The reasons behind our accents

Whenever you change the way that we interact, community structure, you will drastically alter dialects. Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and have you ever been charmed by someone's accent, or has someone ever asked you, "Where are you from? " Well, our accents play a huge role in how people perceive us and how we perceive them. And Valerie Fridland is here today to talk with us about her fabulous new book, Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. Valerie, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Well, I'm so excited to come talk accents with you today. I know, and our listeners should be familiar with you because you've written so many great segments for the show, and I'm excited to talk with you live here. So, one thing that surprised me is when I first learned that you grew up in the South because you don't have a hint of a Southern accent to my ears, but you've been interested in accents it seems like your whole life. You know, I started my accent journey very young but without knowing it cuz no one thinks at five, "Huh, I think I'll be a linguist. " You know, astronaut, maybe, not linguist, for sure. But my parents were actually French speakers that moved to Memphis, Tennessee, when I was 9 months old for a job, and obviously they stood out because they had French accents, and we were in a place that accents were such a salient part of the Southern identity. So, you know, I think this early indoctrination into the world of accents and how it tied into identity both with my parents being kind of outsiders in this place and Southerners being very aware of what people said about them with their accents, but also of its charm and sort of this cultural closeness that it helped engender. I think that really started me thinking about the social power of accents early even though I was obviously not sophisticated enough to realize that's what I was doing. And when I went to college, I was very interested in languages, and I took a linguistics class mainly because it was required. I'll have to admit that. But I took that a class in general linguistics, and it kind of rocked my world. I had never thought about language that way, and I think that's an experience a lot of people have. When you say linguistics, think, "Ugh. " Right? It sounds kind of painful. It's sort of like saying calculus, you know, but when people actually understand what a linguist does in terms of studying, you know, how language is part of our social identity, how language follows these really cool rules, and how sort of everything has a history to why it's said the way it's said, sometimes it's really eye-opening for a lot of things you wondered about in your life that you didn't even know were language-related. Um, and I think for me, this feeling of maybe being an outsider a lot of times when I was a kid, I didn't understand as partially tied to the accents that my parents came with and the way that made them different, not necessarily negatively. I mean, people weren't mean to them about it, but it was something that always stood out, and it could never be that we could walk into a room when it would just be like we were part of the pack because everybody wanted [clears throat] to know where my parents came from and then their stories, and it sort of exceptionalized our existence there in a way that I think just made me feel like a little bit of an outsider in a place where everybody was from there at the time. So, I think when I took that linguistics class and I finally started to understand the power of accents and the history behind them and how deeply enmeshed in our interactions they are in sort of defining who we belong to, I think that's when I realized, "Huh, linguistics is cool, and maybe I want to be one. " So, it was a long journey, but my childhood experience in Memphis really started me off. But to get to your question about why I don't sound Southern, you know, it's really funny because I used to sound more Southern. I will admit that. There were certain traits in my speech, but some people still hear the Southernness in my accent, and other people don't. But I'm part of this larger generation starting with Generation X where regional dialects have been dying out. And so, part of what led me not to have a very strong Southern accent is that I'm part of the new group of um people that are growing up in an era where regional accents are becoming less strong and other forms of accents are becoming more salient. — So, why is that happening? It's a really fascinating tale of a number of different factors all coming together at the same time, predominantly after World War II. I think a lot of people today when they hear a Gen Z talk, they're like, "Oh my god, that's so social media-related, and it's got to be that social media is wiping out accents. " And you know, it's true in terms of contributing to this loss of regional accents, of localness, but it's also not true in the sense that social media is also making other accents more salient. So, you know, it's really a trade-off, but the sort of story that goes deeper starts with the increase in

