What your accent reveals about you

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

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Brian Mackey: Today on the 21st Show, from Chicagoans complaining about [the] Bears to Bostonians giving directions to [Javad Yad — reviewer: verify place name], linguist Valerie Friedman says our accents say a lot about where we grew up and how we grew up.

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Valerie Friedland: And then they become social markers, so markers of identity, and it's at that point they really start to get heard as a regional accent, for example, or an ethnic accent, and that's essentially how they develop from the beginning of time.

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Brian Mackey: Friedland's new book explores the history of accents and the way they shape our perceptions of other people. It's called "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." I'm Brian Mackey with Valerie Friedland for the hour today on the 21st Show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media. But first, news.

From Illinois Public Media, this is the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. Have you ever had someone comment on your accent? Maybe you thought to yourself, what accent? For some of us it might sound a little like this.

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Speaker 2: What do you have? Eggplant [rollatini] today with Kirkland marinara sauce. So give it a try. Might be what's for dinner tonight.

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Speaker 3: At this time it appears that this is all stemming from a domestic incident that occurred at a residence on the block here. Um, that's really all the information I have [that] pertains to that exact incident.

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Speaker 4: I've been told from people in New York that my state has an accent. Some people go Chicago. I don't think we do.

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Brian Mackey: In America, our accents took shape over hundreds of years, and they are still evolving today. From the moment we say hello to someone, the way we talk has a significant influence on how other people perceive us. We heard about this in our texting group. Chris in Rock Falls said, "Oh yeah, for sure. Having grown up in the Chicago suburbs and moving about 100 miles west as an adult, I hear the subtle differences. I've added y'all to my vocabulary as well." And he says, "I've heard animals can have regional dialects too."

So what makes our accents what they are? All this history and the science behind it is covered in a new book called "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." Its author is Valerie Friedland. She's a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. This is her second book. Her first, published in 2023, was "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English."

I taped this conversation with Valerie last week so we could make it into a video podcast. Yes, this is one of the ones you can now find on YouTube. Just search for the 21st Show. Valerie's with us for the hour today. Valerie, welcome back to the 21st Show.

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Valerie Friedland: Well, thank you. I am thrilled to be here, especially to talk about this really fun topic that I think is very germane to anybody from Illinois.

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Brian Mackey: I don't know what you're talking about, but we'll see as we go on. So let's start there. Let's start with the Midwest. Let's start with Illinois, and we'll even hone in further on Chicago. So what are some of the defining features of the Chicago accent?

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Valerie Friedland: Well, I think we can start with the question of whether it's milk or [melk], uh, to begin with, but there are a number of different defining features that Chicago has that other people notice. But a lot of times I think people that live in Chicago don't notice this, and a lot of that stems really from the early settlement pattern and some later immigration in the 1800s. So it's a really fascinating history to how Chicago got to be sounding like they do.

But what typifies the modern Chicago — and so the things that I think people comment on today, like the Chicago pronunciation of the name — are actually very recent, from just the mid-1950s. A pattern called the Northern Cities Shift, which sort of swept through the areas of the inland north, including Chicago, and states in — in places like Rochester, Cleveland and Chicago — that makes your "job" sound more like "jabs" and your "cats" more cat-like. And so that's really one of the things I think people notice a lot about modern Chicago speech.

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Brian Mackey: How did that happen? How did this — would you call it the Northern Sweep Shift?

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Valerie Friedland: The Northern Cities Shift. Yes. The reason we call it that is because it does primarily affect northern cities, and it's less common in the northern rural areas, although there was some evidence that it moved out depending on how much contact they had with cities in that area.

There was some really fascinating research done by the late, great Dr. William [Labov — reviewer: verify spelling], who was a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania and actually the father of my field. He was the father of modern sociolinguistics. He wrote seminal work on how social factors affect the way we talk in the 1960s that really changed the way that we think about how language evolves.

And his work looked at the building of the Erie Canal as the start of what's known now as the Northern Cities Shift, which is where it brought a lot of people together with different accents that kind of ended up converging on some of those sounds that influenced other sounds. And ultimately it was the spread of people past — you know, into the Great Lakes, past the Erie Canal — that brought that with them: the seeds of what would be the Northern Cities Shift.

