00:00:00.000Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. My name is
00:00:13.960Anne Foster. And today, we're talking with author Valerie Friedland about accents, specifically
00:00:20.680the accents that we use when we speak in English. And I think this is such a timely topic, because
00:00:26.860Recently, the trailer came out for Christopher Nolan's new movie version of The Odyssey.
00:00:31.720And among various things that various people are up in arms about with this film, one of them is, why does Matt Damon have an American accent?
00:00:39.940Why is Tom Holland using an American accent?
00:00:41.780Why aren't people talking in the British accent that we imagine everybody in all of history always spoke with?
00:00:48.180And in talking with Valerie about how people speak English, we get into that.
00:00:52.300like what accents did people maybe have in the past and how can we guess what those were like
00:00:57.220and what we think of now is the sort of british accent the sort of fancy accent that people often
00:01:03.060have in historical costume dramas was actually a recent accent and people in history didn't really
00:01:09.040talk like that i also really enjoyed talking with her about what did people maybe talk like
00:01:14.140during the founding of america what sort of accents did people have she's a linguist this
00:01:19.500is a topic of valerie's new book which is called why we talk funny the real story behind our
00:01:24.300accents we had valerie on the podcast a few years ago when she's promoting her previous book
00:01:28.660like literally dude arguing for the good in bad english i love that she's talking about how
00:01:33.660language specifically the english language is always developing and always changing and people
00:01:39.040who get mad about it are just there's are just behind the times man like languages aren't frozen
00:01:46.080an amber and they're always changing. They're always developing. Accents are changing. She's
00:01:49.420such a fun person to talk to. So enjoy this conversation with Valerie Friedland, author
00:01:54.120of the new book, Why We Talk Funny, The Real Story Behind Our Accents.
00:02:01.940Okay, so today we are joined for a return visit by author Valerie Friedland about her new book,
00:02:08.120Why We Talk Funny, The Real Story Behind Our Accents. So you were on this podcast a few years
00:02:12.780ago with your previous book, which was talking about, well, your previous book, I just remember
00:02:17.980I invited you on because it was, to me, a defense of saying like in sentences, which is the way that
00:02:23.400I talk. Right. Well, it was called Like Literally Dude. So it was kind of featuring all those things
00:02:30.140they love to hate, and especially the things that we love to hate in women was a big part of that.0.99
00:02:36.100I was happy to have you on the podcast last time because, well, because it was great talking with0.98
00:02:40.960but also now when somebody leaves a bad review for my podcast saying, oh, she uses the word like,
00:02:46.320or she says, um, I can be like, listen to this episode. This explains why actually.
00:02:50.580Exactly. Exactly. I have it on a good authority. It actually means a lot more than you think.
00:02:55.360Right. Uh, you know, we, we, this is how language progresses. Exactly. We have such a short
00:03:00.740view of history in terms of speech and why we get the features we do. And, um, a lot of times
00:03:07.660it's because we don't ever learn linguistics. We don't learn language history. We learn
00:03:12.520prescriptivist history and that's a very different thing. And so we get really annoyed by all these
00:03:18.180new features that come into language, but this is exactly the life cycle of language and old
00:03:23.680English is unintelligible. I mean, just go read Beowulf. No one wants that. So when we complain
00:03:30.080about these new features, we're really complaining about the very evolution of language that brought
00:03:34.660us to be speaking the way we are today. So really the goal of that book was simply to
00:03:39.200set the record straight about features like literally and like, and I'm an odd that we love
00:03:45.020to hate and why we do them because they're obviously super popular. They serve a purpose.
00:03:50.080We don't just randomly do things. And so, you know, that was really a book about people's
00:03:55.160complaints about language that they bring to me. So a lot of that was inspired by the things I kept
00:03:59.840hearing. This new book is really inspired by what I have spent my career researching and also my
00:04:07.640early life experience as the child of people with a non-native accent. So what it was like growing
00:04:14.840up in a place, the South, the South of the United States that has such a salient accent itself,
00:04:21.340and then having parents who had accents in that already accented place. It was a unique experience
00:04:27.700That made me incredibly aware of the social power of an accent.
00:04:32.320And then when I would talk to people, I'd find everybody has an accent story.
