August 17, 2017 • 56 mins
Accents are truly fascinating. Put simply, they are how a person sounds when they talk. From England to America and all over the world, the way people speak in their native tongue can vary drastically. What are the influences? When do accents begin to take hold? Can you lose or gain an accent? Learn about all this and more in today's decidedly interesting episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles to w Chuck Bryant, and there's Noel
on the Wheels of Steel, So that makes this stuff
you Should Know the podcast. So Chuck, Yeah, how you feeling?
(00:25):
I before your answer, I am so excited about this
one because there's just no way it's not going to
be a Chuck accent Bananza. Well, I am super excited
about this because I love accents almost more than anything
in the world. I know it. Man not doing accents
(00:48):
because sometimes I'm okay, sometimes I'm terrible, but I'd like
to try, right, I just mean hearing. There's nothing in
the world I love more than talking with someone who
has a really heavy accent of some kind. I love it.
I love it, I love it. I love it. So
if you encounter somebody with a heavy accent that you're
(01:09):
having trouble understanding, how do you feel, oh, like in
say Scotland, Sure, well, what do you mean, Like, are
you just like, gosh, this is fascinating, or are you
like do you start to sweat and get nervous because
the communication is breaking down? No, I'm delighted beyond words,
(01:31):
and I will like laugh and say, man or a lady,
I like, I can barely understand you, and I love
it so much. I can hardly stand it. That's great,
that's a great way to handle it. It's just the best. Man.
I love it all accents, I mean there are very
I can't think of one accent I don't like hearing.
(01:53):
Uh what about Uh? No, I got nothing like. I mean, sure,
there might be some accents that might be a little
grating to your ear on a personal level, but I
even like hearing those just because it's just it's so
that person in that region, and especially when we travel
(02:14):
and for these shows and get to speak with fans
from you know, from Boston or from the Midwest or Canada. Yeah,
god's the best. I love it. Or on the UK
towards I was just like flipping out, you were I
had to calm you down, like every few minutes. It's
(02:34):
just amazing, and it makes me like, it makes you
feel a little self conscious that I have such a
non accent, but you do have an accent, you just
can't hear it. That's one of the hilarious parts of accents.
Is that person with the accent can't hear their own accent.
It just sounds normal than them sort of. But it's
(02:57):
like everyone has an accent, they even say in this article.
But unmarked speech technically is what we're talking about, which
is it doesn't have a hallmark sign of geographic area. Yeah,
because that's, if anything, what an accent is. It's a
telltale giveaway of where you where, where you live, where
(03:22):
you're from, where you were raised. Usually, Yeah, you don't
have I mean again, it's you know what I mean.
But you don't have an accent either. Now we have
those things are pretty unmarked. We have non regional accents,
non regional American accents, I think, yeah, or jen am,
I've heard it called general American. That makes sense. That's
that's good. It's lovely. I mean, listen to us right now.
(03:45):
I love this accent. But and I may have told
the story before. I heard a cassette tape of myself
as a like a twelve year old a couple of
years ago, and it was heavily southern. Oh really yeah.
And I didn't try to lose it. I didn't work
on it. I never thought about it. Um, where did
go Chuck, I have no idea what you do. I
(04:07):
don't know, I really it just I was shocked. I
was like, that's not me. Wow, that's really surprising because
I mean from from and we'll talk about it a
little bit, but accents they tend to develop in childhood
and they tend to stick. I don't know, man, I
can't explain it. That's pretty interesting. The only thing I
(04:29):
can say is that at the time, I was friends
with a lot of rednecks. Oh, I guess, and I'm
not now, even though I love the right kind of redneck.
Don't get me wrong, Um, I love the right kind
of redneck, the salts of the earth. Good to each
(04:49):
his own kind of redneck. Yah. Sure, that's a good
redneck good the best. Plenty of other kinds too, plenty
of other kinds. Um, boy, do you know what? This
is kind of off topic, but you don't hate More
than anything is when a fellow like I'll just go
ahead and say it, when a fellow white dude thinks
(05:12):
you think like them just because you're a white dude.
Oh yeah, and they you don't know them, and they'll
just start saying stuff right, And I'm just like, dude,
that's awful. I'm not like that, and please don't presume
them like that. You just throw your hands to your
ears and stomp up and down and go no, no,
no until they run off. That's the worst. I hate it.
(05:33):
It's pretty bad. We're all that way. Yeah, all right,
let's get into this. Oh we're not into it already. Well,
I guess the first thing technically we should say, uh,
is that dialect and accents are two different things. Yeah.
Accent is how something sounds when you talk. And again,
it's usually related to where you're from and usually where
(05:58):
you're raised, right, yeah, and in your family too, Yeah, yeah,
and a dialect you're probably going to pick up from
where you're from, from your family, that kind of thing.
But dialect more has to do with the vocabulary you use,
the like, the words you use, the slang, that kind
of thing. Um, there's grammar rules that that can be
different than you know, the standard grammar of the language.
(06:23):
So it's it's more like, what you're saying is dialect
how your how you sound when you're saying it. That's
the accent. That's the big difference. Yeah, have you ever
taken one of those dialect tests online? No, it's pretty neat.
And the New York Times has one where you basically
go through like twenty questions that say things like, um,
(06:43):
what do you call the the strip of land between
two streets? Or what do you call a house on
the opposite corner of your own? Um? And stuff like that.
It's not just like soda pop um. I gotta okay, Yeah,
that would be interesting. Like I say median, I say
kitty corner. Oh, I say catty corner. No, see, that
(07:04):
was one of the choices, but I would say median
as well. Right, some people say devil stra. One of
them was interesting was what do you call it when
it's No, that's a thing. That's not a thing it is.
What do you call it when the when it's raining
with the sun shining? Apparently that's highly regional raining with
the sun shining. I didn't even know there was a
(07:25):
name for that. Yeah, people call it different things. We
grew up calling it the devil's beating his wife. But
what's up with all this devil's stuff? Don't know, it's
all the devil's beating his wife? Is what you call that?
When rain it's coming down while sun was shining. That
crazy yeah, anyway, it's got It has an interactive map
(07:46):
that as you answer the question, it turns different colors,
like from red to blue. How heavy You're like, no, no, no, no,
it's like that went back, well not politically, um. And
then eventually after the last question, the reddest hot zones
will be where you are from. And mine was like
Atlanta or not Decator specifically, but Atlanta Decatur or Atlanta, Birmingham, Alabama,
(08:12):
and I think like Nashville. Huh, so I was in
the zone. So cosmopolitan southern is your dialect? Basically it
sounds cosmo southern. Yeah, southern Mo. Anyway, I highly recommend
it's gonna be a fun test. Yeah, it sounds pretty fun.
But nothing to do with accents. What what I mean?
Can you put like not applicable for the one about
the rain when the sun shining? Yeah? Most of them
(08:34):
have an option that says I know what this is,
but I don't have a name for it. Gotcha, Okay? Cool,
Well then yeah, i'll take it. I'll take it right now.
All right, So we've established what dialect is, we've established
what accents are, and apparently now that we're diving into
that world of accents. If you are a linguist, there
(08:55):
are basically two categories that you would put accents into.
If you want to start talking accents with linguists, they're
gonna be like, wait, wait, wait, are we talking about
the accent that a person has when they're speaking their
native language or are you talking about the accent of
person has when they're speaking what is not their native language.
(09:15):
Explain yourself, says the linguist. Right, and when you go
to learn a second language as a a non you know,
developing infant, like let's say high school, middle school, or
beyond um, you have to I mean, you took language
class in high school, right, sure, French? But was this
(09:37):
in Georgia or yes? And there are plenty, plenty of
thick Southern accents speaking French and it is about as
grading as it gets. Well, it's funny because that's a German.
It was the same thing. And I always had a
knack for Um speak and a Deutch. Yeah that's how
(09:57):
it sounded. And it was always funny to me because
our teacher would you know, dictating or say something in
perfect German and we would repeat it back individually. And
I always had a pretty good knack for not accents,
but just sort of parenting. I'm much better if I
hear someone say something, I can kind of say it
back like they say it. And I just figured, like,
(10:17):
just do that and then you're speaking correct German. And
some of these dudes would, you know, prekin ze Deutsche
And I would just be like, how can you just like,
can you not pretend to speak German, like with a
German accent? And they couldn't, And it's just fascinating. I
just thought everyone could pare it something back, and that's
when I realized, no, not at all. Well they have
(10:39):
those people have very well formed, non plastic synapses, is
really what it comes down in a lot of ways.
Do you, uh, you want to take a break before
we get into the development of accents? I guess, so, well,
let's do that, m all right, Chuck. So, there's been
(11:23):
a lot of study about accents about when we developed language.
There's a lot of debate about whether we're born with
a language instinct or if it's just something we we
naturally develop as a result of being social animals. Who knows,
but one of the studies on accents specifically has found
that apparently babies they recognize accents in the womb. They've
(11:49):
tested newborn kids. I don't know what parents let this happen,
but apparently in the delivery room or shortly after um delivery,
the baby was born. It's another way to put it.
They've had people speak with different accents to the baby,
and the baby just based on their gaze, tend to
(12:09):
prefer the accent that they heard while they were in
the womb. It is pretty interesting, right, And apparently from
that moment on, even from the time their brains developed
enough to to start hearing and soaking this in, and
then after they're born, they're they're taking all of these
(12:29):
these little things we take for granted when we speak,
when we use dialect, when we when we um form
an accent. All of the stuff is sinking in their
little baby brains and it's helping them develop UM what
is called basically a map, a language map, a dialect map,
and accent map, and they're hearing how to talk, learning
(12:53):
how to talk just by listening to the people around them,
even before they're six months old. Yeah, this UM researcher
UH speech professor named Patricia cool k u h L
you dub go Huskies um. She said that she was
describing the map, and she said, you know, the sounds
(13:14):
they don't hear, their synapses aren't firing when they don't
hear those sounds, so they just sort of fall away.
And you can think of it as like pruning of
that network of the brain, which I thought was really interesting.