And what happens in our vowel sounds is we only have so much room in our mouth. So if you say [ah] and then you go [ah], right, you can't go higher and you can't go lower. So any vowels you're going to have have to move around in that space. So if you start pronouncing one vowel slightly differently — so you move your tongue up or your tongue down to do it — then what's going to happen is it's going to start to encroach on your tongue position for another vowel, and then it's called a chain shift. Everything has to start moving so that you can still remember what — or know what — people are saying and they keep words different.

So what happened in the Northern Cities Shift is there was a little bit of fronting of the words — of words like "caught," C-O-T; "call," C-A-L-L; "hawk," like C-H-O-C-K; and then the word "dawn," the name Dawn, D-O-N, as opposed to D-A-W-N. And when that fronted in terms of where the tongue was — so you'd say more like "yawn," "dawn" — I don't have a great Chicago accent, but you get my drift. What happens is that started sounding like an [ah], so the "cat" vowel had to move, and the only place it can move, because it's in the lower part of the mouth, is up. So it started to sound more like "kak." And then you just get this chain shift and everybody is like, "Oh, that's cool," and all of a sudden everybody's saying it.

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Brian Mackey: And this happens within — like, even person to person. So, you know, the people are wielding the shovels or pickaxes or whatever on the Erie Canal, and then, you know, flying the — the donkeys or whatever was drag[ging] the ships — like, it's, you know, Jebediah is talking to whomever, and they sort of pick up on things like that. Is it — is it, you know, and yeah, maybe I'll say it that way? Or it just happens subconsciously, or —

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Valerie Friedland: It happens subconsciously. So there's something called accommodation that naturally happens whenever we converse. So by the end of this hour, if I was acoustically analyzing your speech and my speech, we could actually find a subtly measurable difference in the way that you and I started speech that moved towards each other — and that can be at a number of different levels. So if you use long sentences, I'll use longer sentences. If you use a certain higher pitch, I often will start to move my pitch a little higher. If you use certain intonation patterns, I might start copying that melody. So if you, you know, start [uptalking] a lot, I might start [uptalking] back. But it also happens on the level of the sound, so that if your vowel is slightly separate from another vowel in a different way than mine is, our differences will start to converge a little bit. But of course that's very, very subtle, and we just have an hour of exposure.

But if you're building a canal — and, you know, they didn't have a lot of help back in those days from electric things or machinery — it takes a long time, so you're having repeated exposure for many, many months, hanging out with the same people. And they probably go drink at the bar afterwards, or, you know, at your little tent, because you need it by the end of the day. And you're talking to those same people. They will start to converge very subtly, but then — anybody who's younger, the younger the exposure, the more intensely it happens. So if you bring that slight accommodation back home with you and you're talking to your children, they'll move it that much farther. So that's really how the process of language change happens.

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Brian Mackey: If you're just joining us, it's the 21st Show. We're talking today with linguist Valerie Friedland. Her newest book is "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." It's out now from Viking Books. We originally taped this conversation last week, and I should say this is the latest in our series of video interviews. You can find an extended version of today's program on YouTube.

With that in mind, no calls for the hour today, but let us know what you thought. Talk at twentyfirstshow.org. All right, I want to share another message from our texting group, which I should say people can join by sending the word "talk" to 217-803-0730.

This is from Amy in [Wakanda — reviewer: verify place name]. She says, "Midwest is too broad to discuss as an accent." And to be fair, this is in response to our prompt. She says, "You have the upper Midwest of the Dakotas, the lower Midwest of Kansas and Nebraska. You have Chicago, you have Ohio, you have the lower areas of Illinois that start to get a twang. You have the roundness of Wisconsin, and then you get Minnesota and the Canadian areas. Midwest is too big, but perhaps our linguist can tell us of a feature — like perhaps a sharp A or dropped consonants — that bind us all together."

Valerie, how about that?

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Valerie Friedland: Well, I think that's a very good thing to notice, because it's absolutely true that we have a lot of subregional differences. And even what counts as Midwestern speech — I think some people can argue with a lot of those differences. So for example, she talks about, you know, upper Illinois and lower Illinois with the twang. I think probably people in lower Illinois probably describe the upper — upper Chicago — also as something different, right? With sort of more of a harsh sound or something like that.

