American and British accents explained

[00:00:00]Is British English posher than American [music] English?

[00:00:03]>> Are American accents starting to all sound the same?

[00:00:06]>> And is there anything actually wrong with the word moist?

[00:00:10]>> Today we [music] are talking about accents, pronunciation, dialects, and more with author and socio [music] linguist Valerie Fridland on this episode of Words Unraveled.

[00:00:28]Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Robords >> and I'm Jess Fareras, author of etmology books including useless etmology. And today we are here with Valerie Fridland who is a professor of linguistics in the English department at the University of Nevada in Reno and she writes popular language blogs and books and all manner of other things. Two of my absolute favorites are like literally dude and the most recent one which we're talking about today why we talk funny which talks about the real story behind our accents. Welcome Valerie.

[00:01:02]>> Well thank you. I'm super excited to be here to talk with you today.

[00:01:05]>> I really enjoyed this Valerie. I've got it as well. You see although I have to admit I actually which I do more often than I I do care to admit I listen to the audio book which is a real treat because uh you got people with various different accents reading it. Um, but the book basically tells us why we speak the way we speak and why other people speak differently to us. I mean, that's sort of what I took away from it.

[00:01:28]>> As one person put it, it's a primer on all things accent.

[00:01:31]>> I like that. So, we've already used two these two words, accent and dialect so far. Could you just explain to us like you do in the book um the difference between those two terms because it's going to be important.

[00:01:43]>> Sure. And I think a lot of people kind of use them interchangeably. there's not really a good sense of the difference between them. But as a linguist uses those terms, accent refers to only differences in the level of pronunciation.

[00:01:55]So if you say um data or data for example, right, that might have something to do with accent. But dialect is the various levels on which two varieties can differ. So it can be um you know, if you say we was versus we were, that's a syntactic difference. If you know, and this is relevant in the United States, you call it a Coke, a pop or a soda. That's a difference on the level of vocabulary. And so those are dialectal differences. And then dialect can also include accent, but accent is a smaller term than dialect, if that makes sense. [laughter] >> Gotcha. So the words you use and how you use them, that's your dialect, whereas your accent is is just how you say them.

[00:02:36]>> You talk a little bit about judgment around accents. Could you could you expand on that and talk a little bit about like pronunciation debates that come up? Some people perceive certain pronunciations to be more correct than others. Right.

[00:02:52]>> Right. Well, I mean, one thing that I think history will tell us is that people are very judgy when it comes to each other's accents. We go from, you know, other people having an accent that's not like ours and having attitudes about them like they're not as good or they're not as smart or not as as educated, but we're also very picky about what we think is right um in our own accent, right? So even if it's we might be saying accent speakers, we have these ideas about what is the correct way to talk about things or the correct way to pronounce things. One of my favorites is um the debate that's around how you pronounce and I probably should spell it, but I'm gonna say it the way I naturally say it. The word caramel.

[00:03:31]>> So, I'm curious. I'm curious, Jess, how you say that word?

[00:03:35]>> I would say caramel or caramel. Yeah, that's how I say it. I was like, how do I how do I say it?

[00:03:40]>> Right. I know when people ask you that, you have to think. So, it's right probably three syllables. And Rob, how about you?

[00:03:46]>> I I'm a caramel sort and we are in Britain generally. don't have this sort of caramel variant that >> caramel. Caramel is that it's a twocllable versus a three syllable. And of course, everybody always thinks that when you cut things that's somehow wrong, even though that's really the the way that language is forged, right? It's a cycle of deletion and addition and deletion and addition. So, a lot of people are like, "Oh, well, Caramel can't possibly be right because it's spelled a certain way, right?" But honestly, as a linguist, what we see is that's a regional difference. So in the south of of of the US and in New England, the three syllable option is the one that people tend to use. In the Midwest and West, it's caramel. And so this is you know when we step back really about separation among speakers and how when you ever whenever you get separation among speakers and you don't interact for long periods of time then changes that would naturally occur in different ways but driven by the same underlying forces just cause slight variations in the way things are said and then those become emblematic of some sort of identity. Right? And in this case, they were very tied to one single word rather than a generic kind of vowel change. And that's why people are like, "Well, no, it has to be a right form versus a wrong form." But really, what it is is actually a a process of larger reduction. You have an extra syllable.

[00:05:10]We drop syllables all the time, right?

[00:05:12]When I say something or if I say photograph instead of photograph, right?

[00:05:16]That's just a natural process. And so this natural process was just realized differently in two different groups of speakers that didn't talk a lot. And then you get caramel in the west and caramel in the south.

