February 18, 2022 • 27 mins
Heyo, why do you talk like that?
Do French babies cry in French? Our accents may start to take shape well before we learn our first words. Dessa investigates why we speak the way we do - how our accents and dialects serve us; hamper us; and might even, in rare cases, lead to life-or-death consequences.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, this podcast includes an unbleeped swear word that's important
to a story we tell, so if you've got kids
or sensitive years around, you might want to save this
one for later. Olivia Coleman, the impossibly talented British actress,
worked with an accent coach to prepare to play the
(00:21):
Queen of England, and the coach explained that to pronounce
the word yes, as her Majesty would, Olivia should say
the word that's spelled E A R S, like the
things on the side of your head. Okay, this might
work slightly better if you have a British accent, but
I'm gonna give it a go. Yes, yes, I love that,
(00:45):
I love it. Okay, here's another language parlor trick may
be suited better for a new world accent. Say the
words rise up lights in quick succession, rise of lights,
rise of lights, and boom you're an Australian sand razor blades.
(01:08):
I am fascinated by accents and regional dialects, and I
think a lot of us are. We like knowing how
other people swear, the kind of slang they fling around
that the American zucchini is the British Courgette that in India,
the opposite of postponing something is to prepon it, to
hear our own familiar language. The substrate of our thoughts
(01:29):
made new and novel is just a little electric thrill.
So how exactly our accents forged? Can they change? And
how might they affect the trajectory of our lives? You
are listening to deeply human and I am Dessa hereby
asking the question why do you talk like that? My
(01:53):
name is John Ball. It rhymes with however you pronounced
the words l A w or or saw. That takes
into account than any different regional accents. So if someone
is from the South, is John Bower, you know? Or
if it's a New Yorkist, John Blow? All right? So
it rhymes with law and so. John ba is the
(02:17):
president of the Linguistic Society of America and a professor
at Washington University in St. Louis. Lawyers sometimes called John
to ask for his help in what's called linguistic forensics,
legal analysis of speech to help shed light on a crime.
He's been asked to serve as an expert witness for
more than one trial involving homicide, and, as he puts it,
(02:38):
a person's accent could be the difference between life and death.
Let's back up to a pivotal moment in his career.
In the nineties, he became particularly interested in an insidious
phenomenon now called linguistic profiling. So linguistic profiling occurs when
someone calls for goods or services over the telephone and
(03:02):
site unseen, the person who receives the call denies those
goods or services based on stereotypes about the person's speech.
And this interest wasn't entirely academic. John himself was making
calls looking for a new apartment, and in a few instances,
when I showed up in person, I was told that
(03:23):
nothing is available. You know, and I'm African American. A
lot of people can't tell that from my professional voice.
And no one said, oh, I am so sorry. Had
you sounded African American over the telephone, I would have
never given you an appointment, right, I mean that that's
a slam dunk lawsuit I win. So they would always
(03:45):
come up with some other excuse. But you know, I
was suspicious, So he decided to run a formal experiment. Yeah,
I can modify my speech. So I grew up in
l A you understanding the in the city, and in
Los Angeles I had a lot of Mexican American friends,
So in the experiment I modified my own speech and used, Hello,
(04:09):
I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper.
And I'd say Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you
have advertised in the paper, or along coming about the
apartment you have advertised in the paper. The sentence was
always the same, and John was always the person calling,
so the voice was the same. The only difference was
the accent. As you might guess, the accent made a
(04:32):
big difference. Landlords were screening out potential renters whose speech
implied they were from minority communities, and as a general rule,
the discrimination was worse in affluent neighborhoods. And it's international.
We've done these experiments in South Africa and Brazil, in France,
and you know, every place that's an advanced industrialized society
(04:54):
has its own version of this. Linguistic profiling is also
bigger than ray. Other research revealed that female voices calling
to ask about an open executive position in a bank
were informed that it had already been filled, whereas mail
callers were more likely to be told it was still available.
Gay men have also reported being denied goods or services
(05:16):
because of the way that they speak. Okay, quick self
interruption here to note that none of us speak in
exactly the same way at all times. The way that
you'd voice frustration at having been cut off in traffic
by some ding dong in a miyata with flame decals
is not the same way that you'd voice frustration in
an all staff meeting. What's commonly called code switching, though
(05:37):
john Ball might more accurately call it style shifting, is
the way we change our speech based on context or company.
The ability to identify even really subtle details of dialect
has made John Ball a powerful expert witness and criminal court.
In one particular case, a murder case, he was called
(05:58):
in to analyze the recording of a phone call. If
you're arrested and you go to jail in the United States,
any phone call that you make can be recorded by
law enforcement, and anything you say during that phone call
can be used against you in a court of law.