00:04:37.300And one is, obviously, we all have accents.
00:04:40.340We might not believe it, but that's because we think of accents in terms of region.
00:04:45.200So if you sound like you're from a region like the South or New York that has a salient accent.
00:04:50.980But accents tell a lot more than region.
00:04:52.940they tell us about race, gender, ethnicity, and class, age. There's all sorts of things that our
00:05:02.200accents reveal, and we don't think of that. So when I think I don't have an accent, I just don't
00:05:07.580have a noticeable accent to myself because everybody I talk to sounds like me. But if I
00:05:13.560leave my country, clearly people know I'm not from there. And they'll even often say, oh, you have an
00:05:18.780American accent. When I lived in Istanbul, people always tagged me for American. And, you know,
00:05:24.800most people would say, oh, I don't have a super strong accent, but I obviously do because when
00:05:30.880I left and moved to another country, people knew where I was from right away. So accents are
00:05:36.320incredibly revealing about social aspects of our lives, both because those aspects are important
00:05:42.620to us. So they talk about sort of, you know, where we're from and who we spend time with.
00:05:49.220But also they tell people things that we might not realize they do. So, you know, there are
00:05:54.640always complaints about young speakers, which is something I talked about a lot in my last book.
00:05:59.660And, you know, that shows us that accents are about age because we hear things in other people's
00:06:05.480speech. If we're young, we feel like, oh, that's old people talk. As my daughter says to me all
00:06:10.440the time, say something or sound like something she thinks is old, or older adults often complain
00:06:17.920about how those young people talk. So, you know, obviously, there's so much more in our accents
00:06:22.620than people think about. And that's really what drove this book. Well, and I can really see the
00:06:28.100in terms of how you're describing your first book in this one, there's also the way that people
00:06:32.280perceive certain accents as being incorrect, or people are speaking differently, or there's like
00:06:37.500a certain way that we should be speaking and someone with a certain accent dropping the g at
00:06:42.180the end of uh ing word for instance like and you talk about that in the book as well just kind of
00:06:47.540how there is this kind of classism and there's sort of an assumption that certain accents and
00:06:51.180you see it in you know comedy or the simpsons or something when you want to have like a really0.95
00:06:55.500stupid character like often they do give them a southern accent you know like different accents
00:07:00.780mean different things and that's so i thought that was really interesting to read through your0.99
00:07:04.300book and just explain why these accents are the way they are. Right. There's a history behind the
00:07:10.100reasons we think of, you know, a British RP accent as aristocratic and smart and sophisticated.
00:07:16.880But, you know, we think of a sort of Spanish based accent as being sort of someone from
00:07:22.620an outsider accent and maybe someone from a more lower class background. We're very classist
00:07:29.240because of historical events and relationships that we have with speakers that come from areas
00:07:36.980where those languages are spoken or different accents of English are spoken. And those get
00:07:43.160imbued with not just, you know, an association with a way of speech, but also associations with
00:07:49.500a way of being, a way of presenting and our beliefs about how smart those people are, how
00:07:56.560good those people are, right? So people that are socially lucky, that have certain accents,
00:08:04.000we then start just seeing them as socially superior and not just socially lucky. So people
00:08:09.620that have certain accents often are considered high class, like RP, because of their historical
00:08:16.040positioning, you know, they were the place that became a cultural center, and they were the
00:08:21.400speakers that lived in that place that became a cultural center. And they were the ones that
00:08:25.620happened to have you know aristocratic blood so they were wealthy and lived in a place that was
00:08:29.900a cultural center and so it's kind of luck of the draw that they ended up having the you know
00:08:34.580sophisticated accent but then that becomes associated with how you get to that position
00:08:40.580and somehow they're intrinsically better and that gets put on their accent and the same thing
00:08:45.980happens when you have a working class accent it's imbued with all these characteristics some good
00:08:50.680some bad but just like you said Hollywood is great at understanding that social power of accents
00:08:55.340because they cast characters with certain accents so that all these associations we have with those
00:09:01.700accents do the work of characterization. So they don't have to tell you the backstory of these
00:09:07.220characters because their accents do that for them. And it's so fascinating to me how those
00:09:12.900backstories were built by history and naturally the story I'm telling these books. What is the
00:09:18.700history behind the African-American accent, for example, behind the American accent and, you know,
00:09:23.940the New York accent and all those different accents that we find very salient, because I
00:09:29.580personally find that fascinating how it tells a story that we're not aware of. You know, it's
00:09:34.380really the story of humanity. And your book, just, you know, there's so many interesting examples in
00:09:40.920it. And I was like, I need to, I need to drill down. I can't ask you too many questions. We're