suburbanization that happened in the 1950s to '60s when you really started seeing people leave urban centers. Now, a lot of that was driven by racial tension and a lot of white flight that happened at the time. You don't hear that term used as much now, but in the 1970s, for example, it was a widely used term to describe this increase in sort of growth of the suburbs. And so, what happened is you had a period where there was a lot of racial tension and a lot of local white and local African-American accents kind of diverge because it was very salient this difference, this social difference, and accents follow social differences. But as, you know, suburbanization took people away from these inner cities with lots of dialect diversity, then it made the children of those people less aware of these, you know, causes of why their parents spoke the way they did. And then you also throw in a change in both migratory patterns and industrialization practices. So, a lot of big companies at the time used to always, you know, fundamentally rehire people from the local area, and you know, you could sort of expect a lifetime in that career or in that place. You know, factories had a different idea about what kind of things they owed to their employees at the time. — even imagine now. It's totally hard. Like they probably had pensions. Oh my gosh, what a novel concept. But um so, that started breaking down in that same period. So, between the 1950s and 1970s, you really saw uh you know, shifting from the Rust Belt to places where it was cheaper to operate an industry. You also saw changes in external hiring practices. So, instead of only going local and kind of promoting from within, and therefore really having a local group in your company, people they started hiring from outside, which kind of broke down local networks of communication. And then you also had these industries moving to the South and to the Sun Belt. That also changed interaction patterns. It brought a lot of people from outside the area into these new areas. And whenever you change the way that we interact, community structure, you will drastically alter dialects. So, that's really why Generation X is the pivotal turning point in that. And then, of course, social media comes in, and that completely also alters the linguistic landscape. Yeah, oh, that's fascinating. And it reminds me of in the part in your book where you're talking about the history of how the American accent developed in out in the West and how it was I was it was interesting to hear about how because people in the frontier needed each other, they needed to work together to survive, that it actually changed the language. It led to a leveling. Again, it all relates to the interaction patterns we have. And when you start new interaction patterns for whatever reason causes it, whether it's, you know, the changes that happened in the 1970s or the ones migrating to a new world in the 1600s, the effect is the same that things radically change with each generation that's exposed to a different interactional patterns and different input accents and dialects. So, you know, when things are stable and people are talking to the same people and then they're having their babies, and those people those babies are exposed to the same people, you're not going to have a lot of linguistic change. But think about the flood of migrants coming to the new world in the 1600s, you had, you know, people from all over Britain. So, there were obviously the most formative inputs to the American language as it was called at the, you know, in that era were British dialects. But it wasn't one uniform British dialect. It varied in each colony, you had a very wide diversity of British dialects represented. But in those colonies, you also tended to have a concentration of people from sort of particular areas, which might have given a little bit of a push towards those being foundational accents. So, for example, with the Puritans in the Massachusetts colonies, you had more people from East Anglia that were there. So, Southeastern British inputs were more predominant even though again, it was a wide variety of people. You had Welsh, you had Irish, right? You had a lot of different inputs. And then in Jamestown, you had more Southw- Western, a slight edge towards the Southwestern part of Britain, but again, also a lot of diversity. In the Midland, though, we had a, you know, pretty different set of initiating accents because we had the Quakers who were primarily from Northern Britain, which was a little different than some of the primary accents that founded the other colonies. But also, and this is really important, we had a lot of Scots-Irish and German immigration in that area. So, those were foundational to the Midland, Midwestern, and Upper Southern accents that we ended up with. And it's amazing to me how that still like seeps through the language today. You were talking about that people in Minnesota will still say, "I'll borrow you my car. " because of the German

influence, right? Absolutely. You know, even the Minnesota accent that we hear about, you know, in Fargo in movies and things like that, or if you've ever been to Minnesota, you've heard it yourself. That's still a substrate or underlying influence from a lot of the Scandinavian and German accents that were foundational in that area. How does that still last till today? You know, it's funny because I would imagine that most people living there don't speak any of those languages. I mean, there's still people that do, but a lot of people that have those accents don't necessarily even have a background where those were in their family, but they pick them up from what the salient markers of local identity were there. So, that's when we repurpose these underlying influences on our language that come from another language that perhaps our forefathers spoke. We repurpose them from being markers of being from somewhere else to that specific place. So, they're markers of local identity and they get sort of separated from their originating accents. And you know, another place you see this is, for example, Miami where Spanish has really impacted the English there and people that don't even necessarily have a background in Spanish will pick up some of the local features, the certain ways you phrase certain things that were picked up from Spanish because it's