That actually dates back to early settlement history. So there's a fascinating reason why we hear southern-ish sounding in the northern parts of some states, especially in the Midwestern region. That's because there was more Scots-Irish influence in that area in the immigration pattern from the mid-Atlantic colonies, and the upper Midwest got much more German settlement. And that really led to that sort of splitting of the North and South in many states, like Ohio and Illinois. So that takes care of that question.

But in terms of the sound that unites us, I would say that one big thing that really puts the Midwest — and especially the northern part of the Midwest — on the map as a unit is the fact that they don't participate in something that the rest of the country is doing, which is called the cot-caught merger. Now, I have the merger, so you can't hear the difference. But if you said those two words — which is "cot," C-O-T, for the first one, and "caught," C-A-U-G-H-T, for the second — they would sound more like — and I'm going to do again a bad Chicago accent — [cot, caught]. And I'm gonna have you do it, Brian.

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Brian Mackey: 'Cause I — I can do this. So we're — we're loading camping equipment, you know, for the campout, and somebody drops a cot and I caught it.

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Valerie Friedland: Exactly.

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Brian Mackey: Perfect.

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Valerie Friedland: That's perfect. And so —

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Brian Mackey: Most of it's very natural.

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Valerie Friedland: Yes. And most of the northern region — most of the upper Midwest — does not have that merger. That's sort of an area where it sticks around. Now, some of the lower Midwest does have it. Interestingly, St. Louis — which is actually a corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, and a lot of people notice in St. Louis there's a lot of Chicago features — they don't have that merger even though some areas around them do, because they're a little closer to the South, which is now increasingly having that merger.

But that's one feature I would call out. The other is in some of the larger cities, like I've talked about, the Northern Cities Shift is also found in that area.

But I think what your writer or texter or — whoever it was — was really noticing is that over time, an area that once was a fairly uniform dialect region in terms of its early settlement history — the place it came from was really the mid-Atlantic colonies; that's where the heartland dialects of America were forged — has come to have its own unique varieties, as every other part of the United States has done.

So it's the same thing about the South. There are some things that unite the South, and maybe more than unites the Midwest, but very few Southerners from Texas would say they sound anything like a Southerner from South Carolina. So we notice those differences.

I think what also contributed to a lot of the differences that she's referring to — like in Minnesota and Wisconsin — is a lot of the later immigration. So you had a lot of, for example, Scandinavian influence in Minnesota, and that's why, of course, we say "Minnesota," because that's actually the monophthongal residue — to use a big word — of Scandinavian pronunciation, where the vowels were shorter and they don't have that little extra piece on the end. Like Americans like to say "oh," but if you're from Finland or Sweden, you say "oo," so "Minnesota" becomes a shorter pronunciation. So a lot of that is really later settlement — you know, 1800s immigration — that also forged some differences in those areas.

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Brian Mackey: I don't know how much you can separate the development of language from the development of accents, but to the extent we can — why did we develop accents in the first place?

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Valerie Friedland: Well, you know, let's just define "accent" quickly, because I think that is actually something people throw around and don't really know what linguists call an accent versus a dialect. So an accent is actually just pronunciation features. So when we're talking about an accent, we're only talking about how people sound when they say something. When we're talking about a dialect or a language more holistically, we're actually talking about features at every level.

So, for example, I say "soda," you say "pop." That's actually a dialectal difference because it's at the level of vocabulary. Or if I say, you know, something like "we was" versus "we were," that's at the level of syntax — that would be part of language, part of a dialect. So if we're talking about accent, it's just the sound.

But in terms of your larger question about how accents develop — or differences in sound — it's really the same way that dialect differences develop. So at every level, this is how dialect differences and accent differences happen: when we get separated from other speakers and we don't have interaction with them anymore, or we have very limited interaction, and our social group becomes more of a certain ethnicity or a certain region or a certain class. And those are the people we spend our time with and we work with and we hang out with and we identify with. Then small tendencies of mouth and mind that affect all our speech — which just makes us vary whenever we talk, because it's part of the inherent disposition of language — they start to accumulate differently in each group. So the small differences in this group that is no longer talking to that group, having those other small differences, accumulate, and gradually get heard as accents or as dialect differences, depending on the type of difference they are.