[00:05:27]>> We were talking about miniatures in a previous episode and how miniature and miniature have both been current ways of pronouncing that pretty much since the word was borrowed, >> right? Especially when you get into large salabic structures like that. when once you get above two syllables, it's really common to have a syllable reduced. And it's called, you know, syllable reduction. And this is particularly prevalent in English because unstressed syllables often get the schwa vowel. And then the schwa vowel is already a weak form of the original vowel. So you have phototo which is a strong vowel, right? But photograph. So then it's really easy to just say photograph, which is what we actually say in everyday speech, even though if we might deny it, >> right? photograph photograph.

[00:06:13]>> We don't listen as much as you would think.

[00:06:16]>> Right. So that a lot of times we wouldn't notice that we're deleting that extra vowel, but we do it in our very fast speech. What was really exciting for me was to read about the differences between American accents and dialects and particularly the fact that I'd always thought that it was mostly a sort of geographical thing, but actually there's a historical thing going on in terms of what different regions have seen as sort of prestige ways of speaking. What I was sort of getting to here is I was surprised to hear about the influence of British English on American accents sort of quite a long time after the first settlement by the British in North America and and the fact that the sort of still looking to London for certain ways of speaking. I mean, I'm thinking about roticity, I suppose, or lack thereof, >> right? Oh, and it's fascinating because I think a lot of people always think the received pronunciation accent is sort of British speech eternal, right? That's that's how it was sounded, you know, a thousand years ago. And that's obviously completely wrong. And this concept of received pronunciation with the a vowel instead of the a vowel and the rd dropping that really typifies sort of elite London polite speech of the eras that we're familiar with in period pieces and things like that. That's only really been defining of British speech or London speech um at the sort of posh level for about 200 years. So it's not what the early colonists would have had as a model at that time. They came from all over of course. Um but even at the time of the first settlement of the colonies, southern British speech did have more prestige than northern British speech, but not really in the way we think about it today where London was sort of the cultural capital that it it was yet to become. Um but really what we see is this second wave in the 19th century where the new models of prestige in London which was Rdropping and taking ah to a so that you'd say rather rather than rather um that actually is a 19th century innovation both in British speech and in American speech. Now in British speech we see fledgling tendencies towards this in the 17th and 18th century. So our dropping actually in the 1600s we see some writings that have things like bust for burst or um they'd say something like um hassle for parcel. So that we get a sense that the r started dropping first before s sounds. And that's actually the difference between your ars and your ass.

[00:08:57]>> That's what I was saying is that that's probably >> cursing and cussing as well. Right.

[00:09:01]>> Yes. Exactly. And bust and burst. That's actually those are just the R- dropped versions of those words and because they were very very early they were 1600s when we started to see those versions that did come to America but the following progression of Rd dropping where R went from just being deleted in front of S sounds to being deleted in front of almost any consonant where it occurred right so post vocalic R we call it to be fancy but that's the R in words like cart car right those got deleted more wholesale by the late 1800s.

[00:09:37]Of course, in the 1700s, it was called out as a vulgar provincialism, right, and lowass speech. So, it started with the lower classes. But then what happens is people don't really notice that they're doing it in their own speech.

[00:09:51]They're probably interacting with a lot of people from various lower classes.

[00:09:55]Women in particular were probably interacting a lot with their maids and the the house workers and things like that. that gave them exposure to what seemed like a really casual kind of hip style. And who doesn't want to be casual and hip? And it slowly works its way into everybody's speech. And then the wives talk to the husbands who are probably the only literate ones, right?

[00:10:16]The well-educated husbands because women were not exactly schooled very much back then. And they were the last to do it because they were tied to the written version. And in the writing, we still have the R. And so what we see is it slowly works its way up the upper classes until it became posh in the 1900s and late 1800s. And that's when the New Englanders that really looked to London as sort of the model of prestige and cultural influence picked it up as the new fashionable London way of speaking and that's really when it got introduced into New England speech. So also in the 1600s and 1700s when New England was early settlement there was not our dropping there either. So it's a really fascinating kind of misunderstood history because it sounds archaic but it's actually relatively new.

[00:11:06]>> Is this where we get the sort of recurring claim that Shakespeare and English sounded more like an American accent because it was supposedly more rodic? I I think that at the the a alternation that's a lot of it. And there's certain words like fall versus autumn, right? Things like that. And um you know there's there are certain words that get retained in American English.

[00:11:27]That's a fallacy, right? Because neither British modern British English nor modern American English sounds anything like Shakespeare would have sounded like. Um you know, for example, Americans pretty much merge every vowel sound before R. [laughter] So, you know, Mary, Mary, and Mary all sound the same.

[00:11:46]Fur F I R and F U R sound the same.

[00:11:50]Horse and the the animal horse and being horse in your throat sound the same. And none of those would have sounded the same in Shakespeare's time. So, you know, there's there are a lot of changes that have happened, but are there some relic features that Americans preserve that modern British speakers don't still have to the you know, a large part? Yes, that's true. But vice versa as well, right? So Americans don't talk about reckoning very much. I don't reckon things, but I think you still you still reckon in Britain, right? And that's an older form. So there, you know, we guess in America, you reckon. And that's actually a relic form. So, you know, you can you can always find those wherever you're looking. So there's really no truth to that that rumor.

