Category Archives: Accents

The best week yet: accents and dialects

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A meme referenced in Understanding Language Through Humor.

Now, this is one of the reasons I took this linguistics course. This is the good stuff.

It’s been getting better week by week. This being an introduction course, it’s bound to cover things that I’m less interested in, and we got that in the first couple of weeks — stuff like mechanics of speech, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. But now it’s getting good.

The week before this past one, we were studying how children learn to speak, and I picked up a lot of interesting stuff — stuff I didn’t know, despite having five children and five grandchildren. (I’ve already bored one friend with advice about her toddler’s linguistic development, so if you have any tots at the moment, you might want to steer clear of me.)

But this week that just ended was the best so far, and I hope for more like it. It covered accents and “varieties” of languages (which is what linguists call dialects because calling them dialects might hurt some people’s feelings).

I mentioned in my Christopher Guest post what a fascination accents are to me. I love them as living demonstrations of the seemingly infinite diversity of human beings. If I go to another country or part of this country, I want to hear those local accents — the more stereotypical they are, the better. When I’m in New York, I love hearing the cops talk like the ones in the movies. And one of the most delightful moments of my first morning in England in 2010 was when I asked a copper for directions and he answered me in perhaps the first Cockney I’d ever heard in person. (My joy was increased by the fact he was wearing the traditional Bobby uniform with the oddly shaped helmet. They do that in London, at least in areas frequented by tourists, unlike in other parts of England.)

At the same time, I marvel that people still speak with such accents. Why on Earth do people speak that way? When I was young, I figured that I was a member of the last generation that would hear the really thick ones. And we’d only hear them from older people — the rest of us would have our accents ironed out by TV, radio and movies. And that was true for military brats — we all had flat, regionless modes of speech, unlike the older people around us. But there are still plenty of people out there who can be hard for folks from elsewhere to understand. And I wonder at that. I suspect it’s now one of two things: The first is that it’s like any other physical ability, such as being able to hit a curve ball. Some have elastic speech abilities and can smooth out their accents (or imitate the accents of others) at will. Others are stuck with the way they first learned speech from their parents.

Lately I’ve been giving more creedence to the second theory: The people with the accents are clinging to them deliberately — or at least semi-deliberately — as a means of expressing their membership in a particular group, and boosting the degree to which they are accepted in that group. There’s also a related, but more personal, emotional motive: “Talking like this was good enough for my momma!”

I grew up in the postwar period, when a uniform sense of American identity was strongest. It’s been eroding ever since, and America is more tribal today than ever. So people want to sound like members of subgroups.

I suspect both of those theories — the physical and the group identification –are at work. But I’m eager to learn more about these things I enjoy hearing.

I’m also interested in learning more about how people in different regions or demographic groups speak aside from accents. We actually concentrated more on that than accents in the class. Since I’ve moved around, I was familiar with most of what we discussed, but was shocked by other things. For instance, in some parts of the country, such as Indiana and much of Pennsylvania, people actually think these are logical sentences:

  • Your car needs detailed.
  • The baby needs changed.
  • The baby likes cuddled.

(To the people who say this things and their neighbors, it makes sense to leave out the words “to be.”)

This caused one of our liveliest  discussions. I was shocked by those nonsentences. The student from New Jersey next to me was practically outraged that anyone thought such abuse of the language was acceptable, and I wasn’t far behind her. But the Hoosier across the room found that useage quite normal. (And I had thought Indiana folks were relatively normal speakers, compared to those of us in the South, or Boston, or another of your more colorful places.)

Yeah, I know. Most of you don’t care. But I do. And I share these things for those who find similar things interesting.

I just wanted to share the fact that I’m enjoying this limited return to college. I’d go on about it further, but now I’ve got to work on the assignments for the coming week…

I’ll end with one of my homework questions from last week. The image above is from a new book by my professor. It’s called Understanding Language Through Humor. I enjoy our reading from that. Unfortunately, most of the homework comes from our stultifying main text — which I didn’t mind as much this past week. Note item C:

On the brilliance of Christopher Guest’s voices

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Thinking back to my “Top Five Best Actors” list from last month…

One thing that was wrong with the list — not as wrong as leaving out Gene Hackman, but wrong — is that it fails to acknowledge comic actors.

I thought about that the other night while rewatching “Best in Show,” that descendant of the ultimate mockumentary, “This is Spinal Tap.” This is the one that did for dog shows what, say, “A Mighty Wind” did for folk music. Or “Waiting for Guffman” did for… well, you get the idea.

It struck me again that Christopher Guest, who is in all of those films (and I think directed all of them but Spinal Tap), is a wonder. Let’s just focus on one of the essential skills that distinguish a great actor — accents. (Or perhaps I should say “voices.”)

Among all those mockumentary roles, it’s easiest to remember Guest as Nigel Tufnel in “Spinal Tap.” Listen:

It’s a good accent, although that doesn’t really set him apart. Michael McKean and Harry Shearer are just as good as his bandmates. Americans can take pride in their portrayal of the Three Stooges of rock. We see Brits put on convincing American accents all the time (Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, or about half the “American soldiers” in Easy Company in “Band of Brothers,” or Hugh Laurie as Dr. House, and so forth). It’s nice to see we have some talent over here as well.

(Of course, one might note that Guest had an unfair advantage — his Dad was a British diplomat, and he spent part of his childhood in his father’s country. In fact, he ascended to the House of Lords when his father died. But Nigel Tufnel displayed an accent that was very different from the RP we generally associate with lords.)

But what really got me was his accent — and general characterization — of the man from a small town in North Carolina who brings his bloodhound to the dog show. It’s not just the accent, as perfect as that was (definitely not a cheesy Hollywood imitation of a generic Southern manner of speaking). It was the quality of his voice behind the accent, his facial expressions and other facets that made me like he was a true, unique individual I had met sometime in the past — not a “type.” Listen:

Hear it? There’s finesse in that voice, as well as in the accent, that few actors are able to display.

And it’s much the kind of finesse that Robert Duvall brought to his roles.

I just thought I’d acknowledge that…