In the bonus segment this week, we look at the "Shakespeare in the holler" myth and whether isolated American communities actually speak like 17th-century colonists. Then, we look at why the cover of Valerie Fridland's book, "Why We Talk Funny," was modified to better reflect the phonetic sounds in the word "talk." We also look at the evolution of the "R" sound and how social media influences regional dialects.
In the bonus segment this week, we look at the "Shakespeare in the holler" myth and whether isolated American communities actually speak like 17th-century colonists. Then, we look at why the cover of Valerie Fridland's book, "Why We Talk Funny," was modified to better reflect the phonetic sounds in the word "talk." We also look at the evolution of the "R" sound and how social media influences regional dialects.
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Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. Thank you so much for supporting the show. And we just finished up the main segment with Valerie Fridland about her book, "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents," just this wonderful, fascinating book about why we talk the way we talk. In the main segment, we talked about why English speakers have trouble rolling their R's, why some people embrace their accents and others try to get rid of them, what it can mean for you in the workplace, but what it means for politicians. It was really fascinating, so if you haven't listened to that, go check it out. But now in our bonus segment, we're going to talk about a myth, maybe a myth, about Shakespearean English and American English, how social media affects our language and more. Valerie, thanks so much for being here.
Valerie Fridland: Of course, excited to talk about these special topics.
Mignon Fogarty: Special topics, bonus topics.
Mignon Fogarty: I have heard that there are pockets in America where people still speak like Shakespeare. I think that might be a myth, but I think there's sort of like a half-truth to it. Can you explain?
Valerie Fridland: Absolutely. That certainly is an enduring myth, and especially about Appalachian dialects, people sort of say, you know, Shakespeare in the holler. But that is untrue in the sense that every accent retains certain combinations of older features, what we call relic features in linguistics, and newer features and in different combinations. But what happens is when the dominant dialect of sort of standard American English doesn't contain those features, certain certain groups of speech features anymore, but we hear them in these more localized accents, they stand out to us and then then we notice them as being these old features. So a good example of this is A-prefixing it's called, which is I was a-huntin' and a-fishin'. That "A" that actually was widespread. So if you went back to Colonial English, you would have heard that everywhere. It was a very typical part of 1600s English, more generally British English. So it was brought over with a lot of the early colonists and it was not relegated only to certain areas of the South or certain dialects. But it started to die out in other ones so that it became retained as a relic feature in Appalachian dialects. And so we hear that myth about, "Oh look, it's Shakespeare." But the reality is, you know, a lot of English accents that are Americanized have some older features that that would have been true of Shakespeare's English, but it's just more generalized. So a good example of that is the "A" vowel. So if I say "bath" instead of "bath", right, that actually is the original vowel. So it's not until the 19th century that we see that "bath", "bath" split that happens. And so that is actually an innovative feature in Britain that came later. So Americans are actually more like Shakespeare in their pronunciation of that vowel because Shakespeare would not have had that "ah" vowel, he would have had the "a" vowel. And you know, the fall in autumn split, so fall is an older term. And those are all relic features, but because we all have them, we don't think of us sounding like Shakespeare, but it's true that those were a Shakespearean era features. But if you hear something like A-prefixing that stands out or older, you know, terms, one thing sort of for example in North Carolina English, you could hear "bees," "I bees goin'." That also actually is an older form that we found prevalent in Irish Englishes in the early colonial period. That's a relic feature, it stands out though because people elsewhere don't tend to say it. So is it Shakespearean? Well, no, that's Irish actually, but it's not more Shakespearean than some of the relic features we find elsewhere.
Mignon Fogarty: And the R, I was surprised too that the way British people and American people pronounce their R's isn't as much American or British as I thought, that the older pronunciation was actually different.
Valerie Fridland: Right. The older pronunciation of an R was a trilled R. But that would have been a lot, maybe even, you know, the old English period it was probably already dying. So when we look back at the languages that we think kind of evolved from these Proto-Indo-European languages and the Proto-Germanic, we do find a lot of them had at one point a trilled R. And there's something inherent in R, it's very kind of phonetically complex to get into what it is, but basically that leads to it's called weakening over time, which simply means that the gestures we use to make it kind of lessen or decrease. And part of that's because we're talking fast, and when you talk fast, if you can get your point across by not hyper-articulating something, you'll do it. Which is why "did you eat yet" often becomes "jeet yet?"
Mignon Fogarty: Uh-huh.
