Who puts the 'oot' in 'aboot'?

February 20, 2006 4:11 PM

How do accents work?

I've always been fascinated by the forces that define and maintain accents in human populations ever since I noticed that kids at my school on Vancouver Island from Washington State sounded significantly different from those from BC.

I think the observation holds: There is a distinct Toronna accent -- and southern Ontario/ rural Ontario accent -- noticeably distinct from our brothers and sisters just down the 401 from Buffalo and upper New York State. And, of course, in the UK there is a huge number of accents.

But these sharp distinctions despite proximity don't seem, to me, to make total sense.

My question: Why do these accents persist? Is a child's accent determined solely by its parents or does mass culture play a significant part? Is there a physiological aspect to accents or is it all neurological or cultural? Will mass culture and immigration tend to homogenise accents or will they keep on? Thanks!

posted by docgonzo to human relations (35 comments total)

Accents are learned. Children are most "vulnerable" to developing an accent because they're learning how to speak from hearing their family, of course.

However, accents can be picked up later in life, too. We tend to imitate those around us. Ask anyone who's travelled for an extended period of time for a job - say they're sent to Texas, USA from somewhere in the midwest. Often times they'll come back with a bit of an accent - we can't help it when we're surrounded by people who all talk that way... we just sort of absorb it. It certainly happens slower, and probably has less of a lasting effect, on adults.
posted by twiggy at 4:18 PM on February 20, 2006

Accents are definitely learned on a subconscious level. Twiggy says someone who moves to Texas might come back "with a bit of an accent." Well, I've been known to come out of a movie featuring British accents, sporting the accent myself. I really have to watch myself when I'm talking to someone with an accent, too, lest I pick it up and they think I'm mocking them.

I think the bigger question, though, is how they develop in the first place. I can think of at least 6 major ones in the USA (California, Midwest, South, New Jersey, New York, Boston), but when the colonists moved here from England, they didn't have these variations.
posted by CrayDrygu at 4:27 PM on February 20, 2006

Accents can also be tied closely with one's identity - it's a way of showing allegiances. If you value rising in society, you will likely adopt what is considered a prestigious accent, whereas you may change the way you speak when at home, in order to reinforce that part of your identity. As long as people remain different, accents will persist.

Here's a recent NPR piece that may interest you: American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift.
posted by RGD at 4:37 PM on February 20, 2006

re: sharp distinctions in spite of proximity

Sometimes an accent is subconsciously gained in order to fit in with people of a higher class. The upper class tends to speak "correctly" (that is, the "correct" way to speak is determined by them), and so if you're trying to appear more educated or sophisticated, you will align to their way of speaking.

On the other hand, sometimes an accent is used to emphasize group solidarity. While a certain redneck accent might not identify you as well educated or in a good social position, it will identify you as part of your group. For example, in a poor black neighbourhood, the typical accent and collection of slang is not that of the dominant upper class, but it establishes who is an insider and who is not.

Sometimes an accent is subconsiously preferred because it helps you to gain social power, and sometimes another is preferred because it establishes group solidarity. The first would move us towards homogenization, while the second vies for difference. At least, that's how sociolinguistics explains it right now.
posted by heatherann at 4:39 PM on February 20, 2006

when the colonists moved here from England, they didn't have these variations

What, you think everyone in England has the same accent?

Also, see Albion's Seed.
posted by tangerine at 4:40 PM on February 20, 2006

I moved over from Ireland to England when I was 7 (this was in 1989), and at the time I had a thick Cork (southern Irish) accent which was massively different from the Devonshire accent in my current locality.

My original accent has almost completely deteriorated, only very occasionally slipping out, and although my current voice isn't Devonshire (from Devon), it has been described as Middle English.