A crucial bit of the prosecution's case centered on the
(06:18):
content of a call in which the defendant spoke to
his cousin on a jailhouse phone. Both speakers were young
black men, and so his cousin thought that it would
be to his advantage to have a speedy trial, and
he asked him, He said, well, why don't you do
a speedy trial. The defendant's answer to this question, according
(06:38):
to the prosecutor, was a smoking gun. The prosecutor produced
a transcript that said, why would I want a speedy
trial when I know I committed this ship And that
for the prosecutor was the admission of guilt that the
prosecutor needed in order to pursue the convict sction aggressively.
(07:03):
But when John heard the recording, he wasn't sure that's
what the defendants said at all. He heard a totally
different sentence, which will explain in a moment, because a
particular vowel caught his ear. Both speakers were using what
scholars referred to as African American vernacular English, and John
wondered if the prosecutor just didn't know how to interpret it.
Maybe the confession wasn't a confession at all. The prosecutor
(07:28):
likely wasn't very well acquainted with a dialect used by
the young man on trial. Our accents and patterns of
speech can vary dramatically, even for people who live very
near one another, and often those differences are perpetuated on purpose.
People from Boston don't want to sound like people for
(07:50):
New York. Right, If you're a Red Sox fan, you
don't want to sound like a Yankees fan. That is
Aaron Dinkin. He teaches socio linguistics at San Diego State University,
and he focuses on variations in American English dialects and
how they change over time, features of linguistic variation, just
get all of this subconscious social freight assigned to them,
(08:14):
not just in terms of regional dialects, but also in
terms of gender and social class and ethnicity. That word
dialect describes all the features of a manner of speaking
a language, our pronunciation, rhythms, melodies, and the particularities of
our vocabularies. So think of the British lift versus the
(08:36):
American elevator, or the British adjective hinch versus the American honky,
the British fly tipper versus the American. Okay, admittedly, I
just learned that word this morning, and I think it's
a person who dumps a lot of trash without paying
for proper disposal. I'm not sure we have those in America. Well,
I'm sure we have people who do that, but I
(08:57):
don't think we've given them a proper name, So the
just call them garbage scoundrels. Anyway, your accent is shaped
not only by where you're from, but by all sorts
of super fine tuned markers. Aaron told me about this
one study by a researcher named Suzanne Wagner that illustrates
how a single vowel sound can serve as a hook
on which all sorts of identities are home. So we're
(09:19):
talking about the long eye vowel in words like fight
and price and rice. It has been found that statistically
in Philadelphia, there is a change in the pronunciation of
that taking place where what was originally I as in
fight and rice is changing more towards that I as
(09:43):
in fight and rice. And it has been found that
again statistically, not like a hard and fast distinction, but
just you know, on average, men are more likely to
pronounce the vowel a little bit closer to A as
in fight and rice, and women are more likely to
pronounce it a little bit less far along that curve
(10:06):
and it sounds so brey right, so it got that
associated with it. But she found that that I pronunciation
was a little bit more common among the girls who
were less invested in conforming to conventional femininity and who
(10:29):
were more invested in like appearing tough, or the ones
who were more likely to get into fights, which is
perceived as a masculine thing. And there was an ethnic
correlation as well, because for the most part, the more
conventionally feminine girls in this neighborhood in South Philly were
(10:53):
Italian American and the Irish American girls were more interested
in seeming tough. Word broy freaking. This one vowel, even
just a little, really meant something. It meant something about
Irish roots versus Italian ones. It meant something about the
(11:14):
relative merit of trying to be fem versus trying to
be tough, and the girls knew it. I read some
of their research interviews. It was like two worldviews competing
for dominance in that little dot above a lower case I.
The vowel change in South Philadelphia is a subtle one,
but accents can diverge enough to cause confusion between speakers
of the same language. If I were watching a movie
(11:36):
whose character spoken like Scottish brogue or something, I'd probably
have to turn on the subtitles to track the action.
Which brings us back to John Baw, the expert witness
in the murder case and the defendant speaking African American
Vernacular English on a call with his cousin. To study
the roots of that dialect is to understand the extreme
(11:58):
pressures that forged it. The linguistic heritage of slaves in
the United States is unique in comparison to every other group.
Slave traders separated slaves whenever they could based on language.
Beginning in the slave factories on the West coast of Africa,
(12:19):
people who spoke the same language were forcibly kept apart.
If you don't share the same language, then you're less
likely to be able to, you know, foment an insurrection.
So that explains why no African language survived the Atlantic crossing. Intact,
We've got lots of communities where Polish is spoken, or
(12:42):
German is spoken, or Italian is spoken, but there's no
community where TWEE survived. And then it was illegal to
teach slaves to read and write African American vernacular English
can differ from the kind of English that's taught in
textbooks in many ways, in part because of this interrupted heritage,
and it's also the product of a lot of really
(13:03):
varied linguistic influences. If I say i'll be i'll be done,
told this story a thousand times, Okay, That use of
be done can be traced back to Scott's Irish dialects
and the indentured servants that introduced that to the slaves.