[00:12:31]>> We kept that one in Tennessee, though.

[00:12:33]We we reckon the truck's parked down the road, you know. [laughter] >> Okay. So that's where you get to that other rumor, right? And you and I are both Tennessans, which I love. How often does that happen, right? Because I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. And I know it's crazy. See, it obviously spawned great language thinkers.

[00:12:51]>> There you [laughter] go.

[00:12:52]>> What's really interesting is that gets to another myth, which is that Appalachin speech is Shakespeare in the holler, right? Which is another really widespread myth about American English and its sort of British counterpart. And the reason for that is it's true that Appalachic English preserved certain archaic forms of British English that the rest of American accents got rid of or dialects got rid of. But the the same is true that Appalachin speech doesn't sound anything like Shakespeare either.

[00:13:22]It just it sounds different from other American varieties and some of the archaic features like a prefixing. So I'm a fishing and a hunting and a walking and a going, right? That's an older feature and that's very salient um to people about Appalachin speech even though young Appalachin speakers don't really do it anymore. But I think that's really what gets at that myth so that people like to say that. I also think with Appalachia because it's always been historically a really disparaged region.

[00:13:48]It has been considered sort of an uneducated region by its speech. And I think this Shakespeare and the Holler myth partially arose to help discount that fact and show what a vibrant really enriched language it is. So I think there's good reasons why that myth came up. But it's no more valid than saying that Americans speak Shakespeare and English either.

[00:14:14][music] Back to our discussion of British and American English. If Rob and I switched places, how long would it take for me to sound more like him and him to sound more like me?

[00:14:26]>> You know, the answer to that question is like immediately and never. So there there, you know, you can move someplace and pick up a word that sounds, you know, if you've moved to Britain and you start saying blimey and bloody, you know, you'll instantly sound more British, but is that authentic? Not really at all. So can you pick up quickly something? So I Right, Jess, you're in New York. Is that correct?

[00:14:47]>> Connecticut, but close enough.

[00:14:48]>> Connecticut. Close enough. So if Rob all of a sudden found himself waking up in New York City, he could probably quickly say Long Island like the best of them because that's just a oneoff. Now it's it's something that's very salient and stereotyped. So people might think, "Oh my gosh, listen to him. You know, he's already picked up some of the accent."

[00:15:06]But in reality, he's just picked up one new pronunciation of one single word.

[00:15:11]And we're very good at that, right? So we notice these salient features of a place. Another thing in New York that's very salient is saying coffee is coffee, right? That's also a stereotype, but really that's actually an example of a larger process in New York English where the cot c o t vowel and the cot c a u g ht vowel which I have merged but New Yorkers say very differently have actually kind of moved further apart in New York giving off that quaffy but you'd also say tw you say it in a lot of different places. So if Rob just starts saying coffee, has he picked up a little of that pattern? Yes. But has he actually picked up the pattern? No.

[00:15:54]Because he's not applying it everywhere where it has generalized, which is in all places where that vowel exists after a while. So if he's been there five or six years, what we find and there was actually a really interesting study done in New York on people who had moved from Canada to New York on that vowel exactly because in Canada they have the merger which is actually widespread across the United States. So it's called the cot merger. So words like c o t c a u g ht or a word like h o c k hawk and h a w k hawk or a word like collar c a l l e r and then the collar around a dog's neck.

[00:16:35]Those are actually historically separate vowel classes. So you wouldn't normally say them the same. And I'm sure um probably you might just say them the same because southerners actually have this merger that are younger, you know, that are not sort of um boomers. Rob, you probably don't because British English doesn't have that merger. So you would say them differently. So just for you know before I launch into this say c o t and then c a u g ht >> cotton court. I mean a way that I can always spot an American doing a British accent is usually that they wrongly merge those two. So they end up having British people saying not for, >> right? So they can't say it correctly, right? But Jess, can you say those two words?

[00:17:15]>> Cot and cot. We've actually done this before and I thought Rob was saying a different word because of it. I don't remember. Yeah. I thought you were saying court and you [snorts] were saying >> that's right. Yeah. Merging two other words [laughter] instead.

[00:17:28]>> Right. Right. Exactly. Exact. And we find those low vowels are really shifty and they they do these weird mergers.

[00:17:34]And Americans have very disperate forms of that merger, right? So in New England, it's a little different than, you know, and it depends what part of New England you're in, right? If you have it or not. So it's really complex.

[00:17:46]In Pennsylvania, parts of Pennsylvania have it, other parts don't. It's a very complex thing. But the long and short of it, they measured Canadians who have that merger who moved to New York and I think they'd been there about 5 years and they studied those vowels particularly because New Yorkers do not have them merged at all. And what they found was none of the Canadians mer unmmerged completely, but they had all unmerged to some degree. So um and it was particularly unmerged in words that were highly salient like coffee. But even in words that were less salient after 5 years they had actually started to move those vowels somewhat together.

