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I'm sure I've posted something along these lines before, but I've made a lot of new friends since then, so I'm talking about it again!
It's spring break here, so there are almost no students on campus. I had to take the campus bus from one side of campus to the other on Monday, and I was the only person on the bus. The bus driver got to talking to me, and he had a pronounced southern accent, and as we talked I could hear my own accent coming out more strongly to meet his. So here we were, him from West Virginia and me from Tennessee, sitting there talking about how insane it is that students actually pay the tuition required to go to the institution that employs both of us.
Anyway, it got me thinking about how my southern US accent comes and goes. When I was in Vienna during study abroad in undergrad, my two roommates (from Ohio and Oklahoma) thought it was hilarious the couple of times I called my family back home because apparently my accent came out super thick. Since that time, I've paid attention to it, and realized I definitely do code-switch.
My standard way of speaking is much less obviously southern. There are shibboleths--I say "y'all" constantly and I do the typical southern thing of putting the emphasis on the first syllable of some words (umbrella, guitar, insurance, thanksgiving, etc.), turn -ings to in's, don't differentiate between certain vowels (pin and pen are pronounced the same), add extra syllables to things (we love our dipthongs!), etc. But by and large in settings where I'm surrounded by people without obvious southern accents (work, most of my socializing these days), my accent doesn't come out very thick.
However, when I was a small child, my accent was very thick. We only have one VHS of home videos from my childhood--we never had a camcorder, so we would just get a few minutes here and there whenever someone else had one. But I am struck when I watch that footage of just how thick it was. What changed?
I think I realized on a sub-conscious level as a child that the people who I admired for being smart all spoke less accented English. I think I taught myself to talk like them without realizing I was doing it, and I internalized it so much that it takes an outside trigger to turn my real accent back on.
I'm kind of sad about this? I love accents of all kinds; I find them wonderful. I like them on an aesthetic "this is fun to listen to" level and I like what you can learn from them. There are lots of different kinds of southern accents, for instance--you can usually tell not only what sub-region within the south someone is from (the deep south, the coastal south, the mountain south, whatever) but also what their class background is.
For instance, my maternal granddaddy's family was poor and from Appalachia and so they had very different accents from my maternal grandmother's. They sounded like hillbillies, whereas she was from Alabama and did the non-rhotic thing (she pronounced her friend Martha's name as "Mah-thah"), she turned ohs into ahs (taco was "tah-cah"), and she did some weird things that I can't categorize (her other friend Sarah was "Say-rah"). She sounded like what she was, which was a middle class, well-educated woman from a city (Montgomery) in the Deep South. Her accent was noticeably different from the accents of everyone I knew from Roanoke and Wedowee in Alabama--two hours' drive further north, but very small town, less well-educated. They sounded more like, well, hicks (I say this with all the affection in my heart). I don't think my grandmother's family was ever anything other than middle class, but they had the echo of old southern money in the way they spoke (perhaps this was aspirational?) in a way that everybody in Wedowee simply did not.
It's amazing how we all pick up these things--for instance, I am not great at distinguishing geography in British accents (I mean, I can tell a Scottish accent from an English one, but I can't really listen to an English accent and tell where in England the person is from), but I absolutely can hear the differences in class--just from watching UK TV and movies growing up, I can easily hear the difference between a posh accent and a working-class one. Nobody had to actively say, "Now this is what a rich person sounds like."
I know that there is a ton of discrimination built into this whole thing, and lots of people purposefully choose to learn to speak more "standard" (read: how the newscaster sounds) versions of their own native languages to avoid that discrimination. I don't blame them for this at all--it's a useful survival tactic--but it does make me sad because I just find accents so fun.
And I like to think about accents in other languages even if I can't hear them! In Spanish, I can tell a Spanish-as-in-Spain accent from a Latin American one, mostly because of the c/th distinction, but that's about as far as I've gotten. (And I will say: I prefer Latin American Spanish to European Spanish. But then, I'm an outlier and think that Spanish sounds way more beautiful than French.) I have learned that a bunch of the specific vocabulary my sister's family uses are used in Ecuador but not in, say, Mexico--some because they're Quecha loan words, other times just because different regions have different words for different things. (The one that comes to mind is "chompa" for jacket/sweater, which is used in the Andes but not in other Spanish-speaking areas, though there are lots of other ones.) It's always fun when she points out, no, that's not the Spanish word for something, that's the Ecuadorian (or Andean) word for it.
I have no takeaway from all of this, I just like thinking and talking about accents! So feel free to share any thoughts you have about accents of any kind--I'd especially be interested in hearing from non-native speakers about accents in your own language!
It's spring break here, so there are almost no students on campus. I had to take the campus bus from one side of campus to the other on Monday, and I was the only person on the bus. The bus driver got to talking to me, and he had a pronounced southern accent, and as we talked I could hear my own accent coming out more strongly to meet his. So here we were, him from West Virginia and me from Tennessee, sitting there talking about how insane it is that students actually pay the tuition required to go to the institution that employs both of us.