00:09:44.520just having a short podcast interview. But if you could, I think it would be interesting for people
00:09:48.860understand, for example, how at the time of the American Revolution, you know, there's this big
00:09:54.140anniversary coming up, like the schism between the British accent and the American accent,
00:10:00.020like at what point did those diverge in your research? Absolutely. You know, I think people
00:10:05.700think of the regions that are existent today and the differences between them as something that
00:10:10.440have always existed. So, you know, the South versus the North is antagonism we kind of see
00:10:15.660culturally and linguistically, these very salient dialects. They feel like they've been around
00:10:21.180forever, but truthfully, they really have only been around since soon after the American
00:10:27.520Revolution. Prior to that, in the early settlement of the colonies, when it was the new world and not
00:10:33.080the new republic, there were actually bigger differences that were emergent between the
00:10:39.760American language, the dialects on the tongues of Americans on these new colonists, and Britain.
00:10:46.260So the differences that you see written about there was shock and awe at how incredibly distinct
00:10:52.220the American language, as they called it, had become from the British language.
00:10:56.780And the other remarkable thing that you see in the late 1600s and early 1700s primarily
00:11:02.260is commentary on how similar Americans were to each other.
00:11:07.140Of course, they weren't Americans at that time.
00:11:08.600They were British subjects still, but how similar to the different colonies sounded.
00:11:14.200And that's probably not completely accurate.
00:11:16.880I'm sure that, you know, people, you know how when you're in the South, everybody outside
00:11:21.220the South hears a Southern accent, but people in the South or in the North, they know where
00:11:27.500So there are these differences that exist that are kind of invisible at the larger level.
00:11:32.280And I think that's really what happened.
00:11:33.900I doubt they actually sounded all that similar.
00:11:36.040But the contrast between the incredible diversity of British dialects and British accents in Britain, where, you know, you could go to a neighboring village and they would sound completely different.
00:11:48.660And there was a lot of classism as well. Now, that really happened around 1600 and 1700, but there were there were remarkable differences in the accents there.
00:11:57.960And in America or in the colonies, people sounded very uniform and also very distinct from those back in Britain.
00:12:07.900So what was really commented on until about 1780, 1790 was this uniquely American sound, New World sound.
00:12:17.380Can I ask what the people who, like the settlers who came initially over to America, is part of it, and I think you say this in the book, they were coming from certain regions of Britain.
00:12:29.180So it was people coming over who already shared an accent.
00:12:31.740It's not a bunch of people came over with 17 different accents and they all flattened.
00:12:40.080That is about a bunch of people came over with 17 accents and they flattened.
00:12:43.320However, what set up the unique, so I think what the best answer is the seeds of the American
00:12:50.360regions were set in play at the very first founding of the colonies, but it took a while
00:12:57.360for that tree of dialects to grow, but the seeds were there.
00:13:01.620So what happened is you had these three distinct main early colonies.
00:13:05.460So you had, you know, the earliest one was Jamestown, and that was obviously sort of
00:13:10.580what would become the southern accent. But at that time, it was basically settlers from
00:13:16.000the southwestern parts of Britain were the predominant areas. However, there were also
00:13:23.140people from all over. So in no colony was there just one main accent. What we do find is there
00:13:30.140was a tendency for southern British accents to be more highly represented in the Jamestown colony
00:13:37.940and the next colony that was settled, which was the New England or the Massachusetts or Plymouth
00:13:43.300colony. That had more East Anglia sort of settlement, so southeastern Britain, but both
00:13:49.520of them were predominantly southern British in terms of the sheer numbers of people from one
00:13:55.000area. However, there were a lot of Irish, there were a lot of Welsh, there were some northern
00:13:59.300British dialects represented. There was simply not a preponderance of one group. There was a
00:14:05.820slight tendency for southern British dialects to be overrepresented in the colonies. And that
00:14:12.100seems to be what kind of shaped some of the leveling that happened. So I would say that
00:14:18.000there's there's both seeds of both of what you brought up. There were people from certain areas
00:14:22.700that kind of pushed the dialect in one direction. But there was such great diversity in not just
00:14:29.800where people were from, but the classes and ranks they came from, that was unheard of of the kind
00:14:36.180of mixing that happened in Britain, right? Aristocrats and servants didn't mix in the
00:14:41.740way they did in the colony. So yes, servants would have served the aristocrats, but they would never
00:14:47.620have talked like them. But in the new world, survival was the key. And you didn't have time
00:14:53.700to be worried about who you were talking to. You built the thing together. You worked the land
00:14:58.200together. You had to survive together. You strategize together. There were also many fewer
00:15:03.740people there. And so you had this intense mixing of classes that you didn't have back in Britain.