It's also worth noting that accents on occasion vary between social classes too, and tend to get more pronounced the lower down the classes you go (but please don't interpret this as prejudice!).
posted by rc55 at 4:40 PM on February 20, 2006

Docgonzo...this is not an answer to your question, but an observation that might interest you. I grew up on Vancouver Island and some of us who are multi-generation Islanders can actually identify Island accents. People from Port Alberni have a bit of a drawl and people from the far north of the Island (and Sointula...sp?) also talk a little differently. I'm from Nanaimo, but a university professor once asked where I was from. (Of course, she was a Jamaican who had lived most of her adult life in Toronto.) When I moved to Vancouver, I found the locals had a slightly different accent, in comparison to Islanders. Just slightly, though.
posted by acoutu at 4:43 PM on February 20, 2006

It's also worth noting that accents aren't learned primarily from parents, but from peers. That's why children of immigrants generally speak like locals, while their parents retain a foreign accent.
posted by nomis at 4:56 PM on February 20, 2006

docgonzo, I think one can begin by modifying one's voice simply in order to be understood, and the rest falls into place. Or you change your voice so's not to be mocked - my dad came to Canada from England as a kid, and I bet he lost his British accent fast after being beaten up a few times in the schoolyard.

There are indeed micro-accents. In Montreal, McGill students and hangers-on have a distinct accent, speaking English - more nasal and forward in the mouth than the standard local accent.
posted by zadcat at 5:12 PM on February 20, 2006

If you want to hear an incredible variation in accents in a very small space, visit Scotland. A single town might have a few different accents. Accents on different coasts can be mutually unintelligible (I'm thinking broad Galloway vs broad Aberdonian here).

Why wouldn't people keep local accents?
posted by scruss at 5:23 PM on February 20, 2006

I think that it's a combination of peer group and familiarity. Parents and their social group are a factor, but mostly people speak with the accent they hear most often.

I speak (in general) basic Midwestern American. I can drop into a Yooper (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) accent with very little provocation; and once had someone come up to me in a store in Minneapolis and ask when I had left Calumet. (I went to college in Houghton, and lived there for a few years after graduation.)

There are towns in the UP where the accent is very identifiable -- my dad, not a linguist, once identified a friend of mine as being from Negaunee in about four sentences. Some students at a UP university did a study on the waning of the sentence-terminating 'eh' in the typical Yooper accent, and their hypothesis is that it's being transmuted into 'hey' because the younger folk associate the 'eh?' with the dumb Canucks from the Mackenzie Brothers, but can't just stop using the rising terminal inflection altogether. (That, linguists think, comes from the combination of Finnish and Italian native speakers....)

I used to 'translate' my sister's township drawl for my dad, who had grown up in the same area but before the socialisation of the local high school (it hadn't been built when he was in HS, so he had used the socialising accent from a different HS).
posted by jlkr at 5:46 PM on February 20, 2006

Anecodotal, but I think it varies from person to person, as well. I know some people who have moved all over the world, but still maintain the accent from the area in which they grew up. I'm an Army brat, and I'm an accent chameleon. My parents are both from the Deep South and retain their accents, but I spent ten years in Germany, several years in the South and just as many years in Minnesota. I went through a bunch of speech training for a theatre degree so I have a fairly neutral dialect, but when I'm relaxed, my accent is some bastardization of Virginia, Minnesota and even a little German.
posted by Zosia Blue at 5:53 PM on February 20, 2006

I've wasted many hours looking around on wikipedia's section on the english language. You might be particularly interested in the articles dealing with accent, but I've found all of it fascinating. The more you read, hte more you want to read. Also, I've found myself intensifying my naturally slightly texan accent when with people from the south or with my grandparents who are from kentucky. I also adopted a quasi- british accent when I spent a week in england with some british relatives; i think it came on so quickly because I spent an entire week hearing only british accents (besides me and my mother).
posted by MadamM at 5:54 PM on February 20, 2006

German dialect atlases show tremendous variety in regional speech from materials collected mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. Since then, after a couple of big wars, massive resettlements, cold war refugees, and the juggernauts of radio, television and film, things have flattened out considerably. But not completely.
posted by gimonca at 6:04 PM on February 20, 2006

"What, you think everyone in England has the same accent?"