Valerie Fridland: You know what I'm talking about, you know whether we've had dinner or not, but it's more efficient to say it that way. So that's sort of a form of weakening, meaning you simply do less gestures. So R is very prone to that, and so a trilled R that has a lot of gestures, right, the tongue has to go back and forth, that tends to lessen over time to the point where sometimes it gets deleted altogether, which is why we have some southern British Englishes that have no R in words in the middle of words. I mean they have R's at the beginning, but American English kept its R, again a relic feature, because in, you know, the Middle English period, everybody had their R.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, yeah, I I may have told this story before on the show, but I had a professor who was British and in a biology class and she kept telling us to mock our tubes. And everyone was looking at each other like "mock", "mock our tubes"?
Valerie Fridland: We're supposed to pretend like I'm a tube?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I'm going to make fun of them, like we were genuinely confused. Finally she was like, "mark," you know, and I...
Valerie Fridland: I love it, I love it.
Mignon Fogarty: But that mock would not have been the British pronunciation 200 years ago, 300 years ago?
Valerie Fridland: Right. Well, actually, it's sort of the 19th century that we got that R dropping in full, but by in the 1600s when the first colonists would have come to America, there were some small hints that R was going to be lost, but it wasn't widespread either here or in Britain. And really why British speakers, southern British speakers I want to say because not all British speakers do this, so northern British accents have the R, the reason they started to drop it was that it continued this early pattern, but once people were separated so that, you know, the colonists were in the New World and the original speakers were still in Britain, they got separated so the tendencies didn't operate the same over time in those two places. But the roots of R dropping had already started so in the 1600s we see words like "arse" becomes "ass," you know, and then "ass," and "burst" becomes "bust," "first" is often pronounced "fust," which we see it written that way, which tells us that R dropping had already started then but it was very regulated only to these these sounds before S sounds. So we only find it happening before S sounds. So that's why we say "bust," for example, in American English and "cuss" for "curse" because that had already come with the early colonists, but it wasn't for 200 years later, about 1800, where we really see it starting to expand in other patterns where it's completely sunk as an elocution expert in 1791 commented. And so that continued in Britain and then got taken over to Australia when later colonists colonized Australia from Britain, which is why Americans have all their R's but the Australians follow the more southern British pattern.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh wow, and it has to do with like London becoming the prestige area, right?
Valerie Fridland: Absolutely. So London at that era had sort of risen in cultural and economic clout and that was where this was happening most predominantly and so because of this prestige of being in London where everything was happening, kind of like New York or Boston in the early days of colonial settlement, those well, I mean not early days, New York really was a little later, but still, we used to look towards New England for example which as the prestigious dialect even up to 1900, early 1900s. That London took on that kind of cultural linguistic and social happening place to be, and then everybody wanted to emulate the speech there because that would help you sort of be upwardly mobile at the time when upward mobility was a possibility, so up to about 1700 it really wasn't, you were either born a commoner or someone in the aristocracy. But with the Industrial Revolution sort of changing the nature of how you got rich, that changed and the accent of London, the accent of the elite in London became the accent to know to get the trappings of wealth so to speak.
Mignon Fogarty: Hmm. Nice. Well, let's come back more toward the modern day because I know people will be really interested to hear about social media and what effect it has on people's accents.
Valerie Fridland: I think a lot of people think social media is going to be the death of accent and in some ways they're right, but in some ways they're wrong. So where they're right is social media and the way that you interact with it and the almost parasocial relationships that we form with a lot of influencers, for example, and also a lot of the connectedness we're having now with people far outside where we live. So young people now connect with people all over on social media that they would have never connected with 20 years ago without it, has really fundamentally changed our interactions with our local communities. So what it's really done is not so much move us towards, you know, the influencer accent because that's very performative and I don't think anybody is walking around in their high school hall sounding like a social influencer, but what it's done is really move us away from the local identities that drive local accent. So what we have found is it's really helping propel this already in motion tendency to move away from local accents that we talked about in the main episode, propel it even further and faster than before so that we're losing local accents regionally and we're moving towards this sort of pan-national pan-regional accent that we identify on social media. So that's really been impactful in that way. But on the other hand, when I said it's also moving us towards other accents, it's not so much the social influencer accent that we hear a lot of sort of talk about the TikTok accent with uptalk and all that, because you know a lot of young people already do uptalk anyway but that's really not the accents that we're moving towards. Instead we're moving towards subcultures that are made more visible by social media. So a lot of comments have been made about Gen Z language being very similar to African American English or taking on features of African American English. Well, what's really propelled that is this access to the African American language that's become really visible on social media. So now kids that wouldn't have had a lot of exposure to those varieties can pick up aspects of it and sort of try to take on the coolness that's associated with it because it's all of a sudden something they can see and hear and participate in on social media in the way they couldn't before. So I think what we're seeing is kind of a move away from regional accents but a move towards some subcultural or more marginalized accents because now they're more accessible.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I liked how you compared it to clothes, you know, that the fashion of the language and the fashion of what people kids want to be cool. Adults want to be cool.