00:15:09.860And so that was also foundational to the accents. But the basic reality is it was a vast
00:15:16.040caudron of different dialects with slightly more Southern British in both the Jamestown and Plymouth
00:15:22.040colonies that ended up doing something we call leveling in linguistics, which means they kind
00:15:28.540of had this, you know, sort of mixture of all these different features. And the features that
00:15:33.300were most prevalent tended to stay. And the ones that were less common tended to die out.
00:15:39.400Or sometimes ones that were not maybe so prevalent, but had prestige for some reason,
00:15:45.760those ended up staying, right? So it was kind of a mixed bag of what was picked from each dialect.
00:15:50.760And that's what leveled out. And that's how we got the sort of different mixture that ended up becoming the differences between the New England accent and the Jamestown accent.
00:16:02.140But then, you know, about 60 years later, you get Pennsylvania, and that actually was settled from very different settlers. So the Pennsylvania colony, which was settled in 1681 by William Penn, who had received a charter from King Charles II, settled with mainly a northern British group.
00:16:22.620So they were different than the Southern British that had settled Jamestown and Plymouth in terms of their dialect features.
00:16:28.620And still today, the big difference between accents, larger accents in Britain are the Northern versus Southern British.0.90
00:18:38.260And it's those founders effects of these three main dialect areas that happened with the early colonists.
00:18:45.140But it wasn't for another 100, 150 years that we start to see comments on regional accent divides.
00:18:52.160And that's about the time of the American Revolution.
00:18:55.280And that's when a lot of the founding fathers actually were really worried about the different emerging dialects of the different regions tearing apart this fragile union.
00:19:04.740And, you know, we see that same talk echoed today where people are worried.
00:19:10.080So, for example, Benjamin Franklin was extremely antagonistic to German input into English and French and made some really hostile comments that if you read them today, they could sound like a modern speaker talking about Spanish.
00:19:25.620So it's the same fear of, you know, foreign influence on English tearing the nation apart.
00:19:31.500Obviously, it didn't do that in Benjamin Franklin's time.
00:19:34.740Instead, German and French became part of the American dialect story.
00:19:38.920And the same thing is happening today where Spanish is becoming part of the American dialect
00:19:44.380But it's an inspiring of fear when it happens.
00:19:47.640And it's just funny when you think about in the long view of history, how we've had the0.98
00:19:53.100same fear, you know, with all different groups that have come in from the French and the
00:19:57.500Germans early on to the Italians and the Irish a little later.0.97
00:20:01.100And now it's Spanish that's doing it.0.83
00:20:03.500But so far, English has survived quite well.
00:20:07.260Well, and what you were saying about the I found this part really interesting because you're talking about, you know, historically, but also in current times.
00:20:14.420And I see this all the time with people who I know where the parents came to North America from somewhere else.
00:20:19.940And but the kids, the kids don't have an accent like their parents.
00:20:23.960The kids have an accent like the people who they're around.
00:20:26.580So I, I presume that that's, I forget you have a name for it, but it's something about like the
00:20:31.700three generations of how long it takes for the accent. And so I'm just imagining in early America,
00:20:36.420a similar thing. Like the parents came from this part of England with a really strong accent,
00:20:40.280but their kids are growing up around people from different places, different classes. So the kids
00:20:44.340would be the ones like each generation. That's how the new accent is kind of developing. Is that
00:20:49.460correct? Exactly. Exactly. It's called the three generation pattern that happens. And we, we find
00:20:55.200this overwhelmingly, whenever someone from someplace lands in a new place that has a
00:21:00.700different language, we find that it's within three generations that the original language
00:27:23.080Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, and armies scattered like bones in the dust.
