticut
Speaker 1: and friends from Oregon who both say the word both
Speaker 1: like both like instead of both, they put an L
Speaker 1: in it. They say both both like an intrusive L.
Speaker 1: Yeah both.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I had that feature, and that's they're
Speaker 2: from Connecticut.
Speaker 1: That's Connecticut, but also Oregon.
Speaker 3: So Oregon.
Speaker 2: When you get to the Western States, it doesn't seem
Speaker 2: it's never that surprising when you hear features from somewhere else.
Speaker 2: In parts of the West because of the migrat tory
Speaker 2: patterns of settlement later. So you know, the West was
Speaker 2: settled about two hundred years after the East coast colonies
Speaker 2: were settled, and it was already America, and the accent
Speaker 2: in the American States was that they were bringing over
Speaker 2: with them was also already much different from the British
Speaker 2: forms that many of the earliest settlers had brought over.
Speaker 2: There was also a lot more other language influence, so
Speaker 2: you had a lot of Scandinavian, Finnish, German settlement in
Speaker 2: the Upper North that would have gone from Connecticut to
Speaker 2: Usually you migrated westward alongside sort of the parallel of
Speaker 2: where you had started, so there was the earliest settlement
Speaker 2: in that area was really New England. Connecticut was an
Speaker 2: outpost of the New England colony. So that actually make
Speaker 2: sense to me that you could hear a feature. A
Speaker 2: lot of those are sometimes remnants of either an immigrant
Speaker 2: language that affected the pronunciation, so that sounds like a
Speaker 2: monopthungal vowel, so that means a shorter vowel, which is
Speaker 2: often sort of Scandinavian, So that's sort of why you
Speaker 2: get mussola. It's a shorter vowel and actually in earlier
Speaker 2: English is we would have more monupthungo vowels. So around
Speaker 2: the revolutionary times we would have said something like go
Speaker 2: or no, more like go nah. So sometimes as a
Speaker 2: remnants of those early forms that just got retained in
Speaker 2: a word or two.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's so fascinating when you watch like period pieces,
Speaker 1: does it make you crazy? How wrong they.
Speaker 2: Are so wrong? So wrong? Yes, one time I did
Speaker 2: have a director of a movie that was sort of
Speaker 2: in the upset in the early eighteen hundreds, the very
Speaker 2: early eighteen hundreds call to ask for some help in
Speaker 2: making sure they did authentic dialect. And I'm not an
Speaker 2: accent I'm not an accent coach. It's a very different thing,
Speaker 2: right to be an accent coach than to be a
Speaker 2: professor of linguistics. But I was like, okay, let's give
Speaker 2: it a try. So I was telling him a lot
Speaker 2: of the features that would have been frontier speech at
Speaker 2: the time, because this was set in the frontier and
Speaker 2: you know, for most people if they heard features of
Speaker 2: frontier speech from that era, it would sound very rustic
Speaker 2: and hickesh to our ears, because a lot of those
Speaker 2: things like rastle and Giett and sari for sarah or
Speaker 2: best for best. Those things were actually very widespread features
Speaker 2: in the early colonial period that were had become around
Speaker 2: the Revolutionary era a bit hurt as a bit more
Speaker 2: rustic even than by the more educated elite in the
Speaker 2: cities along the East coast, But it was very much
Speaker 2: what the frontiersman spoke that was considered very typical of
Speaker 2: frontier speech. So it would have sounded, you know, really
Speaker 2: hickesh to most modern English speakers. So I did not
Speaker 2: think that that's probably how he wanted to have his
Speaker 2: main character speak in this piece. But most of the
Speaker 2: period pieces always seem to think that the elite British
Speaker 2: rp accent is the one that everybody spoke in the
Speaker 2: you know, from sixteen hundred to to current times.
Speaker 1: But particularly in then every country too.
Speaker 2: In some country, if you want to seem like, you,
Speaker 2: you know, have some colonial era language, it's going to
Speaker 2: be our P. But the truth is our p received pronunciation.
Speaker 2: This sort of posh British accent we associate with Queen's
Speaker 2: English today really didn't emerge until the late eighteenth early
Speaker 2: nineteenth century. Really yeah, so it doesn't mean that there
Speaker 2: weren't components of it, but two of the most recognizable
Speaker 2: features of received pronunciation, which is a non roticity, which
Speaker 2: is a really fancy word that simply means our dropping,
Speaker 2: So saying things like wata instead of water. That didn't
Speaker 2: emerge until the late eighteenth century. And also the awe
Speaker 2: for a pronunciation was also not prevalent in even elite
Speaker 2: British speech until then. In fact, those two variants, which
Speaker 2: was saying things like instead of saying aunt, you'd say aunt,
Speaker 2: or eve, instead of saying father, you'd say father, those
Speaker 2: would have been very typical of all British speakers up
Speaker 2: to the end of the seventeen hundreds. So none of
Speaker 2: the representations we give people with that RP accent in
Speaker 2: those period dramas is very accurate unless it's after the
Speaker 2: eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: That's so fascinating and I see that actually with all
Speaker 1: of my British South African Australian friends, I always tell
Speaker 1: them they're allowed to call me Kara because they struggle
Speaker 1: to say Kara. But none of my American friends who
Speaker 1: are from here are allowed to do that. It's not
Speaker 1: my name, it's Kara, it's not car.
Speaker 3: You've had a tricky name.
