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Accent and Dialect (Language and Culture Series #1)
This episode of anthro.mp3 explores the topic of accents and dialects as part of our language and culture series. We discuss how every person has a unique way of speaking, and how the distinction between “languages” and “dialects” is often more political than linguistic. At the end, we get into our personal and day-to-day experiences with language and dialects!
Source:
International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA)
https://www.dialectsarchive.com/
Language Advantage
https://languageadvantage.ca/what-is-an-accent-and-how-can-it-be-improved/
Oregon State
https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-are-dialects-oregon-state-guide-grammar
UPenn
Library Fiveable
https://library.fiveable.me/key-terms/language-cognition/prestige-dialects
Yale
https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena-by-category
Should Robots Have Accents?
Classification of regional dialects, international dialects, and nonnative accents
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447016300407
A meta-analysis of the effects of speakers’ accents on interpersonal evaluations
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejsp.862
What is the General American (GenAm) Accent?
https://www.boldvoice.com/blog/general-american-accent
Becoming Adept at Code-Switching
https://www.ventrislearning.com/wp-content/uploads/Wheeler_Ed_Leadership_April_08.pdf
Five Reasons People Code-Switch
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/13/177126294/five-reasons-why-people-code-switch
Code-Switching and Language Ideologies: Exploring Identity, Power, and Society in
Dialectically Diverse Literature
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23365404
“Nah, We Straight”: An Argument Against Code Switching
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20866886
A market of accents
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10993-009-9131-1
Governing English: Prescriptivism, Descriptivism, and Change
https://exhibits.lib.ku.edu/exhibits/show/english-language/governing-english
Transcript:
Tim: Hello friends. Welcome back to anthro.mp3. We’re students from UMass who love anthropology. Anthro Hub is a website we help run that’s full of all things Anthro. Make sure to check it out to look at some incredible blog posts and creative works made by students from our schools and others. My name is Tim, and I’ll be one of your hosts for today’s episode
Sophia: And I’m Sophia, your other host for today. So today, we will be discussing accents and dialects, something that holds a lot of interest for sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. If, before listening to this episode, you want to know more about the field of linguistic anthropology in general, refer back to episode two of Anthro.mp3, covering Linguistic Anthropology. That being said, let us dive in.
Tim: So I’d really like to just start by saying we all have an accent and dialect. If you don’t think you do, chances are you speak in the standard accent or dialect of the language that you’re speaking in. But before we get into the politics of standard or non standard accents and dialects, let’s first kind of discuss what accents and dialects really are before we get in it’s important to practice.
Sophia: Good idea. So what is a dialect and how is it different from a language?
Tim: It’s kind of a loaded question. Actually, there’s a lot of history behind it. There’s a popular saying from the sociolinguist Max Weinrich that every student of linguistics has probably heard like a million times, probably a lot of linguistic anthropology students too. He said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. So this refers to the fact that, realistically, there’s no such thing as a common or proper language. There’s no one true language spoken by people. But rather there’s a collection of dialects, sociolex which is how the community around you practices language, and idiolects, which is how individuals speak. You know they themselves will speak. And those all kind of work together to make up what becomes this common perception of what a language is, a common sociolinguistics method of examining what is and is not its own language is a test called mutual intelligibility. So this is exactly what it sounds like, right? You get two people to speak to each other in their respective dialects or languages, right? And if they can’t understand each other, then their languages are considered mutually unintelligible. This obviously has some caveats. Some languages are more related to than others, Spanish and French, for example, or several of the Arabic languages are going to be more similar to each other than, say, like, you know, Chinese or English, right? Mandarin, Chinese or English. So there will be some more mutual intelligibility between some languages, because a long time ago, they were all the same.
Sophia: Wow, that’s really interesting. So you use the example of Spanish and French and then Arabic. How come we refer to some languages that are related to each other as one language, whereas we refer to some related languages as separate?
