00:17:56.280Some easy examples are like the word kin and the word britches.
00:18:00.860These exist in Scottish and Irish varieties too.
00:18:03.900Also Gaelic has double modal constructions,
00:18:06.820so this thing that's like we might could, we might can.
00:18:09.540Yep. Yep. Yep. Those are direct parallels. So we we think that that's where we got those from.
00:18:15.440So indeed, yeah, like there is clear influence from these different waves of migration to
00:18:19.580different parts of the United States. What about the upper Midwest and Scandinavian
00:18:24.700immigrants? Because for me, it's almost the tonality. It's like the way that the like
00:18:28.640the melody of the of the way you speak. Does that make sense?
00:18:32.860Yeah. So I think we're going to talk about Minnesota later. And there's some stuff with
00:18:38.340the vowels there that's really interesting. What you're asking about, Anne, is a thing called
00:18:43.660prosody, which has to do with the rhythm, intonation, pitch. And that's actually what I
00:18:48.400study. But prosodic variation is really, really underdescribed because it's hard. First of all,
00:18:54.340we have to have physical recordings. So we don't have physical recordings from the 19th century to
00:18:58.620be able to look at tone. We don't write tone, right? We write words. And sometimes we write,
00:19:03.780we try to approximate pronunciations by the way we spell things. But the tone and stuff,
00:19:08.000The only way to study that is to have recorded audio, which means that we can't do anything before, like, 1900.
00:19:15.520And then, even then, it's really difficult, like, manual work to describe prosodic differences.
00:19:23.160I do this in African-American English, but I don't know of any studies where people have looked at the prosody of Scandinavian immigration to the upper Midwest.
00:19:31.400So somebody out there, intrepid listener, please go do this study.
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00:32:41.800Like that's not what we're doing here.
00:32:43.540So when an individual like her mother-in-law sort of adapts a micro community level language
00:32:50.680features that aligns with their certain politics or identity, that is something that they can
00:32:55.840use to distinguish themselves from, okay, yeah, like maybe I'm in San Francisco, but
00:32:59.900let me show you that I don't align with what you think of as San Francisco. And I do think that
00:33:05.920this has always been the case, but she's correct that it's more relevant in the age of digital
00:33:10.400media because people have access to this, right? If you lived in LA 40 years ago and you freaking
00:33:15.740hated it and you were like, these commies around here are not real Americans, which let me be0.79
00:33:21.580clear that I don't think that, you weren't able to spend your entire day in a media universe of
00:33:27.480people who you thought of as being the right people with the right ideologies. So now if you're
00:33:33.320conservative in the middle of LA and you want to performatively show yourself as different from the
00:33:37.940people around you, then you've got this useful tool of identity to go, nope, I'm going to go
00:33:42.940sound like Hannity or whoever, right? And this is a, we talk a lot about like whether language is
00:33:49.700like fashion and in some ways it is, in some ways it isn't. This kind of thing is kind of like
00:33:53.700fashion, right? Like I don't want to dress like that because I'm not a punk or I don't want to
00:33:56.940dress like that because I'm not preppy so there's a old school way of thinking about like stylizing
00:34:01.740yourself and people imagine this as inauthentic but I don't think it is inauthentic right like
00:34:07.140we're all doing something to perform who we are all the time and sometimes it's conscious and
00:34:12.000sometimes it's not and some people are better at hearing these differences and performing these
00:34:16.660differences or pulling them off in this way it's like fashion but it doesn't mean that they're not
00:34:22.240really being themselves. It's that they're being themselves in response to people around them who
00:34:27.120they do or do not want to be associated with. No, and I see it so vividly, too. If you take
00:34:32.220just one step back, good white liberals performing good white liberalism on social media, in0.53
00:34:38.920conversations, like talking about public school, like there are all of these preambles that I see
00:34:46.160employed that are often like they are linguistically specific and interesting but maybe like normalized
00:34:53.020if you're within that group you're like that's just how people talk about race right now or
00:34:56.560that's just how people talk about school choice right now um yeah and if we're gonna take a minute
00:35:01.280to pick on you know the bay the berkeley liberals i this is not in berkeley but i walked out of a