No, I said they didn't have these variations. I'm no historian, but I'm pretty certain that none of the colonists sounded like Jeff Foxworthy, or the mother from That 70's Show.
posted by CrayDrygu at 6:06 PM on February 20, 2006

Accents probably shift around in time as much as they do in space, IMO.
posted by delmoi at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2006

You have to also consider that the accent or dialect of particular region comes from the accents of the immigrants who migrated there. Often these immigrant populations were concentrated in small areas and isolated from other groups.

Also, Texas A&M did a study a few years back that discovered a correlation between the intensity of someone's accent and their feelings toward Texas (i.e., people who have positive feelings about Texas have heavier accents; people that think Texas is filled with assbackward hicks don't have such a heavy accent). This was true for both native-born Texans and those who moved to Texas. I grew up in a suburb of Houston, and the variability in accents just within my own high school was mind blowing. Some people had very neutral, almost mid-western accents, some had drawls so thick you could barely understand them.
posted by lunalaguna at 6:40 PM on February 20, 2006

I'm pretty certain that none of the colonists sounded like Jeff Foxworthy

Actually, that variety of Southern U.S. English owes a lot to the English "West Country". Even more so when you get up into the mountains of the Carolinas and Tennessee.
posted by gimonca at 7:11 PM on February 20, 2006

Most mind-blowing accent experience I've had in the South: big, old dude who was hired a few years ago to pull stumps out of my grandmother's back yard. His residence: Ville Platte, Louisiana. "My Momma, shay's cookin some pays for dinner." Pays = peas. This person was not a self-identified Cajun. Were those vowels borrowed from French neighbors, or did he just miss out on that vowel shift the rest of us had 700 or so years ago? That bowl of pays and rice was food for thought.
posted by gimonca at 7:17 PM on February 20, 2006

In Britain, it's something of a consequence of high population density and low mobility. I can easily distinguish between my own accent and ones from towns 8-10 miles in either direction.

A good way to see how accents work is when you have children born to parents from different areas: my sister now lives in her husband's home town, and while her daughter's accent is primarily a local one, it also has some of the main characteristics of her mother's.

Melvyn Bragg's series 'Routes of English' is good at tracking both regional accent and dialect, and talks about how mobility and broadcasting is chipping away at the distinctiveness of local speech.
posted by holgate at 7:29 PM on February 20, 2006

It's a very interesting issue for me. I'm an American who's been living in Sydney, Australia for over four years now. Previous to that I lived in London for two years. My normal American accent is just flat Midwestern - I'm from Indiana - but I can also slip into a hillbilly twang pretty easily when I'm around my relatives from Kentucky (or upon viewing "Walk the Line"). I didn't pick up much in London other than the rising inflection thing, which annoyed the crap out of my family in the US. For the first two years in Australia I worked in a corporate office and I don't think my accent shifted much at all. Then I got a job working in a shop and came into contact with a much broader spectrum of people... and now I've become a mutt. American customers think I'm an Aussie and get all freaked out when I tell them I'm actually a Hoosier, while Australians get kind of snooty pointing out that no, I really do still sound like a bloody Yank. Personally I don't hear it myself unless a word slips out that is obviously 'Strine, and I'm like, "Where did that come from?" Last week I actually had a radio interview here and it freaked me out listening to it afterwards. I really do sound different than I thought I did. (There's an mp3 of it linked on my blog if anybody wants to analyze.)

I wonder how much of it has to do with living with an Australian. I'm friends with an American couple who've been here even longer than I have, and I think they still sound more American than I do. Or maybe it's just when we get together that we all just fall back into it? I know that I consciously make an effort to sound like my old self when I talk to my family on the phone.

Anyway, point being, you don't have to consciously intend for your accent to shift in order for it to happen. I'd rather sound obviously Aussie or American, and I can "put it on" if I remember to, but most of the time I just talk like me... It's just that "me" has somehow changed.
posted by web-goddess at 7:32 PM on February 20, 2006

shay's cookin some pays for dinner.

"pays" for "peas" is quite common in many regional Irish accents. I wouldn't read too much into it.

Vowels just shift, as people pointed out, across time and space. You hear enough variations, dipthongs, and tripthongs, you learn to roll with it.