Speaker 2: So the funny thing is the words spelled with A,
Speaker 2: and particularly those before an R, are incredibly variable in
Speaker 2: the history of English and American English particularly, so depending
Speaker 2: on where you're from, you'll say those vowels differently. So
Speaker 2: I think we do have to cut people some slack.
Speaker 2: But I do have a lot of friends with a
Speaker 2: names like yours that get, you know, a little bit
Speaker 2: upset when people seem to use the different vowel, And
Speaker 2: I get it, I get it. I don't like being
Speaker 2: called vowel. So you know, we all get to choose
Speaker 2: what we are called. But I will say in their
Speaker 2: defense and their defense. Even for Americans, there are such
Speaker 2: variable pronunciation for words that are spelled with a, especially
Speaker 2: if they were borrowed words or from a different language,
Speaker 2: they get variably pronounced in American English or a Canadian English.
Speaker 2: So one of the examples, my mother is actually French
Speaker 2: Canadian and the word pasta. It used to drive me
Speaker 2: baddie when she pronounced it because it was pasta pasta yasta,
Speaker 2: which is a very Canadian pronunciation of the word.
Speaker 3: And again it's because.
Speaker 2: It's a loanword, and a loanword with with an a
Speaker 2: in it, and that throughout our history of borrowing words
Speaker 2: has always been really hard for Americans to settle themselves
Speaker 2: on one particular pronunciation of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it also varies by context. I
Speaker 1: used to always joke that my father, who is Italian,
Speaker 1: but many generations, you know, separated, who gave me my
Speaker 1: last name. If you say it the way that most
Speaker 1: people you know want to say it romantically, they'll say,
Speaker 1: my name is Gotta Santa Maria. But if you want
Speaker 1: to go super southern and include my middle name, I
Speaker 1: become Cara Louise. And it's a quick change.
Speaker 3: Quick, so adaptable, per.
Speaker 1: It's there's so many interesting things, you know. I remember
Speaker 1: reading a book when I was young about the Revolutionary No,
Speaker 1: it was not, it was about the Civil War. Actually, yes,
Speaker 1: it was about the Civil War and there was a
Speaker 1: soldier I think in Kentucky. And the way that they
Speaker 1: wrote it was like a lot of phonetic writing and
Speaker 1: book And I don't know why this sentence sticks out
Speaker 1: to me, but the boy was asking his parents, will
Speaker 1: Kaneentuck go sickish? And it was the way that they wrote,
Speaker 1: will Kentucky secede? And I remember being so fascinated by this, like, well,
Speaker 1: Kane Tuck go Sickish. I don't know what the accent was,
Speaker 1: but that was how they wrote it, and learning more
Speaker 1: about like Appalachia and about this region of the United
Speaker 1: States that was so Scottish and not realizing that.
Speaker 2: It was very right Scottish not and also it had
Speaker 2: some you know, Irish, and not only just the Scots
Speaker 2: and the Irish, but author the Scots Irish were very
Speaker 2: influential in that area. There was also early British influence
Speaker 2: as well. So a lot of the features that we
Speaker 2: think of as typical in Appalachian English, so like a prefixing,
Speaker 2: so I'm a hunting and a fishing, those are actually
Speaker 2: features that were fairly widespread in early British English at
Speaker 2: the founding of the initial thirteen colonies. He would have
Speaker 2: heard those, not just in Appalachia, which actually wasn't a
Speaker 2: thing at that time, but it would have been all
Speaker 2: over because it was a feature that was used more
Speaker 2: widespread in British English at the time. But scott was
Speaker 2: a variety of English that retained a lot of older features,
Speaker 2: and they retained it for longer. And so that's why
Speaker 2: we see in Scott's Irish. We see a lot of
Speaker 2: features that have overlapped with earlier British English, but were
Speaker 2: we retained longer in Scott's Irish. But absolutely, the Scott's
Speaker 2: Irish were incredibly influential in the Appalachian area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I find that when, like I've had I used
Speaker 1: to have a partner who was Scottish like, born and
Speaker 1: raised in Scotland, and when he would when he was
Speaker 1: here in the US, when we would watch movies or
Speaker 1: he would hear the Appalachian accent, he could understand it
Speaker 1: better than I could, And I found it fascinating because
Speaker 1: he he did really his parents were South African, so
Speaker 1: that's extra confusing. So he sounded kind of just like
Speaker 1: vaguely colonial British, like nobody could place him. But he
Speaker 1: could hear a broad Scottish accent really well because that's
Speaker 1: that's how he grew up. He was surrounded by it
Speaker 1: all the time. And there's a certain point when somebody
Speaker 1: Scottish accent is too strong where I'm like, are they
Speaker 1: speaking English? Like I cannot understand what they're saying at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So a lot of you know, I've had a
Speaker 2: lot of people tell me that the English accents they
Speaker 2: find most difficult to understand is the Scottish one. So
Speaker 2: if they go to Scotland, it takes them a few
Speaker 2: days to kind of acclimate to be like, okay, what
Speaker 2: are you saying. And it's not surprising because in part
Speaker 2: it was a more conservative English, meaning that it retained
Speaker 2: features longer than you know. Even now English English has
Speaker 2: a lot of new features. Scottish English, I mean, every
Speaker 2: dialect has changed, so there's none that we are the
Speaker 2: same as the sixteen hundreds. And it's a riff that
Speaker 2: Appalachian English is, you know, Shakespeare in the Holler. That's
Speaker 2: not that's not true. Does it attain certain features that
Speaker 2: are older, certainly it does, but every accent does things
Speaker 2: like that. You know, we all have things that are
Speaker 2: older and younger and new and innovative, and Scottish English
Speaker 2: is the same way. It's gotten innovations. But for example,
Speaker 2: in Scottish English, you tend to have more differences in
Speaker 2: vowels that occur before our sounds that American English, where
Speaker 2: we've kind of merged everything together, you know, so if
Speaker 2: you have words like mary, mary and mary, which are
Speaker 2: m e r r y y, m a r r
Speaker 2: y and m a r y, most Americans merge those suckers.