It just makes sense. You know, the sounds they hear
most often will be reinforced over and over, and that's
how a dumb little baby gets an accent. And there
(13:36):
there's a really good example, if not a super stereotypical one,
but um speakers of Japanese have a very hard time
saying L making the L sound right. So rather than lake,
they may say rake, they tend to they tend to
replace the L with an R sound. And it's simply
(13:57):
because that's what they were exposed to growing up up
and there they didn't learn to make the L sound
just in the same way that you and I might
have a lot of trouble rolling our rs, where if
we had been raised in a society or a group
or a family even that rolled there ares we could
probably roll our rs perfectly. But all of for all
(14:18):
of this research is starting to show that accents are
just acquired and developed, and they're reinforced through through exposure
by hearing other people around you and then speaking that
way yourself. And that map that that's formed starting before
even six months old. Um, it's what you it's what
(14:41):
you use to navigate through through spoken communication with the world. Yeah.
She found out this is cool still in studying babies
in Sweden, Japan, US and other places that at six
months old, Japanese babies could distinguish between the elm are
just American babies, but by the time they were one,
(15:03):
they had lost that ability again because that was just
sort of pruned away. Yeah, and I looked into this,
I'm like, how how would you set that up? And
this is actually pretty clever. Right, So they would put
these babies in a room and let them all hang out,
and then they'd be like a loud speaker and then
over the loud speaker, hopefully it a normal normal, right,
(15:25):
they would say they would just have a voice, a nice,
pleasant voice saying like la la la la la la
la la la la la la, right, and then every
once in a while the voice would say la la
ra la la, right, And when that r would come
out instead of a la a like a bear would
(15:46):
light up and start dancing and playing like a drum,
like something that babies would love would happen, right, So
they came to associate rather the like the what would
be construed as an error in the act center the
dialect um with something going on with the bear. So
the babies that were Japanese by the time they were
(16:07):
a year when there was an error, they wouldn't look
over at the bear any longer because they stopped hearing
that that la la la and just heard it as
la la la. Interesting, isn't it. Yeah, And apparently they
found that babies crying can even sort of mimic the
intonation of their nationality. So like French babies, apparently French
(16:33):
speakers go up an intonation toward the end of the sentence,
and so French babies would when they cried, I guess,
would go why wawa and go up at the end,
whereas German babies would go down just like Germans. Yeah, wow,
all right, they wouldn't say law no. Uh. Super interesting though, yeah,
(16:57):
And so all of this forms of the basis of
a lot of people already know but you might not
know why. But it is way, way easier to learn
multiple languages when you're younger than it is, say when
you're in high school. And there's a big push among
American educators to start language development second language, third language, uh,
(17:19):
when you're much younger, like even as young as nursery school,
rather than waiting until high school, which is little baby
is being raised bilingual from birth. Yeah, and that's a
really good way to raise a smart kid like you.
May speaks Japanese in English. She was raised in a
household that spoke Japanese in English, right, And I mean
it's the same thing. There's I read another article about
(17:41):
a woman who was raised in the Philippines and her
father was raised I think her father spoke Tagalog, which
is the national language, and then her mother spoke a
regional language. And um, so she spoke two forms two
languages from birth and then learned English as an older person. Yeah.
So the whole idea that you should wait until high
(18:02):
school to learn language because then you're old enough to
understand is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
Like you're supposed to be teaching kids multiple languages from
a very young age because that's when their brains are
plastic enough, and they wanted to know how that's possible.
It turns out that you your brain creates multiple language maps.
(18:25):
So you have a language map for your native language,
you have another language map for this other one you
learned in school, than another one that you're for the
language your grandmother speaks, and you can just switch between
them depending. Amazing and that So when you do learn
another language, though, Um, and I guess it's probably true
(18:45):
for any age, but as an adult for sure, or
a teenager for sure, when you already have your your
own home language solidified, there's something called language transfer that
can happen, or that always happens, uh, And it can
be either good or bad. So, depending on what your
language is and what language you're learning, it might be
a little bit easier to learn that language and say
(19:07):
certain words, or it might be a little harder can
depending on how close it is to your native tongue
and accent. So Um, like a German learning to speak English,
UH may have a tougher time with the th h sound,
and they may say like a like a t z
or or harder s in place of it, like instead
(19:28):
of the German z Germans right or if you're Italian
and you're learning Spanish, you might have an easier time
because those are a little more similar, uh, like with
especially with the ps in Spanish, right, because in Spanish
the P is a non aspirated, short onset time sound right. Um.
(19:50):
In English we would have a hard time with the
P because we say P. We aspirate it, right, P
like your breathe when you say it he um, and
it's it's a It has a long on set time right.
So which is That also explains why native English speakers
(20:11):
often have trouble distinguishing between P and B when they're
listening to Spanish being spoken. Yeah, and so depending on
if it's um easier or harder, it's called negative positive
transfer or negative transfer um. And I remember in German
learning to roll those rs was probably the hardest thing
(20:31):
for most of the kids in the class. Sure, right,
And again it's the same thing. It's like the the
with the southern accent with German. Right. So their language
map is so well formed and so immovable that they
are following the rules of that language map even when
(20:52):
they're trying to speak this foreign language. Well, languages don't
have the same maps, which accounts for different languages and
accents and all all sorts of things like that. So
on the one hand, it's cognitive, but on the other hand,
there's also um differences in in motor function. Right, just
like when you say L but not are as a
(21:12):
kid and there they seem interchangeable to you. When you
grow up, you have trouble actually making the the the
L sound like making your tongue make the L sound instead,
it wants to make the R sound right, So you
have the cognitive trouble with your language map applying your
language map to this new language, and you also have
(21:34):
the physical trouble of actually making your mouth and your
tongue in your airway do the things that it has
to do to make those sounds like rolling in our Yeah,
it's just it's simply unpracticed in doing so. Yeah, but
that's it. That's what the good thing about it is
that you can learn a good accent, You can learn
(21:55):
to speak another language. It just is harder because your
brain is pretty well set. You can retrain it, though,
it just takes practice. And apparently, from what I saw,
the best way to learn an accent and to learn
a new language is lots and lots and lots of
listening up front, that you shouldn't just jump in and
(22:16):
start trying to speak. You should spend a lot of
time just sitting around listening to it first. Yeah, I'm
way out of practice now with remembering German and speaking it,
but I got pretty good at one point to the
um to the point where I went. When I went
to Germany, I had Germans saying, you know, you speak
very good German. And that's like the best best thing
(22:39):
that can happen when you traveled to a different country
and you're trying is for someone to say, wow, you
speak really good uh, French or German or whatever. Here,
have a schnitzel on me. It's funny. My buddy and
I Brett, who did my first big Europe trip with,
we went to a beer garden in Germany and um
in Munich and got uh had a lot of beers,
(23:02):
a lot of steins because this local dude who didn't
speak English and I spoke very little German. And we
drank with this guy for about four hours and bonded
in two different languages over the music of the Beatles,
and it worked somehow, and got our picture with the
guy and it was just one of those travel moments
that just one of the best travel moments of my life.
(23:24):
And I always wonder if this guy remembered that at all.
And that guy turned out to be christof Walls, Yeah,
I have a feeling this guy didn't remember. It's one
of those things like as a young American, I was like,
oh my god, that was a posting. Ever I could
see that happening in Germany. In France, no French person
(23:44):
has ever said, hey, your French accent is pretty good.
Exactly what's gonna help you? Right? Um, Well, let's talk
a little bit because this, to me is one of
the more fascinating parts of accents is the fact that
uh British English, uh and in England, as colonizers all
(24:04):
over the world, we still ended up with so many
variations of the English accent. Yeah, which makes sense, fascinating,
but it's basically like, um, Britain went around the world
and said, oh, we're we're gonna have an illegitimate child here,
and we'll have an illegitimate child here, and in an
illegitimate child here, and they all just kind of look
(24:25):
like us a little bit. Right, Okay, it's a little
bit like that, but language wise or accent wise. So
everybody um who speaks English, I should say, in India
and in Australia and in Canada and in the United States, UM,
they all speak English. All of us speak English. Were
speaking the same language, but we um speak it with
(24:46):
different accents. And when you start to look into why,
it just becomes extremely fascinating. Like you were saying, like Australia,
all right, the Australian accent. Anybody in the world can
pick out an Australian accent no problem, and it's such
a unique accent. But it's also a hodgepodge of English
accents because you had so many people coming from England,
(25:09):
UM in different parts of England fourth together in this
you know, these small pockets over this large geography, but
relatively small pockets of of um uh like cities and
towns and stuff, and they're disparate regional English accents came
together to form a common, unique one which is now
(25:32):
known as Australian English. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I've always
heard that UM English actors have an easier time picking
up the Southern American accent because they're so similar, and
there's actually a lot to that. I read this great
article from PBS called Our Full Southern that's the letter
R f U L Southern U from John Fought and UM.
(25:56):
It basically kind of lays out the history of UM,
the Southern American dialect, where it came from, and how
it's changed over the years, and the fact there's kind
of two different ones there. They call one the are
less Southern accent and one the R full meaning UM
(26:17):
with words when you have an R before a consonant
um are less accents you drop that are altogether. So like, uh,
there are different variations UM. Because you see this in
like in New England, like in Boston, and then you
actually see it in places like coastal South Carolina, in
(26:39):
coastal Mississippi and Alabama. Uh, And so you think, well,
that's weird, But when you think about it, it's true.
If if you're talking about you know, poc in the
CA you're dropping the R as with that hard Boston accent,
but you can also pock the car in South Carolina. Joe, Sorry,
(27:03):
I get fired up, but it's the same thing and
it and it came from the same thing. So what
happened was these coastal plains of uri early European settlements. Um,
and we're talking not New York City and not New Orleans,
but all these other places came from our less areas
of southeastern England. And so as they were settled, they
(27:25):
set up shop, uh, and farmed around the coast, and
the coastline didn'tvert venture very far inland. And so then
there was the second wave that started coming from our
full areas and this started to change apparently. Um. And
what we're talking about is rhotic R H O T
(27:46):
I C and non rhotic dialogue or dialect. Rhotic is
where the R is hard, yes, like park and non
rhotic would be like poc. Yeah. And apparently in England
and especially in southeastern England, when they colonized America, they spoke,
or they sounded a lot more like what you would
think of as an American accent today. Yeah, probably a
(28:08):
lot more that we probably sound very much like they
sounded back then, which is just knocked my socks off man.
Fact of not just this podcast, maybe fact of the year. Yeah.