Valerie Fridland: Exactly. You don't dress the same way at 30 that you did at 15 because what you're attracted to is very different, what's cool is very different. And so now that you can see it really displayed on social media the same way that you also will pick up fashion trends from seeing it out there, you pick up language trends the same way.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and kids have always had a shared language. One thing I wanted to ask you about is we were talking about how we teach babies to talk and how parents interact with them and and am I remembering right that we talk to little girls and little boys differently?
Valerie Fridland: Yes. Well, parents, mothers and fathers talk to children differently, that's one part of the puzzle you know in terms of how they do it and then what we find is sort of that factors into the way that little girls and little boys end up talking themselves. So, you know, we set these models up for gender differences in the way that we use language from the way that mothers and fathers use language but also the way that mothers and fathers interact and vary in their language when speaking to children and then that inspires the next generation to see these models and kind of reify them in their own speech. So it's this weird sort of like weird cyclical pattern. But yes, what's really fascinating is most of the research on child language acquisition is done with how mothers speak to their children because that tends to be in you know, most cultures mothers that do more of the baby raising. That's changing and it'll be interesting to see if that has an impact, but what we found is when we look at how mothers talk to their children in the very early stages, they hyper-articulate sounds. And that seems to be a way of modeling the sounds that will be important in their language. So remember in the main episode we talked a little bit about how for example there's a dark L and a light L, and what we think is children need to learn those patterns by seeing how they're evidenced in the speech around them and by hyper-articulating certain subtle distinctions, mothers don't do this consciously but they do it in very early language acquisition, it kind of makes those differences stand out to those babies and they're sort of picking up the categories of their language better.
Mignon Fogarty: So hyper-articulating would be saying like "lo-la" or like...
Valerie Fridland: Yes, yes, or doing voicing contrasts, so you might have a word like "tip" versus a word like "dip" and it's very close. Those are very close and it's T's and D's are actually only different by one little phonetic difference, so a mother might go "tip," "dip" where they're hyper-articulating that T-D difference because that's salient for making a distinction and that helps a baby learn "Oh, a T is a different sound than a D in my language." So this type of hyper-articulation they also tend to elongate vowels which does seem to also maybe help kids sort of cement in their vowel categories. Children are already born with sort of this ability to categorize the sounds of their language, so you know, there are different cultures that use sort of child-directed speech to different degrees in early life, but children in all cultures learn language just fine so you know it's not that that's absolutely necessary, it but it does seem to help with the acquisition of categories. But around age two to four, mothers switch it up so that now they're using more local variations on those forms. So when they were hyper-articulating them, they hardly ever did some of the processes we do in fast speech or when we're talking to friends where we're dropping the G or dropping the T, when I say "internet" instead of "internet." But when the kids hits two to four, we start using those forms with them more, and we usually do them in cases where we're modeling that these are casual loving like friendly interactions, so you might say the word once and then you repeat it in a friendly kind of playful way and that's teaching the kid "Oh look, when I drop the T in internet," I mean that's probably not the word you'd say to your kid but who knows, in these days you might. But then that oh, this is playful, loving, casual, solidarity kind of speech, right? So it's modeling not just that there are variants of that form, but also what the meaning behind those variations are. But of course mothers are doing this unconsciously. But what's really fascinating is when the few times that you know, fathers have moved into the recording frames of these experiments so that you know, it's naturally occurring data and there happens to be a dad there for that day, dads don't do any of this to the same degree. So they don't vary their speech in the ways that mothers do when they're talking to their children. So this is generic, so they don't do it to the little boys or little girls in terms of sound, but what it does is sets up this opposition between the way mothers talk and the way fathers talk, or the way the girls talk and the way that boys talk, and so mothers use more standard forms, so especially early in life, mothers tend to use more standard forms and then they might vary into local forms some, but fathers almost always use more local forms. And so that kind of sets this model up where boys use more non-standard language than girls do, which we do find in many studies of sounds that girls tend to be more prone to use standard versions of sounds than boys do and also, you know, dropping the G, things like that. So girls drop G's, which is actually not really a G but the "-in", "-ing" alteration on like walkin', walking, girls do that less than boys do typically we find and that's probably modeled by early childhood acquisition processes.
Mignon Fogarty: And that's what I was remembering, and I wanted to know how that fits in with the idea that teenage girls are the ones who drive so much language change and so much language innovation, because if they're speaking more standardly, how is it then that they're also the drivers of change?