00:27:28.500Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight.
00:27:36.040But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins.
00:27:40.320This is old school adventuring at its most cruel.
00:27:43.540Your torch ticks down in real time, and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job.
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00:28:02.040Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on youtube.com slash the glass cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day.
00:28:12.580See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark.
00:28:43.540Especially then we're looking at a time when, you know, we're talking about many, many fewer
00:28:48.060people than we have today in a, or in a city there, their, their townships or their villages
00:28:54.000were far smaller and more interactive, right?
00:28:58.400There was an incredible need for a collective action, collective work, collective parenting.
00:29:05.100And therefore these kids would have had intense interaction with other children born probably
00:29:10.820to parents speaking different dialects, if not different languages. And so they needed to find
00:29:15.940common ground. So it's really in children that the accents change. So their parents didn't level
00:29:22.360the speech. So their parents died with the same accent they probably came with,0.73
00:29:26.860but their children sounded nothing like them. So that's why within one generation,
00:29:32.660when travelers came and experienced the new world, they were stunned at the leveling of
00:29:38.440the British accent because they were listening to the kids, right? And, you know, within 18 years,
00:29:43.320you have a whole new set of accents. So it's pretty rapid when it happens in a setting that's
00:29:49.060so intensely distinct, like the colonies were. Well, and something you talk about in the book
00:29:55.120as well, and I've heard so many theories about this. I'm curious for you to share your theory
00:29:59.420about this. People often like to think about, well, what did people sound like in Shakespeare's
00:30:04.700time. Like when the original Shakespeare plays were coming out, what was that accent? And I've
00:30:08.300heard various different people claim, well, actually, they sound like this. Actually,
00:30:12.000this is the accent that's the most similar to that. Can you talk about what your findings are
00:30:16.480about what was you, what currently today is the closest sound to what Shakespeare would have
00:30:21.840sounded like? Yeah, you know, I think that it's so funny. It's a funny thing. People really have
00:30:27.520this view that there still exists some Shakespearean English. And my answer would be
00:30:32.580there's no accent that is alone itself most like the Shakespearean accent because so much has
00:30:40.260changed they've just changed in different ways so a lot of times we've heard you know Appalachian
00:30:44.340accents are sort of Shakespeare in the holler that's been a long long-standing fallacy
00:30:51.080because certain things like a prefixing so I'm a hunting and a fishing that form um and and
00:30:59.820multiple modals so when you say i might could those are older features that are relic features
00:31:05.660so they're retained in certain dialects namely in appalachian dialects still today
00:31:10.800and those have been lost in other ones so people then point to oh look so they're you know
00:31:16.100shakespearean in their speech and multiple negation is another one in the 1600s shakespeare
00:31:21.280used a lot of multiple negation it was it was okay to do um at the time it wasn't a pariah
00:31:27.360like it is today so that's like to say like i'm i'm not going to not do that i'm not no ain't
00:31:33.200nobody doing nothing that kind of thing right and ain't ain't is also a relic feature right it was
00:31:39.280very prominent in the 1600s among people of all different social classes it gradually became more
00:31:45.620associated with um lower class speech but it wasn't at that time it was pretty prevalent we
00:31:52.100find it in aristocratic speech as well so you could point to all those features as being
00:31:56.540archaic features or relic features, but no more so in the sense of any features being able to
00:32:05.000be pointed to that were around then and maybe died out in some accents, but not others would
00:32:09.960be relic features. So, you know, if you go to North Carolina, there are some Irish verb forms
00:32:15.960like bees that you can also find in Newfoundland where they also retain those, right? Where the
00:32:23.680bees isn't that that one of the sorry as a canadian as a canadian i need to say it's newfoundland
00:32:29.360newfoundland okay i have a problem that one all kills me i'm always like am i wrong in pronouncing
00:32:34.940it so i everybody everybody says their own newfoundland newfoundland newfoundland okay
00:32:41.000newfoundland perfect anyway there was a lot of irish settlement there so we find a sort of
00:32:46.800striking similarity actually when you look at relic features that exist in that accent and in
00:32:52.880some in North Carolina because there was also a lot of Irish settlement there. So those also are
00:32:58.700relic features. So it's hard to ever pinpoint one accent or one dialect as having more of those than
00:33:05.480any other. Those are more noticeable because the relic features that other varieties of American
00:33:10.940English have, so things like saying the ah vowel, ah is actually an older vowel than ah. So when you
00:33:17.960say, you know, aunt, that's an older pronunciation than aunt. Aunt is only basically a 19th century
00:33:24.500pronunciation. So while we think of that as, oh, very British, it's actually not. Aunt was the
00:33:30.160original British form, and that's what was brought over with the colonists. But the difference is
00:33:34.420there are more Americans that have ah and not ah, so it doesn't feel like a relic feature to us.