Speaker 2: But you know in Scottish and Irish English is those
Speaker 2: vowel mergers before r were not as widespread, so you
Speaker 2: tend to have more distinct vowels before them. So that's
Speaker 2: an Mary. Yes, yes, Southerners actually used to do that
Speaker 2: distinction more often, but it's harder to find it in
Speaker 2: the South nowadays.
Speaker 1: And you hear the opposite. I remember there was a
Speaker 1: viral video of a man in Baltimore, which to me
Speaker 1: is one of the most fascinating accents. There's a viral
Speaker 1: video of him reading the sentence. It was something like
Speaker 1: aarin uh oh, gosh, Aaron's something in iron eurn Aaron Oh,
Speaker 1: Aaron earned or Aaron earned an iron earn. And he
Speaker 1: was like iron earned and iron urn, like all the
Speaker 1: vowels were the same, and he's like, whoa.
Speaker 2: Do I talk like yes? But you know, some people
Speaker 2: feel I have heard Southerners that also say things that
Speaker 2: I think non Southerners, if they're very traditional Southern, often
Speaker 2: at certain places in the South that have a heavier accent,
Speaker 2: where people go there and say the same thing. You know.
Speaker 2: So I've had, you know, someone saying I'm ron it,
Speaker 2: which is I'm going to iron it. That's Southern for
Speaker 2: I'm going to iron it, you know, I I oh, right, right,
Speaker 2: Or I would say someone who said that it took
Speaker 2: me a while. I'm like, oh, okay, you're going to
Speaker 2: iron it. One of my mothers when I was young. So,
Speaker 2: you know, I think it's partially whenever we have accents
Speaker 2: that are further from what we think of as sort
Speaker 2: of this national standard, general American model that we're more
Speaker 2: familiar with, even if we don't speak at ourselves, because
Speaker 2: we can't help but be familiar with it because our
Speaker 2: teachers are broadcasters. You know, every ad on television tends
Speaker 2: to have that accent. Then it can be harder for
Speaker 2: a short time for us to figure it out. We
Speaker 2: do something really amazing called accent normalization or vowel normalization,
Speaker 2: where our brain kind of adjusts with enough input and
Speaker 2: relatively rapidly to understanding how this new system fits with
Speaker 2: our old system. So the more familiar you become with
Speaker 2: the speaker, the better.
Speaker 1: You do with this, and it probably makes it just
Speaker 1: easier to understand people with time.
Speaker 2: Well, what we do find is people with really diverse
Speaker 2: accent exposure. So people that either grow up around a
Speaker 2: lot of diverse accent. So, for example, in la Or
Speaker 2: they have more people at work from various places, they
Speaker 2: tend to do better with accent normalization because they're just
Speaker 2: more adaptable. They've had more range, and so their brain
Speaker 2: has learned to process it more quickly.
Speaker 1: You know, I have a tendency. I've traveled quite a
Speaker 1: lot in my life. Have been very lucky because of
Speaker 1: the work that I do to travel quite a lot,
Speaker 1: and my friends would tell me that I have a
Speaker 1: tendency when I come home from a lot of travel
Speaker 1: to sort of have picked up like affectations and different
Speaker 1: kind of quirks of speech while I'm away, and then
Speaker 1: obviously they decay after a few days. But usually when
Speaker 1: I come home from a place, they're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: you're talking like.
Speaker 2: You're like a superheroer. There are yes, I think all
Speaker 2: of us are familiar with it, with those types.
Speaker 3: So superhero types, Oh my god, I didn't even know
Speaker 3: as I was doing it.
Speaker 2: That's all just pick it up, and you know, there
Speaker 2: really is some interesting variability in our ability to do that.
Speaker 2: So I think a lot of times people are feel
Speaker 2: like they are not as good as other people in
Speaker 2: picking up languages or hearing accents, and part of it
Speaker 2: is part of its exposure and motivation, for sure, But
Speaker 2: it does seem like certain people are more perceptually able
Speaker 2: to pick up on these finer distinctions, analyze it cognitively,
Speaker 2: and produce it. And we see this in people particularly
Speaker 2: that have a really good musical ability.
Speaker 1: And I was gonna say I was trained as a vocalist.
Speaker 1: That's probably good.
Speaker 2: There you go, right, And so if you, especially if
Speaker 2: you can hear tone differences really well, you tend to
Speaker 2: be very good at picking these very nuanced differences in
Speaker 2: language up better. So there we tagged you. We know
Speaker 2: why you're so good or bad?
Speaker 1: It was so annoying, I guess I could say, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm also really curious. You mentioned something before about oh gosh,
Speaker 1: what was it?
Speaker 2: It was?
Speaker 1: It was a Southern thing where they ran, oh the
Speaker 1: ironing thing, which was so good, and one of the
Speaker 1: ones that I saw once on it was either Baltimore
Speaker 1: or or Pittsburgh, which I think Baltimore. I find Baltimore
Speaker 1: and Pittsburgh to be the most fascinating accents in the US.