The dialect that's considered standard or correct, or the Queen's English,
or whatever you want to call it, that kind of
(13:25):
status is really usually just the product of the fact
that the classes in power consider their own way of
speaking as correct. But linguists recognize that, at least from
a purely theoretical point of view, all languages and dialects
are equal, but they do vary. And the dialect spoken
by the defendant on trial for murder was not the
(13:46):
same as the one spoken by the prosecutor. John took
the taped call, which included the so called confession, to
his language lab and he slowed it down to analyze
every sound, and he began some research with speakers of
the same dialect. I conducted some experiments with African American
men similar background, same age, who were listening to the
(14:09):
recording under headphones, and I had them produce at the
same pace. You know, I know I committed this ship
versus I know I ain't committed this ship. Okay, let's
break that down. That one syllable from the defendant is
the crucial detail on which John's testimony hinges and in actuality,
what he said in black dialect was whim a dual
(14:31):
speedy trial, want to know and committed this ship now
when I know I ain't committed is a nasalized dip
thong without the tea of the word ain't. What the
prosecutor had taken for a confession, John understood is a
statement of innocence. He took the stand and shared that
analysis with the jury, and he presented them with an
(14:53):
image called a voice print, a graphic that showed the
sound waves of both sentences. You can see the different
it's more clearly than you can hear the difference. After
all the evidence was presented, the jurors went to deliberate,
and the stakes of the verdict were really, really high.
The crime that was committed was one where the defendant
(15:14):
was eligible for execution, so essentially the single nasalized vowel
sound potentially could be the difference between life and death.
The jury was asked not only for a verdict, but
to decide whether to impose capital punishment a death sentence
if they found him guilty. In the end, the jurors
(15:35):
didn't vote to equit the defendant. They did find him guilty,
but the jury decided not to invoke the death penalty.
So it could well be that John's testimony, undermining the
otherwise damning confession, stopped them from issuing a death sentence.
(16:00):
Your particular dialect, which can shape your life and reflect
all sorts of facets of your identity, probably started to
gel before you learned your first word. Okay, we get
the idea. You can really only take so much of
that anyway. Researchers led by Kathleen Vermke at the University
(16:20):
of Wurtzburg in Germany have found that infants cry and
the melody of the language they've heard while in the womb,
so French babies tend to produce cries with the rising
melody contour, whereas German babies produce more falling ones. Both
patterns distinguishable from babies crying in Mandarin. But as soon
as we're old enough to spend time with our peers,
the parental influence on our language quickly dims in comparison
(16:43):
to that of our own social groups. Back to socio
linguist erindiccken to a kindergartener. If there is nobody cooler
than a first grader, right, So that's who becomes your
new lingualistic models. But the profits of language teenagers, the
way that like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year old speak, that
(17:05):
is what's in the crystal ball, the nascent trends that
will shape the speech of the future, and about of
language innovations are first used by women or girls. So
what changes are currently underway? What sort of language forecast
are we in for? Well, in the North American corner
of the map, there is a front coming in. It's
(17:28):
been called the California shift, it's been called the third
dialect shift, it's been called the Canadian shift, the short
front vowel shift, or the low back Merger shift. So
I'm talking about the short O vowel as in c
ot cot and then this other vowel as in c
A U g h T cont and since I'm from Massachusetts,
(17:53):
I pronounced those two the same already. I say caught
and caught, but somebody from New York City, for example,
might say c ot cot and c a U g
h T court. Essentially, two distinct vowel sounds are collapsing
into one single sound, and this is creating a chain
reaction all over Vowelville. So other vowels are essentially shifting
(18:17):
to fill in the space left by this convergence. Think
of how tectonic plates shift and collide and push one
another around. So the third dialect shift involves the short
a as in the cat and the hat, moving backwards
towards like the cat and the hot the e and
dress and the eye and fit those are morphing too,
(18:39):
So that's what the third dialect shift is. The short A,
short E, and short eye vowels all moving kind of
down and back in the geography of the mouth. So
maybe when we hit the ten thousandth episode of Deeply
Human will be calling it a podcast as about human behavior,
(19:02):
I don't talk about the vowel sounds in English seem
particularly susceptible to this kind of evolution. This may be
because English, as compared to other languages, has a bunch
of vowel sounds somewhere between eleven and sixteen, which means
that each of them has sort of a narrow lane,
like if you move your tongue just a little bit
one way or the other, you wander into the neighboring sound. Spanish,
(19:26):
by comparison, has only five vowel sounds, and Aaron says
that some of those have been stable for as long
as linguists have been able to trace their history. Okay,
speaking of foreign languages, James, that's the signal, James, my guy,
play the next clip. My name's Katie Harris, thank you,
(19:50):
and I run a website called Drew of Languages, which
is where we help adults learn a foreign language by
making it far and making the grammar explanations really really simple.
