Valerie Fridland
Subject: I Love Your Accent
Bio: Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nevada at Reno and Author of Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is I Love Your Accent.
Our speaker is Valerie Fridland who is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nevada at Reno. She is the author of the new book entitled Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.
I want to learn from Valerie why accents develop and if there are rhyme and reason for their differences. I grew up in Chicago and I don’t think I have an accent, yet I hear that the Chicago accent is the most difficult to understand. How is that even possible.
Valerie, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Valerie Fridland:
I am a sociolinguist. While a linguist is interested in the structure of language, a sociolinguist is interested in answering questions like: Why do New Yorkers and people from Chicago put their groceries in “bee-ags” [biægz], but in the West or LA, you’d say ”b-awe-gs” [bɔːɡz]. In the South, why there’s a drawl? Why do young people say like all the time?
Sociolinguists are interested in understanding how the inherent variation in language are due to articulatory tendencies to be more efficient or clear. Certain sounds are easier to perceive versus others. We can hear a d better than we can hear a “thuh” [ð], which is why only 8% of languages have “thuh” [ð], but many languages have “duh” [d]. Those are linguistic questions. We want to know why speakers start changing thuhs to ds, even if they are speakers of English naturally?
Take an articulatory tendency and then investigate where we’re from, ethnicity, people we interact with, or how major social changes affect our accents.
Belonging and identity are deeply tied to the way we sound. Everybody thinks they speak without an accent, but the reality is we all have an accent. The accents you don’t notice are dominant and powerful in society. And when you’re a member of that group, you think of that as the norm and therefore accent-less. But for a linguist like me, I can tell.
Accents are ancient and advantageous. Language started about 150,000 years ago in Africa. The Khoisan languages that have clicks are some of the oldest. We can trace languages back to 10 major families that likely started as one language. Migrating speakers left the cradle of Africa, they started sounding different and those differences turned into accents. Over time, when you don’t talk to each other, those accents turn into languages. That’s how Latin, after the fall of the Roman Empire, became Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Larry Bernstein:
I’m from Chicago.
Valerie Fridland:
I can hear.
Larry Bernstein:
I used to think I was totally neutral, mostly because when I listened to the national news, I didn’t hear an accent. Peter Jennings and Walter Cronkite have distinct voices, but I didn’t feel like they would feel out of place in suburban Chicago. Saturday Night Live came out with their “Da Bears” sketch. I never said The Bears like that, with the “duh” [d]. I thought it might have reflected some sub-regional language differences. Maybe it was Polish or other Eastern Europeans going to the Bears games. Tell us about “Da Bears.”
Valerie Fridland:
You fall into this myth of non-accent. If you look at who tends to have that myth, it’s often middle-class white speakers from the Midwest. The Bears “Da Bears” does have a lot of substrate influence from Eastern European languages.
In the middle of the 1800s, there was a huge amount of Eastern European immigration, also Yiddish speakers, that came into Chicago and are the foundation of working class Chicago accents. Working class features might not be visible in suburbs or middle-class speech because there is a homogenizing tendency of what you want to do professionally.
We find an intense pressure on standard language forms that moves us away from local features. If a kid’s growing up in a neighborhood where people go to college, there’s pressure to keep local features in that area reduced. But when you go into inner city that’s not the case with working class communities.
Northern Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, they’re all part of the German Belt. The Palatine Germans came in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It’s predominantly their influences felt in the upper north because Scots-Irish influences tend to be more in the Southern parts of those states. Then you get in the later 1800s other immigrants, all of whom don’t have a th sound, and second language speakers pick up that sound that their parents had problems with. Almost everybody born to non-native speaking parents don’t sound like their parents; they sound like everybody they hang out with. But that doesn’t mean they don’t sound like some of the origins of their parents.
That’s why we have “Minne-soooo-ta” [ˌmɪnɪˈsoːtə]. That becomes an influence of the culture of social belonging. It’s not that they can’t say those sounds, it’s that those sounds are revealing of who they are.
In Chicago, it’s not just “Da Bears.” They have something called the Northern City Shift, and you have some in your voice. When you say something like half, you say “hee-af” [hɛəf]. But I’m hyper articulating it.
Larry Bernstein:
My example is “roof” [ruf] versus “ruff” [rʌf]. “Ruff” [rʌf] is common here in the Midwest. When I went out East, they were like, “What are you talking about? It’s a ‘roof’ [ruf].”