But at some point, uh, And I think there's a
little bit of debate on exactly when there became a
conscious shift in England for uh kind of to draw
(28:29):
class distinctions, to to have a more posh sounding accent,
Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, there's something called so the
typical British accent. When you listen to say, someone like
you Grant speak what you think of as like kind
of classy British, that's called Grant, right, classiest guy around
at the very least, he's one of the most charming, um,
(28:51):
which is how he gets away with so much. But uh,
that that that accent is called received pronunciation, and it
developed in England as kind of an aspirational accent among
the middle class. The middle class was starting to grow.
Um from what I saw that it was the mid
nineteenth century. I know you saw something like the sometime
(29:12):
in the eighteenth century, but regardless, it came out of
the middle class in England getting a little wealthier, sending
more and more middle class English kids off to boarding
school where they were kind of being instructed in this
received pronunciation accent, and it it became the the educated
(29:33):
southern England accepted way to speak, right, it was British
and that really got cemented in the nineteen twenties when
the BBC started broadcasting and they actually held a panel
to try to figure out what accent or accents their
broadcasters were going to speak in, and they settled on
received pronunciation. It became the one accent that all BBC
(29:58):
broadcasts were done in from nineteen twenties to the nineteen
seventies or eighties. It became quintessential British accents, despite the
fact that something like less than ten percent, maybe even
less than that, of the population actually speak with that accent.
But that's what everybody else in the in the world
typically thinks of when they think of a British accent.
(30:20):
It's fascinating and it's again, this came after America was colonized.
It came from what I understand, after Australia was colonized.
So at the time Americans and the British um sounded
very much like we do today. Yeah, So starting in
about picking back up with the R lesson R full
(30:42):
stories UH. Starting in about the middle of the eighteenth
century and for the next hundred years or so, you
had more people coming over from UH like northern and
western England, UH and Scotland and Ireland, and they appear
cly started entering the US, not along the coastline but
(31:04):
through like the port of Philadelphia, which um that was
the busiest in the nation at the time. So these
folks move inland instead of hanging around the coast, and
then west and southwest, and uh they had the r
full accents. And so you had these inland varieties of
accents that were are full, these coastal that were are
(31:24):
less and are less was far more prominent for a
long time just because of the way, um migration happened
and immigration happened. And then are full has since sort
of taken over. Our full Southern has taken over and
our full Northern because it's you know, sort of the
same version of the two different versions of the same thing. Uh,
(31:47):
and now are full is what you kind of think
more of us that sort of red nicky Southern accent
um like orange glad I said orange like that? Sure? Okay,
Uh what they say here in this PBS article is
is the prevailing prevailing dialect of like Nascar. You think Nascar,
(32:08):
you say that hard are instead of Nascar Nascar. I
feel like I'm going to yeah, just think of Judy
Davis and Barton Fink. Okay, well Boughton, you know that
kind of Uh, I always think of Charleston for some reason.
Oh yeah, because Charleston is super are less in that respect.
(32:30):
And yeah, I think just like in say England or
the UK, that um are less is associated with higher society.
I think, oh yeah, for sure, the non rhotic speech,
for sure. So then the sun Belt UM gets populated
and people keep going inland and more inland, and our
full accents, both northern and southern sort of became the
(32:53):
dominant UH speaking style in the United States. Well, you know,
you said that a lot of those UM those immigrants
came to the U. S and State in the coastal
areas or went inland. There's been a lot of um
a speculation that there's pockets of of UM accents, say
(33:14):
like tucked away in the Appalachians or in the Outer Banks,
or just kind of in less populated or trafficked areas
where those original accents were captured and kind of frozen
in time. Which apparently all of that's been debunked. Um
that that you can't find the original colonial slash British
(33:35):
imperial accent in you know, the people in the Outer
Banks or in the Appalachians. But it's pretty romantic to
think of and I have to say, I gotta say this,
speaking of the Appalachian accent. Um, I've said before, you
know that that that airline pilot talk, how all airline
pilots sound exactly the same, and they're all actually doing
(33:59):
Chuck Yeager, Chuck Yeager, whose Appalachian accent was kind of
famous because he broke the sound barrier. Um, all pilots
kind of aspired to sound like him. So that's why
all airline pilots sound exactly the same on the intercom,
because they're all, whether they know it or not, trying
to emulate Chuck Yeager, who actually did talk like that.
(34:21):
And that raises like something pretty pretty significant, Chuck is
you can acquire an accent just by aspiring to sound
like somebody. And that's how a lot of accents have
spread over time. That's how we received pronunciations spread. People
listen to the broadcaster on the BBC and said, I
like the cut of that guy's jib, and they started
mimicking him, and that's how that accent spread. You want
(34:45):
to take a break, Yeah, we'll take another break and
we'll talk about media and the movies and um, how
accidents can affect the perception of a person right after this,
(35:22):
all right, So I got a call one day from
John Hodgeman. Yeah, and he, uh, if you don't know,
as a writer and actor and more and more so
an actor, and he was auditioning for a part where
he had to speak with a Southern accent. So he
called me up and was like, dude, I need some help. Um,
(35:45):
what what do I do? Because I think he's heard
me complain a lot about bad Southern accents and movies
and TV and how that's just such an immediate turn
off for me, Like that's why I couldn't watch House
of Cards because Kevin Spacey. Oh his accent you mean?
Oh yeah, I just heard it off and how you
meant just Kevin Spacey in general. Now he kind of
bugs me in general these days. Yeah, I don't see
(36:07):
Baby Driver then, Oh no, I love Baby Driver and
I liked him in it. And that's the first thing
I'm really in a long time. Yeah, I thought it
was standard Kevin Spacey. Oh well it was, but I
used to love Kevin Spacey and what the oh just
in the early days like usual suspects and uh American beauty.
(36:29):
He was okay, no no qualms here, with American beauty. Yeah,
he just kind of just got tired of it. Yeah.
I think Pay It Forward really killed it from You
should go see it. Go see it, yeah, go to
my bedroom. Yeah that wherever you have to see it.
See it. Well, Baby Driver was great though. How about
(36:50):
that movie? Yeah, no batting Southern accents, and they're really
I mean they were, although the whole thing was shot
and setting it Atlanta. Yeah, I mean baby and the
oh yeah, the waitress had a bad Southern accent. It
wasn't bad. I thought it was okay, Okay, it wasn't
too bad by my standard at least. So anyway, Hodgeman
(37:13):
calls me and I told I basically told them that
even someone like me, who um doesn't have a very
strong Southern accent at the very least, there's still something
we do in the South, which is, um, we soften
our tease generally. Um. Many times tease become d's and
sometimes they become ends. Like no one from Atlanta says
(37:37):
Atlanta Atlanta. It would be spelled A D L A
N N A. You know it's funny, is it's exactly
how people from Toronto's Toronto Toronto. But like we're so
we live in Atlanta, but we say Toronto, right, But
whenever you hear someone say Atlanta, you just think, you know,
(37:58):
get the stick out of your butt, pal, Relax, don't
be so formal. Yeah, so I went through and I
took Hodgman's pages and sort of rewrote them phonetically. Well,
I hope you charged for this, No, of course not
um and yeah, and it kind of helped him out.
I think I don't think he got the part. But um,
that's because of his acting, not because of my just kidding. Uh.
(38:24):
But anyway, it's just it's an interesting lesson in that
um accents. I think oftentimes regional accents of the same
language often come down to such subtleties as softening certain
letters or dropping certain letters ours or teas or whatever.
But you also, yeah, you raised uh, you raised the
(38:44):
point earlier where you know, people in Boston and people
in Alabama both dropped their rs. There are lists, but
you would never confuse um in English speaker in Alabama
with an English speaker in Boston. In so there's a
lot more going on there. Well, it's just like the
Irish immigration in Boston that had a big impact because
(39:07):
they weren't immigrating to uh mobile, right. But I mean, like,
there's there's a lot more going on accent wise to
just dropping the R. But that's the reason why that
one has brought up so much is because it's such
a a common and identifiable beginning point to differentiate different accents. Yeah,
(39:28):
and I guess that's probably a good place to talk
about perception um because whether we like it or not,
if you hear a very thick like old school New
York Brooklyn thing or a very southern kind of Nascar talker, like,
you're gonna get stereotype like it it sucks. But you
(39:52):
have a very hard Southern accent, people are gonna think
you're dumb. That's because of the hookworm than anything. But
I think any really really heavy accent can um very
much affect what a person thinks initially when they talk
to you. Well yeah, um, so accents are at their
(40:13):
base and in group out group marker. Right. And we
despite how long we've been living in a larger, more
integrated society UM full of more and more people that
we interact with from different groups every day, Uh, we
still have this kind of evolutionary spark where we are
(40:35):
aware of people who are different from us, right, and
we surmise different things, whether correctly or incorrectly, based on
some of these markers. And one of the big easy
to identify markers that says, oh, you're from a different
group than me. Let me just put a little barrier
between us here is the accent. Yeah, for sure. Um,
(40:56):
they've even done studies. Uh, I know that the is
it babel or babel babel b A b b e
L the the language app. They've done studies and they've
um had people mark like what accents they thought were sexy,
which accents they thought were annoying, which ones they trust
and don't trust, And of course, like a French accent
(41:19):
was more favorable, the German accent was the least favorable. Um.