Katie lives in Italy, and I'm told that her Italian
accent is pretty think good, like almost native. But it
was not always. So I've been living in Italy for
(20:14):
a year, nobody had ever told me about the difference
between single and double sounds. So in Italian there's this
difference between how long you hold a sound. So, for example,
if you say I'm not with two ends, then that
means year. But if you say are not with one
(20:36):
end a shorter end, then that means anus. So it
can be quite dangerous, especially because in Italian, so to
say your age, it's like Spanish, where you say I
have thirty five years. So I thought I'd been walking
around telling people that. Well at the time, you know,
I had twenty three anuses. It's unfortunate. Yeah, Katie, who
(21:01):
I will note also speak Spanish and French and some
German and some Mandarin, had to really focus on getting
her Italian accent down, whereas it comes more easily to
very young humans. Babies when they're born are able to fully,
of course, perceive the difference between any sound in any
of the world's languages. It's almost as if their brain
(21:25):
starts to lock on to the first language that they learned,
so that then it becomes more difficult to hear the
difference between other sounds and therefore pronounce them as well.
If you focus on learning the sounds of a language
in the same way that you focus on learning the words,
it's quite possible to train yourself to pronounce new sounds.
(21:46):
You have to be patient because it's a bit like
going to the gym. You have to change the muscles
in your mouth, so that takes a little bit of time,
but it's absolutely possible to learn them. I spoke to
an accent coach, Jack Alas, who said that part of
the challenge is just to make people aware of all
their muscles. So sometimes teachers will ask students to roll
(22:07):
a blueberry on their tongue just to get a sense
of what's really going on in there. Being a language
teacher and learner herself, Katie is dialed into all the
tiny variations of speech sounds around her. For example, my
partner speaks wonderful English. He's Italian, but he still has
an Italian accent. He asked me about the pronunciation of things,
(22:29):
for example, saying, the Italians when they speak English, tend
to say because they don't have the sound, and if
we just sit and I explain how to make it,
he can make it perfectly. It sounds native. And then
I asked him why he doesn't actually do it when
he's speaking English, and he said, it feels silly. I
(22:50):
feel like I'm trying to pretend to be somebody that
I'm not. I don't want to pretend to be an
English person. I'm Italian. I'm happy to sound like an Italian.
He's speaking English. Okay. By this point you've probably picked
up on the fact that identity is a big theme here. So,
for example, if I think about chefs who might have
been living in the country for twenty thirty years, say
(23:12):
an Italian chef living in the US. For some reason,
I've always noticed that chefs always really tend to keep
their accents, even if they've been living there for decades.
I think it's probably because it's useful to them. They
have no reason to adopt a new local identity, because
the stronger their accent is, the more that people can
associate them with where they come from. So you know,
(23:33):
I personally would trust a pizza made by an Italian
chef that has a stronger Italian accent than they had
an American accent. Why you talk the way you do,
there's a product of a lifetime of layered factors. The
melodies of speech that make their way to you while
you're still an incubation, the words and phrases learned from
(23:54):
your parents, the rough and tumbled talk of the first
greater jet set, and then in humorable, fine layers of
identity informed by the slang at the girl's table, in
the lunch room, the talk in the brake room, maybe
the language of the Sunday sermon. You're like a walking
archaeological dig of language, and of course they are your
own aspirations to speak like the person you'd like to be.
(24:17):
My job as a scientist is to try to have
people appreciate and respect that someone who's linguistic background is
substantially different from your own is equally worthy of your respect,
your kindness, and the assumption that they may be just
(24:39):
as intelligent and just as capable as those people that
you prefer in your own linguistic comfort zone. Snaps Wow,
landed Man, Well, let me give you your shoutout girlfriend,
because you are good. What kind of maniacal, self celebratory
podcast host would include that complimentary bit of audio. If
(25:02):
you guessed this guy, yes you are correct, Watch out Olivia. Also,
let me share a quote from author Amy Chua, but
struck a chord with me. Do you know what a
foreign accent is? It's a sign of bravery. Okay, let
(25:23):
the record show what a highbrow podcast you are listening to,
and that we got almost all the way to the
end of this thing before even mentioning the fact that
some accents are just really sexy, like unwholesomely charged with
pure animal Hang on, we'll come back to that in
(25:44):
a second. Got into the credits first. Deeply Human is
a BBC World Service and American Public Media co production
with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Tessa. Find
her online on Instagram, Darling on Twitter. My French friend
(26:05):
who lives in Milatin. When she was in the States
for a while, she found the perfect pickup line was
to say, I'm French, but they live in Milan. Is
she single? Yes? But she wasn't when she was in
(26:26):
the States because it was so easy. Everyone would melt
as soon as she said it. If you play music
for a nine month old baby, they'll start to squirm
and bop around and dance in whatever manner is possible
for somebody who can't yet stand unsupported in whose arms
are barely long enough to reach over their own heads.
(26:48):
Join me Tessa for the next Deeply Human to find
out why our bodies respond to rhythm and if you
dig the podcast and you've got an extra forty five seconds,
rate us and drop us a review. I read them all,
and more than once I have referenced to review while
chatting with the team to craft a new episode. Thanks
per usual for listening, and we'll see you. Next question.