Speaker 1: But they would say like g eat jeet instead of
Speaker 1: did you eat.
Speaker 2: Yes, running all together, I mean all of us do it.
Speaker 2: So there's you know, economic ways of speaking, and it's
Speaker 2: all due to articulatory efficiency, and every one of us
Speaker 2: does things like that where we uh sort of smush
Speaker 2: a lot of sounds into smaller and smaller syllables when
Speaker 2: we're talking fast, and it's something very familiar and recoverable
Speaker 2: from the context. The trick is certain places like Pittsburgh,
Speaker 2: I know is one. Also Philly is also known for that,
Speaker 2: where's there's a lot of smushing that goes on. Sort
Speaker 2: of it's become a local joke, right that you can say,
Speaker 2: get yet, and everybody there will know, will know what
Speaker 2: it is, but all of us say eat, yeah, did
Speaker 2: you eat it yet?
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, I'm going.
Speaker 2: To As a Southerner, I actually one tag for me.
Speaker 2: My husband always says he notices I say it is
Speaker 2: I say, I'm a I'm doing that. I eat. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna eat now, And that's the same thing instead of
Speaker 2: I'm going to eat or finna right the.
Speaker 1: I was going to bring that one up, fina, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Was fixing to right too. Yeah, and then it shortens
Speaker 2: so and we all do this. It's all due to
Speaker 2: these natural tendencies and speech, which are the things that
Speaker 2: gave rise to accents in the first place, which is
Speaker 2: whenever we separate we're not talking to the same people,
Speaker 2: we will have these different variations arise that sort of
Speaker 2: come in different ways, different forms, but all from the
Speaker 2: same underlying predispositions we have as human language speakers due
Speaker 2: to articulatory and perceptual efficiencies in the way that our
Speaker 2: mouths work, in the way that our brains process things.
Speaker 2: So a great example is in unstressed syllables, of which
Speaker 2: English has a lot. Whenever you get an unstressed syllable,
Speaker 2: it for every speaker of every variety of English, it
Speaker 2: will cause what's what's known as weakening or nission bilinguist,
Speaker 2: which simply means you reduce the articulatory gestures because it's
Speaker 2: spoken much more quickly and which with less articulatory force
Speaker 2: because it's an unstressed syllable, and so.
Speaker 1: And so those tend to be the ones that disappear.
Speaker 2: They are the ones that either get completely deleted or
Speaker 2: you have continental changes that happen typically, or even vowel changes.
Speaker 2: So a great example is the way that we say water,
Speaker 2: so water is a stressed and unstressed syllable. The first
Speaker 2: syllable stress, the second's unstressed, which means that second still
Speaker 2: syllable is ripe for stuff to happen. And yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean you can get things where it's who whole deletion,
Speaker 2: So I want some wah wah.
Speaker 3: Right by the way a baby would say it wah wah.
Speaker 2: But more likely what happens is you do something like
Speaker 2: change the way the teas pronounce, so you either keep
Speaker 2: it a tea so water, which sounds very right British,
Speaker 2: or you say wah uh, which also sounds British, but
Speaker 2: a very different variety of British English. Or you say
Speaker 2: water with a D, which is which is always say
Speaker 2: that lap, right, which is a flap. It's not really
Speaker 2: the same thing as a D, which is actually a
Speaker 2: more forceful articulation, So a D has more articulatory effort
Speaker 2: than the flat. But a flap is like an intermediate
Speaker 2: sound between a T and a D, where the tongue
Speaker 2: just slaps against the alveolar ridge really fast and makes
Speaker 2: a D like sound.
Speaker 3: And notice how those.
Speaker 2: Are all basically weakening occurrences occurring in an unstressed syllable.
Speaker 2: So but the outcome is different, and the outcome is
Speaker 2: different because we've been separated by time and land and
Speaker 2: social space. So it one became British and one became American,
Speaker 2: and it's mainly because those things developed after we separated,
Speaker 2: and we're apart for long periods of time.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating and I've always posited, tell me if this
Speaker 1: is wrong. I've always posited that the reason that Americans
Speaker 1: say file at and British people say fill it is
Speaker 1: because we are adapting the I mean, it's a French word, right,
Speaker 1: so we're we're saying it the way we heard the
Speaker 1: French say it, or did we change it back from
Speaker 1: phill it?
Speaker 2: Well, you know it's I'm more systemically, American English speakers
Speaker 2: tend to have stress patterns that are different than British speakers.
Speaker 2: So secretary secretary, how do they say it in Britain?
Speaker 1: So say secretary secretary or laboratory?
Speaker 2: Yes, right, So they often have a different stress pattern
Speaker 2: and so that will change the way you pronounce, specially
Speaker 2: the end sounds and like buffet is the same thing,
Speaker 2: it's different.
Speaker 1: Yeah we say ballet, Yeah, we say in ballet, ballet right.