Tim: So this really all comes back to that Army Navy quip from earlier. Usually, what determines if language is referred to as the language rather than dialect, is if there’s a group behind it with a significant influence on a more global scale, the Arabic languages are usually referred to as just one language because of typically Western and Eurocentric perceptions of the world. In fact, most Arabic languages have highly differing vocabularies and pronunciations. Thus there is kind of a limited degree of mutual intelligibility. Maghrebian Arabic, for example, is nearly unintelligible for someone who speaks Egyptian Arabic and vice versa. This is why I’m opting to say Arabic languages here as compared to dialects.
Sophia: What if these varieties of Arabic are near each other, surely they’d be more mutually intelligible, right?
Tim: Yeah, for sure, Arabic exists in a state of dialect continuum, meaning that someone from a group A can understand and communicate just well with somebody from Group B and B, likewise to C, but C can’t really as effectively, if at all, communicate with Group A. So they might switch to more common tongue to facilitate language like Modern Standard Arabic, which is taught in schools and use in formal settings, but not really spoken naturally at home or in informal settings.
Sophia: Is there just code switching on a massive level?
Tim: Yeah, exactly. This dichotomy between a formally taught modern standard tongue and a colloquial actually spoke in a naturally learned tongue is called diglossia, wherein the speakers refer to languages one in the same despite being arguably separate languages for political reasons, this dialect continuum is treated and recognizes one language, which is called a macro language, as it were, the same is true for the several Romance languages spoken in Italy, such as Sardinian or Sicilian. They all exist in a dialect continuum in diglossia, switching from their individual languages who evolved independently from vulgar or colloquial Latin alongside Italian, not from it.
Sophia: So what about languages that are treated as distinct even though they’re similar?
Tim: Well, the Romance languages are really good places to look. Another example of this influence that comes with the state and perceptions of the split between languages and dialects are in Spanish and Portuguese, which are incredibly mutual. Intelligible, up to 90% these languages are more often perceived as different because of their associations to different nations and people groups. This kind of asserts them in the public guise as being highly different, when in reality, they’re actually highly similar.
Sophia: So what makes a dialect, then? What kind of features does a dialect have?
Tim: So a dialect within language, in brevity, can be described as comprising a few different things, and these kind of appear the most commonly as maybe a common accent. This usually means differing from the hegemonic standard, right? An accent is a systematic way of pronouncing different sounds within the language, or how maybe these sounds are realized when people are saying them. Take, for instance, car being pronounced as car near Boston, the R sound in that final position will get dropped. This could also mean a different grammar, or different grammatical forms than that of the standard, right? Maybe how you negate things. This could mean different common vocabulary, proper words, you know what people are saying, how they might communicate. The same thing, and it can also mean different prosody, this refers to how people stress or intonate their words. For example, laboratory in British English compared to laboratory in American English.
Sophia: That’s so interesting. You know, accents and dialects factor not just into how we use a given language, but how we are perceived by those around us. One study showed that accent based social categorizations and feelings of ingroupness are believed to be even stronger than those due to ethnicity or gender. This may be due to the fact that during our evolution, warfare was common among bands living in close proximity to one another, and that might have had similar languages back then, an accent or a dialect could have been crucial in distinguishing a friend from an enemy. Nowadays, the distinction may not be as dire, but differences in accent or dialect may still have social implications, like how speaking with a prestige dialect often conveys a host of positive associations about the speaker, like intelligence, reliability and trustworthiness
Tim: So I heard you say, prestige dialect. What is that?
Sophia: A prestige dialect is one that is most associated with status or power in a given society. It is usually considered the standard version of a particular language, and is most often the version that is taught to children or second language learners in school. People who speak with a prestige dialect are typically perceived as smarter or more trustworthy than those who speak with other dialects, really. Why is that? Well, for a number of reasons, like your analogy of a language being a dialect with an army and a navy, prestige dialects are cultivated by people in power conferring status upon themselves simply by the way they speak. But that being said, there are scenarios in which people will favor non standard dialects as opposed to prestige ones. For example, a study done by scholars from Ireland and Sweden found that having a robot speak with the user’s non-standard dialect increased feelings of ingrewness, and therefore trust and credibility. And among certain dialects, there is a sense of what is called covert prestige, that is a feeling of pride in maintaining a speech pattern that is divergent from the dominant dialect.