Hey, this podcast includes an unbleeped swear word that's important
to a story we tell, so if you've got kids
or sensitive years around, you might want to save this
one for later. Olivia Coleman, the impossibly talented British actress,
worked with an accent coach to prepare to play the
(00:21):
Queen of England, and the coach explained that to pronounce
the word yes, as her Majesty would, Olivia should say
the word that's spelled E A R S, like the
things on the side of your head. Okay, this might
work slightly better if you have a British accent, but
I'm gonna give it a go. Yes, yes, I love that,
(00:45):
I love it. Okay, here's another language parlor trick may
be suited better for a new world accent. Say the
words rise up lights in quick succession, rise of lights,
rise of lights, and boom you're an Australian sand razor blades.
(01:08):
I am fascinated by accents and regional dialects, and I
think a lot of us are. We like knowing how
other people swear, the kind of slang they fling around
that the American zucchini is the British Courgette that in India,
the opposite of postponing something is to prepon it, to
hear our own familiar language. The substrate of our thoughts
(01:29):
made new and novel is just a little electric thrill.
So how exactly our accents forged? Can they change? And
how might they affect the trajectory of our lives? You
are listening to deeply human and I am Dessa hereby
asking the question why do you talk like that? My
(01:53):
name is John Ball. It rhymes with however you pronounced
the words l A w or or saw. That takes
into account than any different regional accents. So if someone
is from the South, is John Bower, you know? Or
if it's a New Yorkist, John Blow? All right? So
it rhymes with law and so. John ba is the
(02:17):
president of the Linguistic Society of America and a professor
at Washington University in St. Louis. Lawyers sometimes called John
to ask for his help in what's called linguistic forensics,
legal analysis of speech to help shed light on a crime.
He's been asked to serve as an expert witness for
more than one trial involving homicide, and, as he puts it,
(02:38):
a person's accent could be the difference between life and death.
Let's back up to a pivotal moment in his career.
In the nineties, he became particularly interested in an insidious
phenomenon now called linguistic profiling. So linguistic profiling occurs when
someone calls for goods or services over the telephone and
(03:02):
site unseen, the person who receives the call denies those
goods or services based on stereotypes about the person's speech.
And this interest wasn't entirely academic. John himself was making
calls looking for a new apartment, and in a few instances,
when I showed up in person, I was told that
(03:23):
nothing is available. You know, and I'm African American. A
lot of people can't tell that from my professional voice.
And no one said, oh, I am so sorry. Had
you sounded African American over the telephone, I would have
never given you an appointment, right, I mean that that's
a slam dunk lawsuit I win. So they would always
(03:45):
come up with some other excuse. But you know, I
was suspicious, So he decided to run a formal experiment. Yeah,
I can modify my speech. So I grew up in
l A you understanding the in the city, and in
Los Angeles I had a lot of Mexican American friends,
So in the experiment I modified my own speech and used, Hello,
(04:09):
I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper.
And I'd say Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you
have advertised in the paper, or along coming about the
apartment you have advertised in the paper. The sentence was
always the same, and John was always the person calling,
so the voice was the same. The only difference was
the accent. As you might guess, the accent made a
(04:32):
big difference. Landlords were screening out potential renters whose speech
implied they were from minority communities, and as a general rule,
the discrimination was worse in affluent neighborhoods. And it's international.
We've done these experiments in South Africa and Brazil, in France,
and you know, every place that's an advanced industrialized society
(04:54):
has its own version of this. Linguistic profiling is also
bigger than ray. Other research revealed that female voices calling
to ask about an open executive position in a bank
were informed that it had already been filled, whereas mail
callers were more likely to be told it was still available.
Gay men have also reported being denied goods or services
(05:16):
because of the way that they speak. Okay, quick self
interruption here to note that none of us speak in
exactly the same way at all times. The way that
you'd voice frustration at having been cut off in traffic
by some ding dong in a miyata with flame decals
is not the same way that you'd voice frustration in
an all staff meeting. What's commonly called code switching, though
(05:37):
john Ball might more accurately call it style shifting, is
the way we change our speech based on context or company.
The ability to identify even really subtle details of dialect
has made John Ball a powerful expert witness and criminal court.
In one particular case, a murder case, he was called
(05:58):
in to analyze the recording of a phone call. If
you're arrested and you go to jail in the United States,
any phone call that you make can be recorded by
law enforcement, and anything you say during that phone call
can be used against you in a court of law.
A crucial bit of the prosecution's case centered on the
(06:18):
content of a call in which the defendant spoke to
his cousin on a jailhouse phone. Both speakers were young
black men, and so his cousin thought that it would
be to his advantage to have a speedy trial, and
he asked him, He said, well, why don't you do
a speedy trial. The defendant's answer to this question, according
(06:38):
to the prosecutor, was a smoking gun. The prosecutor produced
a transcript that said, why would I want a speedy
trial when I know I committed this ship And that
for the prosecutor was the admission of guilt that the
prosecutor needed in order to pursue the convict sction aggressively.