Valerie Fridland: Well, this has been called the Gender Paradox and this is actually something that researchers and linguists and sociolinguists in particular have studied for years. How is it that girls are both more conservative and more innovative at the same time? And I think what we have sort of come up on as the best explanation is that there are different kinds of novelty and innovation, and the types that boys do is less not it's novel in its own way, but it's more towards norms that exist and have social meaning as being kind of cool and maybe edgy and maybe non-conformist, whereas girls move to innovation that's novel and new and has no strong social stigma attached. So in many ways, they're being innovative in a less noticeable way than boys, which is probably what helps with the process of language change because if you are moving towards something like using more profanity, that's a real simple example but we think about it in terms of sounds for example like dropping a G, they both have that kind of non-conformist sort of more not lazy, I mean or sloppy, but that often is that sort of less formal standard language association with them. That sends a message that might be like "I'm cool, I'm too cool to care," right, "I'm hanging with the tough guys." But if that message is already there, then a girl's probably less likely to pick it up. But if instead somebody cool and hip uses some slight variation like saying their vowel for "bad" more like "bod," like "that's bod, that's so bod," that's a more subtle example and there's no social meaning yet attached so other girls might kind of jump onto it as sort of being stylistically fashionable before a strong social stigma gets attached and then that's what pushes language forward because this is more unconscious variation. Does that make sense?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, yeah, that's so great, so interesting. The book is called "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.” You're going to love it and I think that you might want to check out the audiobook because a lot of the chapters are read by people who have the accent that are being discussed in the chapter and that just sounds delightful. So Valerie, thank you so much. Now we're going to get your book recommendation. So after you finish reading Valerie's book, we have some recommendations of what you might want to read next.
Valerie Fridland: Well, I I sort of have a couple or three from very different genres. The first I am reading right now and I'm really enjoying it and I think it really ties into this idea I was just talking about about creativity and how you know innovation happens and that you try a lot of things to get at what's going to stick around and language does that for sure. But Adam Grant has a book called "Originals", which is all about the birth of creativity or how creativity happens and how successful variants kind of are or successful businesses get born, successful ideas get born. And I see a lot of mapping to what I learn about in linguistics about how novelty kind of inspires new forms to be successful but if you think about how you hear speech varying all the time, there's so many different variants, what what gets picked up? Well, what he talks about in this book is really how when you look at the history of innovation in businesses and ideas what you find is there are so many bad ideas out there but the people that have the best ideas are people that have had a lot of bad ideas first.
Mignon Fogarty: Hmm.
Valerie Fridland: And I love that, I love that message because what he really is suggesting is, you know, the more you try and the more you come up with these creative ideas, the more likely to be successful in one of them. It's no one ever gets lucky their first time, I mean maybe you do, but mostly that's not how it happens. And so it's a really fun book and kind of learn a little bit about how innovation happens. That's one sort of completely, you know, non-fiction recommendation. Normally when I'm having, you know, a just day at the beach, I don't pick up a non-fiction book, I pick up something mindless and fun and thrillery and mystery. And so the last book I read that I really enjoyed was "The Woman in Cabin 10", which is by Ruth Ware. It's a great mystery thriller and the story there is about a woman who is on a boat, and in fact I think there's a even a movie that has come out, I haven't seen it yet, but it's it's a great book. She's invited, she's a travel writer and she's invited on this cruise that's supposed to be this really incredibly luxurious cruise, and so she's a journalist and then she swears she witnessed a woman getting thrown overboard that was in the cabin next door to her. But there was actually nobody in the cabin next door to her. So she has to solve this mystery, and of course everybody thinks she's crazy and she's trapped on this boat, and that's all I'll say about it. It's great book. And then the other one science fiction which is also one of my great loves, and that is the "Project Hail Mary" book by Andy Weir. Oh I just love those books, I love "The Martian". If I could pick you know my best beach read, it would be one of those kinds of books and I really enjoyed that book. So read it before the movie comes out which might be too late. I don’t know if that movie is already out.
Mignon Fogarty: No, it’s already out. I’m hoping to go see it soon. I’ve heard good things. But, yeah, I love those books too. And I have read other things by Ruth Ware and enjoyed them. So yeah, those are great. They'd all make good gifts, fun, fun, fun. I'm picking up on "Project Hail Mary". Fun, fun, fun, I know it was bad, bad, bad.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, thank you again Valerie so much for being here. Again last time, the book is "Why We Talk Funny" by Valerie Fridland. Where can people find you?
Valerie Fridland: They can go to valeriefridland.com, that's probably the best place to find the latest on everything I'm doing.
Mignon Fogarty: Great. Thank you.