Anyway, it got me thinking about how my southern US accent comes and goes. When I was in Vienna during study abroad in undergrad, my two roommates (from Ohio and Oklahoma) thought it was hilarious the couple of times I called my family back home because apparently my accent came out super thick. Since that time, I've paid attention to it, and realized I definitely do code-switch.
My standard way of speaking is much less obviously southern. There are shibboleths--I say "y'all" constantly and I do the typical southern thing of putting the emphasis on the first syllable of some words (umbrella, guitar, insurance, thanksgiving, etc.), turn -ings to in's, don't differentiate between certain vowels (pin and pen are pronounced the same), add extra syllables to things (we love our dipthongs!), etc. But by and large in settings where I'm surrounded by people without obvious southern accents (work, most of my socializing these days), my accent doesn't come out very thick.
However, when I was a small child, my accent was very thick. We only have one VHS of home videos from my childhood--we never had a camcorder, so we would just get a few minutes here and there whenever someone else had one. But I am struck when I watch that footage of just how thick it was. What changed?
I think I realized on a sub-conscious level as a child that the people who I admired for being smart all spoke less accented English. I think I taught myself to talk like them without realizing I was doing it, and I internalized it so much that it takes an outside trigger to turn my real accent back on.
I'm kind of sad about this? I love accents of all kinds; I find them wonderful. I like them on an aesthetic "this is fun to listen to" level and I like what you can learn from them. There are lots of different kinds of southern accents, for instance--you can usually tell not only what sub-region within the south someone is from (the deep south, the coastal south, the mountain south, whatever) but also what their class background is.
For instance, my maternal granddaddy's family was poor and from Appalachia and so they had very different accents from my maternal grandmother's. They sounded like hillbillies, whereas she was from Alabama and did the non-rhotic thing (she pronounced her friend Martha's name as "Mah-thah"), she turned ohs into ahs (taco was "tah-cah"), and she did some weird things that I can't categorize (her other friend Sarah was "Say-rah"). She sounded like what she was, which was a middle class, well-educated woman from a city (Montgomery) in the Deep South. Her accent was noticeably different from the accents of everyone I knew from Roanoke and Wedowee in Alabama--two hours' drive further north, but very small town, less well-educated. They sounded more like, well, hicks (I say this with all the affection in my heart). I don't think my grandmother's family was ever anything other than middle class, but they had the echo of old southern money in the way they spoke (perhaps this was aspirational?) in a way that everybody in Wedowee simply did not.
It's amazing how we all pick up these things--for instance, I am not great at distinguishing geography in British accents (I mean, I can tell a Scottish accent from an English one, but I can't really listen to an English accent and tell where in England the person is from), but I absolutely can hear the differences in class--just from watching UK TV and movies growing up, I can easily hear the difference between a posh accent and a working-class one. Nobody had to actively say, "Now this is what a rich person sounds like."
I know that there is a ton of discrimination built into this whole thing, and lots of people purposefully choose to learn to speak more "standard" (read: how the newscaster sounds) versions of their own native languages to avoid that discrimination. I don't blame them for this at all--it's a useful survival tactic--but it does make me sad because I just find accents so fun.
And I like to think about accents in other languages even if I can't hear them! In Spanish, I can tell a Spanish-as-in-Spain accent from a Latin American one, mostly because of the c/th distinction, but that's about as far as I've gotten. (And I will say: I prefer Latin American Spanish to European Spanish. But then, I'm an outlier and think that Spanish sounds way more beautiful than French.) I have learned that a bunch of the specific vocabulary my sister's family uses are used in Ecuador but not in, say, Mexico--some because they're Quecha loan words, other times just because different regions have different words for different things. (The one that comes to mind is "chompa" for jacket/sweater, which is used in the Andes but not in other Spanish-speaking areas, though there are lots of other ones.) It's always fun when she points out, no, that's not the Spanish word for something, that's the Ecuadorian (or Andean) word for it.
I have no takeaway from all of this, I just like thinking and talking about accents! So feel free to share any thoughts you have about accents of any kind--I'd especially be interested in hearing from non-native speakers about accents in your own language!
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My boss is from Vermont but her husband is from Arkansas (he has the exact same accent as Bill Clinton) and she's taken on some of his speech characteristics. If I didn't know she was from here I would probably think she was from Arkansas and her accent had softened.
My dad is from upstate New York and his accent is as strong as ever even though he's lived in California for like fifty years.
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I'm told there used to be a distinctive Vermont accent, but now only older people from very rural areas speak it.
I would love to hear this. I'll have to go on YouTube and see what I can find.
(I shop with a shopping cart and she shops with a buggy, I put things away and she puts things up)
Haha, yes! I'm with
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A lot of the old local ways of speaking in the UK have been fading into the mainstream for a long time (e.g. few Yorkshire folk would still use thee/tha). On the bright side, new accents and trends are always being born.
My ability to distinguish American accents is also limited -- the ones I'm in with a chance of (roughly) identifying are ones that I've heard extensively through TV shows. Minnesota from Fargo. Baltimore from The Wire.