(07:03):
But when John heard the recording, he wasn't sure that's
what the defendants said at all. He heard a totally
different sentence, which will explain in a moment, because a
particular vowel caught his ear. Both speakers were using what
scholars referred to as African American vernacular English, and John
wondered if the prosecutor just didn't know how to interpret it.
Maybe the confession wasn't a confession at all. The prosecutor
(07:28):
likely wasn't very well acquainted with a dialect used by
the young man on trial. Our accents and patterns of
speech can vary dramatically, even for people who live very
near one another, and often those differences are perpetuated on purpose.
People from Boston don't want to sound like people for
(07:50):
New York. Right, If you're a Red Sox fan, you
don't want to sound like a Yankees fan. That is
Aaron Dinkin. He teaches socio linguistics at San Diego State University,
and he focuses on variations in American English dialects and
how they change over time, features of linguistic variation, just
get all of this subconscious social freight assigned to them,
(08:14):
not just in terms of regional dialects, but also in
terms of gender and social class and ethnicity. That word
dialect describes all the features of a manner of speaking
a language, our pronunciation, rhythms, melodies, and the particularities of
our vocabularies. So think of the British lift versus the
(08:36):
American elevator, or the British adjective hinch versus the American honky,
the British fly tipper versus the American. Okay, admittedly, I
just learned that word this morning, and I think it's
a person who dumps a lot of trash without paying
for proper disposal. I'm not sure we have those in America. Well,
I'm sure we have people who do that, but I
(08:57):
don't think we've given them a proper name, So the
just call them garbage scoundrels. Anyway, your accent is shaped
not only by where you're from, but by all sorts
of super fine tuned markers. Aaron told me about this
one study by a researcher named Suzanne Wagner that illustrates
how a single vowel sound can serve as a hook
on which all sorts of identities are home. So we're
(09:19):
talking about the long eye vowel in words like fight
and price and rice. It has been found that statistically
in Philadelphia, there is a change in the pronunciation of
that taking place where what was originally I as in
fight and rice is changing more towards that I as
(09:43):
in fight and rice. And it has been found that
again statistically, not like a hard and fast distinction, but
just you know, on average, men are more likely to
pronounce the vowel a little bit closer to A as
in fight and rice, and women are more likely to
pronounce it a little bit less far along that curve
(10:06):
and it sounds so brey right, so it got that
associated with it. But she found that that I pronunciation
was a little bit more common among the girls who
were less invested in conforming to conventional femininity and who
(10:29):
were more invested in like appearing tough, or the ones
who were more likely to get into fights, which is
perceived as a masculine thing. And there was an ethnic
correlation as well, because for the most part, the more
conventionally feminine girls in this neighborhood in South Philly were
(10:53):
Italian American and the Irish American girls were more interested
in seeming tough. Word broy freaking. This one vowel, even
just a little, really meant something. It meant something about
Irish roots versus Italian ones. It meant something about the
(11:14):
relative merit of trying to be fem versus trying to
be tough, and the girls knew it. I read some
of their research interviews. It was like two worldviews competing
for dominance in that little dot above a lower case I.
The vowel change in South Philadelphia is a subtle one,
but accents can diverge enough to cause confusion between speakers
of the same language. If I were watching a movie
(11:36):
whose character spoken like Scottish brogue or something, I'd probably
have to turn on the subtitles to track the action.
Which brings us back to John Baw, the expert witness
in the murder case and the defendant speaking African American
Vernacular English on a call with his cousin. To study
the roots of that dialect is to understand the extreme
(11:58):
pressures that forged it. The linguistic heritage of slaves in
the United States is unique in comparison to every other group.
Slave traders separated slaves whenever they could based on language.
Beginning in the slave factories on the West coast of Africa,
(12:19):
people who spoke the same language were forcibly kept apart.
If you don't share the same language, then you're less
likely to be able to, you know, foment an insurrection.
So that explains why no African language survived the Atlantic crossing. Intact,
We've got lots of communities where Polish is spoken, or
(12:42):
German is spoken, or Italian is spoken, but there's no
community where TWEE survived. And then it was illegal to
teach slaves to read and write African American vernacular English
can differ from the kind of English that's taught in
textbooks in many ways, in part because of this interrupted heritage,
and it's also the product of a lot of really
(13:03):
varied linguistic influences. If I say i'll be i'll be done,
told this story a thousand times, Okay, That use of
be done can be traced back to Scott's Irish dialects
and the indentured servants that introduced that to the slaves.