What's really interesting is that while people tend to believe accents grow in popularity in a top-down process, in Britain over the past 70 years or so it seems the process has been more bottom-up, with the "Estuary" accent that's now spreading out over south-eastern England a product of some of London's dodgier areas. but increasingly adopted by many of the toffs over the past couple of decades.
posted by meehawl at 8:19 PM on February 20, 2006

quite common in many regional Irish accents, except that Irish English wasn't a major contributor to language variety in that area, or areas that supplied settlers to there. Scots or Scots-Irish, yes. The English southwest, yes.
posted by gimonca at 8:40 PM on February 20, 2006

It doesn't answer your question, but I remember a couple of years ago, listening to Russell Crowe being interviewed about his role in the movie Master and Commander where he plays an English Ship's Captain. Crowe is Australian, but for authenticity's sake he wanted to use the accent that his character of that place and time would have had. After some research, and talking to experts in the subject, it turned out that his character, an 18th Century man from the South West of England, would have had an accent almost indistinguishable from his modern-day Australian accent.
posted by veedubya at 2:26 AM on February 21, 2006

"My Momma, shay's cookin some pays for dinner." Pays = peas.

"pays" for "peas" is quite common in many regional Irish accents. I wouldn't read too much into it.

This vowel shift also occurs in English West Midlands accents, especially Black Country.

Faggits un Pays = Faggots and Peas.
posted by plep at 3:28 AM on February 21, 2006

@web_goddess: You just sound American to me!
posted by salmacis at 4:01 AM on February 21, 2006

This article is written by an academic, and is very interesting on the subject:
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/mullan.htm
posted by dance at 4:02 AM on February 21, 2006

Good old BBC. They've done an entire website on voices and accents.

Personally, I remember at 16 being told that I sounded really really welsh. This was a great shock to me at the time.

14 years later, (having moved from Wales to Bradford, London and Louisiana in the meantime) I was in Edinburgh when a drunk called me a posh English w**ker. Accents change over time, depending on where you are.

Still can't imitate an accent to save my life though.
posted by badlydubbedboy at 4:32 AM on February 21, 2006

The point being, 'ea' was originally pronounced 'ay' by the majority. In very Old English, it even had a separate rune. Those of us who pronounce it 'ee' are the ones who shifted.
posted by gimonca at 5:19 AM on February 21, 2006

This has always bothered me too. I've always thought that television should've killed off all the various accents, particularly within the US where lots of people watch the same shows. The amount of variety is still quite remarkable. I think there's actually an element of an active subject going on here. When people listen to the others talk the differences jump out a lot more than the similarities so the differences actually get reinforced while the similarities are silently ignored.
posted by nixerman at 7:36 AM on February 21, 2006

Some news magazine a couple years ago did a report that claimed regional accents were actually growing stronger, versus diminishing.

I think a part of this is that consciously or subconsciously, an accent is part of your identity. When you're confronted with other accents, your own instinct may be to reinforce your accent or, it may be to adopt the other. I once had a friend who turned off and on their accent out of fear of being made fun of for speaking in the manner that she grew up in.

My own part, I spent a year in England, and I felt my own Virginian accent became stronger. I've also been living in southwest Missouri and Northwest Arkansas for the past five and a half years, and I know that I've taken on aspects of the regional accent in my own speech.

My family lived in Appalachia for generations until my own raising, and despite being raised elsewhere, I'll still use phrases and words learned from my parents. I also make a conscious effort as well, such as pronoucing "hollow" as "holler."

I digress, but accents and dialects are very interesting. I'd suggest reading up on the Ozark and Appalachian accent/dialects. While they're not crystalized forms of Elizabethian English as fantastically thought in the past, they are closer to that form of English than nearly any other dialect/accent in the country.
posted by Atreides at 7:51 AM on February 21, 2006 [1 favorite]

It's probably worth saying that, especially in the case of speaking a second language, an "accent" results from speaking the second wrong.

For example, in Danish (and, I presume, Swedish), there is no "th" diphthong. Hence, when a Dane speaks English, it's common for them to pronounce the word "three" as "tree", "sree", or "free". They simply substitute a sound that they know for a diphthong that they don't know.