Speaker 2: So it's part of a larger trend, and part of
Speaker 2: that is driven by after the Revolution, the founding fathers
Speaker 2: and Noah Webster really wanted to americanize American English because
Speaker 2: of its role in symbolic unity, but also its role
Speaker 2: in separating from our former motherland. And so a lot
Speaker 2: of stress differences were part of this reform movement that
Speaker 2: was both in spelling, to spell English differently, but also
Speaker 2: to pronounce words in an American way. And sure, some
Speaker 2: of it more recently, depending on the history of a
Speaker 2: specific word, can be while we borrowed it later from French,
Speaker 2: and so that's why we have that pronunciation. Certainly you
Speaker 2: can find that, but more generally, when we see patterns
Speaker 2: like this, it's often attributable to these earlier points of
Speaker 2: history where the American language was trying to find its
Speaker 2: own footing. We got lots of new words, new stress patterns,
Speaker 2: new spellings, and much of this played a symbolic role
Speaker 2: in establishing American identity. But it wasn't just arbitrary. In fact,
Speaker 2: you know, people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Noah Webster,
Speaker 2: John Adams, even George Washington did play a role in
Speaker 2: make making sure the American language as they called it,
Speaker 2: which Noah Webster coined, was a unifying force on a
Speaker 2: fragile nation because the states were already at war with
Speaker 2: each other within a few years after the revolution, and
Speaker 2: having regional dialects was actually something they were worried about.
Speaker 2: Having different ways of saying things with something they were
Speaker 2: worried about because of the impact it had in sort
Speaker 2: of establishing a national identity.
Speaker 1: So how did they talk?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: I've always been curious because I don't trust the movies.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know that they don't didn't have just
Speaker 1: straight up British accents. But even when you look hundreds
Speaker 1: of years later at early like American cinema, there was
Speaker 1: this way, or if you listen to old recordings of
Speaker 1: poets around the turn of this past century, there's this like,
Speaker 1: very like affected way that they talk. And I always
Speaker 1: have wondered, was that how they actually talked or were
Speaker 1: they putting something on for the camera?
Speaker 2: No, that's definitely putting something on. In fact, in the
Speaker 2: early twentieth century, when cinema was getting started, there was
Speaker 2: something called the Transatlantic accent, which was an affected, basically
Speaker 2: fake accent that was very prominent in Hollywood, and it
Speaker 2: had been taught by essentially articulation and elocution experts and
Speaker 2: was particularly talked to actors. It was also taught in
Speaker 2: East Coast boarding schools, which is why it has you know,
Speaker 2: the Catherine hepburn esque and Jackie o' nassis and Carrie Grant,
Speaker 2: So it has this mix of people that were both
Speaker 2: actors at the time, but also just you know, fdr
Speaker 2: those types of people that were just affluent East Coasters
Speaker 2: because that was put on accents that was considered very
Speaker 2: elite and posh at the time. When that was a
Speaker 2: model of sort of New England model of what we
Speaker 2: should sound like, it.
Speaker 1: Was just made up.
Speaker 2: It was made up. It was actually constructed by a
Speaker 2: woman who taught elocution, and it was based on the
Speaker 2: model of a sort of a New England American and
Speaker 2: received pronunciation British accent kind of hobbled together. But if
Speaker 2: you go back to the time of the Revolution, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a completely different thing sound than we would think
Speaker 2: of today. In fact, I think the closest thing I
Speaker 2: could say it sounded kind of like is probably what
Speaker 2: we would think of as an Irish accent today, although
Speaker 2: again that's changed a lot since the time, But words
Speaker 2: like fight and life would have been pronounced more like
Speaker 2: foight loife. So it really there were a lot of
Speaker 2: things that the flapping we talked about in water would
Speaker 2: not have happened yet, so people would have said water, water,
Speaker 2: water because there wouldn't have been our dropping yet, so
Speaker 2: there would have been no r dropping, So you know
Speaker 2: a lot of these things, and vowels would have been shorter,
Speaker 2: so when you say day it would have been more
Speaker 2: like de wow, and when you say go it would
Speaker 2: have been more like gough. So it was very different
Speaker 2: than what we think of, and it was probably heard
Speaker 2: as still somewhat British, and it probably wasn't that different
Speaker 2: than contempt the British of that contemporary time, especially on
Speaker 2: the East Coast colonies that had a lot of contact
Speaker 2: with Britain, and they would have had a lot of
Speaker 2: British speakers because the model of the colonies for really
Speaker 2: up to the time of the Revolution was the model
Speaker 2: of London for cultural style and speech. So it did
Speaker 2: have a pressure on the colonies speech, especially among the
Speaker 2: educated colonists in those cities, to sound more like that.
Speaker 2: So it would have sounded still somewhat British. But a
Speaker 2: lot of the commentary we see at the time of
Speaker 2: people writing notes about how Americans versus British speakers sounded
Speaker 2: say that the Americans spoke a more pure form, a
Speaker 2: more homogeneous, elegant form of British English. And that's probably
Speaker 2: indicative of the fact that in Britain at the time,
Speaker 2: you could walk ten miles down the road and not
Speaker 2: understand your neighbor because there were so many incredibly rich,
Speaker 2: dive accents at the time, both from what part of
Speaker 2: Britain you were from, but also and even within England
Speaker 2: if you were northern or Southern English, but even a
Speaker 2: little town that had its unique accent, and then class
Speaker 2: was also very prominent. So in England there were a
Speaker 2: lot of diverse accents that sort of felt like no
Speaker 2: one talked the same way and you couldn't understand your neighbor.
Speaker 2: But because of the fact that it was a London
Speaker 2: cultural and linguistic model used in the colonies, and the
Speaker 2: fact that you had people from all over Britain, plus
Speaker 2: some German and Scott's, Irish and Welsh and Dutch settlement
Speaker 2: early on, you got this sort of leveling of accent,
Speaker 2: so that it kind of moved towards this more central
Speaker 2: tendency of what was more prominent in these feeder accents
Speaker 2: that would have made it still sound British, but almost
Speaker 2: like a purified form of British English, were some of
Speaker 2: the more regional accent features that were less prominent in
Speaker 2: everybody's speech would have died out.