00:35:09.240comedy show in la uh it was before the pandemic because i thought that the way that they were
00:35:14.780talking about the south was extremely offensive like you would not talk you would in la you would
00:35:20.000not get away with talking about black people like that or mexican people like that but because the
00:35:25.640target was white people in the south and that kind of discrimination is the like liberal coastal elite0.99
00:35:31.180bullshit that shoots us in the foot like those people have different vowels it doesn't mean that0.97
00:35:35.620they're not smart like get over it and i'm gonna i really wanted to say this earlier so now i'm1.00
00:35:40.220going to tell this story um my colleague at pitzer college carmen fought uh i taught with her once
00:35:47.000and she had this brilliant thought exercise for the students and she basically asked the students
00:35:51.880like you know jeff foxworthy she played a clip of jeff foxworthy the old comedian who had this
00:35:57.200whole shtick that was like you might be a redneck she said does the person that sounds take a person
00:36:02.040that sounds like jeff foxworthy could they be a brain surgeon and these are good linguistic students0.55
00:36:07.320at a liberal arts college and they go of course like anybody that talks anyway can be a brain
00:36:12.020surgeon and she said I don't think so and they're like what and she says by the time you go to high
00:36:18.540school college and medical school and do a residency if you sounded like that someone
00:36:22.780beat it out of you yeah and she's not wrong it's very hard because there is that stigma
00:36:28.860mm-hmm um okay so you were just talking about saying vowels differently great tee up for our
00:36:35.660next question. This is from Kelly. I'm a Mississippian who now lives in Minnesota. While I certainly
00:36:41.620understand that we have our own southern regional variations on vowel sounds, I remain baffled 11
00:36:48.380years into living here at the vowel sounds and shifts in the upper Midwest, especially on words
00:36:53.960that have A-G constructions, certainly on soft A words like bag and flag, etc., but even more on
00:37:01.780hard A words like bagel and vague. I've heard this called the great Midwestern vowel shift,
00:37:07.680but I'd love to know more about it, especially if it will help me be slightly less annoyed with
00:37:11.840my lovely Minnesotan spouse when he asks if I want a bagel with cream cheese.
00:37:18.960My born and bred Minnesota mom says bag, and I think I also get vague from her,
00:37:25.700which I say on the podcast all the time. I'm very self-conscious about. Tell us about this.
00:37:29.820Yeah. So I was telling you that English speakers are always hearing the vowels and she's she's really attuning to what's going on here.
00:37:39.460So she's talking about this kind of upper Midwestern English, which some linguists have argued is a contact phenomena because there was so much Scandinavian immigration to that area.
00:37:50.400So you mentioned you think there's something about like the tone that we haven't studied yet.
00:37:53.680um that would explain some of the monophthongs so in english like standard american english that
00:37:59.840oh sound like in boat um the way that i say it is kind of two vowels for the price of one it's like
00:38:06.080oh and it vowel changes in the middle but in upper midwest english it's more like oh like
00:38:12.160yeah don't you know right the stereotypical one don't oh yeah don't you know that one
00:38:17.920that's my grandma and yes that's very uh we'd call it in registered it's very in registered
00:38:24.560because if people can do a parody of it that means they know that it's there um and the other
00:38:29.940really kind of showcase feature is that higher ah in words like bag um there's also the backer
00:38:36.940ow so in words like about like I'm gonna say about but it'd be like about um my husband is
00:38:44.220from South Dakota and he spent a lot of time in Minneapolis and he doesn't have these vowels but
00:38:49.180when I go to South Dakota I encounter members of his families who have that and I'm like oh it made
00:38:54.580it over to the plains too really interesting but you can see like when you go there you feel the
00:39:00.500Scandinavian-ness and the vowels are part of that too so I hope she's not annoyed right like
00:39:07.240we love all vowels all vowels are great yeah what is your experience of what black people0.87
00:39:13.520sound like in Minnesota is it do they have as much of the accent I don't know enough so I don't
00:39:18.820really know I have only been to Minneapolis once and in South Dakota ever I have encountered one
00:39:23.780other black person so real next time I see that guy I'll ask him um I will say like in Minneapolis
00:39:32.500specifically because the there's African Americans that have been there for a long time but there's
00:39:38.180So a lot of immigration from East Africa, that affects what goes on.