00:33:41.340You know, saying fall and autumn is the same thing, right? Fall is an archaic term.
00:33:47.960So we don't point to, you know, someone from, you know, Chicago and say, oh, my God, they're a relic speaker, because they're saying those, but they are relic forms. It's just that it's more widely shared. So, you know, it's a really interesting kind of tease out what were older forms and what weren't. But what we find is it's a hodgepodge. So every English accent has some features that are relics and some that aren't.
00:34:09.040they may differ. And the ones that we tend to say, oh, that's more Shakespearean are simply ones that
00:34:14.440accent A doesn't have, but accent B does. But accent A has other ones that are maybe more
00:34:19.900widely shared that are also relics. So I would say there is no accent existent today that sounds
00:34:26.480like it. And in fact, one of the reasons is if you go back and look at some of the early transcripts
00:34:32.920of, um, you know, like trials, the Salem witch trials or early documents written in colonial
00:34:39.280English, which is the only way we have to understand what sound, what sounded like what
00:34:44.300back then, um, or rhyme scheme. So I know the crystals, Ben and David Crystal have done a lot
00:34:49.640with Shakespearean rhyme schemes by, you know, trying to sort of how would it, what would have
00:34:54.260rhymed at the time. Yeah. And that's how they reconstruct. Um, so, and they're fabulous. So
00:34:59.120if you ever want to hear more what Shakespearean English sounded like, I would say they are the
00:35:03.100sources that you should probably look to. But what we find is a lot of those speech features that we
00:35:08.620would think of as sort of rustic or rural or uneducated today are what Shakespearean English
00:35:15.580would have sounded more like, which I think surprises people. So if it, you know, this
00:35:20.260classy, sophisticated, received pronunciation that almost all movies that are have sort of
00:35:27.000Victorian settings sound like right you see the and you feel oh look how elegant and sophisticated0.94
00:35:31.980well if you go back 100 years before that no they would have sound rustic and rural and dumb to you
00:35:37.660because that is a lot of the features that would have been part of Shakespearean English and you
00:35:43.100know one of the things for example is the axe for ask pronunciation that was really prevalent
00:35:48.280in 1600 and so you know and winter instead of window you know things like that naked
00:35:55.500instead of naked all of these things are actually what you would have been hearing around you and
00:36:00.460sari instead of sarah dafter for daughter right these are all actually archaic forms that would
00:36:08.340have been shakespearean english-esque of that time period but if you said them today people
00:36:15.260would look at you funny they wouldn't think oh my god that's so elegant and shakespearean they0.96
00:36:20.580would think, oh my God, you know, so rustic and dumb. So it's, it's really funny that the reality0.91
00:36:26.940of what it would have sounded like and what we have in our imagination about what it would have
00:36:31.060sounded like are completely different. I've always thought that this is funny that when
00:36:35.300people do Hollywood or I guess, especially Britain, they do any film set in a historical
00:36:40.520time period with classy people. So if it's like ancient Rome, it's like they all have to receive
00:36:45.780british pronunciation because it's like so funny classy people but what like what you're explaining
00:36:50.400what you talk about in the book is like that received british pronunciation is like a fairly
00:36:54.360recent accent but it's like no we have to show that these are classy olden times people so and
00:36:59.420if they're not classy then it's cockney it's like absolutely i don't know i recently watched
00:37:04.440i claudius do you know the old like 1970s series so it's it's an ancient roman all of the the roman
00:37:11.100senators like it's patrick stewart isn't it people are all talking in these received british
00:37:15.340pronunciation and then the workers are like oh they're like the workers are literally cockney
00:37:20.060but it's ancient rome but it's just a shorthand for audiences i think to be like these are classy