Speaker 1: It's so fast, you know, there's one concept that I know,
Speaker 1: I said I was going to keep us at the hour.
Speaker 1: I'm trying. I'm trying, but there's one concept that I
Speaker 1: can't help but bring up that I find really fascinating.
Speaker 1: You've talked a lot about the divisions, right, the divisions
Speaker 1: like geographically, the divisions of class, the divisions of country
Speaker 1: of origin, even through time we've been discussing. One thing
Speaker 1: that I think is a really fascinating slice of America
Speaker 1: is when I talk to my friends, and specifically my
Speaker 1: black friends, who have kind of cultural accents, but who
Speaker 1: also feel a lot of pressure in their daily lives
Speaker 1: to code switch and their ability. And I think some
Speaker 1: people have, you know, more or less ability, probably based
Speaker 1: on all sorts of different things, but their ability to
Speaker 1: change how they speak depending on the audience and whether
Speaker 1: obviously the perceptions there are going to be hateful or understanding,
Speaker 1: or you know, communal or judgmental. And it's such a
Speaker 1: fascinating I think example of a lot of things that
Speaker 1: we've been talking about.
Speaker 2: Absolutely the African American English that we hear around us
Speaker 2: today what a lot of people don't understand. And this
Speaker 2: is why I had to write a whole chapter on
Speaker 2: it in the book, because I felt like this was
Speaker 2: such an important story that doesn't get told is that's
Speaker 2: a colonial English, just like every other English.
Speaker 3: And we forget that African American heritage started forcibly but
Speaker 3: at the same time essentially that the colonies started. So
Speaker 3: you know, the first slave ship was brought over and
Speaker 3: I think it was sixteen nineteen, which is actually before
Speaker 3: the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. So the history of
Speaker 3: African American English is just as long as the history
Speaker 3: as of white English of the colonies. But what is
Speaker 3: really I think the point of what you were talking
Speaker 3: about is something called the double consciousness of being black
Speaker 3: in America, which you have to be able to recognize
Speaker 3: and adapt to these different situations in terms of how
Speaker 3: you project your identity because first of all for safety,
Speaker 3: for professional success, but also for in group membership and
Speaker 3: feeling part of something. So this idea that you're supposed
Speaker 3: to sound general American is completely denying the fact that
Speaker 3: our identity is tied up in the accents that we
Speaker 3: have in the speech of the people we love and
Speaker 3: grow up with.
Speaker 2: And who are important to us. But it also ignores
Speaker 2: that you can be an African American English speaker and
Speaker 2: be a middle class standard African American English speaker. This
Speaker 2: idea that African American English is only this vernacular form
Speaker 2: is erroneous. And I think what we have found, particularly
Speaker 2: in the modern era after the Great Migration of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century, that African American English, which effectively was Southern
Speaker 2: to begin because at the turn of the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: ninety percent of African Americans lived in the South, but
Speaker 2: by the end of the twentieth century, fifty percent of
Speaker 2: those African Americans lived in urban areas, primarily in the North,
Speaker 2: and many have also re emigrated into the South since then.
Speaker 2: But you know, it is a story of such incredible cultural, linguistic, musical, literary,
Speaker 2: social heritage that forged all these different varied accents of
Speaker 2: African American English, and I think what we often think
Speaker 2: of as code switching is often this idea that to
Speaker 2: be black in America and sound black can serve a
Speaker 2: really good purpose for you as a social being, right
Speaker 2: fitting with the people that matter to you. But it
Speaker 2: can also be a very difficult sound to have if
Speaker 2: you're trying to be successful in this structure that white
Speaker 2: America has put up. And you know, one of the
Speaker 2: things that I talk about in the book is that
Speaker 2: we don't expect most middle class white speakers to go
Speaker 2: to school or go to work and adopt a different
Speaker 2: accent and then get judge for the fact that they
Speaker 2: can't do it. But that's precisely what we expect African
Speaker 2: American English speakers.
Speaker 1: To do, and so we are less patient about it.
Speaker 1: I mean as a as a like a white nationalistic
Speaker 1: supremacist society. I think we are less patient with an
Speaker 1: African American person who maybe has more of a difficulty
Speaker 1: with that adaptations than somebody who is like a foreign national, right,
Speaker 1: somebody from India or somebody from China who speaks English
Speaker 1: but has a very thick accent.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I think that we're impatient with a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you're probably right. Yeah, it's a pretty
Speaker 1: racist country across just race.
Speaker 2: Its class, So you know, I mean, I think also
Speaker 2: we forget with African American English. And this is one
Speaker 2: point that I really do think is important, is there
Speaker 2: are a lot of African American standard English speakers. And
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about necessarily standard mainstream general American only,
Speaker 2: but there are standard varieties of African American English that
Speaker 2: have more of the prosity, sort of the melody, but
Speaker 2: less of the you know, stigmatized features. And that's a
Speaker 2: different thing than a working class white speaker or a
Speaker 2: black speaker that tries to be successful in professional America.