00:39:44.300So you do get some traditional like African-American English features, the same that you will see in Chicago or Detroit or whatever else.
00:39:49.720But you'll also get this like Somali influence, which is pretty cool.
00:55:11.740But many people are bilingual and bicultural, so they'll be speaking something like standard English with the phonology, the pronunciation system of Hawaiian Pigeon English, which I think is what she's asking about.
00:55:24.140And she's right that you can speak HPE, like an HPE accent, without speaking HPE itself.
00:55:30.960So whatever your first language is will always have an effect on your second, especially with Creole languages.
00:55:36.940and with creoles the boundary between like we're speaking English and like we're not speaking
00:55:41.700English is really porous and these people are bilingual anyway so in their everyday lives
00:55:46.560they don't usually go around being like well now I'm not speaking English anymore like why would
00:55:50.540you do that right right right she's right that it's super overlooked this variety has been really
00:55:55.780stigmatized over time there were bans on its use in educational settings um right now there's been
00:56:02.460a revitalization movement. There's like 500,000 people that speak this as their first language
00:56:07.540in addition to Hawaiian and there's more push for teaching Hawaiian itself in the schools too as
00:56:13.040part of their local identity in Hawaii. So I'm glad that she asked about this. The phenomenon
00:56:19.580of Creoles happens elsewhere too. So there is Louisiana Creole which is very endangered. There's
00:56:25.780Gullah Geechee in the Sea Islands and then of course like Jamaican Creole, Haitian Creole.0.99
00:56:31.420There's they're all over the place, but you usually find them in this type of situation where there was slavery because they're a special kind of contact phenomena.0.80
00:56:40.620OK, so another Creole question. This one comes from Cora.
00:56:44.180I'm from New Orleans and would love to know why the New Orleans accent is so different from the rest of the South.
00:56:49.880My parents' accents sound much closer to Brooklyn accents than true Southern accents.
00:56:55.200Unfortunately, I don't really have one. Thanks, gentrification.
00:56:58.740So many interesting assumptions in here.
00:57:01.040So true Southern accent and also that gentrification is at work in kind of smoothing out this question asker's accent.
00:57:10.900So can you talk about the New Orleans accent a little bit?
00:57:13.420Yeah. New Orleans, she's right, is different from the South for a variety of reasons.
00:57:17.360And I'm going to send you to the work of my colleague, Katie Carmichael, who's at Virginia Tech, who studied the New Orleans accent a lot.
00:57:24.520In particular, she studied what happened with Hurricane Katrina displacement.
00:57:28.060what happened to the accent and then people moving back in and then like a lot of those
00:57:32.680people went to Houston where they were then displaced again and like there's this whole
00:57:35.680circular migration thing happening there too. So in general whatever is going on with the accent
00:57:41.700is going to tell you something about the migration patterns. So we know New Orleans was part of
00:57:46.220France until quite late in the development of the American English accent relatively and there is
00:57:51.560still Louisiana Creole spoken there although by very few people. So in New Orleans they'll call
00:57:57.940the strongest version of that accent, yat, which is also something that refers to a particular
00:58:03.540neighborhood. But usually when they talk about yat, that's like a white working class variety.
00:58:08.640And of course, there's other stuff going on in New Orleans. There's African American English.