Just generally, they've done tests that find that people are
distrusting of someone with a foreign accent period. Yeah. And
I don't know if that has to do with the
fact that it is in group out group, or if
there's a UM there's like a kind of a much
(41:42):
lighter hearted explanation for it, which is that we tend
to prefer people with our own accents or people who
sound like us are close to us because that's what
we're used to. So we're just physically more comfortable hearing that, right,
makes sense, not in hearing something different puts on edge
or guards up or we're just a little more, um,
(42:03):
a little less comfortable physically just from hearing somebody speak
with an accent. And then another study suggested that cognitively,
we're having to work harder to um understand what a
person with an accent that's foreign to us as saying,
and uh that and one way to put is that
(42:25):
we kind of resent them for making us work harder,
so we're less trusting of what they're saying, right, which
is just weird. Well, yeah, and all of this is
reinforced and um borne out of and reinforced by movies
and television to a large degree, because anyone who's ever
(42:46):
seen a movie, they have these kind of go to
trope accents depending on what kind of character it is, um,
whether it's the dumb Southerner or in the case of crime,
um like this this new arc accent for like petty criminals,
whereas the criminal mastermind will usually have a British accent. Yeah,
(43:07):
I read an article on that about villains having accents
and usually it's British and apparently that's just kind of
lazy filmmaking in a way, like many years for sure. Yeah,
And so like the the no matter if it was
like on another planet or Russian villain, the villain typically
(43:29):
has a British accent, and they the article was saying
that they had to do with one. It's just an
easy cheap way of saying this person's foreign, this person's other,
so right there that they're the bad guy, right um,
and then secondly that it was British, so that we
can understand what they're saying still very easily, but on
(43:53):
an unconscious level again there other their foreign and then um,
the the In America, there's something called cultural cringe. It's
in America, it's in Australia that there's this idea that
the British colonized this country and they were originally like
the parent country, and there's still some kind of unconscious
(44:14):
resentment of them. So that making the villain British taps
into that unconscious disdain for British people, which obviously don't
have consciously. But it's called cultural cringe where you're just
kind of like unconsciously comparing your culture to their culture
and like irritation comes out of it. Yeah, it's funny.
(44:36):
Even the Star Wars universe, it was uh a long
time ago in a different galaxy, and yet you have
like some American accents and some English accents, and it's
kind of all over the map. Like uh, I mean
even in the in that first Star Wars movie, Carrie
Fisher sort of vacillated between English accent and regular Americans.
(45:00):
He almost adopted a mid Atlantic accent. Yeah, so that's, um,
we're not talking about Maryland. Um. In the early days
of the movies, they called it mid Atlantic, which basically
meant just somewhere between England and the United States. And
that's how almost all of the early movie stars spoke. Yeah,
and um, I think from what I saw, you could
(45:21):
trace it back to a single um dialect coach who
taught I think Katherine Hepburn to speak that way. And
that combined with Carrie Grant becoming a star and he
was born in England and raised there until he was sixteen,
and then moving to America. Those two becoming big stars
at the same time made this mid Atlantic accent just
(45:42):
spread like wildfire because that's what people saw in the movies.
That's what they aspired to. So some people started talking
like that, Yeah, super interesting. There was um a woman
named Nancy Elliott that did a sample of American actors
in American movies from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen seventies,
(46:02):
and she showed a steady decline and are dropping in
the artless accent, which would support that what you're talking
about with the mid Atlantic from sixty percent of actors
in the nineteen thirties to zero percent in the nineteen
seventies dropped their rs. And then she saw within people's
individual careers that had long careers in movies, they modified
(46:24):
their pronunciations over time. Really interesting. Yeah, so what one
more thing about the British villain or the villain no
matter where he's from, having a British accent. This article
called out and I thought, very very rightly, so um
inglorious bastards as doing it right because there's like whole
scenes that are spoken in German or Italian with subtitles.
(46:48):
So the Nazis spoke German, which they would have spoken German. Right,
you you have to read along English with the British accent,
right right? Yeah, exactly. That's pretty funny. I thought this
was interesting. Sing with the singers um generally, and there
are exceptions like the Proclaimers, an Oasis and Madness at
(47:10):
times Phil Collins, people that would sing with a distinct
British accent of some kind, but generally what you hear
on the radio is what this one linguists called pop
music accent, which is there are a couple of theories
on why you can't tell from Mick Jagger to Adele
(47:31):
to George Michael that they're um not American um. And
there's been a lot of debate over the years, but
there seemed to be a couple of accepted reasons. Um.
One is is that this is just the pop music accent.
This is what's popular, this is what sells, and so
this is what people do when they sing, no matter
where they're from. Uh. And the other is that intonation
(47:55):
has a lot to do with vowel quality, length of
your vowels, and that when you sing, you follow a
melody which sort of just cancels out or negates the
uniqueness of the accent. That one makes sense to mean
both of them do. Actually, yeah, I think it's pretty interesting.
I think I think you almost have to work. Well
(48:18):
maybe not. I was gonna say these bands and singers
that still sound very British are doing that on purpose,
and that may be the case. I don't know. Like
The Darkness, the guy from the Darkness sounds super British.
They're from Suffolk. Yeah, and then have you heard any
Have you heard of the genre UK grime? No, Apparently
(48:39):
that came along in out of East London the two thousands,
and it's sort of a descendant of Drummond bass and
dance hall and stuff like that. But it's just this
really heavily accented rap. Dizzy Rascal is the UK grime
I think, So okay, Well, then I have heard it
and kind of like it because I'm not hip at
all to this stuff, so I had to look it
(49:00):
all up, and I think he was on the list.
I listened to a couple of tunes from some of
these people and yeah, yeah, yeah, Dizzy Rascals, cool roots maneuver.
Check him out too, I think he was on the list. Yeah, man, okay, yes,
I like UK grime. Um speaking of Great Britain apparently,
(49:22):
like so here in the States, if you have a
different accent or whatever, especially if you have like a
southern drawl and you just kind of sound slow. People
elsewhere in the country think of you as slow. That's
just how they take you initially, until you have you
have to work a little harder to prove yourself, right. Um,
that's kind of aside from maybe like valley girl or
(49:44):
valley guy accent, that's really the only accent that's super
discriminated against hearing the States, but apparently in the UK
accents are taken very seriously and discrimination is quite possible. Um.
I wrote a tooth. I was in thirteen article from
The Guardian that was talking about a study that had
(50:04):
just taken place, and the study found that of the
employers surveyed admitted to discriminating against people based on their
regional accent, and that of Brits said that they felt
discriminated against based on their accents. I didn't see any
any study that's found the same thing in America, but
(50:24):
I guarantee those numbers would have been in the basement
compared to that. Yeah, it's definitely a thing in the
UK because I've heard even friends of mine that are
English when they talk to someone and also they're like,
oh yeah, he's he's a you know, from this area,
and not necessarily even disparaging. It's just, uh, I don't know,
(50:46):
it's just a bigger deal, I think. Yeah, I think
it is too over there. I wish they all talked
like Terrance Stamp from The Liney. I like Michael Caine's accent,
which apparently I had no idea, yeah that that was
a Cockney accent, although once I read that, I was like, oh, yeah,
I could hear that. Now. Well, it's funny that I
love the Terrance Stamp in The Limey. But I've read
(51:08):
an article that where one reviewer said it was like
the worst accent they'd ever heard in The Guardian. But there.
Did you see that movie? No? I didn't. Man, it's
so good, uh Steven Soderberg movie. This is where he
and his son built a house together. No, no, no, no,
it's uh he's he's plays a kind of a British
(51:29):
tough coming over to get revenge for his daughter's murder
and ends up working at a pizza place in Connecticut. Nope, man,
I know I haven't seen this movie. Yeah, it's called
The Limy. It's great, but there's this one scene where
he goes off in front of the great Bill Duke,
who I think late grade is built up no longer
with us. I don't know who that is. You would
(51:49):
recognize him, Uh, well build this plays an American. Uh,
I think he's a maybe a copper detective in the movie,
and Terence stamp has this great scene where he goes
into his office and goes off for like a minute
and a half straight in this very thick cockney not
only accent but dialect um, and Bill Dick's just sitting there.
(52:11):
At the end he goes. Bill Duke says, there's only
one thing I don't understand. I don't understand every mother
fan word that just came out of your mouth. So classic.
I gotta see that movie. Oh dude, it's really really good.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute. Does Terence Stamp hire
himself out as a toy for a rich kid and
(52:32):
Jackie Gleeson is the dad? No, that's the toy the
Limi Peter Fonde is in it. Okay, I'll go see it. Yeah,
it's excellent. Um, you got anything else? No, it's weird.
This is one of those where it was even kind
of long, and I feel like we just didn't even
cover half of what we could have. Yeah, no way,
(52:53):
and we definitely didn't. There's a lot to it. It's
pretty interesting. We'll do a part two one day. Oh yeah. Um.
In the meantime, I would direct everybody to I think
wired to look up movie accent expert breaks down thirty
two actors accents and this dialect coach is just doing well.
He talks about thirty two different characters and um, some
(53:14):
are really good, like um, Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Capodi
apparently is dead on, and um, Kevin Costner doing Robin
Hood is supposedly the worst accent of all time and
in movie history. You know who I love a lot,
but he can't do an American accent. But I'll still
watch him just because I love him. Is you and McGregor?
(53:37):
Oh yeah, he in uh. In this season of Fargo,
he was great and I loved it, but he's just
he just has such a hard time that Scott that's
Scottish accent just comes through. Yeah. Same with the men
who stare at goats. Yeah, he had trouble in there.
I mean it was fine, but you've noticed it every
once in a while. He really did the wet behind
(53:58):
the ears thing. He's so like a although I just
I don't care. I just get over it, whereas some
people I'm just like, no, I'm not gonna watch it
with you. Well, if you want to know more about accents,
get out there in the world, meet new people, listen
to their accents. Maybe try someone for size who knows.
Uh And since I said try someone for size, it's
time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this uh switcheroo.
(54:26):
And it's kind of funny. It was not really accent related,
but voice related. Because we get a lot of comments
about people that differently you know, but this this one
was interesting. Hey guys, a little funny anecdote thought i'd share.
I listened to the podcast for about three years. Ah.
Shortly after I started listening, I pulled up a picture
of you guys, just to put faces to your voices. Yesterday,
(54:48):
for some reason, I pulled up a video he watched
our Google Talk at the Google headquarters, um, and he
realized that he had been picturing us backwards this whole time.
That that was jarring. So that's a little switch on
the usual story we get that people don't even know uh.
So he said, since I only saw a picture, I
guess it just assumed I knew by looking who had
(55:10):
which voice. I've had that image for all these episodes
as to who is who? Imagine how odd of an
experience it was to watch a video I saw Josh
speak with Chuck's voice, and Chuck and Josh's by far
one of the weirdest moments I've had in recent memory.
Thanks for all the great shows, Keep them coming. That
is Nick from Indiana. Thanks a lot, Nick, I appreciate that. Um. Yeah,
(55:31):
that's all I have to say about that. You just
so imagine that it was probably pretty funny. He's still
laughing about it. Uh. If you want to get in
touch with us, like Nick did, tell us a funny story,
We're always down to hear those. You can tweet to
us at s Y s K podcast or Josh um
Clark can hang out on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck
(55:53):
Bryant or Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an email the Stuff podcast to how Stuff Works dot
Com and has always joined us at a home on
the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
Stuff Works dot Com m.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles to w Chuck Bryant, and there's Noel
on the Wheels of Steel, So that makes this stuff
you Should Know the podcast. So Chuck, Yeah, how you feeling?