Tim: Wow, that’s really interesting. So I wonder, how do these differences impact someone’s day to day life, do you think?
Sophia: That’s a really good question. There’s been a lot of research into the disparity and respect between standard and non standard dialects, particularly when it comes to people’s education and career prospects. Nowadays, there’s whole courses dedicated not just to learning English as a second language, but specifically to perfecting one’s accent to appeal to the target audience. In America, the standard or prestige dialect would be called the general American or Gen M for short dialect. It’s an offshoot of the Midwestern accent adopted by TV presenters like Stephen Colbert, who would otherwise naturally have a southern accent, as mentioned before, prestige or standard dialects receive preferential treatment. So oftentimes, people code switch between the accent, dialect or language they are most comfortable with to the one that is most accepted in a given situation.
Tim: Wow, that’s so fascinating. I had no idea about that with Stephen Colbert. I wonder where might some of these places be, where someone would do this?
Sophia: Any place, really, but a lot of discussion about code switching revolves around the education system. For a long time, students who spoke or wrote in non standard dialects would receive poor grades and be placed in remedial classes. These non standard dialects are most often associated with marginalized groups such as low income or people of color. My grandmother grew up in Eastern Kentucky in an impoverished mining community where her instructor struck her for using Appalachian English. She still has her accent, but often talks about how she is perceived as less intelligent or uneducated because of it. My mom, who spent most of her childhood in the same town, but moved away when she got older, dropped her accent in order to fit in.
Tim: That’s really terrible that people have to do that.
Sophia: If there’s any positive to this, it would be that the American education system is moving more towards prescriptive versus descriptive attitudes towards teaching language. How do you mean? Yeah. Well, Prescriptivism is an approach to language instruction that is based on rules that lay out what is good or bad English. Descriptivism is an evidence based approach to languages that describes it in an objective manner how language is being used. It allows for more dialectic diversity in the classroom, and even encourages students in the use of their own dialects and the understanding of others. This is especially important for students who have historically battled and continue to battle multiple levels of discrimination in the education system, like students who speak African American Vernacular English have consistently been discriminated against, both within and outside of the classroom.
Tim: So because AAVE is such an anthropologically dense subject, we feel it kind of deserves its own episode dedicated to exploring it further. If you want to know more, look out for future episodes of our language and culture series where we’ll dive a bit deeper into it.
Sophia: Back to what we said in the beginning of the episode. We all have an accent and a dialect. They are natural functions of a language understanding that might encourage us to understand each other better.
Tim: I think so too. Well, don’t you think it’s interesting that we’re discussing accents and dialects at a school here in the Northeast when neither of us are actually from here?
Sophia: Yeah, I’m from Florida with family roots in Appalachia.
Tim: I’m from the Midwest. I’m from Iowa. So as you said, Gen Am was based on the Midwest dialect of English, but because language is always changing, how I speak at home is something that’s definitely perceived as different from that, even if only. I think it probably differs the most with how I pronounce things. But my girlfriend always said she thought I talked a little silly, her words, but when she visited me at home in Iowa, she was actually really surprised that everyone talked like I did. She thought it was just a silly thing that I was doing, or I was just goofing around. One example is, where I’m from, it’s pretty common to double our probably’s. I’ll say: “Oh, he’s probably gonna be late, probably,” And my girlfriend, the first time I said that, she started laughing, and I was like what are you talking about? He’s gonna be late! We also use need or want as modal verbs, which means we might say things like the car needs washed, or the lawn needs mowed. The dog wants walked, stuff like that.
Sophia: That’s actually really cool. You know, I read an article from NPR about different reasons why people code switch, and I related to one of them, which was a story about a girl who played up her southern accent at her waitressing job to get better tips. When I want to be perceived as nice, like while at the DMV or with someone from customer service, I totally layer on my southern accent, but when I want to be taken seriously, like in class, I use something closer to the general American accent.