00:58:12.480So it was the South, but it was, there were French speakers and Creole speakers. And then,
00:58:17.720yes, there are some like pan Southern things that you found in New Orleans too. But it's also unique
00:58:22.880because in the 19th century, there was a lot of migration and trade between New Orleans and New
00:58:28.200York City, particularly with Jewish and Irish business people. So the New Yorkers brought their
00:58:34.380dialect features with them. And that is why in New Orleans, you will see Southern features,
00:58:39.000French features, and New York City English features, because it's this migration and
00:58:43.740movement and trade thing, right? Wow. Yeah. And so like what she might be referring to is you get
00:58:50.580southern features in new orleans so that i monophthongization my our white rice um sometimes
00:58:55.720people are non-rhotic um so this we this is the boston stereotype the park the car in harvard yard
00:59:02.360yeah yeah but uh in new orleans you'll get people who do not with the same vowels but park the car
00:59:08.400and have yard yeah that is a traditional southern feature it's also a traditional new york city
00:59:15.020feature so they they converge in this way um you also get uh what we call the short a split
00:59:21.440so uh mad and map don't have the same vowel for traditional new yorkers and you get that too
00:59:28.660um you also get th stopping so those might be does um and all of these are different from
00:59:36.360other sort of white southern varieties those that's a really who dat you know the who dat
01:00:00.940Like maybe there is, she's in a city, right?
01:00:05.400So urbanization tends to cause a lot of dialect mixing,
01:00:08.780but also I don't want to stereotype the listeners
01:00:11.600of your pod but I imagine that they are highly educated um and this is exactly what I was saying
01:00:17.700about the Jeff Foxworthy thing your regional accent gets taken away from you the more that
01:00:22.860you have to be in spaces where people expect you to sound quote-unquote professional because we0.87
01:00:28.040imagine that sounding like you're from a place is not professional which is ridiculous and upsetting
01:00:32.840to me as a linguist but yeah that's the way that it is um so that's one reason um there's also just
01:00:39.260the contact right so if this person grew up in a place where there were a lot of people that
01:00:43.620weren't from new orleans there were you know people that were coming from other parts of the
01:00:48.120city or from other countries or whatever that's going to uh predict against sounding like your
01:00:53.940parents um also i don't know that they don't have a new orleans accent they don't sound like their
01:01:00.000parents but maybe they have features that are new like what we were talking about with the utah stuff
01:01:04.520We are going to take a little detour into Canada. I'm very excited for this to finish off the show. So we have two questions here. The first one is around, I'm self-conscious even saying the name of this city because people say it so differently.
01:11:11.140Chilean Spanish is very difficult to understand, but also still, I think, understood as prestigious,
01:11:15.720right? Yeah. Well, difficult to understand is like weird and subjective, right? But yes,
01:11:20.660like people will say, oh, Chilean Spanish is really different, but they won't frame that as
01:11:25.720a problem. And so to sort of get at the heart of this question, like it really is about the history
01:11:32.720of the place. And you get all of these advantages from being, you know, aligned with money, prestige,
01:11:38.940power, whiteness, political, capital, all of this kind of stuff. And it happens everywhere around
01:11:44.760the world. Like this is my like hill I will die on. This is what I say in day one of intro to
01:11:49.580linguistics. If you want to know where there is the power in a particular society, all you need
01:11:55.860to do is ask who speaks the worst variety of the language. Who speaks the worst and who speaks the1.00
01:12:00.080best? If you ask that one question, you'll see who doesn't have any power and who does have power.
01:12:03.860Well, even the answer to that question in the U.S., if we're thinking about the heartland as like the possessors of the best English or like the truest English, right?
01:12:12.880Like they actually do hold the power in our governmental system because of how we've arranged our government, right?
01:12:19.700Yes. The people of Wyoming have 750 times more representation in the Senate than I do as a Californian.
01:12:26.200Right. Well, and this also, you know, when I was saying before that, like, I really appreciate French spoken by people from various African nations like that highlights like for me, that is a bonus, right? I like to be able to understand. But to others, it might seem like something that is like a worse French.