I moved to Miami Beach, and I did a podcast on requiring English. In the city of Miami proper, the first language spoken at home, 70% is Spanish. That is an all-time high. It continues to drift higher. I live in Miami Beach and the numbers there are only 50% of the home’s first language is Spanish.
The use of Spanish language reflects Hispanic culture. I feel when I’m in Miami Beach, that I’m in Latin America. It’s everything. It’s food, clothing, how you walk, how you talk. Tell me about language and what makes you culturally from Miami or Chicago.
Valerie Fridland:
The base of Chicago English was the early British settlers. The building of the Erie Canal opened avenues of migration to New Englanders. New England was settled by people from East Anglia, who often had “ruffs” [rʌfs] instead of “roofs” [rufs].
The second layer was German settlement, and they ended up with a blended dialect. But Chicago fundamentally has a British cultural basis.
In Miami, it’s a new place. While you did have a mixing of settlers that spoke American English at the time, you had this huge linguistic swamping from people that spoke Spanish. There have been studies on Miami English, which is predominantly Spanish in terms of its substrate.
That’s things like saying salmon with the l, “sal-mon” [ˈsælmən], because that would be an influence in Spanish, or saying hand with more of an “awe” vowel than an “ah” vowel because Spanish doesn’t have “ah,” so you’d say “hawnd” [hɔnd]. I love going to Miami, the language is not so much Spanish, but the heritage is Spanish. And by having that in their English, it reflects the groups they belong to and the people that matter to them.
Your accents begin in childhood. We have evidence that children can hear the rhythm of the language of their mother in utero. They turn their heads five days after birth towards another speaker that speaks the same language as their mother because they’re familiar with that tempo. But if you give them a recording of someone who doesn’t have that same language, they’re less interested in it.
Then you go to school with kids that sound nothing like you; you’re going to adapt. You’re going to emerge as a speaker with a different accent over time. You pick up the language of the people that matter to you as a child and you continue that into adulthood.
If you take someone that was born in Miami to Spanish-speaking parents and you move them to Minnesota, chances of them having a Spanish substrate in their language as they get older is practically nil, because then you’ve changed the people that matter to them and the people they’re surrounded by.
Larry Bernstein:
I went with my mother to visit my “Ant” [ænt] Beatrice in London. I said to her, “Hi, Aunt Beatrice.” She said, “It’s ‘Ahnt’ [ɑnt] Beatrice.”
I had a conversation with her and she looked confused. After I finished speaking, she said to my mother, “Susie, what did your son say?” And I’m like, “I’m right here. What part of what I said did you not understand?” Then my mother would speak to her and she said, “Oh, now I understand what Larry’s saying.”
We separated from England in the 18th century, but we continued to be repopulated with new people from England, Scotland and Ireland substantially in the 19th century. And yet my “Ahnt” [ɑnt] Beatrice had challenges communicating with her grandnephew. How do you think about the split between England and the United States?
Valerie Fridland:
In Southern Britain, so in London, it’s “ahnt” [ɑnt]. That’s the prestigious pronunciation, but that’s an innovation that’s only been around for about 150 years. “Ant” [ænt] is the older form that the earliest colonists brought with them, which is why we say “ant” [ænt] in the majority of the United States. It wasn’t till the 19th century that became “awe” [ɔ] in certain words in Britain. You had the more authentic British accent.
The early colonists were not from one place in Britain. There were a lot of Irish, Welsh, and Scotts. There were also Northern British immigrants, Southern British immigrants. So for example, New England, a lot of those settlers came from East Anglia. But in Virginia, they came more from Southwestern Britain. They all sounded different.
In the 1600s, one of the things that was ridiculous about Britain is you could walk 10 miles and not understand the person next to you. Within one generation, colonists sounded different from the British back home, no matter what British dialect that was. Then you get to the revolution and uniformity is a big issue because the more unity these states can show, the better likelihood they’ll stick together. Language is identity, and when you can have the same identity through language, that’s when you can have a united nation. I would say the first truly American language occurred after the revolution, not because we didn’t sound different from the British before then, but because we recognized the importance of changing language to sound different.
The dropping of r in Britain, that was a late 18th century innovation. There was a reason we didn’t pick those up. It wasn’t that we didn’t have interaction with British speakers, it was that we had a different identity and we wanted to be American. We revolted not just with guns, it was also with language.
Larry Bernstein:
In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins plays this game where he could listen to an accent and then place a location where the individual was from. He didn’t focus so much on class. It was more like a street or a place. I know it’s fiction, but what lessons can we learn from Henry Higgins’ behavior?