Speaker 2: And you know, I don't know that you know, race
Speaker 2: is a big issue, for sure, but also class is
Speaker 2: a big issue. And you know, if you are black
Speaker 2: and working class, you have a double whammy. But if
Speaker 2: you're white and working class, you're judged also quite a
Speaker 2: bit for the accent you have. And there's a resounding
Speaker 2: number of studies that suggest when you talk with accent
Speaker 2: that betrays your class status, that sound makes you sound
Speaker 2: like you're from a certain class group, that doors shut
Speaker 2: to you in professional settings so that people find you
Speaker 2: less intelligent, less educated, sloppy, lazy, all these negative personality traits.
Speaker 2: So I think it's actually a lot with class, and
Speaker 2: race does also play an issue, but I think also
Speaker 2: non native speakers. I've heard from so many non native
Speaker 2: speakers that have told me that they've encountered that same
Speaker 2: kind of impatience.
Speaker 1: You're so right.
Speaker 2: So I think what we don't understand is that we
Speaker 2: don't just speak with an accent. We listen with an accent,
Speaker 2: and we filter everything we hear through the accent of
Speaker 2: our own people, right, our own groups, our own identities,
Speaker 2: and then we judge other people for not measuring up
Speaker 2: to the identity accents that we have. And it's really
Speaker 2: about communication, and we are in a partnership when we're communicating,
Speaker 2: and we tend to forget that when we're talking to
Speaker 2: someone that doesn't sound like us.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and I think we see it with gender differences
Speaker 1: as well. I mean, one thing we were talking about
Speaker 1: right as we started this recording, and maybe it's an
Speaker 1: interesting note to go out on, is the judgment that
Speaker 1: often women speakers have with the sounds of their voices
Speaker 1: and different standards that are held. I mean, I know,
Speaker 1: working on another podcast where I'm the only woman, we
Speaker 1: get so many emails all the time about my vocal
Speaker 1: fry and about how often I interrupt, and the male
Speaker 1: host is always like, I interrupt more, but.
Speaker 2: I'm sure of it. I'm higher percent sure of it.
Speaker 2: We hear interruptions from women much more than we hear
Speaker 2: them from men, and this is a very consistent finding
Speaker 2: the vocal fry issue. So this was actually what the
Speaker 2: topic of my first book. One of the main motivations
Speaker 2: for like Literally Dude is because it's not just that
Speaker 2: these are new features we love to hate, but that
Speaker 2: so many of the new features that we love to
Speaker 2: hate are also new features that women are associated with.
Speaker 2: And it really is. There is a lot of history
Speaker 2: behind why that's so, dating back to you know, antiquity.
Speaker 2: But vocal fry is a particular pariah for a lot
Speaker 2: of people in the broadcast network. So I hear that
Speaker 2: from so many female hosts. I can't tell you, almost
Speaker 2: every female host of every interview I have been on
Speaker 2: tell me that they have gotten notes from listeners about
Speaker 2: their vocal fry, even though men fry too, and historically speaking,
Speaker 2: when we look at the early studies of fry, we
Speaker 2: hear the studies were first done in Britain. It was
Speaker 2: a predominantly masculine feature.
Speaker 1: It was a masculine voices, yes, and it.
Speaker 2: Was as being actually aristocratic. So you know somehow now
Speaker 2: that women use it and we notice it more and
Speaker 2: women's voices only because creek, which is what we call it,
Speaker 2: but vocal fry happens at lower pitches. So women have
Speaker 2: higher pitch voices, so when they go to creek, in
Speaker 2: order to get creek, you have to drop to a
Speaker 2: lower pitch, and so it's more noticeable that pitch cliff
Speaker 2: that you go off. That makes sense, and I have a.
Speaker 1: Deeper voice for a woman like I don't have a
Speaker 1: high pitch voice as far as women's voices go, and
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a pressure on you in broadcast settings. So
Speaker 2: we find that actually in the nineteen nineties, one study
Speaker 2: looked at women in broadcasting and found that women in
Speaker 2: broadcasting tended to use vocal fry in part to achieve
Speaker 2: this deeper broadcast voice that was required for women. Because
Speaker 2: in the sixties and seventies, when we first start seeing
Speaker 2: women in broadcasting, they were called shrill of course, and
Speaker 2: so there's been a general lowering of pitch in many
Speaker 2: women's voices, particularly in that setting. And then vocal fry
Speaker 2: also adopts a lower pitch, and those same women in
Speaker 2: a later study that used it in broadcast settings did
Speaker 2: not use it in non broadcast settings. So it seemed
Speaker 2: to be something that what they were using in order
Speaker 2: to come off as more authoritative and more you know,
Speaker 2: sort of assertive in their speech, because they were often
Speaker 2: then getting hit for not sounding assertive enough, and then
Speaker 2: they kept asure, yeah, you can't win, and all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, we're sounding you know, to deep.
Speaker 1: God, it's so so I mean, gosh, I feel like
Speaker 1: I could talk to you, but for like hours and
Speaker 1: hours and hours about this stuff. I warned you at
Speaker 1: the beginning. I'm fascinated by accents. You are a wealth
Speaker 1: of information. We didn't even get into most of the
Speaker 1: things in your book, which is always the case on
Speaker 1: this show, because why would we do that if you
Speaker 1: could go buy the book people? But is there anything
Speaker 1: I mean, there's probably several, but is there anything that
Speaker 1: sticks out to you that we didn't dive into that's
Speaker 1: sort of like whoa that was? That's like such an
Speaker 1: important topic, and we just completely glossed over.