00:37:25.020people and if you if anyone and i think some people have tried to do or have done you know
00:37:30.480costume dramas using what would probably be a more authentic accent the audiences are just like
00:37:35.360that's not right they sound too modern sound too american that's right actually i was asked one
00:37:40.600time to help on a movie where they were trying to go back into early American accents a couple
00:37:47.760hundred years and they want it to be authentic. But then when I was teaching them what it would
00:37:51.380have been more authentic at that time, they were like, no, we can't get away with that. People
00:37:55.440would hate that. You know, it's just not, it's not what you think. It's not because that image
00:38:00.440I think people have is that classy accent and it just would have sounded quite different. And you
00:38:05.980have to remember too, literacy is a relatively new thing. So this, you know, tie we have to what
00:38:11.880classy is, is actually a fairly new one tied to literacy. And, you know, prior to the mid to late
00:38:20.3801800s, literacy was not widespread. And so, you know, women, for example, particularly would not
00:38:26.300have been taught to read and write prior to that. And so a lot of times their speech would have0.99
00:38:31.440been more similar to some of the working class or what they didn't have a working class at the time,
00:38:35.920the low-born people, because that's who they spend a lot of their time with in terms of
00:38:41.260servants and things like that. And in fact, when we track language change in the 16, 1700s,
00:38:47.460a lot of times we find that women's letters, if they did have some literacy and they were able
00:38:52.760to write some, they wrote how they spoke and that their pronunciations of things and their usages
00:38:58.620were very similar to some of the laborers and sort of, you know, they didn't really have a
00:39:05.540middle class at that time, but people of non-highborn rank. So a lot of the innovations
00:39:10.820that were introduced in that speech found their way into women's speech as well at the era. But
00:39:15.820we find that less common in educated men's speech. And that's because they were the ones1.00
00:39:20.860that were highly literate. So they were much more tied to the pronunciations that they saw written
00:39:24.980in texts. So what do you think about, so today, when people are being prescriptive and saying
00:39:33.340something like saying x instead of ask you know and how that's looked down upon is like well that's
00:39:38.460people who are sort of grammatically people who develop an accent because of where they live
00:39:43.720and that's just how they speak and then for that accent to be looked down upon and for those people
00:39:48.420to be seen as lesser when like how do you how would you explain in the most kind way like actually
00:39:55.220this is everyone just talks like how they talk like there's not one correct way i think you know
00:40:01.400one of the things I try to do in the book is show how a lot of these features came to be and that
00:40:06.520they have the same origin story as the things we think are high class. You know, there's really
00:40:12.040not a difference. It's not like one is an uneducated bastardization of another, which is
00:40:18.040sort of the thought, right? That X is a mispronunciation rather than the fact that it's
00:40:22.900actually an alternative pronunciation that has existed since the time of old English.
00:40:26.980And in fact, was used widely in well-regarded texts at the time.
00:40:32.060So Chaucer used Acts quite frequently.
00:40:35.100Bible translations, early Bible translations used Acts quite frequently.
00:40:39.760And so, you know, it's really just getting people to understand the history behind why
00:40:44.780we think certain speech features are better, are sort of more elite than others, and getting
00:40:50.680them to kind of untangle this idea of goodness with certain speech forms.
00:40:56.980because there can be certainly speech forms that are preferred socially.
00:41:01.320And that's really what standard speech is.
00:41:03.700It's a social preference for a form of speech.
00:41:07.000And that preference for the type of English that we consider standard today
00:41:11.380really started in the 1800s in Britain.