Valerie Fridland:
Linguists look at this idea from My Fair Lady that you can change language and somehow become a better person. Eliza Doolittle had a Cockney London working-class accent. He was a posh speaker, which is the upper-class London accent. It was about changing her speech to sound more like this elite accent. But he realized that she was the most wonderful person because he was surrounded by phonies. It’s about class and language being mixed with one another. You can learn to pronounce something differently, but that doesn’t change, fundamentally, a person.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you have a different view for the movie Clueless? Because in this film, Alicia Silverstone does a makeover. She doesn’t change the language. She just changes, hair, style and clothes. Do you have a different view on clothes versus language?
Valerie Fridland:
The problem is clothes are easily shed. Language is not. The evaluative tendencies we have with clothes are much harsher with language because most people can’t be Eliza Doolittle. Very few people have a phonetician that take them under their wing and say, “Let’s change you and give you a better life.” Eliza Doolittle does express that you lose something when you lose that accent. With Alicia Silverstone she discovers that too. She dresses differently, but the authentic self is what we love in that movie. And that’s what we love about Eliza Doolittle, authenticity.
Larry Bernstein:
Working Girl was filmed in Seven World Trade Center, and I worked in the building. Sigourney Weaver played the investment banker who was unable to go to some meetings. Her secretary from Staten Island, played by Melanie Griffith, got dressed up and played the role, but she couldn’t get rid of her accent.
Valerie Fridland:
There was a reporter in Boston that went viral because she has this very authentic local back Boston accent. People loved it and she’s been on all the morning talk shows because of this local accent. These local accents, whether it’s New York, Chicago, Boston, the South, they scream authenticity. Melanie Griffith seems more authentic in a place where inauthenticity runs rampant.
Larry Bernstein:
There was a professor in linguistics at Penn, Bill Labov. He noticed that most Americans pronounced the consonants the same, and that all the variation in sound was coming from vowels.
He found words that, when their vowels were pronounced differently, would become different words. He would verbally quiz people from different parts of the country on the meaning of those words when said in various accents.
He found that the Chicago accent was the most misunderstood. Now I took that personally.
Valerie Fridland:
Bill Labov is the founder of modern sociolinguistics. He died in his 90s and was doing sociolinguistic research till the day he died. He’s one of my great heroes and a great mentor to me. One of his innovations in studying accents was to recognize that consonants are more uniform across different dialects because of the way that consonants are articulated in the mouth.
The place your tongue hits, how your lips are shaped, what your glottis is doing, those are much more circumscribed when you’re saying consonant sounds than when you’re saying vowels, which are relatively free flowing air. The way that you shape vowels is more on a continuum.
To give an example of consonant variability that Bill Labov did study, think about t sounds. If I’m a standard British English speaker, I’d say “butta” [ˈbʌtə], where I have a full t articulated but no r. If I’m a Cockney speaker, I say “bu’uh” [ˈbʌʔə], where I have not, but instead glottal stop and no r. Or if I’m American, “budder” [ˈbʌɾɚ]. I have what’s called a flap [ɾ] in place of the t, but full r. All the vowels in that are the same, what differs between those three accents in that context is consonants.
One of his most seminal studies was in New York City department stores where he went and asked where lady’s shoes were, which tended to be on the fourth floor. And that was important because there are two rs. He would get “fawth flaw” [foəθ floə] or “fourth floor” [fɔrθ flɔr]. The amount of r used correlated with social class in New York City; is it wasn’t regional, it was class-based.
The secondary area of study he did was on vowel sounds, where he was able to show that there are three major dialect changes happening in the United States. The Western Vowel Shift, Northern City Shift, which is why Chicagoans had the most distinct pronunciation that was hard to understand, and the Southern Vowel Shift. He suggested that in the 20th century, the biggest differences among American regional accents was not in the consonant, but in the vowels. In American English in the 20th century, the most striking changes that were moving the North, South and West further apart was in the way that vowels were pronounced. If you were from the north, from Chicago or Cleveland, you would say “hee-af” [hɛəf]. If you were from the West Coast, you say “hawf” [hɔf]. If you were from the South, you’d say “hayuf” [hæjəf] because you had what was called an off-glide. Those were novel changes that didn’t exist at the beginning of the 20th century.
At the turn of the century, you wouldn’t have heard these regional differences that we hear today. These vowel changes didn’t exist in the beginning of the 1900s, but by 2000, they were making speech among the three regions more distinct on the basis of vowels. That was his main contribution in terms of vowel studies, which was remarkable because it has reversed. Studies done in 2015, 2020 have shown a reversal of all these vowel changes so that we’re finding the opposite, where regional dialects of American English are moving closer together rather than further apart.