[00:18:24]So they didn't sound like New Yorkers but they didn't sound like Canadians either. So what we really see is that you probably never become perfect native in your articulation in the patterns that you do. But you do start to move closer to this new place in a way that also distances you from your old place.

[00:18:42]So you're kind of a dialect or accent Frankenstein, I think, is the way to think about it. [laughter] So you have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and you've kind of cobbled together this whole new accent that makes you sound kind of like neither, but a little more like that new place you're at. But the fact that you do it more in the highly salient words like coffee or talk, which are words that New Yorkers often are heard and kind of stereotyped about suggests that maybe that makes you sound more native even if you're not doing it everywhere. So when I said never and immediately, that's kind of what I meant that you pick up some aspects and others you'll never quite get.

[00:19:17]>> That's cool. Linguistic Frankenstein is my favorite takeaway from this so far.

[00:19:20]>> I love it. I just think it's so true, right? A little bit of that and a little bit of this, right? And hopefully it's not a monster. [laughter] >> We had a maths teacher who went away.

[00:19:30]This is when I was in secondary school.

[00:19:32]So from the ages of 11 through to 16.

[00:19:36]And she arrived. She came back about four years later. Having been in America. We didn't know any more than that. That was exotic enough to know she'd been in America. And she came back and so far as we were concerned, she now spoke American. She just had this. And I think if any of if either of you heard her, you wouldn't have thought she had an American accent necessarily, but we absolutely thought she did. And she managed that in four years, which I I feel as though you have to really go out of your way to change your accent that extremely.

[00:20:06]>> It's really it's dependent on a lot of factors. So I mean, obviously the age at which you leave is a big one. So if you move away to a new accent area as a child, you'll be much more successful at sounding like a native. So, if you're if you're five and you move somewhere else, you will not sound like where you came from. You will sound like your new place. But if you're 25, it'll be a little different. And it really depends on a number of things like how long you're there because it's repeated exposure that helps us with pattern recognition. So, if you're there a month, it's going to be different than four or five years, but also what you're doing there and what your integration into that network is. So, if you move to a new place and you really like despise everybody there, you're definitely not going to have the motivation to sound like them. And those those are not the identity models you're going to aim at.

[00:20:49]But if you are marry, you know, you marry someone from this new place. So say I meet this, you know, incredibly hot Australian and I'm like, "Ah, God, yes, I'll follow you to the ends of the earth, even if that's Australia with all these deadly creatures, and I move to Australia." And so I'm hanging out with his family and we all our friends are Australian, then my motivation and identity is going to shift me towards that model to a much greater degree. Um, and then the third factor is sort of cognitive ones. Some of us are simply better at picking up new tricks, linguistically speaking, than others.

[00:21:21]And there is a sort of correlation with musical ability. So people that are better at hearing different tones. And that doesn't mean you're necessarily, you know, a piano virtuoso or anything, but some people seem to be innately better at hearing these fine distinctions in tones. Those people actually seem to be better at picking up languages and accents. Um, and there are probably neurobiological differences among us in terms of what brain resources are marshaled in doing this.

[00:21:47]So I think there's a combination of factors that can determine how well you pick up a new accent. But a lot of it is really what you're doing there and why you want to pick it up or whether you don't. So there, you know, there are a lot of reasons why we can or cannot pick up an accent, but the basic fact is we can very rarely pick it up. Exactly. So, even those of us that are really good at it generally don't sound native like when we move someplace.

[00:22:12]>> I have a friend who moved here, moved to Tennessee and then Kansas from uh the UK and she still she still doesn't soften her I'm probably using the wrong term here, but she doesn't soften her TE's, but otherwise she sounds relatively uh relatively similar. But this calls to mind the what is it the three generation pattern.

[00:22:35]>> Yes. Yes. Which I think you've written about before.

[00:22:37]>> That's sort of the process of language nivization over time kind of. So when when you have parents like I did, my parents are actually both French speakers and they moved to the United States um before I was born and I was born here and so they spoke French and I'm the second generation and I speak English and have pretty bad skills at French but some skills at French and my children have zero French ability. That's the three generation pattern and we find that very very typical. Um in fact the it's basically a guarantee when a new group moves to a new place and they have children that they're by the time they have grandchildren those grandchildren will speak the language of the new place and have forgotten the language of the old or at most have some sort of passive understanding of it. So, for example, um my university is a Hispanic serving institution, which means we have a lot of Spanish heritage students there, and almost all of them are grandchildren.

