Have Americans evolved their speaking style/accent significantly in the past 50 years?

June 2, 2010 1:47 PM

Have Americans evolved their speaking style/accent significantly in the past 50 years? I'm not talking about de-regionalizing of an accent. I'm talking about normal conversations, let's say with a midwestern, suburban accent.

Watching movies and television reports, everyone "sounds" different. I'm not sure how to describe it: the diction, the voices, they sound different. Think of Jimmy Stewart talking, or even John Facenda, Perry Mason. Did non actor/ television personas talk like this before? Or was this a natural way to talk into a camera and the radio?

posted by sandmanwv to Society & Culture (25 answers total)

Ooh, I have been meaning to ask a similar question for a while. I thought of it because I noticed while watching new footage of student activists from the 60s being interviewed that the women, especially, had a very different style of speaking.

This interview with Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground is a good example of what I'm talking about (interview starts around 1:26). I can't quite place my finger on what makes it so distinctive, but it's noticeable.
posted by lunasol at 1:54 PM on June 2, 2010

You might be talking about the differences between classical acting and method acting.

Or you might be talking about uptalking? Where you ending most sentences with a question? Right?
posted by unixrat at 1:55 PM on June 2, 2010

s/ending/end/
posted by unixrat at 1:57 PM on June 2, 2010

Keep in mind that film and television acting were pretty new concepts for the people you've mentioned, and that the predominant notion of how to speak during a broadcast came from the world of radio.

Think about the way our news announcers speak now, or the way voice-over announcers in commercials or documentary films sound. They don't sound like regular, conversational voices. People put as much work put into meeting the typical broadcast standard as they do into finding their own distinctive "radio voice".

Some people are more willing/able to drop their "voice" for an interview or casual appearance and speak more conversationally. For others it's an important part of their persona and they'll rarely be heard in public without it.
posted by hermitosis at 2:03 PM on June 2, 2010

I've noticed a shift in the way women in the media talk--I haven't noticed it so much with men. I don't really have the vocabulary to describe it well. It's nasal, and does incorporate up-talk. In some movies, the young actresses talk like this (I think the one in Up in the Air did, for instance) and it makes it hard for middle-aged me to take them seriously as adults.

Some of the personalities on Michigan Public Radio pronounce vowels differently than I do, or ever heard anybody do a decade ago. For instance, the "Ann" in "Ann Arbor" used to rhyme with "can" but for these women now rhymes with "on."

I've been curious about this but am not very knowledgeable about linguistics and language change.
posted by not that girl at 2:07 PM on June 2, 2010

There is an obviously-elderly lady who calls my job on a semi-regular basis on behalf of some charitable group, and one thing about the way she talks has always stood out to me. She frequently starts a sentence with the word "say". As in "Say... is Miss Andrews in?" I've only ever heard this done in old black-and-white movies, and hearing her say that always brings to mind a certain old-Hollywood style of diction that I too have always wondered about whether people actually used to talk that way.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 2:10 PM on June 2, 2010

Best answer: You're thinking of the Transatlantic accent, which was considered a more specifically "proper" way of speaking, as represented in older media like film or tv.

An older relative of mine (female) once told us of having to complete a "diction" course in secretary school in the post-WWII era, and I think that a lot of people considered speech/accent a lot more important in business than they do now. For example, finishing schools or private schools would provide students with access to the "correct" type of pronunciation, and you will even see in old movies children having to take diction as part of their studies.
posted by SassHat at 2:15 PM on June 2, 2010 [13 favorites]

Think about the way our news announcers speak now, or the way voice-over announcers in commercials or documentary films sound. They don't sound like regular, conversational voices.

Hermitosis's comment ... making a good point. Reporters on cable news channels ... using participles without "to be." The first part of every sentence leading to an inquisitive upturn ... followed by a dramatic pause ... and ending on a resolute low note. Anyone who tries talking like this in everyday conversation ... not being taken seriously. John?
posted by Jaltcoh at 2:22 PM on June 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think Sasshat nails it. Although I have constant arguements here in Chicago about how it's pronounced, Chi-caw-go, or Chi-cah-go...