And then they become social markers — so markers of identity — and it's at that point they really start to get heard as a regional accent, for example, or an ethnic accent. And that's essentially how they developed from the beginning of time.

So as you know, groups of speakers from the first language 100,000 years ago started to migrate into other parts of the globe out of Africa — probably around 50,000 years ago, because that's when the mass exoduses happened — they started to be separated, and then those small variations would start to define them. And that's really the basis of all languages that we have today. None of the languages we speak today are the ones we spoke back then, but all of the languages we speak today are the residue of these early accent and dialectal differences that emerged in those early periods.

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Brian Mackey: All right, we need to take a break. We'll have more with Valerie Friedland when we return. She's a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her newest book is "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." Because we originally taped this conversation last week, no calls, but you can let us know what you thought. Our voicemail line is always open: [217-300-2121 — reviewer: verify number; spoken as "217-32121" in audio]. That's 217-300-2121.

This is the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. We are talking today about accents — from how they take shape in our voices to the way we perceive what we hear from the people around us and the judgments we make about them. My guest is Valerie Friedland, professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, who wrote the book "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." It's available now from Viking. We originally taped today's conversation last week. As I mentioned earlier, it's also available in video form on YouTube and includes some questions we weren't able to fit into our radio broadcast.

With that in mind, no calls for the program today, but you can always let us know what you thought by emailing talk at twentyfirstshow.org. That's talk at twentyfirstshow.org.

You mentioned how these differences become part of identity. They also become part of class, and that affects perception of accents. And you talk about — or write about — this in the book. There's an example from Britain, right? Dropping R's. It's seen as vulgar, kind of low class. Now it's more widely adopted in everyday speech. Talk us through that.

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Valerie Friedland: Right, and that's such a fascinating change, because I think most people hear someone with a posh British accent today — the King's English or the Queen's English — and the dropping of the R, and they sound so sophisticated and, you know, fabulous and cultivated. Or that transatlantic accent we love in those old Hollywood movies, right? Those are all R-dropping accents.

But the reality of R-dropping is when it first started happening in the 1600s — and that's when we would have started to notice it in writings — it only started to get dropped before S and S-consonant clusters. So for example, the word "bust" is actually from "burst" after the R got dropped. The word "cuss" is actually from "curse" after the R got dropped. The word "ass" is actually from "ars" after the R got dropped. And those S's seemed to trigger that R to get dropped really early on.

So that's the first evidence we have, in the 1600s, where people remarked on it — particularly in the 1700s, because we didn't get a lot of writing about language really in the 1600s. But in the 1700s, when people started to notice differences like that and comment on them, it was considered vulgar and crass. And then in the early 1800s, it was also considered [lowly] among the speakers that dropped their R. And now it's the high, posh [speakers] that drop their R.

So this is a perfect example of how it's really our beliefs about the speakers that drives our feelings about the accent, and nothing inherent in the accent at all. Because R-dropping was a vulgar feature until pretty much the later part of the 19th century, which is when all of a sudden it started getting picked up by a higher-class group of speakers, and then all of a sudden it was a great feature and it sounds really intelligent and cultivated.

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Brian Mackey: So the story of how we pick up accents is pretty similar to part of the story of how we pick up language in the first place, right? So children obviously have this remarkable ability to do that. Talk us through how that happens.

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Valerie Friedland: As everybody who has children knows, your kid seems to spontaneously learn to speak without you putting a lot of effort into it other than talking at them sometimes. You're not modeling, "Here's a sound. I'm gonna teach you the T sound today. Let's study how it sounds." No one does that — thank God, because you have so much else you have to worry about in early infancy.

But even a few days after birth, children start sort of working their articulatory gestures and structures, and we start to hear this babble come very early, where they're basically practicing articulation. They actually hear their mother's voice in utero, and we actually think that they have a sense of their native language rhythm even before they're born.

So language acquisition happens extremely early. And by a year old, a baby has figured out not only that they can get you to come whenever they cry, but they've also figured out all the sounds of their specific language — which is really pretty incredible, because as an adult learning a new language, it's almost impossible to figure out those sounds that differ from your own.