[00:23:37]So, they're almost all the third generation. And most of them say they're really embarrassed to be with their grandparents and try to speak Spanish because their Spanish is so bad. Um they said, I they all say, "I can understand them, but I have a real a real difficulty talking to them." Um, and you know, so it's not always the case that they don't speak any Spanish, but it's almost always the case that English is the dominant language for them. And that's called the three generation pattern. And you know, at the time of the revolution, the founding fathers, particularly Ben Franklin, were really concerned about all these foreign, you know, non-English speakers that were moving in, especially those Germans. And he said horrible things about the Germans and called them a lot of names that we would not want to repeat. But it, you know, has it turned out that German, the German language destroyed English? Absolutely not. And it's the same that would be true for Spanish today. We hear exactly the same complaints about Spanish coming in and worry worries about what it's going to do to English that Benjamin Franklin fredded about with the Germans and the French at the time of the revolution.

[00:24:43]Generally, it has not affected English except it's been absorbed and maybe we've gotten words and enrichment from it, but not destruction and decay. And that's because of this third generation pattern. It's not that we get absorbed into new languages. It's that new languages get absorbed into ours. And that's really what the three generation pattern it talks about. Now, it's sad for native languages. So, it doesn't bode well for people who want to preserve their language history because this is the pattern that happens. And this is why so many Native American languages have died because the grandchildren rarely speak the language uh of their grandparents. I actually have studied some Native American languages in Nevada and it it was exceptionally hard to find anybody who still spoke those languages and all of them were the elders of the tribe.

[00:25:30]>> So it's not really a question of immigration is it? It's a question of numbers in that case.

[00:25:36]>> Right. And and interaction I mean interaction is the bread and butter of everything language wise. So when we move to a new place and we stay in a certain community. So I think what happens a lot of times when the first generation moves they're in enclave communities. So they move to where all these other people from their community back home move to. And so then they may only interact with those people. And we see in in big cities we have these kinds of like little Italy, Chinatown where a lot you could move and speak only the language that you came from. But generally children then go out in the world. So the grandparents might have lived and only spoken Chinese in Chinatown, but their children go to school with kids that speak English, and that's the dominant language, and that's the one they see most social rewards from. And so they they shift towards English. And so, you know, you could possibly live your life in those little enclaved communities and never learn a language, but it it doesn't happen that way because of what we want as a child of a new place. And usually what we want as a child of a new place is to in sort of enlarge our world beyond the, you know, five blocks of Chinatown. And so that's just naturally how it occurs.

[00:26:48]>> Does this kind of thing happen to accents too? Are are we sort of are American accents leveling out?

[00:26:54]>> Yeah. And it's a really fascinating story with American accents because what almost every new study that has ever been done in the last 20 years on regional American accents in urban areas in the United States. So rural areas are a whole different ballgame. But urban areas, which is where most language studies happen, have shown the same pattern that starting with generation X, accents are disappearing regionally. Um, and people are moving towards this sort of more pan regional, pan global English accent, but still American, but just not with the sort of features that typify local speech. And there are a number of different factors that have influenced that. Of course, the one that everybody points to is like, oh, it's got to be social media, right? People just talk to their phones now, so why would you talk to a real person nearby? And that certainly is true of Gen Alpha and Gen Z. And I guess it will be true of Gen Beta, which was just born. But um generally speaking, it it's a process that started long ago. So it's not just like Gen Z woke up and only looked at their phone and all of a sudden sound very different than their parents. You and I are perfect examples. And we're probably slightly different generations.

[00:28:02]I'm Gen X. So I'm the first generation for which this was true. And I think people would not know I was southern.

[00:28:08]And that's because I was actually the first generation for which these changes came through. And it was social and migratory and economic changes that really put this into play. One of the big factors of course for the South was actually air conditioning. Widespread adoption of air conditioning in the middle of the 20th century because why would anybody move to the south before that happened because for those that are listening from other places, the south is hot in the summer. Um, I mean, of course, every place now is hot in the summer, but [laughter] back then it was definitely hot and a company wasn't going to relocate from the north if they they couldn't, you know, have people survive in the office. So, air conditioning, the introduction of air conditioning in businesses and, you know, workplaces was a big motivator for people to start looking at the cheaper south. And so, that flooded non southerners into the south. So if you look at, for example, Raleigh, North Carolina, which is essentially now half people from outside the South, when children start going to school with other kids that no longer sound like the locals, they're going to start to sound less local themselves because their social network and interactions will be with people that don't sound so southern and don't have that same heritage. And then maybe their what's important to them changes too in terms of southern culture and being part of that. Um, and then, you know, of course, we have migratory changes with a lot of um, African-Americans going to the north in the early 1900s in something called the great migration.