such a Miami English thing to do. And that's really how it continues when becomes not about where people were from, but about where we live now. And that's really how those markers stay there. Yeah, like saying, "Well, we're going to make a party. " Because that's how you'd say it in Spanish. Right. Or do you want to come with is another thing that's a German influence because it's often common to end with a preposition in that structure. And so, if you've ever heard someone say, "Do you want to come with? " Yeah. That's also a substrate German influence. Amazing. Yeah, one thing that's jumped out at me, too, is that you said that it's harder to learn a language that's similar to your own, not learn it, but to maybe sound more natural, have your accent sound more like the language you're trying to learn in a language that's really similar to your own than when you're trying to learn a language that's really different from your own. And that was surprising to me. Well, all of them are hard. Yeah. As anybody who's ever tried to learn a language as an adult. So, here we're talking about adult language acquisition. Children have no problems with any language acquisition because it's a very different process to acquire a language as a young child where it's being learned in a different fundamentally different way than as an adult. So, just to be clear on that, we're talking about adult language learning here. And I wouldn't say it's necessarily, you know, harder. Sometimes people struggle with languages that are extremely different because there's so many things that they have to figure out. So, you know, languages like Japanese, for example, will be quite hard for someone speaking English. But if you are, say, an Italian speaker and a Spanish speaker, those are very similar and actually a lot of Italian and Spanish speakers say that they can learn those languages very easily. So, it's not always the case that that's true. But where it's really the case is in particular sounds. When a sound that a language has is extremely close to a sound your language has, in fact, often the same category, but pronounced slightly differently, and I can give an example of that. Yeah. Um is when it becomes really hard to learn that new sort of more nuanced version of the sound compared to learning a language where that sound doesn't exist at all and so, you're just learning a new category. Let me give an example. — yeah, because I think that's hard for some people to kind of grasp. But a good example in English is we have something called a light L and a dark L, but most English speakers would think, "Oh, I just have a L, right? I just say L. " No one walks around saying, "Wait, is light L that starts the word? " I mean, you just do it naturally. — L sounds sinister. — sound very Star Warrian, you know, like on the dark side of L. Um I expect Darth Vader coming in with a deep breath right now. Uh yeah, so when you say a word like, and I'm going to spell it so that when you say it out, I'm not influencing you, but L U L L. Go ahead and say that word. L L. Okay, do you feel a difference in the way you say that first L and that second L? — No. L. So, feel your tongue. L. Oh, yeah. L. It's lower on the end. — The tongue is lower, right? So, you go from a tongue tip L, to a tongue back L, L. So, L So, one the first one's a light L and the second one's a dark air L. We also call it an alveolar L versus a velar L, if you want to get very linguisticky about it. But that's because it's when it's at the beginning of the word, you do use the tongue tip L. When it's at the end of the word, you use a velar L. It's essentially the, you know, down and dirty rule. But most speakers wouldn't know that. If they don't know that they do it, they just do it automatically. And you don't even know you make different qualities of L. Well, one of the issues for people like Spanish speakers, for example, that are

learning English is Spanish only uses light L. It doesn't have that unspoken rule of doing these two different L's. So, that's a really subtle difference in the L that people aren't aware of because they already have that category in their language. So, they have the category L, they just don't have these two versions of it. So, you go to learn a language where they have the same category your language has, but not the same versions of L. And that's really hard for non-native speakers to pick up because it it's already a category that exists in their language. And so, they have to not only forget the rule they already have, but also learn an unconscious rule as well. But if you go to a language that doesn't have a sound at all, then yes, it's very hard to learn sort of how to make that new sound, but you can kind of wrap your head around the fact that it exists in a way that it's harder to do with the two versions of L where people think, "Oh, it's just L. " But that makes sense. — Yeah, so like what you already know kind of gets in the way. Exactly. So, it's just it creates difficulties in learning that sort of subtlety of that sound. And so, often what happens is you'll say something like, "L. " Where it becomes an accent because your L is light in both cases. And so, you're making an L, so it feels like you're being native-like, but because you haven't learned that really subtle variation, it comes off as slightly accented. Interesting. Well, we're talking about Spanish. I also would love to know why I can't roll my R's. I think anyone who English speaker has tried to learn Spanish has probably had the same struggle. Oh my gosh, so funny story about reading this book in the audio book. I was reading a chapter where I'm talking about L R sounds, sorry, R sounds and rolling my R sound. And so, I'm supposed to try to roll them to