01:12:45.320The argument would be that it's been, quote unquote, corrupted by contact with the other languages that are spoken there.
01:12:53.480And actually, with French in particular, you get that argument about Quebec, right?
01:12:58.820So what people, very conservative language people in Paris would say is, no, Quebec is a problem because there's all those English speakers.0.60
01:13:09.200gonna say like this is not like and so is it is there more english in quebecois than there is in
01:13:16.680standard french i mean it's hard to sort of quantify that but it's the ideological association
01:13:23.740right that like you're not speaking the real one um it goes in reverse too so americans
01:13:30.100americans can be intolerant of other accents um particularly when they come from black and brown0.91
01:13:36.560people. But you know what Americans love? Everybody British. Because we imagine that they speak the0.97
01:13:43.400real English and not our corrupted version that we brought over here and then had to deal with0.98
01:13:48.120Native people and Mexican people. And oh, my God, right? They must hold the real one.1.00
01:13:53.400So people that are very progressive about a lot of issues are often quite conservative about0.97
01:13:57.760language. And you just unpack that like one level and you go, wait a minute, that's pretty messed up.
01:14:02.760Right. Totally. That's so interesting. Well, and even like I think about it with profanity all the time because I often get people writing into the newsletter about my use of various profanities and like there's not anyone under 30. Right.
01:14:18.160And my mom always says, like, I just tell people that your generation thinks of it differently.0.99
01:14:23.780But like you could have someone who is otherwise thinks of themselves as like a very socially liberal person who has very conservative ideas about what languages make someone sound more stupid, make someone sound uncouth.0.90
01:14:41.080All of these different words that we have to make someone feel other.0.91
01:14:44.220We're very socialized into language. And we also understand that it's a tool of power, right? The class anxiety is a lot of what is coming out here. So and gender norms, right? So when I was a kid, like the reason you weren't supposed to swear was that it made you seem quote unquote, uneducated and unfeminine. And the prohibition has loosened, right? Like younger people are swearier. The FCC is actually loosened its rules. You can say many more bad words on TV than you used to. And also we all have streaming. So who cares? Like, you know, I watched the it's always
01:15:14.140sunny abbott elementary crossover and quinta brunson said cunt and i was like0.89
01:15:18.780gasp and i was like oh right it's fx right it's not abc quinta it's fine um but but yeah like0.88
01:15:29.620part of the reason that a lot of educated people are so conservative about language
01:15:34.000is because we understand that it can be weaponized against us or you see this in people trying to
01:15:40.740protect their kids right well you I know that it's okay if you talk like that but I'm worried
01:15:45.800about how other people will evaluate you if you pronounce things this way or if you use this set
01:15:51.220of words and so it's often coming from like not a bad place but it still does the work of reifying
01:15:57.040this kind of inequality that is a fantastic place for us to stop Nicole this is the episode of my
01:16:03.040dreams it's been so good where can people find you on the internet if they want to find more of your
01:16:09.040work thank you so much um i am at mixed linguist on tiktok and blue sky um also my website is just
01:16:16.500my name nicoleholiday.com two l's amazing thank you again this has been an utter delight
01:16:22.700thanks for listening to the culture study podcast if you want to support the show
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01:17:02.820now birding culture and baseball plus we convinced author lee bardugo who i know is a culture study
01:17:09.440favorite she's author of six of crows and my favorite ninth house and she's going to talk
01:17:15.100all about fandom genre like the weird lines between ya and fantasy whatever it is that you
01:17:21.720want to know so if you have a question for her or on any of these other topics or for a future ask
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01:17:34.300show notes for a link. And if you're a paid subscriber, head over to the discussion thread
01:17:38.260and keep the conversation going. This week, I want to know what this conversation shifted for you
01:17:43.840about your own accent or the accent of someone in your life. I think there's a lot of ways we
01:17:49.380could take this. The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody
01:17:54.280Rowell. Our music is by Pontington Bear. You can find me on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson,
01:17:59.300Melody at Melodious47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.