[00:29:33]There was actually a reverse migration back from the north to the south in the latter half of the 20th century. And then the other big thing was suburbanization. So you move from urban centers where there was a lot of sort of um you know race hostility and people actually started to change their speech if they were white and black away from each other. So we actually see in the 20th century more diversity between af African-American and European-American speakers because of this sort of hostility that was encouraged in these urban dense centers. Well, as suburbanization happened, which was essentially white flight, then the children of those white speakers who had left, really didn't have that same racial hostility because they weren't in that same environment. And so that probably also created more cohesiveness between white and black speakers in terms of the way that their their features were or their adoption. I mean, really what it did is create more of an attraction for young white speakers to African-American norms. So all of these factors were part of Gen X really. And then of course you throw in social media which then makes your social world not local but global. And your attraction to local features, your rootedness in one place is really what's shifting. And it's rootedness in our desire to be like someone that really drives the accent we pick up.

[00:30:58]>> [music] >> I would love to pivot to another topic that I I think is a lot of fun and it's phono aesthetics or the idea that sounds themselves may have intrinsic appeal or or could cause aversions. So, this reminds me of word aversions and those words we love to hate collectively like moist and panties and crud. Could you talk to me a little bit about phono aesthetics and why we like words that don't?

[00:31:24]>> But sure. Now, those are great examples um because they are words that people hate. And I have a friend that w that when I first met her, she goes, "Okay, if you ever use the word panties around me, we can't be friends." [laughter] So, people definitely have some serious word aversions. Now, those three are things that describe gross things, right? Well, no, panties don't, but they they describe things that are sort of, you know, can have associations with sexualized behavior or uh body functions, things like that. crud is usually something gross. So in that sense, word aversions can be driven by the semantic associations or meaning associations. So there certainly is a lot of research on that. But what I'm interested in is more how the sounds of those words might also be contributing to the fact that we love or hate them.

[00:32:13]There has been a lot written about this weird word I think or combination of words that I have never personally thought of but then when people wrote about them as being particularly beautiful I was like ha actually that is a nice word so let me say the word and you tell me what you think seller door [laughter] >> now is that just the sexiest word you've ever heard or what [laughter] >> think about it in its Italian form >> well in the story from which this supposedly comes. It isn't Italian who makes the observation that this is a particularly beautiful collection in the English language. The production company that produced Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The the British version of it was called Celidor spelled C E L A D O R exact thing and actually non-rotic as well. They didn't bother with the R in the cellar. Celidor. Yeah, because so is it which is better or sellor?

[00:33:10]>> [laughter] >> Well, yeah, when you say it like that, but you know what's interesting about that? So, I've never particularly found seller door particularly attractive. I mean, maybe if a tornado is approaching, then I'm like, "Yes, get [laughter] me to the seller door." But in all other circumstances, it's never been a word I thought about, but it does highlight the sounds that have been photo, you know, when we look at phono aesthetics that have been studied as the sounds we like the most. And that is a class of sounds called sonarant sounds which is just a big fancy word for sounds that tend to have a very open articulation when we make them. So there's equal airflow on both sides of that articulation. So coming up through the mouth and exiting out of the mouth. So it's very singable.

[00:33:54]Right? When you have a very open articulation it's very singable. And sounds that are highly sonorate or open and flowing in their articulation are all vowel sounds. Those are the most sonorate sounds. So think and I'm sorry for anybody whose ears that hurt because singing is not my forte or L or R or N or M those are the most soner sounds also glides like W and Y. So any language that uses those in great frequency even if they don't necessarily have more of them than another language but they use them often or a word that has a lot more of those like seller door right that has a lot of vowels L's and Rs will be heard as more pleasing is the theory and there does seem to be something to it when we think about the languages that people love they tend to be highly sonerate languages so it's not just that they have more sonor consonants but it's that they occur more frequently and they have more open syllables because when you have more open syllables that by definition means it ends in a vowel which means you'll have more vowels occur more frequently and guess what languages those are things like French and Italian and Spanish which are the languages people do tend to point to as beautiful languages.

[00:35:11]English on the other hand has words like strengths with which are horrific from an open syllable standpoint and other than being globally powerful I don't think English would be considered beautiful because nothing about the English sound system is phono aesthetically pleasing in the ways that we have found people prefer certain sounds. So it's a whole fascinating field our feelings about what tends to be beautiful but it does seem to play a small role. The truth is when we actually study what drives people towards certain accents or certain languages, the biggest predictor in what language or accent people will like is familiarity. So the more familiar you are with something, particularly if it's ranked high on your social hierarchy, so it's, you know, considered a status language or accent for you, whether that means it's because it's people that you like or it's a powerful global language, that is the biggest predictor of what drives people to appreciate certain sounds and languages.

[00:36:11]>> I was looking at some research just a couple of years ago on languages considered most beautiful and the language that came out on top, most beautiful.