(00:25):
I before your answer, I am so excited about this
one because there's just no way it's not going to
be a Chuck accent Bananza. Well, I am super excited
about this because I love accents almost more than anything
in the world. I know it. Man not doing accents
(00:48):
because sometimes I'm okay, sometimes I'm terrible, but I'd like
to try, right, I just mean hearing. There's nothing in
the world I love more than talking with someone who
has a really heavy accent of some kind. I love it.
I love it, I love it. I love it. So
if you encounter somebody with a heavy accent that you're
(01:09):
having trouble understanding, how do you feel, oh, like in
say Scotland, Sure, well, what do you mean, Like, are
you just like, gosh, this is fascinating, or are you
like do you start to sweat and get nervous because
the communication is breaking down? No, I'm delighted beyond words,
(01:31):
and I will like laugh and say, man or a lady,
I like, I can barely understand you, and I love
it so much. I can hardly stand it. That's great,
that's a great way to handle it. It's just the best. Man.
I love it all accents, I mean there are very
I can't think of one accent I don't like hearing.
(01:53):
Uh what about Uh? No, I got nothing like. I mean, sure,
there might be some accents that might be a little
grating to your ear on a personal level, but I
even like hearing those just because it's just it's so
that person in that region, and especially when we travel
(02:14):
and for these shows and get to speak with fans
from you know, from Boston or from the Midwest or Canada. Yeah,
god's the best. I love it. Or on the UK
towards I was just like flipping out, you were I
had to calm you down, like every few minutes. It's
(02:34):
just amazing, and it makes me like, it makes you
feel a little self conscious that I have such a
non accent, but you do have an accent, you just
can't hear it. That's one of the hilarious parts of accents.
Is that person with the accent can't hear their own accent.
It just sounds normal than them sort of. But it's
(02:57):
like everyone has an accent, they even say in this article.
But unmarked speech technically is what we're talking about, which
is it doesn't have a hallmark sign of geographic area. Yeah,
because that's, if anything, what an accent is. It's a
telltale giveaway of where you where, where you live, where
(03:22):
you're from, where you were raised. Usually, Yeah, you don't
have I mean again, it's you know what I mean.
But you don't have an accent either. Now we have
those things are pretty unmarked. We have non regional accents,
non regional American accents, I think, yeah, or jen am,
I've heard it called general American. That makes sense. That's
that's good. It's lovely. I mean, listen to us right now.
(03:45):
I love this accent. But and I may have told
the story before. I heard a cassette tape of myself
as a like a twelve year old a couple of
years ago, and it was heavily southern. Oh really yeah.
And I didn't try to lose it. I didn't work
on it. I never thought about it. Um, where did
go Chuck, I have no idea what you do. I
(04:07):
don't know, I really it just I was shocked. I
was like, that's not me. Wow, that's really surprising because
I mean from from and we'll talk about it a
little bit, but accents they tend to develop in childhood
and they tend to stick. I don't know, man, I
can't explain it. That's pretty interesting. The only thing I
(04:29):
can say is that at the time, I was friends
with a lot of rednecks. Oh, I guess, and I'm
not now, even though I love the right kind of redneck.
Don't get me wrong, Um, I love the right kind
of redneck, the salts of the earth. Good to each
(04:49):
his own kind of redneck. Yah. Sure, that's a good
redneck good the best. Plenty of other kinds too, plenty
of other kinds. Um, boy, do you know what? This
is kind of off topic, but you don't hate More
than anything is when a fellow like I'll just go
ahead and say it, when a fellow white dude thinks
(05:12):
you think like them just because you're a white dude.
Oh yeah, and they you don't know them, and they'll
just start saying stuff right, And I'm just like, dude,
that's awful. I'm not like that, and please don't presume
them like that. You just throw your hands to your
ears and stomp up and down and go no, no,
no until they run off. That's the worst. I hate it.
(05:33):
It's pretty bad. We're all that way. Yeah, all right,
let's get into this. Oh we're not into it already. Well,
I guess the first thing technically we should say, uh,
is that dialect and accents are two different things. Yeah.
Accent is how something sounds when you talk. And again,
it's usually related to where you're from and usually where
(05:58):
you're raised, right, yeah, and in your family too, Yeah, yeah,
and a dialect you're probably going to pick up from
where you're from, from your family, that kind of thing.
But dialect more has to do with the vocabulary you use,
the like, the words you use, the slang, that kind
of thing. Um, there's grammar rules that that can be
different than you know, the standard grammar of the language.
(06:23):
So it's it's more like, what you're saying is dialect
how your how you sound when you're saying it. That's
the accent. That's the big difference. Yeah, have you ever
taken one of those dialect tests online? No, it's pretty neat.
And the New York Times has one where you basically
go through like twenty questions that say things like, um,
(06:43):
what do you call the the strip of land between
two streets? Or what do you call a house on
the opposite corner of your own? Um? And stuff like that.
It's not just like soda pop um. I gotta okay, Yeah,
that would be interesting. Like I say median, I say
kitty corner. Oh, I say catty corner. No, see, that
(07:04):
was one of the choices, but I would say median
as well. Right, some people say devil stra. One of
them was interesting was what do you call it when
it's No, that's a thing. That's not a thing it is.
What do you call it when the when it's raining
with the sun shining? Apparently that's highly regional raining with
the sun shining. I didn't even know there was a
(07:25):
name for that. Yeah, people call it different things. We
grew up calling it the devil's beating his wife. But
what's up with all this devil's stuff? Don't know, it's
all the devil's beating his wife? Is what you call that?
When rain it's coming down while sun was shining. That
crazy yeah, anyway, it's got It has an interactive map
(07:46):
that as you answer the question, it turns different colors,
like from red to blue. How heavy You're like, no, no, no, no,
it's like that went back, well not politically, um. And
then eventually after the last question, the reddest hot zones
will be where you are from. And mine was like
Atlanta or not Decator specifically, but Atlanta Decatur or Atlanta, Birmingham, Alabama,
(08:12):
and I think like Nashville. Huh, so I was in
the zone. So cosmopolitan southern is your dialect? Basically it
sounds cosmo southern. Yeah, southern Mo. Anyway, I highly recommend
it's gonna be a fun test. Yeah, it sounds pretty fun.
But nothing to do with accents. What what I mean?
Can you put like not applicable for the one about
the rain when the sun shining? Yeah? Most of them
(08:34):
have an option that says I know what this is,
but I don't have a name for it. Gotcha, Okay? Cool,
Well then yeah, i'll take it. I'll take it right now.
All right, So we've established what dialect is, we've established
what accents are, and apparently now that we're diving into
that world of accents. If you are a linguist, there
(08:55):
are basically two categories that you would put accents into.
If you want to start talking accents with linguists, they're
gonna be like, wait, wait, wait, are we talking about
the accent that a person has when they're speaking their
native language or are you talking about the accent of
person has when they're speaking what is not their native language.
(09:15):
Explain yourself, says the linguist. Right, and when you go
to learn a second language as a a non you know,
developing infant, like let's say high school, middle school, or
beyond um, you have to I mean, you took language
class in high school, right, sure, French? But was this
(09:37):
in Georgia or yes? And there are plenty, plenty of
thick Southern accents speaking French and it is about as
grading as it gets. Well, it's funny because that's a German.
It was the same thing. And I always had a
knack for Um speak and a Deutch. Yeah that's how
(09:57):
it sounded. And it was always funny to me because
our teacher would you know, dictating or say something in
perfect German and we would repeat it back individually. And
I always had a pretty good knack for not accents,
but just sort of parenting. I'm much better if I
hear someone say something, I can kind of say it
back like they say it. And I just figured, like,
(10:17):
just do that and then you're speaking correct German. And
some of these dudes would, you know, prekin ze Deutsche
And I would just be like, how can you just like,
can you not pretend to speak German, like with a
German accent? And they couldn't, And it's just fascinating. I
just thought everyone could pare it something back, and that's
when I realized, no, not at all. Well they have
(10:39):
those people have very well formed, non plastic synapses, is
really what it comes down in a lot of ways.
Do you, uh, you want to take a break before
we get into the development of accents? I guess, so, well,
let's do that, m all right, Chuck. So, there's been
(11:23):
a lot of study about accents about when we developed language.
There's a lot of debate about whether we're born with
a language instinct or if it's just something we we
naturally develop as a result of being social animals. Who knows,
but one of the studies on accents specifically has found
that apparently babies they recognize accents in the womb. They've
(11:49):
tested newborn kids. I don't know what parents let this happen,
but apparently in the delivery room or shortly after um delivery,
the baby was born. It's another way to put it.
They've had people speak with different accents to the baby,
and the baby just based on their gaze, tend to
(12:09):
prefer the accent that they heard while they were in
the womb. It is pretty interesting, right, And apparently from
that moment on, even from the time their brains developed
enough to to start hearing and soaking this in, and
then after they're born, they're they're taking all of these
(12:29):
these little things we take for granted when we speak,
when we use dialect, when we when we um form
an accent. All of the stuff is sinking in their
little baby brains and it's helping them develop UM what
is called basically a map, a language map, a dialect map,
and accent map, and they're hearing how to talk, learning
(12:53):
how to talk just by listening to the people around them,
even before they're six months old. Yeah, this UM researcher
UH speech professor named Patricia cool k u h L
you dub go Huskies um. She said that she was
describing the map, and she said, you know, the sounds
(13:14):
they don't hear, their synapses aren't firing when they don't
hear those sounds, so they just sort of fall away.
And you can think of it as like pruning of
that network of the brain, which I thought was really interesting.