The dialect that's considered standard or correct, or the Queen's English,
or whatever you want to call it, that kind of
(13:25):
status is really usually just the product of the fact
that the classes in power consider their own way of
speaking as correct. But linguists recognize that, at least from
a purely theoretical point of view, all languages and dialects
are equal, but they do vary. And the dialect spoken
by the defendant on trial for murder was not the
(13:46):
same as the one spoken by the prosecutor. John took
the taped call, which included the so called confession, to
his language lab and he slowed it down to analyze
every sound, and he began some research with speakers of
the same dialect. I conducted some experiments with African American
men similar background, same age, who were listening to the
(14:09):
recording under headphones, and I had them produce at the
same pace. You know, I know I committed this ship
versus I know I ain't committed this ship. Okay, let's
break that down. That one syllable from the defendant is
the crucial detail on which John's testimony hinges and in actuality,
what he said in black dialect was whim a dual
(14:31):
speedy trial, want to know and committed this ship now
when I know I ain't committed is a nasalized dip
thong without the tea of the word ain't. What the
prosecutor had taken for a confession, John understood is a
statement of innocence. He took the stand and shared that
analysis with the jury, and he presented them with an
(14:53):
image called a voice print, a graphic that showed the
sound waves of both sentences. You can see the different
it's more clearly than you can hear the difference. After
all the evidence was presented, the jurors went to deliberate,
and the stakes of the verdict were really, really high.
The crime that was committed was one where the defendant
(15:14):
was eligible for execution, so essentially the single nasalized vowel
sound potentially could be the difference between life and death.
The jury was asked not only for a verdict, but
to decide whether to impose capital punishment a death sentence
if they found him guilty. In the end, the jurors
(15:35):
didn't vote to equit the defendant. They did find him guilty,
but the jury decided not to invoke the death penalty.
So it could well be that John's testimony, undermining the
otherwise damning confession, stopped them from issuing a death sentence.
(16:00):
Your particular dialect, which can shape your life and reflect
all sorts of facets of your identity, probably started to
gel before you learned your first word. Okay, we get
the idea. You can really only take so much of
that anyway. Researchers led by Kathleen Vermke at the University
(16:20):
of Wurtzburg in Germany have found that infants cry and
the melody of the language they've heard while in the womb,
so French babies tend to produce cries with the rising
melody contour, whereas German babies produce more falling ones. Both
patterns distinguishable from babies crying in Mandarin. But as soon
as we're old enough to spend time with our peers,
the parental influence on our language quickly dims in comparison
(16:43):
to that of our own social groups. Back to socio
linguist erindiccken to a kindergartener. If there is nobody cooler
than a first grader, right, So that's who becomes your
new lingualistic models. But the profits of language teenagers, the
way that like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year old speak, that
(17:05):
is what's in the crystal ball, the nascent trends that
will shape the speech of the future, and about of
language innovations are first used by women or girls. So
what changes are currently underway? What sort of language forecast
are we in for? Well, in the North American corner
of the map, there is a front coming in. It's
(17:28):
been called the California shift, it's been called the third
dialect shift, it's been called the Canadian shift, the short
front vowel shift, or the low back Merger shift. So
I'm talking about the short O vowel as in c
ot cot and then this other vowel as in c
A U g h T cont and since I'm from Massachusetts,
(17:53):
I pronounced those two the same already. I say caught
and caught, but somebody from New York City, for example,
might say c ot cot and c a U g
h T court. Essentially, two distinct vowel sounds are collapsing
into one single sound, and this is creating a chain
reaction all over Vowelville. So other vowels are essentially shifting
(18:17):
to fill in the space left by this convergence. Think
of how tectonic plates shift and collide and push one
another around. So the third dialect shift involves the short
a as in the cat and the hat, moving backwards
towards like the cat and the hot the e and
dress and the eye and fit those are morphing too,
(18:39):
So that's what the third dialect shift is. The short A,
short E, and short eye vowels all moving kind of
down and back in the geography of the mouth. So
maybe when we hit the ten thousandth episode of Deeply
Human will be calling it a podcast as about human behavior,
(19:02):
I don't talk about the vowel sounds in English seem
particularly susceptible to this kind of evolution. This may be
because English, as compared to other languages, has a bunch
of vowel sounds somewhere between eleven and sixteen, which means
that each of them has sort of a narrow lane,
like if you move your tongue just a little bit
one way or the other, you wander into the neighboring sound. Spanish,
(19:26):
by comparison, has only five vowel sounds, and Aaron says
that some of those have been stable for as long
as linguists have been able to trace their history. Okay,
speaking of foreign languages, James, that's the signal, James, my guy,
play the next clip. My name's Katie Harris, thank you,
(19:50):
and I run a website called Drew of Languages, which
is where we help adults learn a foreign language by
making it far and making the grammar explanations really really simple.