Never heard Ann Arbor pronounced as not that girl describes however.
posted by Max Power at 2:28 PM on June 2, 2010

Best answer: This actually crossed my mind the other day. I was listening to an old ep of This American Life (I know, I KNOW) - the one with the interview of Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, and I specifically noticed that her speech was very, very different from anything I've heard in my normal day-to-day. From what I understand she was fairly working-class, so I would imagine she had diction classes as mentioned above. But, anyway, you can really hear the difference in her speech if you listen to that bit.
posted by Medieval Maven at 2:28 PM on June 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Keep in mind that film and television acting were pretty new concepts for the people you've mentioned, and that the predominant notion of how to speak during a broadcast came from the world of radio.

This is true. A lot of the old actors where coming from the stage, where you have to project to the last row. Also sound recording was so primitive that they had to be loud, just to be heard by microphones that might be hidden in a potted plant or something. (really, they used to do that!)

Also, as film has evolved as a medium, the acting has become a lot more naturalistic. Today's audiences expect that the performance will be a lot more "real," and that the performers will sound more like "real people," and less like Olivier belting out Shakespeare.
posted by drjimmy11 at 2:47 PM on June 2, 2010

American accents and dialects have always been shifting. There has been a definite shift between today and back then for ordinary people and it has nothing to do with acting, projecting, radio-voice or uptalking. I used to hear it in the way my grandparents spoke and I've heard it in other places too.
posted by amethysts at 2:51 PM on June 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

I also wonder -- and this is truly just a guess; I'm hoping some learned Mefite will have more info on this score -- if a little of what we're hearing is due to differences in recording technology as well? Because when I hear recordings of people speaking from the past, in addition to the definite differences regarding accent and diction (as mentioned above), the voices just sound a little more tinny to my ear. So would audio quality be playing some sort of role here as well?
posted by scody at 3:00 PM on June 2, 2010

Some of the personalities on Michigan Public Radio pronounce vowels differently than I do, or ever heard anybody do a decade ago. For instance, the "Ann" in "Ann Arbor" used to rhyme with "can" but for these women now rhymes with "on."

I've lived in A2 for 24 years and have never heard anyone local pronounce it "on" or even "ahn"--"rhymes with can" is the only way. Of course, this is from a She-caw-go expat. Honestly, though, in that latter case, I think and I hear only a completely unaccented, neutral "Chicago." Those around me say that I give it the "aw."
posted by beelzbubba at 3:29 PM on June 2, 2010

Yo michigan people: you might be experiencing the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, its a chain shift that's pushing vowels around, and it is present in Michigan.

The World Famous: when you turn your Michigan accent to 11 and say "kee-on", you are doing "Raising and tensing of /æ/":

The first sound change in the shift, which was identified in the Northern states as early as the 1960s by Fasold [2], was the general raising, tensing, and lengthening of the "short a", that is, the vowel of cat: IPA /æ/. Inland Northern /æ/ comes to be articulated so that the tongue starts from a position that is higher and fronter than it used to be, and then often glides back toward the center of the mouth, thus producing a centering diphthong of the type [ɛə] or [eə] or at its most extreme [ɪə], which is the vowel heard in England in words like pier and beer[citation needed].

posted by jeb at 3:53 PM on June 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I am turning my Michigan accent up to 11 in my head. Do not like.
posted by k8t at 4:07 PM on June 2, 2010

The NCVS caught us when we moved to Buffamalo.

We did our first big shop at Wegman's (duh) and after I paid with the debit card the standard-issue high school student said, as nearly as I can write it,

"Zyagdamyound?"

Pardon me?

"Zyagdamyound?"

I'm sorry, I...

"*sigh* Do you want cyash byack?"

