1208. This week, linguist Valerie Fridland explains why the U.S. has so many regional accents — tracing New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southern, and Western speech back to where their first settlers came from, and how we can still hear "founder effects" in the way we talk today.
1208. This week, linguist Valerie Fridland explains why the U.S. has so many regional accents — tracing New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southern, and Western speech back to where their first settlers came from, and how we can still hear "founder effects" in the way we talk today.
Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty. This week, we'll talk about where America's regional accents come from — and why we sound so different depending on where we grew up.
This segment is by Valerie Fridland.
by Valerie Fridland
Have you ever wondered why, when we meet each other for the first time, one of the most frequent questions we ask is, “Where are you from?” We all seem to have an enduring interest in asking where people grew up, but what does it mean to be from somewhere, and why do we care?
If our speech is any indicator, it means a lot. It means we orient to ideas or activities that our regional culture might value but that others don’t, like Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Cotton Carnivals in the South. It means we recognize that life experience before we got to where we are helped forge us. And a lot of times, it means that someone recognized that we have an accent or a regionally distinctive way of talking.
The way the country is divided up by accents, for the most part, began long ago. In fact, many of the regional divides we still recognize today are reflections of how the U.S. was settled, long before it was a nation. Colonists from different parts of Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries, alongside early Scots-Irish, Dutch, and German settlers, established what are known as founder effects, or long-standing linguistic and cultural differences that persist through time. And these founders laid down some pretty significant social and linguistic divides as they settled and then migrated west.
Most of these early settlers were overwhelmingly British, but that still doesn't mean they all sounded the same. That recognizable New England accent, for instance, was influenced by the Puritans who came in large numbers from Southeastern Britain, primarily East Anglia. These settlers prized education, religion, and order, and how that played out on the colonial ground sometimes led to rifts among its leaders. In a new land, with lots of space to expand, an easy answer was to spread out a bit and take your flock with you. As a result, the Puritans' political and social influence spread out over much of the upper Northeast.
Eastern New Englanders, like people in Boston, tended to keep in touch with people in London more than those living further in the interior, so they were also more likely to pick up changes in the ways Londoners talked, especially Londoners they thought were upper class or important. This included many of the iconic features we associate with New England accents today, such as the "ah" in words like "aunt" and "bath," the "r" dropping in “hahvahrd yahd,” and the distinctively different vowel used in words like “father” and “bother,” which other American dialects have merged into one (e.g, “father” and “bother”). Interestingly, rivers and mountains kept Eastern New Englanders from talking much with Western New Englanders, and settlers living in Western Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut were also less likely to keep up ties with London, which is part of the reason we don’t hear these same accents there.
In contrast, the Mid-Atlantic dialect that centered around Pennsylvania was driven by the Northern British (Quakers), Scots-Irish, and German people who settled there. The Quakers' openness to settlers coming from all over helped create a community that looked to the New World and its possibilities rather than back to Britain. This attitude fostered a blended dialect that was heavily influenced by the Scots-Irish and German languages, giving us the positive "anymore," meaning something like “nowadays” (as in "Anymore, they ship it right to you"); a tendency to pronounce all the “r” sounds, including those sometimes heard in words like “warsh” and “Warshington”; and the handy “yinz” – derived from Scots influenced you’uns – to refer to a plural "you." A number of these Mid-Atlantic settlers would move further inland and across the nation’s heartland, also helping shape what we hear as a Midwestern accent today.
Moving on, the coastal Southern accent developed from a mixture with more Southwestern British influence, brought to Virginia by both aristocratic types and the many indentured servants that settled Jamestown. With regular access to ships at the ports, a number of settlers maintained strong relationships with friends and family back home, so the coastal south shared some of the same later dialect features as New England, such as a dropped "r" in words like "never" or "here" ( said as "nevah" or "heah") and were more likely to retain a Southern British "y" sound (“yod”) in words like "dew" or "tune" (sounding like “djew” or “tjune”). Religious and political differences, however, kept Puritan New Englanders and these Virginia Cavaliers from sharing much more.
In contrast to the coast, inland Southern dialects tend to be associated with more Scots-Irish influence. These rugged and fiercely independent settlers from the lowlands of Scotland who first made a bit of a pit stop in Ulster, Ireland, spread into areas in Appalachia and the inland South. It is the Scots-Irish who brought features such as a-prefixing (as in "We're a-coming"), double modals (as in "I might could do that") and terms like "britches" and "fixin' to," all of which are older forms lost in other American dialects. It's also been hypothesized that this Scots-Irish influence – and namely the use of “ye aw” (meaning "you all") – is where we may have gotten the Southern “y’all.”
African languages also influenced speech in the American colonies, particularly in the South where large numbers of enslaved people were brought. Though exactly how this language contact influenced Southern speech has been debated throughout the years, many features of African-American English, like the lack of plural "s" (as in "I have three dollar") and copula absence (as in "He here" versus "He is here") are thought to have been influenced by the patterns found in West African languages. As well, an Igbo word expressing the same sentiment as “ye aw” may have reinforced the use of an innovative “y’all” to make up for the lack of a similar separate plural “you” pronoun in English.
The accent along the West Coast arrived much later and had quite different ancestry than those accents we just talked about. That’s because the West was settled by English speakers much later than the other colonies, and that extra 200 years or so had a big effect on how the West’s speech developed.
After the Gold Rush began in 1849, westward migration really heated up, bringing settlers from all over to California. Many of the earliest cross-country migrants came from the Northeast/New England area, followed slightly later by many from the Midland and Southern states. The key difference between this settlement to the West and the earlier settlement of the East was that the West was settled by those who already had an American English, rather than a foreign, accent. As a result, the West Coast accent became a leveling out or a blend of those American accents, leading to the sense that people in the Western U.S. have a less distinctive speech pattern.
Today, of course, the accents of these varied U.S. regions continue to evolve, with many sub-regional differences having developed in the years since these early accents emerged. What hasn’t changed, though, is the idea that the different American accents represent something uniquely cultural and not just linguistic for each region.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Finally, I have a familect about Marshall.
Hi, my name is [unintelligible]. I'm the mother of a child, 9 years old. Um, my familect I wanted to share with you guys that's the reason why I'm calling is one that became what a familect when my little one was only 4 years old. Trying to explain to him, and I was trying to explain how mommy's body is very sensitive, and mommy's very sensitive, and I will repeat over and over since he was 3 until he was 4. But he still didn't get it. Until one day, he hit me, and he said, "I'm sorry, mommy. I know you're very expensitive." After that, that is actually something that we use for when somebody sensitive, or when something is expensive. We said, "Oh, that's very expensitive," or "she is very expensitive." That's our familect. I hope you like it. His name is Marshall, and he's now 9 years old. And 5 years later, we still use the familect.
Thanks so much for the call. That's a cute one.
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