Larry Bernstein:
What’s driving that?
Valerie Fridland:
A lot of people automatically say, “Oh, it’s got to be social media that’s making people sound the same.” And while that has some influence, and it’s certainly influential on Gen Z, it couldn’t have been influential on Gen X because they didn’t have social media growing up, which is where our regional accents get formed. But what we did have starting in the middle of the 20th century is increasing suburbanization, a huge rise in the middle class. When you get an increase in class like that, it usually draws you less to local varieties and more to dominant varieties. That’s a homogenizing effect.
Larry Bernstein:
I was in my teens in the mid 1970s. Everyone I know watched the same TV programs: Family Ties, Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and Rockford Files. It would be across suburbia and inner cities. It wasn’t like we had a lot of choice.
Today, we have enormous variation of what’s on television, so it’s hard to believe that modern television and social media which is so varied, would be a force to bring the country’s accents closer together. It seems to me that television would have done that for my generation, but social media would have the opposite effect for Gen Z. I would have expected this homogenizing of accents to have occurred in the middle of the 20th century, not in 2010.
Valerie Fridland:
Television does not change accents. No research has ever shown that television has a profound influence on the way we sound. Does television have an influence perhaps on the words that we use? Yes. But does it forge accents? No. It’s very limited. To have accent change, to pick up novel innovations and do what your peers do, you have to have interaction. One-way communication does not do it. Social media does that. It’s much more interactive than television. Suburbanization at the time you were born was greatly increased, and a lot of it was driven by white flight. This seems to be one of the important triggers for the Northern City Shift in Chicago and elsewhere.
Two things happened with suburbanization. First, you tended to be around similar people to you, which reinforced certain tendencies. It would diverge from the urban centers.
It’s also dovetailed with this change in industrial practices, because around that same time we’re seeing a demise of the rust belt. Industries moved to the Sunbelt. The relocation of industry was massively taking numbers of people to urban areas of the South that had previously been isolated from Northern influence. A case in point is Raleigh, North Carolina. You can barely hear a Southern accent in most people from Raleigh, and it’s directly attributed to this swamping of Northern immigration.
Larry Bernstein:
So much for the founder effect.
Valerie Fridland:
That doesn’t mean that Southerners in Raleigh don’t still see themselves as Southern. Founder’s effects are not about the language themselves; they’re about the identity of that area. These movers might swamp linguistically and enact change linguistically, but the cultural belief of that area often stays the same.
We can’t ignore that race relations. The Gen Z African American influence that we get from social media has opened for young white people from the burbs to witness African American language and culture in a very positive way. They’re adopting a lot of African American speech styles, which would not have happened in the middle of the 20th century, both because of hostility and access.
Larry Bernstein:
Bill Labov analyzed African American accents on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and in the West. He found that there was little variation in African American accents across the United States. And as I remember it’s because the African Americans came from similar places in the South. As a result, these are related people and came from the same accent.
What do you make of Lebov’s African American observations?
Valerie Fridland:
Walt Wolfram, who studied with Labov, and Ralph Falsold, looked at how African American English was related to the Great Migration. Up to 1900, 90% of African Americans in the United States lived in the South. Massive numbers of African Americans around 1917 moved north, and that continued a trend of exodus from the South to 1970 that brought millions of African Americans northwards. By 1970, over 50% of the African American population had moved from the South to the North. Around 1900, the Southern black accent and the Southern white accent were fairly similar. When you move massive numbers of people, you end up relocating your accent. Those accents are unique in this new area because people in Detroit didn’t sound Southern, so what was previously a Southern accent became heard in the North as a black accent. The 2000s have radically reshaped that. Now, most of the literature that we see by younger linguistics that look at African American English is that there have been a number of regional varieties that got their start in those early migration patterns but no longer sound the same. Regional accents for white speakers are decreasing, but regional accents for black speakers are increasing in the 2000s.
Larry Bernstein:
African Americans are exiting Chicago. 10,000 leave the metropolitan area each year mostly to the South because of education, jobs, and gun violence. For the past 20 years, blacks were moving from Chicago to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. As the African Americans move back south, they’re going to bring their Chicago variation to the South polluting the pure Southern African American accents.