(apparently around here they normally ask if you want to pay the exact amount instead of asking if you want cash back)
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:33 PM on June 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

Forgive me for not addressing the question as posed, but jeb's "vowel shift" reminds me of my History of English studies in grad school, which may be useful here.

While diction and vocabulary figure in, regional dialects are mostly about vowels, since hard consonants and, related, fricatives and implosives, pretty much sound the same no matter what mouth they come out of.

Think of spoken dialect as an archery target. If the sound coincides with what you're used to, bullseye. If it doesn't, the closer to the bullseye, the more likely you are to understand it; the further from the target, the more alien it sounds.

A quick example: to someone with a Southern American accemt, 'tar,' 'tire' and 'tower' all sound pretty much the same: 'tar' to non-Southerners.

Add to this the concept of drift. In any language, over time, pronunciation drifts; it's a communal thing, where we understand each other as long as our vowels aren't too far away from the "target" we're used to hearing. The proliferation of worldwide media has resulted in an (increasing?) international accent, which only means that the pronunciation of vowels is gravitating toward a generally accepted standard.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:46 PM on June 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Actors and other voice professionals may not be the best source for comparison from then to now. For one thing, they are frequently hired because they have distinctive voices.

Try looking for interviews with regular folk from back in the day. You Bet Your Life comes to mind as a source. I'm sure there are others
posted by IndigoJones at 5:49 PM on June 2, 2010

"I've noticed a shift in the way women in the media talk--I haven't noticed it so much with men. I don't really have the vocabulary to describe it well. It's nasal, and does incorporate up-talk."

I think you are talking about Valley Girl accent which many women take up in college and then hopefully lose it when they graduate. Meghan McCain often lapses into it.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 7:49 PM on June 2, 2010

Boy, I've definitely noticed a shift in speech style over the last few decades, especially in women.

Mainly a distinct "infantalization" of adult speech; a tendency for grown women to talk like they're still six years old; high, nasal, scratchy, and with the vile "uptalk". You have women in positions of authority in the media, in government, in law, sounding like they're hoping to get approval on everything they say.

I find myself constantly thinking while listening to them, during newscasts for example, "Goddammit, are you ASKING me or TELLING me?" The reason radical activist Bernardine Dohrn sounds in the above YouTube clip so different than so many women today is that she speaks in direct declarative statements like an adult, like she means what she says. Not like she's asking whether she means what she says.

Regional accents are also disappearing at a rapid rate, to be replaced by a kind of generic flat "American" accent without color or character.

For example, for a while I was watching the TV series "MadMen". Something was bugging me about it, and then I realized that while this show purported to be about guys on Madison Avenue in the 1960s, NOBODY had a New York accent, thereby canceling the realism of the show for me, so I stopped watching it. I found that to be a gross omission of detail on the part of the directors.

I grew up in New York in the 1960s, and my Dad was one of those guys, and I knew all his friends and the people he worked with. Trust me, they ALL had strong New York accents.

In general, I think people spoke more clearly, more directly, more colorfully and with better vocabularies in decades past.
posted by Nicholas West at 10:53 AM on June 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I saw this was marked as answered, but I had to chime in because there were some borderline incorrect statements that were appearing.

1) There are 3 major vowel shifts going on in the U.S. right now. California/West, Northern Cities, and Southern.

2) There is not, however, a homogenization of accents happening. There are about 10 major USian accents right now: Western, North Central, Northern, Midland, Southern, Western Pennsylvania, NYC, Mid-Atlantic, Western New England and Eastern New England. Within these accents, there are also subclasses of accents, such as the Inland North or Texas South. In addition, there are a few areas, such as the DC area, Charleston, and Florida, that fall outside all accent boundaries. I'm getting this straight out of the 2006 Labov. What the dictionaries usually use for pronunciation guides is Northern, which does not mean that it is somehow more "correct," but more likely because it's where the publishers are located.