Conversely, the Danish "R" (and many non-English Rs, for some reason) sounds quite different than the English "R" -- it's produced way back in the throat. Hence, an American speaking Danish will often have an "American accent" due, in part, to his or her mispronunciation of Rs.

That said, people around here (South Carolina foothills) can distinguish accents between towns just 10 miles apart in some cases.
posted by LordSludge at 10:05 AM on February 21, 2006

Accents have fascinated me for years. There's a friend of mine who spent his entire life, until arriving in Glasgow to study, in Dundee. The Dundonian accent, for those who don't know, being one of the broadest and most distinctive in Scotland (They don't say "pie" or "Aye" in Dundee. They say "peh" or "eh".) Despite this, and despite him going to high school in a particularly scary bit of Dundee called Kirkton, where being from the next estate over would be enough to get you knifed, he sounded practically English, with only the faintest traces of any Scottish accent. (His sister, in contrast, who went to the same school and isn't much older, sounded like a Dundonian, albeit a well-spoken one.) I've never understood where his accent came from.

Holgate's point about British accents having to do with population density and low mobility is a good one – near the place where I lived longest as a kid (Kirriemuir, just north of Dundee on the east coast of Scotland), there were wild variations of accent within the space of two or three miles, and I can still pick up on them if I'm back visiting.

In contrast, my own accent's a bit of a mongrel: from about one and a half until eight, I lived in Caithness, and had an appropriately sing-song northern Scots accent, which was mostly gone a couple of years after I moved to Tayside. After ten years there and another 11 in Glasgow, I now have a generic Scots accent, not really tied to anywhere specific. Still, someone recently, without prompting, picked up that I used to live in Caithness,, and I do slip back into a more east coast accent whem I'm with old schoolfriends from there.

Have a browse on the (previously linked on the blue, I think) Speech Accent Archive. There are plenty of online samples of different accents from dozens of languages. (English ones here.)
posted by Len at 10:16 AM on February 21, 2006

I've always thought that television should've killed off all the various accents, particularly within the US where lots of people watch the same shows.

But it appears that accents form during conversation, not passive listening.

I'm fascinated by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, since I'm right in the thick of it (Chicago and Wisconsin). I don't think that I have picked up any of it -- the examples given all sound weird to me. But on the other hand, I can't say that I have noticed the shift much (other than the usually hilarious nasal squeakings of Mayor Daley). That may mean I've absorbed it more than I think.

I have definitely noticed an interesting shift in my own language, though. When I grew up, I would answer "yeah" (a very elided yay-eh), which seems a perfectly Midwestern construction. As a kid, I read books (Larry Niven) whose characters all said "yah" (like a stretched German ja). I thought that was odd -- but now I do it. I don't know when I started, but I noticed myself doing it about 8-10 years ago. It wasn't the books; it's been ages since I picked up a Niven. Today, the relaxed "yah" sounds much more natural to me than the somewhat impertinent "yeah" that I grew up with.

I'm not a huge noticer of accents -- so much for a onetime hobby of linguistics! Pittsburgh and Chicago and Detroit don't sound that different to me, although Philadelphia and New York do. I wouldn't be able to identify a Milwaukee accent much. But I have certainly noticed that there's a line between Chicago and Wisconsin (it's more angled than the state line) where people begin to speak a lot more like Fargo's exaggerated Minnesotan. These are my people; I know I'm "home". Funny, that.
posted by dhartung at 10:56 PM on February 21, 2006

dhartung,

I'm not sure why you think accents form during conversation. This doesn't make any sense to me. Infants and children certainly don't pick up their accents through conversation since they largely can't hold conversations while they're learning to talk. Like Atreides said above and I hinted at, I think accents may actually be reinforcing one another. I wonder if the number of identified accents actually is increasing, rather than decreasing. That wouldn't surprise me if it were the case. On my subway ride to work each day I easily hear three to five accents even though the rate of immigration into NYC has slowed a lot.
posted by nixerman at 6:24 AM on February 22, 2006