Accents and accuracy

When I was in eighth grade, a movie aired called The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.  We were encouraged by our English teacher to watch it, and it turned out to be well worth the time, even to a fourteen-year-old who at that point didn't care much about history.  It was based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, and starred the amazing Cicely Tyson, who played a woman born into slavery, who lives to age 110 and sees the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1962.  (And yes, Tyson plays the title character the entire way through -- not only is the makeup incredible, but so is her ability to portray ages between 20 and 110 absolutely convincingly.)

There was only one thing that struck a sour note, and I was far from the only one in my class who noticed it.  One of the characters was the villainous Albert Cluveau, who was identified as "a Cajun."  And this guy had the worst Cajun accent ever.  My mom was 100% pure Cajun, so I know whereof I speak; most of my classmates were Cajun as well, given that I grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, "the heart of Cajun Country."  Cluveau was portrayed by Will Hare, who wasn't even from Louisiana, and I still remember one of my friends saying, "Why didn't they just hire an actual Cajun?  There are plenty of 'em around."

Given how long ago this happened, I don't recall exactly what it was that pinpointed his accent as fake; certainly he was trying his best to make it sound right, but it simply didn't work.  There was something about the pronunciation, but also the cadence -- the "swing" of the language -- that was way off.  And to anyone who grew up in southern Louisiana, it did exactly what movie directors never want to happen; it took the watcher right out of the scene, made them say, "Okay, that's an actor trying to play a role and not doing it all that well."

Sometimes actors can pull it off, of course.  David Tennant is Scottish, but does a convincing English accent as the Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who.  And in the episode "Tooth and Claw," there's a scene where he's pretending to be Scottish -- so he's a Scottish guy playing an English guy who's trying to do a Scottish accent badly. 

Strangely enough, it works.

The reason the topic comes up is a study out of Cambridge University that appeared last week in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, which tested various groups of people in the British Isles to see how good they are at detecting fake accents.  And it turns out that people from Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast, and Durham are way better at picking it up when someone's faking their regional accent than folks from the southeastern parts of England (including London), and also the area around the city of Bristol.

Glaswegians scored in the high seventies to around eighty percent accurate; people from Essex did the worst, averaging only a little better than chance.  The surmise is that the areas where the scores were lowest tended to be more cosmopolitan, where there's a greater likelihood that residents have moved there recently from somewhere else.  Hearing lots of different variations on an English accent, it appears, might make you less aware of when someone's faking your own.  Another factor is that some of the places that score the highest -- Glasgow and Belfast, especially -- have high amounts of regional pride, and value the local accent as a marker of belonging.

"The UK is a really interesting place to study," said linguist Jonathan Goodman, who led the study.  "The linguistic diversity and cultural history is so rich and you have so many cultural groups that have been roughly in the same location for a really long time.  Very specific differences in language, dialect and accents have emerged over time, and that's a fascinating side of language evolution...  Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity.  Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect...  I'm interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms.  One of the first judgments a person will make about another person, and when deciding whether to trust them, is how they speak.  How humans learn to trust another person who may be an interloper has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history and it remains critical today."

Which explains why Scottish people roll their eyes when they hear this guy say he's "an old Aberdeen pub-crawler."

James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, wasn't Scottish, he was Canadian -- the son of immigrants from Northern Ireland.

I know the whole "cultural marker" thing is why I picked up on Will Hare's terrible Cajun accent so quickly.  Cajuns were for many years a poor and marginalized community, ridiculed as being less intelligent and less cultured than the rich (mostly Anglo) landowners, so it was pretty common for Cajuns to try to unlearn their own accent in an attempt to blend in.  (My mom was painfully aware of her own accent, and in something a little like the Cambridge study turned on its head, adopted a stilted "King's English" accent when she had company -- I don't think anyone was fooled by it, and in any event, it's kind of sad she felt like she had to do that.)

What's interesting is that like the Glaswegians' pride in their own accent, in the last fifty years there's been a resurgence of Cajun pride in southern Louisiana, largely spearheaded by the late Jimmy Domengeaux, who founded CODOFIL, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana.  Domengeaux was instrumental in repopularizing Cajun music and in preserving the Cajun French dialect.  They've even appropriated an insult; "coonass" was a derogatory epithet for Cajuns, of uncertain origin but thought to be from an old French slang word for prostitute, and I can remember when I was in high school starting to see bumper stickers saying "Proud To Be A Coonass."  (Nota bene: some southern Louisianans still consider it derogatory, and most people would never use it in polite conversation; and like most words of this type, it comes off completely differently when used by someone who is not Cajun themselves.  So it's still a word to be careful with.)