Katie lives in Italy, and I'm told that her Italian
accent is pretty think good, like almost native. But it
was not always. So I've been living in Italy for
(20:14):
a year, nobody had ever told me about the difference
between single and double sounds. So in Italian there's this
difference between how long you hold a sound. So, for example,
if you say I'm not with two ends, then that
means year. But if you say are not with one
(20:36):
end a shorter end, then that means anus. So it
can be quite dangerous, especially because in Italian, so to
say your age, it's like Spanish, where you say I
have thirty five years. So I thought I'd been walking
around telling people that. Well at the time, you know,
I had twenty three anuses. It's unfortunate. Yeah, Katie, who
(21:01):
I will note also speak Spanish and French and some
German and some Mandarin, had to really focus on getting
her Italian accent down, whereas it comes more easily to
very young humans. Babies when they're born are able to fully,
of course, perceive the difference between any sound in any
of the world's languages. It's almost as if their brain
(21:25):
starts to lock on to the first language that they learned,
so that then it becomes more difficult to hear the
difference between other sounds and therefore pronounce them as well.
If you focus on learning the sounds of a language
in the same way that you focus on learning the words,
it's quite possible to train yourself to pronounce new sounds.
(21:46):
You have to be patient because it's a bit like
going to the gym. You have to change the muscles
in your mouth, so that takes a little bit of time,
but it's absolutely possible to learn them. I spoke to
an accent coach, Jack Alas, who said that part of
the challenge is just to make people aware of all
their muscles. So sometimes teachers will ask students to roll
(22:07):
a blueberry on their tongue just to get a sense
of what's really going on in there. Being a language
teacher and learner herself, Katie is dialed into all the
tiny variations of speech sounds around her. For example, my
partner speaks wonderful English. He's Italian, but he still has
an Italian accent. He asked me about the pronunciation of things,
(22:29):
for example, saying, the Italians when they speak English, tend
to say because they don't have the sound, and if
we just sit and I explain how to make it,
he can make it perfectly. It sounds native. And then
I asked him why he doesn't actually do it when
he's speaking English, and he said, it feels silly. I
(22:50):
feel like I'm trying to pretend to be somebody that
I'm not. I don't want to pretend to be an
English person. I'm Italian. I'm happy to sound like an Italian.
He's speaking English. Okay. By this point you've probably picked
up on the fact that identity is a big theme here. So,
for example, if I think about chefs who might have
been living in the country for twenty thirty years, say
(23:12):
an Italian chef living in the US. For some reason,
I've always noticed that chefs always really tend to keep
their accents, even if they've been living there for decades.
I think it's probably because it's useful to them. They
have no reason to adopt a new local identity, because
the stronger their accent is, the more that people can
associate them with where they come from. So you know,
(23:33):
I personally would trust a pizza made by an Italian
chef that has a stronger Italian accent than they had
an American accent. Why you talk the way you do,
there's a product of a lifetime of layered factors. The
melodies of speech that make their way to you while
you're still an incubation, the words and phrases learned from
(23:54):
your parents, the rough and tumbled talk of the first
greater jet set, and then in humorable, fine layers of
identity informed by the slang at the girl's table, in
the lunch room, the talk in the brake room, maybe
the language of the Sunday sermon. You're like a walking
archaeological dig of language, and of course they are your
own aspirations to speak like the person you'd like to be.
(24:17):
My job as a scientist is to try to have
people appreciate and respect that someone who's linguistic background is
substantially different from your own is equally worthy of your respect,
your kindness, and the assumption that they may be just
(24:39):
as intelligent and just as capable as those people that
you prefer in your own linguistic comfort zone. Snaps Wow,
landed Man, Well, let me give you your shoutout girlfriend,
because you are good. What kind of maniacal, self celebratory
podcast host would include that complimentary bit of audio. If
(25:02):
you guessed this guy, yes you are correct, Watch out Olivia. Also,
let me share a quote from author Amy Chua, but
struck a chord with me. Do you know what a
foreign accent is? It's a sign of bravery. Okay, let
(25:23):
the record show what a highbrow podcast you are listening to,
and that we got almost all the way to the
end of this thing before even mentioning the fact that
some accents are just really sexy, like unwholesomely charged with
pure animal Hang on, we'll come back to that in
(25:44):
a second. Got into the credits first. Deeply Human is
a BBC World Service and American Public Media co production
with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Tessa. Find
her online on Instagram, Darling on Twitter. My French friend
(26:05):
who lives in Milatin. When she was in the States
for a while, she found the perfect pickup line was
to say, I'm French, but they live in Milan. Is
she single? Yes? But she wasn't when she was in
(26:26):
the States because it was so easy. Everyone would melt
as soon as she said it. If you play music
for a nine month old baby, they'll start to squirm
and bop around and dance in whatever manner is possible
for somebody who can't yet stand unsupported in whose arms
are barely long enough to reach over their own heads.
(26:48):
Join me Tessa for the next Deeply Human to find
out why our bodies respond to rhythm and if you
dig the podcast and you've got an extra forty five seconds,
rate us and drop us a review. I read them all,
and more than once I have referenced to review while
chatting with the team to craft a new episode. Thanks
per usual for listening, and we'll see you. Next question.
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