Speaker 2: It, you know, I think, you know, we talked about
Speaker 2: a lot of the things that create accents over time,
Speaker 2: you know, class, ethnicity, separation by geography. But one thing
Speaker 2: I think is a really interesting topic that I have
Speaker 2: a couple of chapters that touch upon in the book
Speaker 2: that we don't tend to think of, is what drives
Speaker 2: us to be attracted to certain sounds more than others,
Speaker 2: in certain languages more than others. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: for example, why is it that we hate the word moist,
Speaker 2: you know, or you know, I can't stand the word panties.
Speaker 1: That's what I was literally about to say that it's
Speaker 1: so gross to say underwear, I know exactly, I.
Speaker 2: Just say underwear. And you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: semantic associations because, especially for women, both of those words
Speaker 2: have been put in context where it's not kind of used,
Speaker 2: not as a slur, but as an uncomfortable, sexual, sexualized
Speaker 2: term for women. And so we do find women find
Speaker 2: those words more unappealing. But generally, you know, about twenty
Speaker 2: percent of the population doesn't like the word moist, So
Speaker 2: there has to be something driving it, and it can
Speaker 2: be partially the semantics. You know, what we call moist
Speaker 2: is often not attractive, right, moist wounds or nobody's best
Speaker 2: idea of a fun Sunday. But part of it's also
Speaker 2: maybe the sounds of the words themselves, and we see
Speaker 2: that also. You were talking about Italian, that your father's
Speaker 2: Italian and you have this beauty. You mentioned it and
Speaker 2: I actually almost broke it, brought it up. Then you
Speaker 2: said your name in this beautiful Italian way, and then
Speaker 2: you said it in kind of this more you know,
Speaker 2: America version in American English. And what I loved about
Speaker 2: that it was really an example of how certain types
Speaker 2: of languages, sounds, and linguistic structures are heard as more
Speaker 2: beautiful to us. And Italian is a beautiful representation of
Speaker 2: a of a language that has that melodiousness that people
Speaker 2: tend to find attractive universally because you know, no offense
Speaker 2: to anybody speaks Italian. But it's not really a globally
Speaker 2: powerful language, right. You know, people aren't learning Italian because
Speaker 2: it's going to help them with world trade, Right, They're
Speaker 2: learning Italian because it's a beautiful language. But what makes
Speaker 2: it beautiful and if we actually look at it structure.
Speaker 2: It's because it has a lot of open syllables, and
Speaker 2: so you know, we have a lot of falla la
Speaker 2: type syllables that end in a vowel, and it has
Speaker 2: a quality called sonority that occurs more frequently. And sonority
Speaker 2: is driven by sounds that are made with a relatively
Speaker 2: open articulation in the mouth, and that sounds like R
Speaker 2: and L and M and N, which you can almost
Speaker 2: just get into the rhythm of me saying those versus
Speaker 2: duh cooh, puh right, which are not very melodious.
Speaker 1: Which sound very German.
Speaker 2: They do sound very German. And so if you look
Speaker 2: at German and English, we actually have less sonority and
Speaker 2: fewer open syllables than Italian or French or Spanish, which
Speaker 2: are the languages people tend to say are beautiful love languages.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, the lovelanguage, romantic languages.
Speaker 2: I do think that's a fun part of how we
Speaker 2: hear sounds. I mean, it's not the main driver. So
Speaker 2: you can have a lot of languages that are quite
Speaker 2: beautiful from that dimension that are not heard as beautiful
Speaker 2: languages because they don't have any global power, or because
Speaker 2: they're associated with a disadvantaged group. So you know, a
Speaker 2: good example of a language you don't ever see on
Speaker 2: those lists is Hawaiian. But Hawaiian is actually a very
Speaker 2: sonaric language.
Speaker 1: I was about to say, yeah, there's what. There's only
Speaker 1: a certain number of letters, and it's a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 2: Of vowels, a lot of vowels which are the most
Speaker 2: sonorant of all sounds. And that's probably because of just
Speaker 2: the power dynamics and familiarity. So familiarity is a big
Speaker 2: driver of what we love. So the more familiar a language,
Speaker 2: the more we love it, which explains why English, which
Speaker 2: is a relatively unattractive language by the measure of phonetics,
Speaker 2: is a very attractive language to many people. Not because
Speaker 2: it has open syllables and you can sing it well
Speaker 2: like Italian, our Spanish or French, but because you are
Speaker 2: familiar with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you saw a lot of movies in English.
Speaker 2: Exactly right. It is hard to avoid English in the world.
Speaker 2: But Hawaiian is one that maybe many people aren't familiar with.
Speaker 2: So there's all these different factors, and I just I
Speaker 2: love everything to do with the way that we talk
Speaker 2: and make sounds. And I think that the message of
Speaker 2: the book is really that we are all coming to
Speaker 2: this from a different perspective of maybe the accents we
Speaker 2: have and the things we say. But what really it
Speaker 2: should teach us is the universality of the facts of
Speaker 2: identity and meaning and connection that these accents bring us. Oh.
Speaker 1: I love this so much. I'm so sad that we
Speaker 1: have to end this episode. I just want to keep
Speaker 1: talking to you all day long, everybody. The book is
Speaker 1: Why We Talk Funny The Real Story Behind Our Accents
Speaker 1: by doctor Valerie Friedland. Valerie, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: being here. It was such a joy.
Speaker 2: It was you are a great conversational partner.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it a lot. Me too, Me too, and
Speaker 1: everybody listening, thank you for coming back week after week.
Speaker 1: I'm really looking forward to the next time we all
Speaker 1: get together to talk. Nerdy