It just makes sense. You know, the sounds they hear
most often will be reinforced over and over, and that's
how a dumb little baby gets an accent. And there
(13:36):
there's a really good example, if not a super stereotypical one,
but um speakers of Japanese have a very hard time
saying L making the L sound right. So rather than lake,
they may say rake, they tend to they tend to
replace the L with an R sound. And it's simply
(13:57):
because that's what they were exposed to growing up up
and there they didn't learn to make the L sound
just in the same way that you and I might
have a lot of trouble rolling our rs, where if
we had been raised in a society or a group
or a family even that rolled there ares we could
probably roll our rs perfectly. But all of for all
(14:18):
of this research is starting to show that accents are
just acquired and developed, and they're reinforced through through exposure
by hearing other people around you and then speaking that
way yourself. And that map that that's formed starting before
even six months old. Um, it's what you it's what
(14:41):
you use to navigate through through spoken communication with the world. Yeah.
She found out this is cool still in studying babies
in Sweden, Japan, US and other places that at six
months old, Japanese babies could distinguish between the elm are
just American babies, but by the time they were one,
(15:03):
they had lost that ability again because that was just
sort of pruned away. Yeah, and I looked into this,
I'm like, how how would you set that up? And
this is actually pretty clever. Right, So they would put
these babies in a room and let them all hang out,
and then they'd be like a loud speaker and then
over the loud speaker, hopefully it a normal normal, right,
(15:25):
they would say they would just have a voice, a nice,
pleasant voice saying like la la la la la la
la la la la la la, right, and then every
once in a while the voice would say la la
ra la la, right, And when that r would come
out instead of a la a like a bear would
(15:46):
light up and start dancing and playing like a drum,
like something that babies would love would happen, right, So
they came to associate rather the like the what would
be construed as an error in the act center the
dialect um with something going on with the bear. So
the babies that were Japanese by the time they were
(16:07):
a year when there was an error, they wouldn't look
over at the bear any longer because they stopped hearing
that that la la la and just heard it as
la la la. Interesting, isn't it. Yeah, And apparently they
found that babies crying can even sort of mimic the
intonation of their nationality. So like French babies, apparently French
(16:33):
speakers go up an intonation toward the end of the sentence,
and so French babies would when they cried, I guess,
would go why wawa and go up at the end,
whereas German babies would go down just like Germans. Yeah, wow,
all right, they wouldn't say law no. Uh. Super interesting though, yeah,
(16:57):
And so all of this forms of the basis of
a lot of people already know but you might not
know why. But it is way, way easier to learn
multiple languages when you're younger than it is, say when
you're in high school. And there's a big push among
American educators to start language development second language, third language, uh,
(17:19):
when you're much younger, like even as young as nursery school,
rather than waiting until high school, which is little baby
is being raised bilingual from birth. Yeah, and that's a
really good way to raise a smart kid like you.
May speaks Japanese in English. She was raised in a
household that spoke Japanese in English, right, And I mean
it's the same thing. There's I read another article about
(17:41):
a woman who was raised in the Philippines and her
father was raised I think her father spoke Tagalog, which
is the national language, and then her mother spoke a
regional language. And um, so she spoke two forms two
languages from birth and then learned English as an older person. Yeah.
So the whole idea that you should wait until high
(18:02):
school to learn language because then you're old enough to
understand is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
Like you're supposed to be teaching kids multiple languages from
a very young age because that's when their brains are
plastic enough, and they wanted to know how that's possible.
It turns out that you your brain creates multiple language maps.
(18:25):
So you have a language map for your native language,
you have another language map for this other one you
learned in school, than another one that you're for the
language your grandmother speaks, and you can just switch between
them depending. Amazing and that So when you do learn
another language, though, Um, and I guess it's probably true
(18:45):
for any age, but as an adult for sure, or
a teenager for sure, when you already have your your
own home language solidified, there's something called language transfer that
can happen, or that always happens, uh, And it can
be either good or bad. So, depending on what your
language is and what language you're learning, it might be
a little bit easier to learn that language and say
(19:07):
certain words, or it might be a little harder can
depending on how close it is to your native tongue
and accent. So Um, like a German learning to speak English,
UH may have a tougher time with the th h sound,
and they may say like a like a t z
or or harder s in place of it, like instead
(19:28):
of the German z Germans right or if you're Italian
and you're learning Spanish, you might have an easier time
because those are a little more similar, uh, like with
especially with the ps in Spanish, right, because in Spanish
the P is a non aspirated, short onset time sound right. Um.
(19:50):
In English we would have a hard time with the
P because we say P. We aspirate it, right, P
like your breathe when you say it he um, and
it's it's a It has a long on set time right.
So which is That also explains why native English speakers
(20:11):
often have trouble distinguishing between P and B when they're
listening to Spanish being spoken. Yeah, and so depending on
if it's um easier or harder, it's called negative positive
transfer or negative transfer um. And I remember in German
learning to roll those rs was probably the hardest thing
(20:31):
for most of the kids in the class. Sure, right,
And again it's the same thing. It's like the the
with the southern accent with German. Right. So their language
map is so well formed and so immovable that they
are following the rules of that language map even when
(20:52):
they're trying to speak this foreign language. Well, languages don't
have the same maps, which accounts for different languages and
accents and all all sorts of things like that. So
on the one hand, it's cognitive, but on the other hand,
there's also um differences in in motor function. Right, just
like when you say L but not are as a
(21:12):
kid and there they seem interchangeable to you. When you
grow up, you have trouble actually making the the the
L sound like making your tongue make the L sound instead,
it wants to make the R sound right, So you
have the cognitive trouble with your language map applying your
language map to this new language, and you also have
(21:34):
the physical trouble of actually making your mouth and your
tongue in your airway do the things that it has
to do to make those sounds like rolling in our Yeah,
it's just it's simply unpracticed in doing so. Yeah, but
that's it. That's what the good thing about it is
that you can learn a good accent, You can learn
(21:55):
to speak another language. It just is harder because your
brain is pretty well set. You can retrain it, though,
it just takes practice. And apparently, from what I saw,
the best way to learn an accent and to learn
a new language is lots and lots and lots of
listening up front, that you shouldn't just jump in and
(22:16):
start trying to speak. You should spend a lot of
time just sitting around listening to it first. Yeah, I'm
way out of practice now with remembering German and speaking it,
but I got pretty good at one point to the
um to the point where I went. When I went
to Germany, I had Germans saying, you know, you speak
very good German. And that's like the best best thing
(22:39):
that can happen when you traveled to a different country
and you're trying is for someone to say, wow, you
speak really good uh, French or German or whatever. Here,
have a schnitzel on me. It's funny. My buddy and
I Brett, who did my first big Europe trip with,
we went to a beer garden in Germany and um
in Munich and got uh had a lot of beers,
(23:02):
a lot of steins because this local dude who didn't
speak English and I spoke very little German. And we
drank with this guy for about four hours and bonded
in two different languages over the music of the Beatles,
and it worked somehow, and got our picture with the
guy and it was just one of those travel moments
that just one of the best travel moments of my life.
(23:24):
And I always wonder if this guy remembered that at all.
And that guy turned out to be christof Walls, Yeah,
I have a feeling this guy didn't remember. It's one
of those things like as a young American, I was like,
oh my god, that was a posting. Ever I could
see that happening in Germany. In France, no French person
(23:44):
has ever said, hey, your French accent is pretty good.
Exactly what's gonna help you? Right? Um, Well, let's talk
a little bit because this, to me is one of
the more fascinating parts of accents is the fact that
uh British English, uh and in England, as colonizers all
(24:04):
over the world, we still ended up with so many
variations of the English accent. Yeah, which makes sense, fascinating,
but it's basically like, um, Britain went around the world
and said, oh, we're we're gonna have an illegitimate child here,
and we'll have an illegitimate child here, and in an
illegitimate child here, and they all just kind of look
(24:25):
like us a little bit. Right, Okay, it's a little
bit like that, but language wise or accent wise. So
everybody um who speaks English, I should say, in India
and in Australia and in Canada and in the United States, UM,
they all speak English. All of us speak English. Were
speaking the same language, but we um speak it with
(24:46):
different accents. And when you start to look into why,
it just becomes extremely fascinating. Like you were saying, like Australia,
all right, the Australian accent. Anybody in the world can
pick out an Australian accent no problem, and it's such
a unique accent. But it's also a hodgepodge of English
accents because you had so many people coming from England,
(25:09):
UM in different parts of England fourth together in this
you know, these small pockets over this large geography, but
relatively small pockets of of um uh like cities and
towns and stuff, and they're disparate regional English accents came
together to form a common, unique one which is now
(25:32):
known as Australian English. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I've always
heard that UM English actors have an easier time picking
up the Southern American accent because they're so similar, and
there's actually a lot to that. I read this great
article from PBS called Our Full Southern that's the letter
R f U L Southern U from John Fought and UM.
(25:56):
It basically kind of lays out the history of UM,
the Southern American dialect, where it came from, and how
it's changed over the years, and the fact there's kind
of two different ones there. They call one the are
less Southern accent and one the R full meaning UM
(26:17):
with words when you have an R before a consonant
um are less accents you drop that are altogether. So like, uh,
there are different variations UM. Because you see this in
like in New England, like in Boston, and then you
actually see it in places like coastal South Carolina, in
(26:39):
coastal Mississippi and Alabama. Uh, And so you think, well,
that's weird, But when you think about it, it's true.
If if you're talking about you know, poc in the
CA you're dropping the R as with that hard Boston accent,
but you can also pock the car in South Carolina. Joe, Sorry,
(27:03):
I get fired up, but it's the same thing and
it and it came from the same thing. So what
happened was these coastal plains of uri early European settlements. Um,
and we're talking not New York City and not New Orleans,
but all these other places came from our less areas
of southeastern England. And so as they were settled, they
(27:25):
set up shop, uh, and farmed around the coast, and
the coastline didn'tvert venture very far inland. And so then
there was the second wave that started coming from our
full areas and this started to change apparently. Um. And
what we're talking about is rhotic R H O T
(27:46):
I C and non rhotic dialogue or dialect. Rhotic is
where the R is hard, yes, like park and non
rhotic would be like poc. Yeah. And apparently in England
and especially in southeastern England, when they colonized America, they spoke,
or they sounded a lot more like what you would
think of as an American accent today. Yeah, probably a
(28:08):
lot more that we probably sound very much like they
sounded back then, which is just knocked my socks off man.
Fact of not just this podcast, maybe fact of the year. Yeah.