But we see that babies actually refine their ability to make the sounds that they're making from universal babble at age 6 months. So a baby at 6 months is babbling just like every other baby around the globe — no specific language involved. By a year old, they have narrowed it down to babble only the sounds found in their specific language. Which, if you think about it, is pretty amazing, because they're doing all this while they're also trying to learn to walk and, you know, go to the potty and those kinds of things. There's a lot else they're doing with motor skills and also just social skills, and they're honing in language skills like crazy.

They don't really sound like a local yet, obviously, because they can only say, you know, like "dog" and "mom" and "dad" at that point. But by around 2 or 3, we notice that sometimes you can hear little local sounds in them — like vowels that are sounding more like the local vowels than maybe they were said elsewhere in their country. And by 4 or 5, they have started this process we call vernacular reorganization, which is just fancy language talk for they sound like their friends in kindergarten rather than their parents back home. Which is why people like me, that come from a background where their parents were not native speakers, don't sound like our parents — we sound like the people we grow up with. And that happens as early as kindergarten.

So we're really incredible linguistic sponges from birth. And then around high school time — early middle school, high school era — is when we really start to, you know, sound nothing like our parents and everything like our friends, because that's way cooler than what you hear at home. And that's really the juice of linguistic innovation that charges the accents that become the accents of the new generation.

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Brian Mackey: I also want to ask you about "shibboleth," which you write about in the book. We have in the state of Illinois many towns named after cities in Europe — like Vienna, Austria — and also there are [African — reviewer: verify; likely "Middle Eastern" or context may differ] cities like Cairo and Egypt. And of course, we pronounce those differently — and you can always tell if someone's not from Illinois or is not steeped in the local dialects — or accents, I should say — because they don't know to say "Vy-EE-nuh" for Vienna, Illinois, instead of "Vee-EN-uh," or [San Jose — reviewer: verify intended example], or "KAY-ro" — Cairo, Illinois — is a famous one.

Talk me through shibboleths and what that says and how that affects our interactions.

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Valerie Friedland: First, well, yes — I absolutely love this idea of shibboleths with names of cities, because I think every state has those where it's kind of like the way you can pinpoint the people you want to push out of your state. Like, you're not from here — out, out — you can't pronounce it right.

Because in Nevada, I mean, just the way you pronounce "Nevada" is a shibboleth.

So basically, a shibboleth is any pronunciation that identifies a speaker pretty much automatically as being a member of a specific group. The most famous shibboleth, of course, comes from the Bible — that's where the word "shibboleth" comes from. Because in the Book of Judges, you had the Ephraimites and the Gileadites, who were warring Israelite clans. And the Gileadites basically kind of crushed the Ephraimites at battle, and the Ephraimites were trying to flee home, which was across the River Jordan. But the Gileadites were also faster on their feet, so they got to the fords that they had to cross over — this narrow passageway — faster than the Ephraimites did. And they set up some sentries that required everybody that passed to say one word, and that word was "shibboleth."

And that's where we get the word "shibboleth" from. And the reason the word "shibboleth" — which meant "stream" or "river" in Hebrew or Aramaic, whichever language was presented in that case — was [chosen] was actually the difference in the pronunciation of the "sh" versus "s" sound. So the Gileadites had a "sh" sound in their dialect, but the Ephraimites only had an "s" sound, so they would say "sibboleth" instead of "shibboleth." And as soon as "sibboleth" left their mouth, their head left their body. That was pretty much how it went.

So that, of course, is the origin of both the word as we use it today and also of this meaning of anything that we say that identifies us. But in Nevada as well, if you say "Nevada" [incorrectly], we're very quickly showing you the state line.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, what's up with that, right? So I mean, it strikes me that [the pronunciation "Ne-VAH-da"] has more in common with, you know, the upper Midwest than it does with "Ne-VAD-a," which it seems like it would fit in better with Spanish, you know, influence in the region.

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Valerie Friedland: Right. Well, you know, I think a lot of people go with that argument — especially people that we don't allow in the state anymore — go with that argument that it's not the right pronunciation. I actually was not a native Nevada speaker. I have to admit, when I came here I said "Nevada" and was quickly told that if I wanted to work here I had to lose that. So that was like in my job contract.