Tim: Yknow, that’s crazy. I really relate with that because my girlfriend says she thinks I sound just a little silly. I code switch when I want to level with people or, you know, come across a bit less intimidating, right? And that really comes in handy with customer service, but when I want to be taken seriously, it’s right back into a more general American accent,
Sophia: Same for me!
Tim: So, when our episode ended, we had a really good discussion about, like, our own dialects, how they kind of differ from each other, and we thought it was really interesting, maybe we should include some about it. See, me for instance, highway versus interstate versus road versus Street.
Sopha: Or freeway!
Tim: Freeway is a- is made up. Freeway is not a real- is not a real term. It doesn’t mean anything. Interstate, you get on the ramp.
Sophia: Um, I actually beg to differ because one, I’ve never heard of using ramp, and that’s honestly just a me thing, probably, but I didn’t know ramp was a thing that you talked about when on the highway
Tim: So how do you get on?
Sophia: You just go!
Lea: You just go on it!
Sophia: You just sort of spawn in.
Tim: Yeah, gotcha.
Lea: And a freeway is basically just route two, going to UMass. That’s all, I know.
Sophia: Okay, and what do you call a water fountain?
Tim: We call it a drinking fountain where I’m from, because you drink from there, I guess, like it’s water, but that’s implied. You know, go to the drinking fountain, get a sip.
Lea: Not implied.
Tim: It’s implied!
Lea: Not implied.
Tim: What other kinds of fountains are there?
Sophia: Water fountain. As it should be. And here, they call it a bubbler.
Tim: Very prescriptivist of you.
Tim: Um, I like talking about tennis shoes, too. This causes a lot of confusion. I like, tell my girlfriend that I got my tennis shoes on. She’s like, what are you talking about?
Sophia: They’re just sneakers, unless you’re playing tennis, they’re sneakers.
Tim: Well, they’re sneakers if you’re like, you know, an athlete, you know you’re running.. to somewhere. You’re playing basketball. But no, no, they’re like, tennis shoes, you know, like, I understand now, like coming here and like, seeing the difference, but like, I’ll still just say tennis shoes. They’re just shoes. But like, I’m not gonna throw sneakers unless I’m talking about, like, like, sneaker heads.
Sophia: But, tennis shoes unless you’re playing tennis.
Lea: Like, you’re adding a sport to the shoe.
Tim: All right, let’s move to… Yeah, let’s move to a different thing! You got me there.. Okay, well, one thing that we do in Iowa City is we call parking ramps… parking ramps? I meant to say the other thing. So here they’re called..
Sophia: A garage! A parking garage.
Tim: Parking garage! I almost said car ramp, but yeah, they’re called parking garages here, which is kind of bizarre for me, because, like, yeah, but it’s a parking ramp, because you drive up and down like a ramp.
Lea: But it sounds like you’re gonna park on the actual ramp and not in a parking spot.
Tim: I thought you said you didn’t know what ramps were!
Lea: No! A ramp onto the highway is one thing. A ramp in a parking garage? I know.
Tim: Yeah, no. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I-it’s always been parking ramp for me. Like, as I got older, I would hear parking garage. Actually, my grandma, she says pop. And this is very common in the Midwest. You hear, usually older people saying pop, or, if you kind of leave the city you hear pop. Iowa City is like the one place that says soda. But I always wonder why my grandma calls it that. I know, like, south they just call everything Coke, right?
Sophia: Yeah, just kind of uniformly, it’s all coke. And so if you order a Coke, they’ll be like what kind?
Tim: That is so weird. Like, the drinking kind!
Sophia: Versus here, like, you would just get a Coke like, what you asked for?
Tim: Yeah, no, that’s bizarre for me. I can’t comprehend that. I see again. It’s the implication. It’s like a reverse implication if you just say Coke!
Sophia: And then, what do you call the meal at the end of the day, the last meal of the day?