00:41:14.820And it simply is a certain style of speech that was the ones that the elite
00:41:24.660and that got elevated to what we consider standard English. But there's a difference
00:41:29.440between having a social preference for something and saying, okay, because we like this better,
00:41:34.160we're going to elevate this variety so that we want to use this in institutions and teach it in
00:41:39.080school and have it in professional context. That's a separate thing entirely than to say,
00:41:44.720well, that means that everybody who doesn't speak this somehow speaks something wrong or
00:41:50.980something incorrect or something that is a bad attack that they don't know any better yeah and
00:41:56.500i think it's the tie-in because we teach standard english in schools that we don't realize that
00:42:02.740that's not that doesn't mean that that's the variety that was always spoken or the variety
00:42:07.840that's actually linguistically more superior it's simply the variety that had been selected by those
00:42:16.560in power at one point in time when schools were getting established to be the one taught there
00:42:20.740And the other thing we don't think about is when you go to school as a standard English background speaker, so when you grow up in a middle class white family in America, you're going to have a variety that more closely aligns to that.
00:42:33.180So your job at school is a lot easier, right?
00:42:38.660You're simply starting with more that's aligned with those norms.
00:42:42.380But when you come as a second language speaker with parents that are not from this country, or you are an African American English speaker coming from an African American English speaking background, or you're a working class speaker coming from a working class background, when you go to school, the norms of your speech and the norms of what's taught in school don't align as easily.
00:43:04.340and we don't do anything to help that we don't we don't have any kind of ways of saying look
00:43:10.760these are just different systems and yours is completely valid but in this context here's the
00:43:16.100you know language basically that we're teaching and here are some rules that can help you make
00:43:22.040that leap right here are some readers that can show you where the differences lie we don't teach0.90
00:43:27.260it that way we just assume okay you guys have a dumb accent and therefore you need to just forget0.94
00:43:32.000it and learn this one. And I mean, not only is that sort of socially wrong, because it's shaming0.98
00:43:38.540people for something that shouldn't be shamed at all. But it's also ineffective from a pedagogical
00:43:45.220standpoint, because children don't learn effectively that way, you're not giving them
00:43:50.320the tools and the scaffolding to learn. You're also making them feel bad about their own speech
00:43:55.720rather than good about learning an alternative variety that can help them be successful in other
00:44:00.560context. So there really has to be a reshaping of thinking about how we approach teaching
00:44:07.040standard English if we want to overcome that, which I think is the goal, right? That people,
00:44:12.720when they look at reading failure rates and things like that in schools, if you want to
00:44:16.640improve those, well, then you have to think outside the box in terms of how to do it.
00:44:21.380I thought that was such a fascinating point. And just listeners, you know, pick up her book to get
00:44:26.780all the information about this but things like somebody if you i'm picturing someone with a like
00:44:30.840how you describe the the african-american um accent if you say like i'm a go to the store
00:44:36.240and then that kid goes to school and they have a reader and it says i apostrophe m
00:44:40.400i am going to the store it's like that's not what they're saying so why would they
00:44:45.240that's the sort of example you're saying right where it's just like the way that they're speaking
00:44:49.360is not the words they're being shown so there's a dissonance between a bigger mismatch right
00:44:54.060Especially, yes, because written English, which is a different skill than spoken English, right?
00:45:05.120So by one, you're making sounds, but you're not reading, right?
00:45:08.720That's something you learn that someone has to actually teach you actively.
00:45:13.300And then we don't realize that actually the letters that we, the graphene we use to represent
00:45:18.740English in written form are much more aligned with standard English forms.
00:45:23.340And therefore, it's a lot easier to learn to read because there's not as much mismatch.
00:45:28.300And there has been a program that was developed by a linguist by the name of Bill Above that actually tried to remedy that by using readers that helped sort of scaffold those differences for non-native speakers.
00:45:39.660Or really, it was more for inner city African-American children that he was developing this for.
00:45:45.800And those schools that implemented that saw a rise in reading rates.
00:45:50.520so it was actually effective because it helped point out okay in your dialect this is spelled
00:45:57.840this way this would be how it would be written in in standard English writing this is how it
00:46:02.240be written so look for that correspondence that's how it's written and you know you're providing
00:46:08.400some clues versus just you know hey kid you're not doing it right figure it out which is really
00:46:13.300the way we teach it so your book this episode is coming out the same week your book is published
00:46:18.440So why we talk funny, the real story behind our accents.
00:46:21.620If people want to keep up with you, do you have events and launches and things that people