But at some point, uh, And I think there's a
little bit of debate on exactly when there became a
conscious shift in England for uh kind of to draw
(28:29):
class distinctions, to to have a more posh sounding accent,
Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, there's something called so the
typical British accent. When you listen to say, someone like
you Grant speak what you think of as like kind
of classy British, that's called Grant, right, classiest guy around
at the very least, he's one of the most charming, um,
(28:51):
which is how he gets away with so much. But uh,
that that that accent is called received pronunciation, and it
developed in England as kind of an aspirational accent among
the middle class. The middle class was starting to grow.
Um from what I saw that it was the mid
nineteenth century. I know you saw something like the sometime
(29:12):
in the eighteenth century, but regardless, it came out of
the middle class in England getting a little wealthier, sending
more and more middle class English kids off to boarding
school where they were kind of being instructed in this
received pronunciation accent, and it it became the the educated
(29:33):
southern England accepted way to speak, right, it was British
and that really got cemented in the nineteen twenties when
the BBC started broadcasting and they actually held a panel
to try to figure out what accent or accents their
broadcasters were going to speak in, and they settled on
received pronunciation. It became the one accent that all BBC
(29:58):
broadcasts were done in from nineteen twenties to the nineteen
seventies or eighties. It became quintessential British accents, despite the
fact that something like less than ten percent, maybe even
less than that, of the population actually speak with that accent.
But that's what everybody else in the in the world
typically thinks of when they think of a British accent.
(30:20):
It's fascinating and it's again, this came after America was colonized.
It came from what I understand, after Australia was colonized.
So at the time Americans and the British um sounded
very much like we do today. Yeah, So starting in
about picking back up with the R lesson R full
(30:42):
stories UH. Starting in about the middle of the eighteenth
century and for the next hundred years or so, you
had more people coming over from UH like northern and
western England, UH and Scotland and Ireland, and they appear
cly started entering the US, not along the coastline but
(31:04):
through like the port of Philadelphia, which um that was
the busiest in the nation at the time. So these
folks move inland instead of hanging around the coast, and
then west and southwest, and uh they had the r
full accents. And so you had these inland varieties of
accents that were are full, these coastal that were are
(31:24):
less and are less was far more prominent for a
long time just because of the way, um migration happened
and immigration happened. And then are full has since sort
of taken over. Our full Southern has taken over and
our full Northern because it's you know, sort of the
same version of the two different versions of the same thing. Uh,
(31:47):
and now are full is what you kind of think
more of us that sort of red nicky Southern accent
um like orange glad I said orange like that? Sure? Okay,
Uh what they say here in this PBS article is
is the prevailing prevailing dialect of like Nascar. You think Nascar,
(32:08):
you say that hard are instead of Nascar Nascar. I
feel like I'm going to yeah, just think of Judy
Davis and Barton Fink. Okay, well Boughton, you know that
kind of Uh, I always think of Charleston for some reason.
Oh yeah, because Charleston is super are less in that respect.
(32:30):
And yeah, I think just like in say England or
the UK, that um are less is associated with higher society.
I think, oh yeah, for sure, the non rhotic speech,
for sure. So then the sun Belt UM gets populated
and people keep going inland and more inland, and our
full accents, both northern and southern sort of became the
(32:53):
dominant UH speaking style in the United States. Well, you know,
you said that a lot of those UM those immigrants
came to the U. S and State in the coastal
areas or went inland. There's been a lot of um
a speculation that there's pockets of of UM accents, say
(33:14):
like tucked away in the Appalachians or in the Outer Banks,
or just kind of in less populated or trafficked areas
where those original accents were captured and kind of frozen
in time. Which apparently all of that's been debunked. Um
that that you can't find the original colonial slash British
(33:35):
imperial accent in you know, the people in the Outer
Banks or in the Appalachians. But it's pretty romantic to
think of and I have to say, I gotta say this,
speaking of the Appalachian accent. Um, I've said before, you
know that that that airline pilot talk, how all airline
pilots sound exactly the same, and they're all actually doing
(33:59):
Chuck Yeager, Chuck Yeager, whose Appalachian accent was kind of
famous because he broke the sound barrier. Um, all pilots
kind of aspired to sound like him. So that's why
all airline pilots sound exactly the same on the intercom,
because they're all, whether they know it or not, trying
to emulate Chuck Yeager, who actually did talk like that.
(34:21):
And that raises like something pretty pretty significant, Chuck is
you can acquire an accent just by aspiring to sound
like somebody. And that's how a lot of accents have
spread over time. That's how we received pronunciations spread. People
listen to the broadcaster on the BBC and said, I
like the cut of that guy's jib, and they started
mimicking him, and that's how that accent spread. You want
(34:45):
to take a break, Yeah, we'll take another break and
we'll talk about media and the movies and um, how
accidents can affect the perception of a person right after this,
(35:22):
all right, So I got a call one day from
John Hodgeman. Yeah, and he, uh, if you don't know,
as a writer and actor and more and more so
an actor, and he was auditioning for a part where
he had to speak with a Southern accent. So he
called me up and was like, dude, I need some help. Um,
(35:45):
what what do I do? Because I think he's heard
me complain a lot about bad Southern accents and movies
and TV and how that's just such an immediate turn
off for me, Like that's why I couldn't watch House
of Cards because Kevin Spacey. Oh his accent you mean?
Oh yeah, I just heard it off and how you
meant just Kevin Spacey in general. Now he kind of
bugs me in general these days. Yeah, I don't see
(36:07):
Baby Driver then, Oh no, I love Baby Driver and
I liked him in it. And that's the first thing
I'm really in a long time. Yeah, I thought it
was standard Kevin Spacey. Oh well it was, but I
used to love Kevin Spacey and what the oh just
in the early days like usual suspects and uh American beauty.
(36:29):
He was okay, no no qualms here, with American beauty. Yeah,
he just kind of just got tired of it. Yeah.
I think Pay It Forward really killed it from You
should go see it. Go see it, yeah, go to
my bedroom. Yeah that wherever you have to see it.
See it. Well, Baby Driver was great though. How about
(36:50):
that movie? Yeah, no batting Southern accents, and they're really
I mean they were, although the whole thing was shot
and setting it Atlanta. Yeah, I mean baby and the
oh yeah, the waitress had a bad Southern accent. It
wasn't bad. I thought it was okay, Okay, it wasn't
too bad by my standard at least. So anyway, Hodgeman
(37:13):
calls me and I told I basically told them that
even someone like me, who um doesn't have a very
strong Southern accent at the very least, there's still something
we do in the South, which is, um, we soften
our tease generally. Um. Many times tease become d's and
sometimes they become ends. Like no one from Atlanta says
(37:37):
Atlanta Atlanta. It would be spelled A D L A
N N A. You know it's funny, is it's exactly
how people from Toronto's Toronto Toronto. But like we're so
we live in Atlanta, but we say Toronto, right, But
whenever you hear someone say Atlanta, you just think, you know,
(37:58):
get the stick out of your butt, pal, Relax, don't
be so formal. Yeah, so I went through and I
took Hodgman's pages and sort of rewrote them phonetically. Well,
I hope you charged for this, No, of course not
um and yeah, and it kind of helped him out.
I think I don't think he got the part. But um,
that's because of his acting, not because of my just kidding. Uh.
(38:24):
But anyway, it's just it's an interesting lesson in that
um accents. I think oftentimes regional accents of the same
language often come down to such subtleties as softening certain
letters or dropping certain letters ours or teas or whatever.
But you also, yeah, you raised uh, you raised the
(38:44):
point earlier where you know, people in Boston and people
in Alabama both dropped their rs. There are lists, but
you would never confuse um in English speaker in Alabama
with an English speaker in Boston. In so there's a
lot more going on there. Well, it's just like the
Irish immigration in Boston that had a big impact because
(39:07):
they weren't immigrating to uh mobile, right. But I mean, like,
there's there's a lot more going on accent wise to
just dropping the R. But that's the reason why that
one has brought up so much is because it's such
a a common and identifiable beginning point to differentiate different accents. Yeah,
(39:28):
and I guess that's probably a good place to talk
about perception um because whether we like it or not,
if you hear a very thick like old school New
York Brooklyn thing or a very southern kind of Nascar talker, like,
you're gonna get stereotype like it it sucks. But you
(39:52):
have a very hard Southern accent, people are gonna think
you're dumb. That's because of the hookworm than anything. But
I think any really really heavy accent can um very
much affect what a person thinks initially when they talk
to you. Well yeah, um, so accents are at their
(40:13):
base and in group out group marker. Right. And we
despite how long we've been living in a larger, more
integrated society UM full of more and more people that
we interact with from different groups every day, Uh, we
still have this kind of evolutionary spark where we are
(40:35):
aware of people who are different from us, right, and
we surmise different things, whether correctly or incorrectly, based on
some of these markers. And one of the big easy
to identify markers that says, oh, you're from a different
group than me. Let me just put a little barrier
between us here is the accent. Yeah, for sure. Um,
(40:56):
they've even done studies. Uh, I know that the is
it babel or babel babel b A b b e
L the the language app. They've done studies and they've
um had people mark like what accents they thought were sexy,
which accents they thought were annoying, which ones they trust
and don't trust, And of course, like a French accent
(41:19):
was more favorable, the German accent was the least favorable. Um.
Just generally, they've done tests that find that people are
distrusting of someone with a foreign accent period. Yeah. And
I don't know if that has to do with the
fact that it is in group out group, or if
there's a UM there's like a kind of a much
(41:42):
lighter hearted explanation for it, which is that we tend
to prefer people with our own accents or people who
sound like us are close to us because that's what
we're used to. So we're just physically more comfortable hearing that, right,
makes sense, not in hearing something different puts on edge
or guards up or we're just a little more, um,
(42:03):
a little less comfortable physically just from hearing somebody speak
with an accent. And then another study suggested that cognitively,
we're having to work harder to um understand what a
person with an accent that's foreign to us as saying,
and uh that and one way to put is that
(42:25):
we kind of resent them for making us work harder,
so we're less trusting of what they're saying, right, which
is just weird. Well, yeah, and all of this is
reinforced and um borne out of and reinforced by movies
and television to a large degree, because anyone who's ever
(42:46):
seen a movie, they have these kind of go to
trope accents depending on what kind of character it is, um,
whether it's the dumb Southerner or in the case of crime,
um like this this new arc accent for like petty criminals,
whereas the criminal mastermind will usually have a British accent. Yeah,
(43:07):
I read an article on that about villains having accents
and usually it's British and apparently that's just kind of
lazy filmmaking in a way, like many years for sure. Yeah,
And so like the the no matter if it was
like on another planet or Russian villain, the villain typically
(43:29):
has a British accent, and they the article was saying
that they had to do with one. It's just an
easy cheap way of saying this person's foreign, this person's other,
so right there that they're the bad guy, right um,
and then secondly that it was British, so that we
can understand what they're saying still very easily, but on
(43:53):
an unconscious level again there other their foreign and then um,
the the In America, there's something called cultural cringe. It's
in America, it's in Australia that there's this idea that
the British colonized this country and they were originally like
the parent country, and there's still some kind of unconscious
(44:14):
resentment of them. So that making the villain British taps
into that unconscious disdain for British people, which obviously don't
have consciously. But it's called cultural cringe where you're just
kind of like unconsciously comparing your culture to their culture
and like irritation comes out of it. Yeah, it's funny.