3) Uptalk has been around for decades and is spreading along with the California vowel shift. It is not, however, the shift itself, nor is the shift caused by uptalk. It is also not this hugely negative thing. In some studies, true, it has been shown that people that use uptalk are perceived to be unsure, meek, or not well-versed in what they're talking about by a segment of the population. HOWEVER. Some of those same studies were funded by private education/diction organizations that have an interest in getting you to pay them to have your child talk "properly."

Other studies have shown that the people using uptalk were not unsure of what they were talking about, in fact, they were quite sure and they were using the uptalk as a dialogue cue to the listener to make sure they understood. As with other filler words, it then actually helps the listener comprehend the conversation. (Whether you find something annoying or not is not empirical evidence that it is harder or takes more time to understand, which is the actual purpose of language.)

Also, it is not used mainly by young women because young women have some innate desire to sound babyish or to be coddled, but because language change occurs first through a) the younger part of the population b) women. This is a natural overlap. Uptalk has spread to young men and older women in some areas after starting with these young women, which is the same pattern as second language acquisition in immigrant areas or creoles usually take (ignoring the part where all that actually happens through children first, since children's prosody is just weird). It is hypothesized that that's because women care more about communication and communicating in a manner that makes someone else feel comfortable, but I don't know of an actual study on that. I can't cite any of the uptalk links right now, because the last paper I did on it is on my home computer.

4) I don't *think* there is any evidence for American becoming more nasal in the past few decades. Possibly what some folks are hearing as nasal is the unrounding and fronting of vowels (again, the California vowel shift is a big culprit here).

5) To answer the actual question, I think what you're talking about is the Transatlantic accent, as mentioned above. It's an accent that no one ever actually had in reality, but was sort of Britishized American that was taught to actors and announcers to sound more cultured. That always used to bug me when I heard old movies come on, too, since I thought for some reason that American had changed abruptly between the fifties and the late seventies/early eighties.
posted by wending my way at 12:11 PM on June 3, 2010 [11 favorites]

I don't need a "study" to tell me whether people who use uptalk sound unsure, meek or not well-versed in what they're talking about. Because to me, in my direct experience, people who uptalk sound unsure, meek and not well-versed in they're talking about. And I ain't the only one.

And that's exactly right, we need schools to be teaching children how to speak properly, in declarative sentences, with knowledge of the difference between a question and a statement, and without substituting "and whatever" and "like" for meager vocabulary, so they don't grow up sounding like infantile blithering idiots.
posted by Nicholas West at 1:18 PM on June 3, 2010

This video of the Boston Brahmin accent was posted here fairly recently. Definitely an accent that is fading. Plus it's an awesome video!
posted by 6550 at 3:56 PM on June 3, 2010

Nicholas West - I'm guessing you fall in the demographic that is historically somewhat resistant to all language change. This is also not necessarily bad and I'm not making a value judgment about it, but you don't sound like you're taking into account that your opinion is not fact. *You* might not hire or interact with people based on their prosody, but that definitely does not mean that these other people aren't using language correctly, or that this language pattern is unsustainable as a form of communication. Saying people should take time out of their day to learn to talk like *you* want, when you are becoming a minority, is, however, unsustainable.

Language change has happened since humans started speaking and will happen as long as humans continue to speak or write. It will always be vaguely upsetting to someone, as is all change. (I, for example, cannot stand people mixing up to/two/too and your/you're. It completely irrationally makes me immediately think less of their intelligence, even though the communication itself is in no way harmed.)

Just so this is somewhat on-topic for OP - I learned back in a 500 level intro class that the current American vowel sounds are actually quite similar to what English sounded like back in Shakespeare's day. Quite a lot more so than any of the current British Englishes. I have no idea where that research is from or if it's actually true, but it amuses me greatly to think that all the American high school actors trying to do Shakespeare right by doing fake British accents are pretty much the definition of doing it wrong.
posted by wending my way at 5:38 AM on June 4, 2010 [2 favorites]