[00:36:20]All right, we can go into how they define that. But the language that came out on top was just by asking people what they thought was English. And the conclusion was it's just because more people have heard English. So it has this familiarity factor for almost everyone uh giving it a head start, >> right? Because really if you break down the sounds of English that it doesn't tend to be the ones that any photo aesthetic study has ever pointed to as a beautiful language. But like Hawaiian, which is very photo aesthetically pleasing by those criteria, hardly ever gets ranked on that list. And that's because a lot of people aren't familiar with Hawaiian. So I I you know, when you look at those lists, there is something about like French and Italian and they have the singability and the melodiousness and sort of the sexiness to them. And it's been called the phonetic chill factor, but the reality is those are also languages that people tend to be very familiar with. And so familiarity by far is what drives our linguistic loves and hates. There was another factor that you mentioned as well in the book which is whether a language is syllable timed or stress timed and I think you said that syllable timing is more attractive.

[00:37:32]>> That does seem to be something that is found that languages like Italian and French and Spanish which are syllable timed which simply means every syllable is basically given equal weight. So, you know, it sort of has this like bup rhythm where everything seems equal are considered more attractive than languages like German, Russian or English, which are what we call syllable timed languages, which is where you have certain syllables that that speaker stresses and then all the syllables in between the stress syllables have to be like jammed into this little timing unit, which is why we get a lot of vowel reduction in English and and say things like 'the' instead of the. It's because we're actually trying to cram those syllables into these little short segments. So, it has this more uneven tempo and it does seem to to be perceived less attractively than syllable time, which is sort of more rhythmic. But again, it's overruled by familiarity because, as you said, English is has not a lot of seniority compared to open syllable, more open syllable languages, and it's stress timed over syllable timed. And yet, it's often number one on those lists. So, we see how far that actually gets us when we actually ask people about their loves and hates.

[00:38:41]>> It's nicer when we am our pentameters.

[00:38:44][laughter] >> Exactly. It's one of those features of English that does not cross your mind until someone points it out to you. the fact that it takes as long to say uh I like pie as it does to say I really like pie just because or the nonressed in between the stressed ones >> until you're trying to learn it right so for I think where you really notice that is if you come from a different timed language and you're all of a sudden like what the heck what are they doing with these vowels right where they're reducing vowels and you don't languages that are syllable time don't have vowel reduction so then you come to English not only does it have this weird thing where jamming all these syllables into a one timing unit because they're not stressed, but then it's reducing some vowels. Like, how do you how do you figure that, right? Why do you why do you say h instead of a in this in this word? It just makes no sense. So, I think you do notice it when you're trying to learn it from a different language background, but as an English speaker, you never think about it because it's so natural. You've just learned it from birth. I remember many of the people with stronger southern accents in my high school French class had a harder time getting that French rhythm down because we tend to draw.

[00:39:57]Yes, exactly. So, I was a Chinese major in college. Um, don't ask me to say anything in Chinese today because that was a long time ago. But we had drill instructors they were called who were the people that kind of led the recitation, you know, where we'd practice the speech. And I was the only Southerner in that class. And even though I don't sound very southern and particularly when I was in college, I had just moved from the south. I was a little more southern, but I had that southern rhythm, sort of the southern intonation pattern, which is very a very salient part of southern speech. And my drill instructor would just shake shake his head and say, "H, you're like a Chinese opera singer [laughter] because I could not seem to get the tone system down." So, he just kind of gave up on me. But absolutely, there's sort of a rhythmic pattern to southern speech that that carries over.

[00:40:43]>> [music] >> One thing I did want to ask you about is prestige characteristics in accents. We s we we perceive certain ways of saying things as just a bit fancier, a bit more posh than others. Are those characteristics are they arbitrary entirely based upon who we're hearing them from? Or are there certain sounds that are inherently more prestigious?

[00:41:11]you know, they're really it's sort of the same thing as um if you're talking about what makes a certain sound beautiful or not um or language beautiful or not. It's really familiarity. It's really associations.

[00:41:22]And in terms of sound, I think the perfect example to show that there can't be anything intrinsic in a sound that makes it a better sound, a more posh sound or a more uneducated sound is our dropping. Because in British speech, um, in modern British speech, at least, dropping R post vocalically, so saying CA instead of car is considered prestigious, right? That's the form you aspire to for upper class sort of posh speech. But if you're in New York, and I'm not a very good New York New York accent, but you get my drift, then it's the complete opposite. It has sort of a real kind of workingass tough kind of uh persona that goes alongside it. And in fact, even in Britain when RD dropping first started, it was considered a crass a lowclass feature that gradually made it its way up the rank. So it is impossible if it's exactly the same feature because the rules that govern our dropping in Britain and our dropping in New York are identical and historically related. The evaluation in Britain is oh this is great. The evaluation in New York is it's kind of indicative of class that's not high class. So it can't be there's something about our dropping that's driving at that. It's more about our feelings about the speakers and the groups we associate those features with. And so that's really where we get these prestige associations. In fact, if you look at how people rate speech like RP versus, you know, a maybe um nonp prestigious maybe northern British accent, but let's take a bremy accent, which I know is one that doesn't tend to get a lot of love in Britain. and then an RP accent, which is one that is often considered posh and and have a lot of prestige. And you take a speaker who doesn't speak English and has no knowledge of of British hierarchy in accents, and you play them both of those accents along with another a number of others, and you ask them to rate what they like and what they don't.