(44:36):
Even the Star Wars universe, it was uh a long
time ago in a different galaxy, and yet you have
like some American accents and some English accents, and it's
kind of all over the map. Like uh, I mean
even in the in that first Star Wars movie, Carrie
Fisher sort of vacillated between English accent and regular Americans.
(45:00):
He almost adopted a mid Atlantic accent. Yeah, so that's, um,
we're not talking about Maryland. Um. In the early days
of the movies, they called it mid Atlantic, which basically
meant just somewhere between England and the United States. And
that's how almost all of the early movie stars spoke. Yeah,
and um, I think from what I saw, you could
(45:21):
trace it back to a single um dialect coach who
taught I think Katherine Hepburn to speak that way. And
that combined with Carrie Grant becoming a star and he
was born in England and raised there until he was sixteen,
and then moving to America. Those two becoming big stars
at the same time made this mid Atlantic accent just
(45:42):
spread like wildfire because that's what people saw in the movies.
That's what they aspired to. So some people started talking
like that, Yeah, super interesting. There was um a woman
named Nancy Elliott that did a sample of American actors
in American movies from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen seventies,
(46:02):
and she showed a steady decline and are dropping in
the artless accent, which would support that what you're talking
about with the mid Atlantic from sixty percent of actors
in the nineteen thirties to zero percent in the nineteen
seventies dropped their rs. And then she saw within people's
individual careers that had long careers in movies, they modified
(46:24):
their pronunciations over time. Really interesting. Yeah, so what one
more thing about the British villain or the villain no
matter where he's from, having a British accent. This article
called out and I thought, very very rightly, so um
inglorious bastards as doing it right because there's like whole
scenes that are spoken in German or Italian with subtitles.
(46:48):
So the Nazis spoke German, which they would have spoken German. Right,
you you have to read along English with the British accent,
right right? Yeah, exactly. That's pretty funny. I thought this
was interesting. Sing with the singers um generally, and there
are exceptions like the Proclaimers, an Oasis and Madness at
(47:10):
times Phil Collins, people that would sing with a distinct
British accent of some kind, but generally what you hear
on the radio is what this one linguists called pop
music accent, which is there are a couple of theories
on why you can't tell from Mick Jagger to Adele
(47:31):
to George Michael that they're um not American um. And
there's been a lot of debate over the years, but
there seemed to be a couple of accepted reasons. Um.
One is is that this is just the pop music accent.
This is what's popular, this is what sells, and so
this is what people do when they sing, no matter
where they're from. Uh. And the other is that intonation
(47:55):
has a lot to do with vowel quality, length of
your vowels, and that when you sing, you follow a
melody which sort of just cancels out or negates the
uniqueness of the accent. That one makes sense to mean
both of them do. Actually, yeah, I think it's pretty interesting.
I think I think you almost have to work. Well
(48:18):
maybe not. I was gonna say these bands and singers
that still sound very British are doing that on purpose,
and that may be the case. I don't know. Like
The Darkness, the guy from the Darkness sounds super British.
They're from Suffolk. Yeah, and then have you heard any
Have you heard of the genre UK grime? No, Apparently
(48:39):
that came along in out of East London the two thousands,
and it's sort of a descendant of Drummond bass and
dance hall and stuff like that. But it's just this
really heavily accented rap. Dizzy Rascal is the UK grime
I think, So okay, Well, then I have heard it
and kind of like it because I'm not hip at
all to this stuff, so I had to look it
(49:00):
all up, and I think he was on the list.
I listened to a couple of tunes from some of
these people and yeah, yeah, yeah, Dizzy Rascals, cool roots maneuver.
Check him out too, I think he was on the list. Yeah, man, okay, yes,
I like UK grime. Um speaking of Great Britain apparently,
(49:22):
like so here in the States, if you have a
different accent or whatever, especially if you have like a
southern drawl and you just kind of sound slow. People
elsewhere in the country think of you as slow. That's
just how they take you initially, until you have you
have to work a little harder to prove yourself, right. Um,
that's kind of aside from maybe like valley girl or
(49:44):
valley guy accent, that's really the only accent that's super
discriminated against hearing the States, but apparently in the UK
accents are taken very seriously and discrimination is quite possible. Um.
I wrote a tooth. I was in thirteen article from
The Guardian that was talking about a study that had
(50:04):
just taken place, and the study found that of the
employers surveyed admitted to discriminating against people based on their
regional accent, and that of Brits said that they felt
discriminated against based on their accents. I didn't see any
any study that's found the same thing in America, but
(50:24):
I guarantee those numbers would have been in the basement
compared to that. Yeah, it's definitely a thing in the
UK because I've heard even friends of mine that are
English when they talk to someone and also they're like,
oh yeah, he's he's a you know, from this area,
and not necessarily even disparaging. It's just, uh, I don't know,
(50:46):
it's just a bigger deal, I think. Yeah, I think
it is too over there. I wish they all talked
like Terrance Stamp from The Liney. I like Michael Caine's accent,
which apparently I had no idea, yeah that that was
a Cockney accent, although once I read that, I was like, oh, yeah,
I could hear that. Now. Well, it's funny that I
love the Terrance Stamp in The Limey. But I've read
(51:08):
an article that where one reviewer said it was like
the worst accent they'd ever heard in The Guardian. But there.
Did you see that movie? No? I didn't. Man, it's
so good, uh Steven Soderberg movie. This is where he
and his son built a house together. No, no, no, no,
it's uh he's he's plays a kind of a British
(51:29):
tough coming over to get revenge for his daughter's murder
and ends up working at a pizza place in Connecticut. Nope, man,
I know I haven't seen this movie. Yeah, it's called
The Limy. It's great, but there's this one scene where
he goes off in front of the great Bill Duke,
who I think late grade is built up no longer
with us. I don't know who that is. You would
(51:49):
recognize him, Uh, well build this plays an American. Uh,
I think he's a maybe a copper detective in the movie,
and Terence stamp has this great scene where he goes
into his office and goes off for like a minute
and a half straight in this very thick cockney not
only accent but dialect um, and Bill Dick's just sitting there.
(52:11):
At the end he goes. Bill Duke says, there's only
one thing I don't understand. I don't understand every mother
fan word that just came out of your mouth. So classic.
I gotta see that movie. Oh dude, it's really really good.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute. Does Terence Stamp hire
himself out as a toy for a rich kid and
(52:32):
Jackie Gleeson is the dad? No, that's the toy the
Limi Peter Fonde is in it. Okay, I'll go see it. Yeah,
it's excellent. Um, you got anything else? No, it's weird.
This is one of those where it was even kind
of long, and I feel like we just didn't even
cover half of what we could have. Yeah, no way,
(52:53):
and we definitely didn't. There's a lot to it. It's
pretty interesting. We'll do a part two one day. Oh yeah. Um.
In the meantime, I would direct everybody to I think
wired to look up movie accent expert breaks down thirty
two actors accents and this dialect coach is just doing well.
He talks about thirty two different characters and um, some
(53:14):
are really good, like um, Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Capodi
apparently is dead on, and um, Kevin Costner doing Robin
Hood is supposedly the worst accent of all time and
in movie history. You know who I love a lot,
but he can't do an American accent. But I'll still
watch him just because I love him. Is you and McGregor?
(53:37):
Oh yeah, he in uh. In this season of Fargo,
he was great and I loved it, but he's just
he just has such a hard time that Scott that's
Scottish accent just comes through. Yeah. Same with the men
who stare at goats. Yeah, he had trouble in there.
I mean it was fine, but you've noticed it every
once in a while. He really did the wet behind
(53:58):
the ears thing. He's so like a although I just
I don't care. I just get over it, whereas some
people I'm just like, no, I'm not gonna watch it
with you. Well, if you want to know more about accents,
get out there in the world, meet new people, listen
to their accents. Maybe try someone for size who knows.
Uh And since I said try someone for size, it's
time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this uh switcheroo.
(54:26):
And it's kind of funny. It was not really accent related,
but voice related. Because we get a lot of comments
about people that differently you know, but this this one
was interesting. Hey guys, a little funny anecdote thought i'd share.
I listened to the podcast for about three years. Ah.
Shortly after I started listening, I pulled up a picture
of you guys, just to put faces to your voices. Yesterday,
(54:48):
for some reason, I pulled up a video he watched
our Google Talk at the Google headquarters, um, and he
realized that he had been picturing us backwards this whole time.
That that was jarring. So that's a little switch on
the usual story we get that people don't even know uh.
So he said, since I only saw a picture, I
guess it just assumed I knew by looking who had
(55:10):
which voice. I've had that image for all these episodes
as to who is who? Imagine how odd of an
experience it was to watch a video I saw Josh
speak with Chuck's voice, and Chuck and Josh's by far
one of the weirdest moments I've had in recent memory.
Thanks for all the great shows, Keep them coming. That
is Nick from Indiana. Thanks a lot, Nick, I appreciate that. Um. Yeah,
(55:31):
that's all I have to say about that. You just
so imagine that it was probably pretty funny. He's still
laughing about it. Uh. If you want to get in
touch with us, like Nick did, tell us a funny story,
We're always down to hear those. You can tweet to
us at s Y s K podcast or Josh um
Clark can hang out on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck
(55:53):
Bryant or Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an email the Stuff podcast to how Stuff Works dot
Com and has always joined us at a home on
the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more
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