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the ones I'm in with a chance of (roughly) identifying are ones that I've heard extensively through TV shows. Minnesota from Fargo. Baltimore from The Wire.
Haha, that makes sense!
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I have worked to acquire a distinct regional dialect in Japanese, partly because it comes naturally when you live here long enough and mostly just because I think it's fun; also, with older people etc. who see my non-Japanese face and assume communication is impossible, it tends to be a reassuring factor. I can still speak standard Japanese if I pay attention to it, but I don't do it very often because there isn't usually much need to speak that formally. Some of it is accent (hey, like you, we put the emphasis on the first syllable!), but a lot is verb/copula endings and other word form differences.
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My country has different accents in English too because your native tongue shapes how you pronounce English. So a Telugu English accent is different from a Bengali English accent for example.
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Yesssss, this is so interesting! The sounds people can and can't make when they learn another language because of how their first language affected their MOUTHS. I love it so much!
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Very interesting! And it's such a big part of class here in the UK, of course. I didn't realise until I was teaching English as a foreign language in the UK that I can pick up someone's class background within seconds based on their accent - and I think we basically all can. Not great!!!
My accent definitely got posher when I went to uni; I pick up other accents easily. And one of my best friends, who I met there, had an incredibly consistent posh accent for YEARS until she very slowly relaxed a bit; she's from Northamptonshire and was enormously self-conscious about her mild Midlands accent, and it was 100% a class thing. Classism's still so embedded in the UK, which sucks. At least we talk about it a bit more, though. I don't wanna sound like I'm doing "the only acceptable prejudice" but I remain genuinely shocked at how acceptable lefty Americans find it to mock southern accents! I vividly remember this Anglophile, vocally left-wing black guy from Chicago who I met when we were teachers in Vietnam telling me a "funny story" about how this well-respected professor did a lecture he'd gone to, and OMG the professor was all y'all, and "I was looking around for the actual professor". It was genuinely wild.
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Yes, that is VERY striking about UK English. There are definitely class signifiers here in the States, but they aren't there for everyone.
At least we talk about it a bit more, though.
You do! Which I appreciate! Y'all are better at talking about class but you're a lot worse about talking about historical sins--in the US, we have to talk about slavery and Jim Crow, so we at least have some scripts to do so, but in my experience, Brits are TERRIBLE about talking about imperalism/colonialism.
I remain genuinely shocked at how acceptable lefty Americans find it to mock southern accents! I vividly remember this Anglophile, vocally left-wing black guy from Chicago who I met when we were teachers in Vietnam telling me a "funny story" about how this well-respected professor did a lecture he'd gone to, and OMG the professor was all y'all, and "I was looking around for the actual professor". It was genuinely wild.
I appreciate this very much.
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TRULY. It's absolutely wild. People still regularly justify imperialism/colonialism, including within my own (white) Labour/Green-voting family. My great-grandfather was a colonial governor of Sudan, and when I referred to him casually as a skeleton in the closet, my uncle was like, "he's not a skeleton, he was a very distinguished man." And my mum has talked about how he gave Sudan railway lines, and wasn't happy when I made the obvious Mussolini joke in response! And my mum is someone who was regularly on anti-apartheid marches and met my dad through studying west African history. (My dad, a historian of west African economics, was studiously silent through this conversation.) Obviously this gets at family stuff, but it's incredible how standard these ideas about how the British Empire had plenty of benefits for its colonies etc are.
And when we talk about slavery it's generally been through the lens of William Wilberforce, aka one of the very few white Brits who wanted to end the practice; discussion of the hundreds of years of slavery beforehand and how we benefited from it is incredibly limited.
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And when we talk about slavery it's generally been through the lens of William Wilberforce, aka one of the very few white Brits who wanted to end the practice; discussion of the hundreds of years of slavery beforehand and how we benefited from it is incredibly limited.
Yeah. It's unfortunate! Do you get any sense that this attitude towards slavery/imperialism is changing at all?
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Very late reply, sorry!
I hope so? 2020 helped activists revise a push to have slavery and imperialism included in the national curriculum. (I took history classes until I was 17, three years beyond the legal minimum, and the one (1) mention of imperialism in my entire education was as a minor cause of WW1 - that the scramble for Africa was one reason for European powers to be annoyed with each other.) And tbf there has been a definite move towards acknowledging/researching/discussing the history of slavery and how it's benefited various institutions - universities, the royal family - and National Trust buildings talk about it a lot more now. So e.g. when you visit a fancy old house it's a lot more likely to have signs about how it was built on sugar plantation profits. But it feels too soon to say on how much it's reaching wider society.
I think the part of it that's probably filtering through most is that British people were complicit in slavery and profited off it - which sounds obvious, but again, I think the Wilberforce of it all and the fact that British-owned slaves were usually not in Britain lets us pretend it was an American thing. Our point on the triangular trade is a bit more visible now. But imperialism more broadly, and especially in Asia... yeah idk.
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