illustrate on the audio book. And oh my gosh, we you had to almost give it up because I, too, even though I'm a linguist and I understand the phonetics of it, it doesn't mean I can actually do it. R is such a fascinating sound in the history of English because English had it from its outset. So, it's not like it's a new sound in English. Germanic languages have R. But it was probably in our earlier history a trilled or rolled R. So, more like the Spanish Italian kind of R. Even some dialects, like I think in southern Germany, still have that rolled R. And if you think about Scottish English, all right, one of the things we think about is that nice rolled R. And so, those are probably earlier versions of the R that we have still. But R is a really interesting sound. It's a complex sound to make, which is why if you've ever had a kid in speech therapy, it's probably R that they had problems with. It's articulatorily complex, which is why children actually learn it later. So, an R sound is one of the later sounds children acquire. It's also one of the harder sounds when we learn a language with the R different than ours. Part of that is because there's a lot of different ways to make R, and part of it is just we have learned a certain R in our language. And again, it's exact it's an example of what I just talked about where it's similar, but it is different, right? So, it's sort of that learning again like that double L concept. It's a new R we're learning even though we already think we know R. So, the problem is you have the motor memory of a regular English R and you're trying to learn the same sound with a different motor skill involved. So, a trilled R like in Spanish has this kind of tongue tip that's rolling back and forth by the alveolar ridge. And that's not a natural part of English. And so, you're having to think consciously about it, so it comes out really stilted and weird. And you often just substitute the R that you have because you're like, "Ah, screw it. I can't do it. " — [gasps] — Oh my gosh. So, so if you're learning as a child, you can roll your R, and then you just sort of lose that as you get older because you haven't done it your whole life. Right. So, you know, if you learn Spanish at one as part of your language, you'll learn the trilled R without any problem. But at 25, it's a whole different ballgame. — We really should teach kids a second language younger, shouldn't we? It would give them a lot more ability to pronounce sounds, right? The more sounds you are motor skilled at as an infant, as a young child, the better you'll be at learning new languages cuz you have a larger repertoire to start with. There's also a lot of evidence, of course, that bilingualism helps the brain and helps with other aspects. Um so, not just in learning to produce sounds. So, there are really no good reasons not to learn two languages. Yeah. Well, I'm going back I wanted to go back to language and identity for a minute cuz I remember I had a student who was from Boston and she was really proud of being from Boston. And you should talk about her pocketbook and her car. You know, she was a delight. I loved her. And was she wicked smart? She was. She was a wicked smart. And then like other people work really hard to lose their accents or to get rid of

their accents. So, why what you know, what what's the difference that causes someone to embrace their accent versus to work so hard to get rid of it? Again, it all boils down to interaction and connectedness. Who is it that we identify with? Who is it we want to belong with? Who was important to us as a child? So, when we have a local accent, it usually means we learned that as an as a baby, as a young child, and then in our adolescent peer group. Because what we find when we look at research on who tends to have strongest local accents, it tends to be those that are most enmeshed in their local community. So, if a kid is growing up and they're going to school with this idea they want to leave their hometown, we actually find that affects typically how strong their local accent will be. So, children that want to stay in their local communities, that get involved in local activities, whose lives are centered on those communities, they tend to have heavier accents than children whose outlook is I want to get out of this place as soon as possible. Mhm. So, it's a lot about who we see ourselves to be, who we want to hang out with, which is why we find local accents often enmeshed with sort of class differences. So, we find local accents often take on also a working class connotation, and that's partially because working class communities tend to be more tightly bound within communities. And they also tend to spend more time together than middle class um Englishes do, right? So, when you speak uh with a standard accent and you sound like you're from no place, then that suggests that you probably have looser ties to any place than people that sound like they're from a particular place or a particular neighbor neighborhood. I think a Brooklyn accent is a perfect example of that. You know, New Yorkers are from Brooklyn and they're proud of it with that accent. And that locates them in a specific community, and it's part of who they see themselves to be. But when you are a New Yorker without an accent, you're definitely less enmeshed in the local community than those that have one. Oh, that's interesting. So, I mean people can be judgy about accents. And one thing that was surprising to me is, you know, studies show that young people are less judgy, but then it doesn't last. So, there's no hope for the future. No, no. Well, I wouldn't say there's no hope, but yes, we do find this interesting trend when we look at how people evaluate in professional contexts