Below, Valerie Fridland shares five key insights from her new book, Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.
Valerie is a professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She writes a popular language blog on Psychology Today called “Language in the Wild,” and is a professor in The Great Courses series.
What’s the big idea?
Accents may seem like small differences in pronunciation, but they reveal how deeply language, identity, and human history are connected. Instead of judging accents as “right” or “wrong,” we should see them as living evidence of cultural change.
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1. Accents are surprisingly ancient.
Accents have been around pretty much as long as talking humans have, and it is a good bet that none of the accents we have today sound anything like the ones that graced the lips of our most ancient ancestors. This is because, about a hundred thousand years ago, when language was a relatively new development in early humans’ mouths, there were just a few (or maybe even a single) language. As Homo sapiens began a large exodus from Africa about 50,000 years later, they brought this language with them.
Over time, these migrating groups began to sound different simply because language naturally changes as it moves through the mouths and minds of speakers. These changes went down different paths for those who had become geographically separated.
To put it in a modern spin, think of small variations, like when the “t” in “water” or “bottle” is said rapidly so it starts to sound more like “wader” and “boduhl.” Those who regularly flock together and talk together pick up on certain variations like these over others, and it is when specific patterns of pronunciation start to identify speaker groups and take on social meaning that they then become accents. For instance, the “waDer” instead of “wawtah” is heard as having a distinctly, and less fancy, North American sound.
2. Accents help us belong.
Accents might have started as simple byproducts of how our mouths work and how early migrations separated us, but the ability to recognize the potential for collaboration or conflict simply from hearing someone speak also offered a survival advantage. Natural selection likely favored both the development of accents and a hard-wired ability to notice them, which would help explain why even very young babies respond more favorably to accents that sound like those spoken at home than to ones they have not heard before.
“Natural selection likely favored both the development of accents and a hard-wired ability to notice them.”
The use of accents to identify those in our group and those outside it has long been part of the human story. Take, for instance, the tale in the Old Testament of two warring Israelite clans, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. Having captured a strategic crossing at the River Jordan, the Gileadites made all who wanted passage say the Hebrew word “shibboleth,” slaying any who spoke with the distinctive accent of the Ephraimites—an accent identifiable by their pronunciation of that one word alone.
Our mad skills at recognizing accents, though, do not have to end in death or disparagement, because noticing that someone sounds different and judging them for it are two different things. What we should be embracing is how accents are a form of connection that touches us all.
3. Accents are forged in childhood.
Accents might be ancient, but they are also very young, because our own accents emerge in childhood. As anyone who ever cussed in front of their kid already knows, children are little linguistic sponges. Without any training, by the time they’re about a year old, they’ve already figured out the sounds unique to the language they will grow up speaking. And once they understand the specific sounds that will be important, they spend the next five to seven years honing the motor skills needed to pronounce them perfectly. If you think about it, it’s not very surprising these little linguistic savants don’t have time for toilets or utensils.
Once you reach adulthood, you have become a true expert in your native language, but it is exactly this accomplishment that makes it so hard to learn another language once you are old enough to vote. Children come to the language acquisition task with a brain primed for it and a mouth not yet glued to any previous patterns. Adults, on the other hand, have a competing system already in place that needs to be thrown out the window when an unfamiliar trilled “r” or awkward “th” sound comes a-knocking.
Of course, we have all heard the story of our friend’s roommate’s mother’s sister who can pick up languages and sound native at the drop of a hat, but this is by far the exception. One study tested whether 24 Americans who spoke German and had attended graduate school in Germany could fool local judges into believing they were natives. The result was that only one of the Americans passed as sounding like a native speaker.
“Children come to the language acquisition task with a brain primed for it and a mouth not yet glued to any previous patterns.”
What made him different? Research suggests that those rare people who are more naturally gifted at picking up native-like skills are often those who also show strong mimicry and musical abilities and, at least according to some studies, might even process language a bit differently in the brain.
Our goal should not be to lose our accents, but to celebrate the amazing abilities we were gifted as children to soak up that language in the first place.
4. Accents are our history.
Accents are a bit like fossils because they bear the marks of what we’ve been through together, but we often misunderstand how to listen to the stories they tell.
The most noticed accents today—those that signal race, class, or nation—are intimately linked to sociohistorical events that fostered language change and language contact. Over time, certain ways of speaking became linked to particular groups because of how their shared histories and social experiences shaped their speech.
For example, African American Vernacular English is often dismissed as “incorrect” or badly learned English, but the origin of this dialect is much older than that of the standard variety that people claim it falls short of. Many of its most salient features, from the pronunciation of ask as “axe” to the use of double negatives, fell from everyone’s lips in early colonial times. It was these colonial accents that served as a model of English for enslaved people coming from West African language backgrounds.
You might also be surprised to learn that these features were generally well regarded at the time. We see axe instead of ask frequently in Middle English texts ranging from The Canterbury Tales to early translations of the Bible, and double negatives regularly show up in both Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works. Other African American pronunciations are related to how West African languages influenced this early English, in the same way that the “Minnesooota” accent still has traces of Scandinavian languages now lost but brought over with some early settlers.
“The most noticed accents today are intimately linked to sociohistorical events that fostered language change and language contact.”
During the 20th century, innovative features entered the picture during the massive relocation of African Americans from the South to the urban North during a period known as the Great Migration. De facto segregation, as well as greater cultural consciousness and community, fostered not just a vibrant artistic, musical, and literary legacy, but also a linguistic one. In other words, sounding Black became a source of pride and an expression of shared experience, all of which spurred the development of even greater distinctiveness over the course of the century.
What we hear as today’s African American English arose from a combination of colonial English forms, West African language transfer, and a newly flourishing in-group culture. Now, in the 21st century, not only are new regional dialects emerging, but African American English’s widespread use in music and social media has helped it become increasingly visible and appealing to those well outside that group.
5. Accents can die out.
While some accents (like African American English) are going strong, linguists have discovered that many classic regional accents are on the way out.
We find far fewer speakers sporting the iconic accents we have come to associate with places like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or the South. Starting with Generation X, dialect studies show that regional accents are losing ground to a more pan-American sound. Despite what you might think, it is not only the internet that is making us sound less like locals. It is also the massive social, economic, and political changes that have swept the nation since the 1970s. This includes increasing suburbanization, the industrialization of the Sunbelt, more non-Southern migration into the urban South, and a rising social consciousness as civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights came to the fore.
More recently, the intense shift to digital culture has radically reshaped how young people relate to one another across geographic and social divides, further eroding the attraction to a local regional sound. But having a less regional accent does not mean we are starting to sound more alike. What linguists have found, instead, is that other accents—like those that identify us as Black or White, rural or urban, and even politically liberal or conservative—are forging the accent divides that will still matter to us in the future.
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