Valerie Fridland:
That’s been referred to as the reverse migration of both whites and Blacks has led to a linguistic swamping effect, particularly in Southern urban areas. It has increased the divide between the rural South and the urban South. The Southern accent does still exist, but it doesn’t exist to the same degree in urban areas.
Larry Bernstein:
I moved with my wife to Tokyo in 1998 to run the Proprietary Trading Department for Salomon in Tokyo. I called a restaurant to make a reservation. I said, “a party of two, the name is Bernstein.” And the person on the other side of the phone said, “Bun-steen?” [bɯ̃nsuˈtiːn]. I said, no, it’s Bernstein. “Bun-steen?”
I said to my wife, oftentimes when foreigners move to the United States, they change their names because Americans struggle to pronounce that name. I think that while we live in Japan, we should use a different last name. It should be short, easy to spell and pronouce. I hear by christen us Mr. and Mrs. Bun.
I called a different restaurant. I make a reservation for eight o’clock. I said, “The name is Bun.” And the woman behind the phone said, “Bun-steen?”
So, we became the Bunsteens.
Valerie Fridland:
I love it. That’s a great story.
Larry Bernstein:
The Japanese can’t not pronounce the consonant r. It wasn’t like they dropped the r, it was something foreign to them.
Valerie Fridland:
We speak with an accent, but we listen with an accent just as much. If you don’t have an r in your language, you generally cannot hear it or you hear it as what the closest approximate in your language is.
In English, we have very specific rs and ls. We don’t have a trilled r. We have what’s called an alveolar r, which is where the tongue tip points to that bony ridge that you burn with pizza in your mouth. If you’re a Spanish speaker, you have two different rs. For an American English speaker, one of the hardest things about learning Spanish is to learn how to make that trill.
Larry Bernstein:
When we moved to Tokyo, my wife went to language school to learn Japanese. Julie came home one day and, I said, “Honey, what did you learn in your Japanese class today?” She said, “I learned how to say shower curtain in Japanese.” I said, “That’s amazing. I’m so proud of you. How do you say shower curtain in Japanese?” She said, “showa kaa-ten”[ʃoːwa kaːteɴ]. It turns out that there are a number of English words which weren’t in the Japanese vocabulary and so they adopted the English words, but they Japanized it.
Valerie Fridland:
Anytime you borrow words into a new language, it involves syllabification routines that we aren’t familiar with. Japanese can’t have as many consonant clusters as in English. Baseball is another word that they borrowed, and it turns out more like “bay-so-ball-a” [basobaɾa]. It has to have more vowels to consonants in Japanese. Languages like Hawaiian, Japanese or Korean are a little more restrictive in terms of what consonants they allow together, so when you’re coming from one of those languages and you borrow English words, you tend to have to break up the clusters and add extra vowels in there.
In American English, a lot of times what we nativize is the vowel pronunciation. The name of the state I live in is a perfect example of that.
Larry Bernstein:
“Nevadda?” [nəˈvædə]
Valerie Fridland:
Right, “Nevahda” [nəˈvɑdə]. Half the country thinks it’s “Nevadda” [nəˈvædə], and their argument is it’s more of the Spanish pronunciation. But almost all the state names come from indigenous languages, they are not pronounced like they were in those indigenous languages. They have been Americanized or nativized.
Larry Bernstein:
I had a roommate and I said, “Oh, you’re from ‘Or-eh-gone’ [ˈɔrɪɡɑn].” He said, “No, I’m from ‘Or-uh-gin’ [ˈɔrəɡɪn]or [ˈɔrəɡən].” How do you do it?
Valerie Fridland:
“Or-uh-gin” [ˈɔrəɡɪn]. Vowels are very variable. They’re more variable than consonants.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to accents?
Valerie Fridland:
My parents had accents. They were both French speakers natively and I grew up in the South. When I went to college and I took a class in linguistics, I understood that accents are driven by the same underlying tendencies of mouth and mind. We all share those same tendencies because that’s part of being human, that’s part of the language system as it’s constructed.
The role that accents play for all of us is all about connection, this fundamental need for social belonging that is so important to us as humans. Accents can be about unity rather than division.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Valerie for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was Unsafe at MIT.
Our speaker was Yossi Sheffi who is a Professor of Engineering at MIT and is a leading scholar in supply chain management. He is the author of a new book entitled Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.
Yossi discussed MIT’s failure to protect its Jewish and Israeli students from violence. He also explained how MIT’s Administration mismanaged the situation, and why MIT’s disregard for its own rules and regulations resulted in chaos
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Unsafe at MIT, here.