So that's our excursion into linguistics for today.  The upshot is not to try to fake an accent when you're in Great Britain or Ireland.  Or anywhere else, really.  People will usually figure you out, and it's not a good look.  Just enjoy the richness of variety in human speech -- and talk like you normally do.  They're probably as curious about your accent as you are about theirs.

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The ship sails

As a linguist, one of the things you have to get used to is that languages change.

The denial of this basic fact is at the heart of the argument between prescriptivists (people who think there are hard-and-fast rules regarding "proper" or "correct" speech and writing) and descriptivists (people who believe that a linguist's job is not to codify language for the purpose of determining what's correct, but simply to describe it and monitor how it changes).  I tend to be strongly descriptivist -- after all, my M.A. is in historical linguistics, and if the vocabulary and syntactic rules of languages didn't evolve, I'd be out of a job.  On the other hand, there's a line (no, I don't know where exactly it is), because if there were no grammatical and pronunciation rules whatsoever, it'd make communication pretty difficult.

So I understand why we teach prescriptively.  But it behooves us all to realize that the language is gonna change anyhow, whether we want it to or not, and fighting like hell against it is the very definition of an exercise in futility.

One of the places things change the fastest is in slang.  When I taught high school, I used to run into new slang expressions very nearly on a daily basis.  Some of them have interesting origins.  For example, the slang use of the word ship -- meaning, to watch or read a piece of fiction and hope that two characters fall in love -- comes from the characterization of fans who want that outcome for the characters as "relationshippers."  This got shortened to "shippers," and finally converted into a verb -- e.g., "I ship Mulder and Scully."  (And in fact, the word did come from fans of the iconic television show The X Files.)

The capacity for sinking yourself into the lives of a celebrity or a fictional character led to another coinage, this one from none other than a song by Eminem.  It's the word stan -- a portmanteau word made up by combining stalker and fan.  Initially, it had a completely negative connotation, implying the person was deranged, perhaps dangerous.  But over time it's moderated, and like ship has become a verb, meaning "to behave like a fanboy/fangirl."  The recent sweet queer romcom Red, White, and Royal Blue led to a lot of people stanning Alex and Prince Henry -- and I have to admit I felt a little of that myself.

Then there's yeet, which dates to 1998, and means "to throw something."  The origin of this word is uncertain, but may be imitative, representing the noise you make when you pitch something heavy.  I posted on social media last week something about this word -- "Linguistics question of the day: is the past tense of yeet yote?  Because it should be."  This generated a rather hilarious discussion over whether it should be yote, yot, yaught, yet, or yut, and one person who patiently explained to all of us that because yeet is a modern coinage, we shouldn't expect it to follow any of the patterns from Middle English strong verbs, so it should be yeeted.

Illustrating another general principle, which is that no matter how obvious you try to make humor, some people are going to take you seriously.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Even accents change, and it's new research in this field that brought the topic to my mind today.  A recent study at the University of Georgia found that the traditional Southern drawl -- for example, pronouncing prize as /praz/ and not as the more standard American English /praiz/, and face as /fɤis/ and not as /feis/ -- is fast disappearing.  The last generation of Southerners whose pronunciations are characteristic of the old drawl are Baby Boomers.  (There are exceptions, mainly in rural areas, but their numbers are dwindling quickly.)  The homogenizing effects of movement from one region to another, and hearing the more common accents of the Pacific Coast and Midwest on television, have gradually shifted the way people speak.  (And another factor has a darker subtext, one that as a native Southerner I'm really sensitive to; people using a fake Southern accent to code someone being stupid, bigoted, or backwards.  These ugly perceptions are why a lot of people who move north strive to lose their Southern-ness.)

The South is not the only area in the United States experiencing this, of course.  "The demographics of the South have changed a lot with people moving into the area, especially post World War II," said study co-author Jon Forrest, of the University of Georgia department of linguistics.  "We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics."

While I understand the reasons behind all this, and I know it's inevitable, I can't help but find it a little sad that regions are losing part of what makes them unique.  Our mobility and the role that television and movies have in culture are blending a lot of the distinctness out of us.

So while we'll continue seeing new coinages like ship and stan and yeet, we'll see other features of our language fade and eventually disappear.  It's the way of things.  Take, for example, this recounting of an argument from printer and writer William Caxton in 1490, when Middle English was inexorably evolving into Modern English, leading to the older generation having some difficulties being understood even in matters as simple as what the plural of egg was:

In my dayes happened that certayn marchau[n]tes were in a ship in Tamyse [the Thames] for to haue sayled ouer the see into Zelande [in Holland] and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte Forlond [in Kent]. and wente to lande for to refreshe them[.]  And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows [house] and axed [asked] for mete [food], and specyally he axyed after egges[.]  And the good wyf answerde, that she coude speke no Frenshe.  And the marchau[n]t was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges and she understode hym not.  And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren, then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel.  Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certainly it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite [&] chau[n]ge of langage.