But, you know, a lot of people have said that, well, it's more Spanish to have the "ah" than the "at" vowel. But we don't say "Tejas" either for Texas. Native-like pronunciation is rarely kept when state names or city names are borrowed over. In fact, over 50% of state names are from Native American languages, and I guarantee not one is pronounced the way that they were in those native languages. So, you know, it's not really a very good argument in terms of how locals pronounce the state names or the city names, because we often Americanize and nativize the way we say every borrowed word in English. And in many languages, this happens.

But with Nevada specifically, it relates actually to something more interesting and more universal in terms of the way that American English pronounces certain words, and that's because it's a word spelled with the letter A. Which, over the history of English — and we think about words like "pasta," words like "vase," words like "tomato," right — all are foreign loanwords, meaning words we got from other languages that are spelled with an A. Well, in the history of English, we've had three variable ways that words that have A's in them in other languages get borrowed into English, and it's either an [short A], an [ah], or an [ay]. And really it's depended a lot on the era in which they were borrowed.

So [short A] was actually a more common borrowing — a more common way to nativize a borrowing — up until the 1900s, when [ay] became more prevalent. And "Nevada" fell in that window of a pre-1900 borrowing. And so we see that more and more words are now using the [ay] when they're new. So you don't say "NAH-cho," you say "NAY-cho," right? And that's because of the era in which it was borrowed.

And "Nevada" is borrowed in the period where [short A] was a more common borrowing. And "tomato/tomahto" is also related to borrowing, but it was a really early borrowing — and in fact [the "ah" variant] was part of this whole Great Vowel Shift process that happened before 1500. And the reason why Americans say "tomato" is on the model of "potato," which was a really early borrowed word.

So there's a really fascinating history, and it's just time period that determines the way of pronouncing a word. And Canada actually did it differently even though now they borrow more on the American model. The reason why a lot of Canadians say "pasta" instead of "pasta" [reviewer: verify intended contrast between pronunciations] is because they were sort of the opposite of us at various times — and would say certain words with an [ah] when we said it with an [ay] and vice versa.

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Brian Mackey: Well, next time I go to a sporting event, I'm gonna order some nachos and see what happens.

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Valerie Friedland: Exactly — see what you get. That's what I'm curious about.

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Brian Mackey: All right, I want to share another message from our texting group. This is Julie in Bettendorf, Iowa. She says, "People comment on the way I speak. I'm a choir teacher, and my singing diction is much different than my speaking diction. My daughter's about to move to college in the Pacific Northwest, and she thinks she'll get teased about her Midwest accent."

Let's sidetrack from this element of place we've talked about here. How is it that people's accents seem to change so dramatically — or disappear — when we're singing and not talking? I think of like the singer Adele. If you've ever heard her sing, it's one way. If you hear her talk, it is — maybe I'll speak for myself — it is not the accent I expected her to have, which is very like working class, you know, this woman in a gown singing these, you know, highfalutin, stage-presence-type songs.

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Valerie Friedland: Yeah, she's a great example. You're right — when I first heard her talk, it was like, "Oh, OK. Great. I love it." Not what you expected.

This is a really interesting question. I'm not actually a voice teacher or a voice instructor, so I know less about the singing version of vowels and consonants than I do about the spoken version. But the reality is when you sing, there are a couple of things that are different from when you just use an everyday speaking tone or speaking vowels and consonants and things like that. It's a more open mouth, so you sing with a much more open mouth with more airflow, and you elongate sounds in a way that would be very weird to do in spoken language — we would just not have time to converse if we did that. Not to mention probably not have a lot of friends, but or maybe extra friends — who knows?

So those two things are very impactful on particularly vowel sounds, because vowels are already a lot of open airflow when we say them. So if you compare the way you say a "tah" sound versus "ah," you can tell there's just less constriction. But then if you open your mouth and do it for longer, it's going to kind of eradicate all the nuances that we have in local accents. So if you go, [ah], and — I apologize, I'm a really bad singer — with that open mouth, you're really not allowing the tongue and the lips to do all the little nuanced work they do to make very subtle differences for regional or class-based accents, because you're just holding it for so long and your mouth is very open. So you're not having the articulatory gesturing that you do when you're just doing everyday talk.