[00:43:17]What we find when we do those studies, which have been done, is that it's arbitrary. So that will they find ones they like more than others? Sure. But are we able when we sort of tabulate across a number of evaluators what's driving it? No. Is there ever consensus like, "Oh my gosh, RP is so much better." No. But when you take, say, an American English speaker and you play those two, we've been trained to think RP speakers are just the bomb. And so we we tend to be like, "Oh yeah, they sound so much better." And it really is just our familiarity and the social associations or the social connotations that we've learned to associate. And we see that starts really early. So even children that have been exposed to a prestige dialect of their variety of their language and a non-prestige, maybe they're a speaker of a less prestigious variety themselves. Very early, as early as like five or six, they'll actually say the other one sounds better or sounds good because they've learned those associations. um very early on. So it's something we are trained in right to have those associations. But if if I've not been trained when we take speakers that have never had that training, there is an arbitrary association with those sounds. Now, there is one exception in a couple of studies that have been they're they're less frequent studies, but they do point to something that might be interesting and and perhaps more typical of um non-standard varieties or relaxed varieties, which is that uh study was done with, for example, Wolof, which has a lot of French influence, but is not a French language and spoken in Sagal. And um what they found was speakers that weren't familiar with Wolof at all were able to locate which ones were the high varieties and the lower varieties. And it's it could possibly be related to the fact that it has a lot of French influence and the ones that are considered a little more prestigious varieties tend to have more French influence and maybe people are actually familiar with French and that's what they're reacting to. But there was another study done elsewhere that also showed something that suggested that when we listen to varieties that that have a lot of reduction. So remember in English I said there's a lot of vowel reduction and things like that that maybe those they hear those as less prestigious because in their own language less prestigious varieties are tend to be ones that are not as norming on saying full forms. um which makes sense and maybe so maybe there is something to that possibly but generally speaking anything that we hear as good in a sound right so in American English for example we say water in um cochney you say w in British you know standard southern British you say water well an American if you ask them which three sounds better well 100% will say well maybe 90% maybe there's some people that just love American water or cogn but most people will say well water is a better right with the t articulation um but in actual fact there's nothing like no Americans say water because it's just a natural tendency between a stressed and unstressed syllable and if someone from another language was asked among those three they would hardly ever notice a difference right they might say oh yeah they're all three I mean they wouldn't there' be no it would be arbitrary it would just be whatever they heard or they'd probably hear the American version as more high prestige because of their associations with English because they have heard that American English more often. So yeah, there's really it's really very arbitrary what we pick as prestigious and posh and uneducated and crass.

[00:46:54]>> I mean even in that example, you're penalizing the dropping as we would call it of the T in water but not penalizing the dropping of the R at the end of water.

[00:47:05]>> It's completely arbitrary, right?

[00:47:07]because all three are showing the exact same process. This is what people don't understand is that we all are doing the same thing but how it's coming out is what's different and because we can't seem to generalize like okay it's all this either assimilatory or weakening process that is natural in language in all three cases every speaker of all three of those act of those accents are doing the exact same thing they're weakening right so in in the loss of R what we see historically is that R starts to weaken where it's not said as strongly. So historically we think that actually American R and British R was a trill kind of like Scottish still has that trill R that burr that Scottish burr that was probably historically the R that descended eventually into the R we have but it weakened over time. So already every R that every British and American English or every English English and American English speaker says is already a weaker version of the R that once started. So then you drop that R completely, that's like the ultimate form of weakening. But no one criticizes a a standard southern British English speaker for doing that. But if you are a Cockney speaker and you you don't you're not completely dropping the tea, you're weakening it because a glottle stop is actually still a sound, right? It's the glatus coming together, but what you've lost in that case is the the mouth articulation which used to make the tea. So you say w where it's the glauatus coming together instead of water where the tongue is also tapping the alvear ridge. So that's also weakening. It's not even as much weakening as the ard dropping was. And yet you judge a cochney speaker negatively and lazy and uneducated, but a standard southern British speaker just sounds posh. So it's just completely arbitrary what we think.

[00:48:54]>> Thank you so much for joining us, Valerie.

[00:48:56]>> Oh, it's been a blast. Thank you for having me. We hope you'll check out the books by our lovely guest Valerie Fidland. We've got like literally dude.

[00:49:04]This is the first one that I read by her called it's about arguing for the good in bad English. And then we have why we talk funny the real story behind our accents which is her more recent book and on the topic of what we spoke today or what we spoke about today. We'll see you next time on words unraveled.

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