different kinds of local accents versus more standard accents both here and in Britain. We find that there's this really interesting pattern where younger speakers tend to use accent as an evaluatory strategy less than older speakers. And you might think, oh, that's great. So, our next generation will be less judgy. But what we find is we've have found this trend for years now. So, it's not like all of these younger speakers are growing into older speakers and keeping those attitudes. They seem to become more judgy as they age, which is probably because of where you come from as a young person, the sort of diversity you've been around as you go into high school as you're in high school, and the types of things that are important to you are usually less maybe economic and professional than as you age, where you start to have these attitudes about what's appropriate in certain contexts. And then also you take responsibility for doing a lot of hiring as you get older. You tend to be in more supervisory roles, and so you take on this sort of mother or father role in some sense, which tends to be about things being the right way. And that all seems to influence us in ways that make us sort of more crotchety about language. Talk more about accents in work. You know, I think if we look at literature on how accents are received in workplaces, I want to get away from the idea that they're always considered negative, but because there are lots of jobs where having a local accent is actually an asset. So, in sales for example, um if you're trying to sell to people that are from that community, it's going to be helpful if you're from that community. Um and you know, if you also work in factories or things like that, a lot of times we find the kinds of work that involves, which is people needing to work close together, people uh having sort of a sense of community to make the day go by, those types of workplaces actually foster local accents, and there's nothing negative about them. But when we look at white collar work, we find an opposite effect. When people go into an interview with a non-standard accent, or they call a place to inquire about what kinds of materials are required for that accent, or they're doing a pitch for venture capital in a non-standard or non-local or local accent, we find that does seem to hurt people. They do tend to get judged as less competent, less intelligent. And another thing that's kind of striking is less trustworthy or credible in those contexts. So, there certainly is a lot of evidence that walking into a white collar context when it's high stakes, like an interview, having a local accent can be a detriment. But if you look at the literature on what helps out, there are actually a number of factors that

are relatively easy, and that's actually kind of gives us hope, right? That judginess is not our future. And one of those things is when a candidate is extremely qualified, so when they are very knowledgeable about the subject or domain area, people seem to be able to look past their accent in terms of seeing the quality of the person rather than their attitudes about the accent as being important. So, you know, knowing your stuff as a interviewee is very important. Um but of course that does put more pressure on someone coming from those accent backgrounds to um kind of work harder to prep than maybe someone who has a standard accent going in. So, again, that's probably not fair, but that is the reality. The other thing is on the in industry side or on the interviewer's side, just being aware that accent bias plays a role in your attitudes and opinions towards an employee, and making yourself focus on what are the qualifications about this candidate that makes them the best for the job. That actually has been found to reduce the accent bias in hiring by a pretty substantial amount. So, that's a actually pretty simple intervention. Oh, that's great. Well, everyone who's listening, take note. — And it does it really made me think I mean it is true that people who are different have to try harder. They have to be better, and that's not — It's not fair, but it is unfortunately part of the way that the world has been designed in terms of accents, right? But on the other hand, I think what we can see is there's a flip side, because the question that might bring up was why does anybody speak with a non-standard accent or why does anybody have a local accent if the consequences are grave like that? That's because there's actually a lot of benefits with it. So, yes, you may not get that dream job because of your accent if in this place that you probably didn't want to work anyway because they're so judgy. Right? But um you know, the community you have, the sense of identity that you have as someone who for example, like your the woman that you were talking about who was so proud about being from Boston, you know, that's actually a great asset. And um it gives us a lot of self-worth and value, and sense of solidarity. And so, I think we want to not ignore that there's a real value in having a local or non-standard accent as well. Yeah, and the trust issue actually would surprise me because I was reminded of politicians. Like we know that when politicians go speak in different communities, they'll all of them will alter the way they speak a little bit to sound more like the locals because it builds a sense of connection and trust. Well, we're talking about when the accents are contrasting. So, when you're in a standard speaking professional environment and someone expects a certain domain knowledge, and then they have a interviewee that has a non-local accent that they don't share, that's when we get the credibility issues. But in a community where an accent is shared, it absolutely enforces credibility and trustworthiness and sort of salt of the earth personas. And I think that's why we see politicians really benefit from using local features because it makes them sound like they're a man or a woman of the people. Mhm. And so, that that's sort of the two sides, right? So, in a professional context where you're an outside accent, especially certain ones that are stigmatized, um those affect credibility. But when you are in a local community or a politician that's trying to appeal to, you know, the masses and sort of this sense of like I am one of you, then local accents are more trustworthy. So again, it's never a straight answer in these contexts. It's very situationally dependent. Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about as we wrap up is our tendency to actually hallucinate accents. That it was just fascinating. It's crazy if you think about it how, you know, you see someone and you have this expectation about what they're going to sound like, and that actually can change the way you hear their voice. And it's not even just seeing you know, somebody and having you know, an idea like, oh, they have an Asian face, so I'm going to assume they're going to have an accented speech, which is what sort of the studies have found that if you play the same recording of a person from, you know, Ohio to two different groups of listeners, and you show them a different picture. So, one is sort of a white woman's picture in this experiment, the other one is an Asian woman's picture. They actually hear an accent when they saw the Asian woman's face that they don't hear when they saw a white woman's face. And not only that, but they didn't understand the lecture as well. Oh my gosh. So, it they heard the same voice, but actually in impacted their intelligibility readings on that. So, they weren't they didn't under comprehend the lecture as well. They can even change when you write a different word on an answer key. So, there was another really interesting linguistic experiment where um a researcher put a different nationality on the answer key, sort of identifying this the speaker as in one case Canadian versus in one case American and this was done in Detroit that's quite close to the Canadian border. So you have to assume people are familiar with Canadian accents. And so the linguist put an answer key where they were supposed to

listen to a voice and say what word they heard. So whether for example it was bed or bad. Mhm. And she had put um Detroit on the answer key when she was describing you're going to hear a speaker from Detroit. And then they would play the tape. And then on the other group she just put Canadian. Mhm. — You're going to hear a speaker from Canada. And then they played the sound clip. Well, the people that heard the Detroit speaker heard bed and the ones that heard the Canadian speaker heard bad even though they actually had heard the same recording. Huh. And that's because they were thinking of what their experience with Canadians were and how they pronounced words and actually there's something called the Canadian vowel shift that makes the vowel in bed sound more like the vowel in bad. So they hallucinated hearing bad simply because of the name that was on that answer key. So it's pretty mind-blowing how we can hallucinate accents if we believe there should be one. Yeah, well the book that's filled with just fascinating insights like those wonderful tidbits it's called why we talk funny. The real story behind our accents by Valerie Fridland. Um oh, you know what you mentioned the audio book and um you've told me the audio book is really special. So why don't you tell people about that before we go. — I love the audio book for this one. So I said was mentioning that I had problems with my trilled R but lucky for the listeners I'm only reading a couple of the chapters. The intro and the outro are me but everything else is read by the accents embodied in the book. So every other chapter is read by an accent of that chapter. So you know, for example in when we talk about sort of the proto origins of the English accent which is you know, Germanic in background we actually have a German speaker that reads that chapter. And when we talk about class, well I'm not going to spoil it but we have a really we have some cool accents. So every chapter has a different accent that brings to life some part of what we talk about in that chapter. So it's a really fun audio book to listen to and also I think when you're talking about accents listening to them is just a classic way to have that experience improved. So I love the audio book for this book. Yeah, I think this is one where people might want to check that out. So great. Well, if you're a Grammar Galootian we're going to have a bonus segment for you. I want to talk about sort of a myth about Shakespeare's English and and American English. Um I think we'll talk a little bit more about social media cuz Valerie mentioned that and we didn't get into that at all. That's interesting. Um and we're going to talk about what the secret meaning is of the cover. The cover of the book has these images of lips and we're going to tell you what they mean. So stick around for that. But for the rest of you thanks for listening. For the Grammar Galootians thank you for supporting the show. If you want to become a Grammar Galootian you can go to patreon. com/grammar girl. Valerie, where can people find you if they want more of your work? They can find me on valeriefridland. com which is my website and I just learn about the types of research I do or the types of writing I do and anything they'd want to know about me is probably best found there. Great. Well, thanks for being here. Of course it was a blast. Thank you for having me.