What those things add up to is less regionally accented speech. There's also the desire to sound more American in a lot of pop music — particularly that has driven British singers in particular to adopt more of an American style when singing — that's a little more conscious effort. And then there's this interesting way that young, indie female singers are adopting a speech style today that has a really tight, closed-mouth articulation, which is kind of the Billie Eilish articulation, which is also a very American style of singing that's pretty novel. And so again, those are stylistic models that people aim at. And that seems to be more true of pop music. But all of those factors make our singing voices quite different than our speaking voices.

[00:33:17]
Brian Mackey: OK. On that note, we're going to take another break, but we will return and have more from our conversation on accents with professor of linguistics Valerie Friedland from the University of Nevada, Reno. She wrote about them in her new book, "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents."

Because we taped this conversation for YouTube last week, no calls for the hour today, but you can share your thoughts about it by leaving us a voicemail at [217-300-2121 — reviewer: verify number; spoken as "217-32121" in audio]. That's 217-300-2121. I should mention you can find our voicemail line as well as our email address and our podcast links — everything else — it's all at our website, twentyfirstshow.org. You can also listen to our past episodes, including our 2023 interview with Valerie about her first book, "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." We'll have more with Valerie Friedland after a break. This is the 21st Show. Stay with us.

It's the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. Let's get to the conclusion of our conversation with Valerie Friedland, the linguist and author of "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents."

So obviously place is important in accents. We talked a little bit about class. These things can lead to assumptions — people making assumptions about capability, background, things like that — based on the way someone talks. So talk us through how that works.

[00:35:35]
Valerie Friedland: Not just can, but often does. In fact, it's sort of something inherent in human nature. If we look at babies and how they notice speech, we find that even by 5 or 6 months, if you have two different voices around them talking, they will pay more attention to the one that sounds like what's spoken at home. And then by 10 months, if you have a person hand them a toy with one accent that they are not familiar with and a person hand them a toy with the accent that they hear at home, they will take the toy from the person with the familiar accent.

So it seems like this sort of accent bias toward something familiar to us, something we know, is very, very innate and starts very young. And that probably makes sense that natural selection would have favored our ability to notice accents because of this in-group marking that it did — that may keep you safe in a case where you were not sure what tribe someone belonged to.

But that's very different from noticing an accent than to judging it, and this is the part that we really have problems with. It seems to be an innate part of nature that we notice accent differences, but it's a bad part of our nature to be evaluative and limit people's opportunity on the basis of that. But it's an incredibly consistent finding when we do research.

Non-native and non-standard accents alike get judged very negatively on scales of intelligence, competence, and even sometimes trustworthiness. So in a court context, we'll find that people with non-standard speech are much more likely to be heard as guilty of a crime — which obviously is a pretty bad thing if you're falsely accused of something. Or if, you know, a landlord is looking for someone to let their apartment, we find that if someone calls with a recognizably ethnic or lower-class accent, they're less likely to say the apartment is available. So there are serious consequences to this kind of accent bias.

Part of it, though, isn't just that we're bad people and we have these attitudes that keep us from being loving and welcoming to everybody — that can be true. Part of it is just familiarity. We tend to just naturally like things that are more familiar to us, and familiarity seems to account for a great deal of our accent bias. Part of it is also just the social hierarchies that have come to play a big role in the way that we rank people. So power and dominance play a big role in the way that we evaluate someone's worth. And when we see someone as a member of a group that we think is socially better than us or socially less than us, then the speech that they use — that's identifiable — also gets kind of imbued with those same qualities. So if we hear R-dropping in Britain because it's posh speakers that do it, we're like, "Oh my God, the Queen." But if we're in the United States living in New York and we hear someone that does it, we're like, "Oh my God, the taxi driver." So we get these class-based associations just based on our familiarity with that variety.

But there's also something to be said about the fact that our brains have to work a little harder when we're processing something that's not familiar to us or that doesn't match our expectations. So when you were talking about noticing that Adele had a really kind of working-class accent and you were like, "Wow" — part of that is actually because it was incongruent with your expectations, it was a mismatch. Your brain actually had to do a little more work in processing it. And as anybody who's ever done the Sunday crossword versus the Monday crossword knows, it's a lot less pleasant when you're working super hard. Something your brain is actually working harder at — you experience that as something unpleasant.

