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:
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Oh, dang! All of this next week’s readings are from the main text, Language Files, which is about as fun to read as a phone book — if you remember those. Nothing from the prof’s fun book, or other articles he sometimes assigns.
The subject looks interesting — “language change” — that suggests etymology, which I love as much as accents. So our class discussions should be interesting. But the editors of this sweeping, introductory text can make anything boring. They’re amazing.
Oh, well. Here I go…
Yikes. This is also Chapter 13 of the textbook. Good thing I ain’t superstitious. Or at least, not much…
OK, the first graf is good… “By comparing different languages, different dialogues of the same language, or different historical stages of the same language, we can discover the history of language groups or families…”
Alright! Etymology AND philology! These are the things that drew me to linguistics more than anything, even accents!
I just hope this book doesn’t ruin those subjects for me…
I wonder if the professor is pulling anything from *The Story of English*, written by Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. It is dated now (last edition was in 2002) but many still consider it an excellent introduction to the subject.
By the way, you can add archaeology and genetics to the fields used to study language. For an excellent introduction to this, I would suggest *Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global* by Laura Spinney on the development of Proto-Indo-European, which apparently originated from what is now the Ukraine.
Those sound good, thanks!
I had taken that meme at the top to be a sort of a riff on the Gomer Pyle routine. In other words, the joke was based on the recruit having a Southern accent.
But after I posted it, I noticed the flags. I hadn’t looked at them at first because a lot military uniforms bear flags on the shoulders. But why is “Gomer” wearing an Australian flag, while the drill sergeant is (quite naturally) wearing an American one? Looking closer, you see those aren’t on their shoulders, they’re just superimposed on the picture.
What’s the point of that? Is the meme really making fun of an Australian accent (“G’die, mite!”) instead of a Southern? And if so, why are they both United States Marines, if they’re from different countries?
Odd.
By the way, to share a bit of trivia… Gomer Pyle’s supposed to be from North Carolina, but Jim Nabors is from Sylacauga, Alabama. I’m not great at telling the differences between Southern accents (unless the differences are extreme, such as between Charleston and New Orleans). I’m not sure why. I can distinguish between several of the British accents, but I have trouble with Southern ones. I think maybe I’ve lived too close to them for most of my life.
But I’m guessing Nabors drew on his Alabama background in creating that extreme accent for “Gomer.”
I’ve been to Sylacauga. I went there for a wedding once, about 50 years ago. I don’t recall details about the way those folks spoke, but I’d have definitely noticed if a small town in the middle of Alabama did NOT have some impressively thick accents….
Of course, a lot of folks in other parts think a Southern accent is indicative of low intelligence. I’m enough of a Southerner to feel insulted by that. But I’ve been guilty of that myself, in specific instances.
Several times during the first Trump administration, I would click my radio over to NPR and hear someone speaking, and I’d wonder, “What is WRONG with that man?” I would assume it was someone with serious intellectual impairment. It often turned out to be Jeff Sessions, who of course is from Alabama. A lot of it was the things he said, but yeah, it was also the way he said it.
I certainly don’t mean to say all Alabamans speak that way, or give that impression. And if I hurt feelings, I feel bad for doing so. It’s not a general comment about Alabamans. Whenever I had that thought, it pretty much always turned out to be Jeff Sessions I was hearing. Maybe he had a personal speech impediment. Which makes me feel worse…
Dear Alabamans, we all have someone like that. People everywhere used to have a lot of fun with the way Strom Thurmond talked, and he’s very much one of ours. And yeah, I get why they did that, and I doubt that Strom cared; he was just who he was….
When I hear someone *really* leaning into a Southern accent, I figure they are trying to get me to underestimate them ….
🙂
My mother taught high-school English. Many years ago, I saw a Sunday Dennis the Menace cartoon. I don’t remember the exact sequence, “Mom, can I have a can of pop?” “Dennis, it’s May I have a can of pop.” Different variations continue in subsequent frames, with Dennis closing with “So you want a can of pop too?”
I didn’t know when I’d use the cartoon, but I saved it for the inevitable. Several years later, I read that cartoon as part of Mom’s eulogy. I heard a few chuckles after reading the cartoon. I closed with “Crista McAuliffe, a member of the Space Shuttle Challenger was fond of saying, I touch the future. I teach. Mom also touched the future. She taught.” A few cousins said my eulogy was appropriate.
I became a stickler for proper English as a result of having an English teacher for a mother.
Soft drinks are one of those regional language differences: coke, soda, pop.
Of course, in Boston, a “pop” is a beer. I seldom drink sweet, carbonated drinks, but when I’m in Boston, I might want a pop…