Forsooth, Caxton, thou hast said it.

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Accent contagion

One of the features of linguistics I find the most interesting is regional accents.

Americans are usually aware of this phenomenon apropos of English in the United States; it doesn't take any great skill to detect a difference between speech amongst natives of Maine, Mississippi, and Minnesota.  It's a phenomenon that is hardly limited to the US, however.  I heard loud and clear the differences between English spoken in Cornwall, Suffolk, Yorkshire, and Durham when I was in England.  And I still recall when I was in a band that played French music, and we had a gig at Cornell University.  Afterward, a very nice couple with a distinctly French-from-France accent came up afterward.

"We loved your singing," they said to me, "and your French is excellent.  But where are you from?  You don't sound Parisian or any of the accents from southern France, and you're definitely not Québecois."

I said, "My family is from Louisiana."

The light bulb went on.  "Ah!" the man said, smiling.  "Of course!"

I guess the Cajun still comes through, even though I haven't lived in my home state in forty years.

What I find even more interesting is how resistant my English-speaking accent has been to change, despite living in YankeeLand for decades.  I took the New York Times Accent Quiz, and even though I feel like my mode of speech has been pretty well homogenized from ten years in Seattle and thirty in upstate New York, the three cities that I scored the highest matches with were Shreveport, Louisiana, Biloxi, Mississippi, and Houston, Texas.

Connect those three into a triangle, and where I grew up is pretty much right in the middle.

The test relies not only on differences in pronunciation (e.g., of the words "merry," "Mary," and "marry," which ones, if any, are said the same way?) but in identifiable regional words.  For example:

• What do you call the children's playground equipment that's a long board that pivots in the middle, so two kids on opposite ends can take turns going up and down?
• What do you call the strip of ground running along the side of a road?
• What do you call fizzy sweetened drinks?
• What do you call a machine affixed to a wall that provides cold water to drink?
• What do you call a residential road with a green space running down the middle?

(My answers, if you're curious: teeter-totter, verge, soda, water fountain, boulevard.)

Of course, there are a few dead giveaways.  My use of the word "y'all" as a second-person plural pronoun pinpoints me in the southeast of the country right from the outset.  And there are a few bizarre regionalisms -- the most striking one, that none of my friends who took the test had even heard of, is the strange expression "the devil is beating his wife" for the phenomenon of rain falling while the sun is shining.  (No, I have no idea where it comes from, but I can remember my dad saying that when I was little.  Apparently it is of uniquely southern-Louisiana provenance.)

What brings this up is a study from the University of Pennsylvania that appeared in the journal Language last week, looking not only at regional accents but in an odd phenomenon called linguistic convergence -- that people tend to imitate the accents they hear, often unconsciously, resulting in phonetic conventions not native to the person's own region or ethnic background showing up in their speech.

The specific one they looked at was the so-called "long i" sound, more technically the diphthong /ai/, as found in the English words "ride" and "dine."  In a lot of parts of the American southeast, that diphthong gets flattened out to /æ/, the vowel sound in the standard English pronunciation of "cat."

What they found was that if a (non-southeastern US) English-speaking test subject was exposed to someone who did have a southeastern accent -- but who had been instructed beforehand not to use any words that had the /ai/ -> /æ/ diphthong shift -- and then instructed to read a list of words, the test subject was more likely to say something closer to /ræd/ and /dæn/ than the standard pronunciations of /raid/ and /dain/.

Evidently hearing southeastern accents makes you likely to adopt southeastern-sounding phonetics, even if you haven't heard the particular phonetic shift in question.

What's interesting about this is that it's not only unconscious, it's temporary -- when time has elapsed and speech is heard using the test subject's native regional accent, the effect goes away.  But we apparently have a mental representation of what "talking southern" sounds like, and that finds its way into our speech when we hear it.

My wife, I've noticed, has a tendency to do this -- she picks up accents, and has to work actively to halt it (she's very conscious of not wanting people to think she's mimicking or mocking them).  I'm not sure if I do it -- I'll have to ask her to pay attention next time we're in a place where the accent is different from mine.

My question, of course, is why?  Humans learn a lot when we're little through mirroring both what we hear and what we see.  Is this a holdover from the way we learn language when we're children?  Or is it some kind of unconscious attempt to fit in with the people we're talking to, to seem less "other" than we would have?  The underlying cause was beyond the scope of the current research, but it's an interesting question about something that seems to be a universal tendency.

So next time you're around someone who speaks with a different accent than yours, keep your ears perked.  I wonder if the fact that you're now aware of this will make it less likely to happen?  Maybe your accent will bleed over into the person you're talking to.  Let me know what happens to y'all, y'hear?

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