Tim: This is, this is dinner in formal settings. But if I’m just like cooking for my mom and grandma’s, like, I’m making supper.
Sophia: Supper?
Tim: I’m making supper.
Sophia: I think that of like being sort of like I read it in books, like it’s sort of like, the little house on the prairie. It’s old fashioned to me.
Tim: I’m an old fashioned guy!
Lea: Medieval sounding.. I think.
Tim: Speaking of medieval, one thing that we do because, remember, I said we use need as a modal verb, right? That means, with negation, we’ll say need not. And because need’s already a modal verb, I don’t say “need not to be”- that makes no sense. So I was like, “oh, you know, you need not be angry about this. It’s nothing.” And that does sound pretty Shakespearean! And even when I like, think about saying.., but no, that just, like, flies out of my mouth. Need not be a bad day. The sun’s out!
Sophia: Oh Hamlet..
Tim: Makes me sound fancy!
Sophia: Prince of the Midwest.
Tim: To be prince of the Midwest!
Sophia: Yes, I’ve designated you as such.
Tim: Awesome.
Sophia: I have been handed to, as a person from the South, I’ve had- I’ve ordered sweet tea at a restaurant and been handed a hot sugar tea! I was very confused.
Tim: That’s bizarre. That is bizarre. Sweet Tea is undrank in the Midwest. People don’t really drink sweet tea. So if you say tea, people will, you know, assume they’re like, “Oh, hot or iced” right? Then they’ll bring you an iced tea, iced black tea or hot black tea, never sweet. That is never the assumption.
Sophia: Hot tea is not a thing. Well, I won’t say it’s never a thing in the South, but no, if you order tea at a restaurant, they will assume sweet iced tea.
Tim: That’s super interesting to me, because, yeah, no, that would never be my first assumption. I feel like, because you got to go out of the way to add sugar to your tea, you know, like, that’s like an extra step.
Sophia: No, it just comes that way…
Tim: It just comes that way?! It’s how the tree leaves make them?
Sophia: That’s exactly how it’s made.
Tim: I see, yeah…, no, that would, like, now that I’m kind of wary about if I ever go to, like, down to like, Louisiana and ask for tea. They’re gonna be like”Okay, here you go” and then I’m just gonna, like, “what did you do to this?” Actually, again, speaking of Shakespeare, one thing that we say in the Midwest, at least in Iowa City, is you will hear yonders thrown out here, there, everywhere! Yonder here, everywhere! So, like, if I give directions here, people think I’m being a goofball or something. And I said earlier in the episode, that probably contributes to why my girlfriend thinks I’m trying to be silly. But yeah, I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, it’s the bus stop. Yonder beyond.. bus stop.”
Lea: How far is a wond- a yonder?
Tim: Um, you know, like, if.. I just gave a head nod, you guys couldn’t see. But like, you know, it’s like, “over there” kind of thing. It’s like, the same thing as saying over there and pointing only it’s-
Sophia: It’s a gesture, direction expressed verbally.
Tim: Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. It’s, like, within immediate importance, like, like, I.. this job I used to work at, if somebody gave directions, it was like a grocery store, like, “Oh, yeah. It’s, um, just yonder that way”, right? And then I’d point, and then it was, it was always understood.
Sophia: It should be registered as onomatopoeia.
Tim: You think so?
Sophia: Yeah! You know, there’s so much more to talk about this, but we’re almost out of time for today. So if you’re interested in hearing more about code switching, look out for future episodes in the language and culture series!
Tim: Thank you very much for tuning in to our show today! It was a really fun episode to do. Another thanks to our great team members and our collaborators with AnthroHub, especially our tech crew. Stay connected. You can find us on Instagram at anthro.mp3. You can also find our sources, transcripts of each episode and more in our AnthroHub show notes. I was one of your hosts today, Tim, joined by our other host, Sophia, and our lovely, awesome tech crew. If you enjoyed this episode, you’ll love our next one. Keep an eye out on our Instagram for future updates on shows, specials and events. Catch us next time and have a great day friends!