And what we do when we experience a foreign accent or a non-standard accent that we don't know — our brain actually has to put a little more processing power into making it intelligible, and we experience that increased brain effort as unpleasant. And then we put that on the speaker as if they're somehow lesser, there's something wrong with them because they're making us work harder, even though it's actually our own brain effort and our lack of familiarity that's doing that to us.

The good news is, if we are better at expecting the right thing — so if we know someone's gonna have a different accent — we actually seem to use less processing effort on it. Or if we let someone know, like a hiring committee: "You know, accent can play a role in the way that you'll evaluate candidates, so please try to work hard for that not to be part of the equation." Just that statement alone has been shown to actually reduce accent bias. So there are some pretty simple ways that we can become less biased in the way we hear others.

[00:40:01]
Brian Mackey: So another way this comes up in the book is to do with race, because it affects who we socialize with and how we interact with the world. And you bring up this idea of double consciousness. What is that? How do people from what we call minority groups deal with that in terms of their speech?

[00:40:20]
Valerie Friedland: I think what a lot of us don't realize when we are judging other people's speech — and particularly when we're judging them as being non-standard or sort of uneducated in their speech because they're different from this sort of norm that we have come to expect, or that we think we use — we don't realize a lot of times that norm is both class and race.

So in American speech, the model of American Standard Speech or Mainstream English is really based on this early colonial development of American English, which essentially is a white middle-class variety. And so that is very classed and race[d] in our judgment of speakers that don't sound like that.

And what we also don't realize is African American English, which is also a colonial variety. People don't realize that. So if you look back at the records we have from early colonial speech, things like "ax" for "ask" was very common all over the colonies, and it gradually sort of whittled away to be associated with particularly African American speakers — but probably not till the 1800s or so. So it is something that actually is colonial in origin, but we don't think of it that way. Instead, we don't think, "OK, this is just an alternative way of speaking." It's instead, "Oh, this is a bad, bastardized way of speaking."

And what we sort of don't realize is that when we hold that model up and we're judging people on the way they sound different from us, we're actually holding them up to a model that is just one of the historical developments of English that happened over time. And then we're also suggesting that the model that we use in school — which I also happen to have as my model at home — is easy. I don't have any problems, because when I go to school, I do just fine. But if you start with a different variety — and that can be anything, whether it's African American English, or say you're from Miami and you have Miami English, which is heavily Spanish-influenced, or you're a working-class speaker, so you have a different variety — then the mismatch between what you speak at home with your friends, with your family, with the people you love, and part of your identity as a person holistically — you go to school, it's actually a different variety altogether you have to use. And that's what we mean by this double consciousness.

That if you want to be successful in America, a lot of what we define that success on is the way you sound. And to be a member of the middle class and professional society in America, you have to learn that white variety of speech that has become known as American Standard English. But when you go home and you're with the people that matter to you — and the people that you grew up with, where your local speech developed, and the people that you identify with — you have this entirely different variety.

And so that's the double consciousness that many people have to inhabit when they're operating in the world: they speak one way at home and they have to speak a different way at work or at school. And it's a lot — it's exhausting to have to do that. And sometimes I think, as standard speakers that might speak standard at home and standard at school and standard at work, we don't realize how much extra effort goes into that. And in fact, where we're just learning one system, they're actually learning several systems. And so, you know, this judgment that we have doesn't really recognize the additional effort and work that that is and the actual fluidity of identity that they're showing when they do that.

[00:43:44]
Brian Mackey: One more text message. This one is from Helen in Springfield, who says: "I've read that accents are fading as our population is increasingly mobile. The only time I was teased about my accent was when our Dayton, Ohio, family visited cousins in the Chicago area — Homewood, Illinois. They said we had southern accents. Actually, our parents were from Pennsylvania, not the Deep South. To us, our cousins had the accent, pronouncing 'shock' as if it were spelled 'Shaq.' So we were very amused."

So, you know, we talk so often about Midwestern accents and California accents and British accents. How do you see the lines on which accents are drawn shifting over time?

[00:44:28]
Valerie Friedland: Well, first I love that example she gave, where "shock" is more like "Shaq," because that's actually a perfect example of the Northern Cities Shift at work, which we don't find in Pennsylvania, which is more part of the mid-Atlantic dialect region. So that's a great kudos for that example.

But she's very accurate that there is a fading of regional accents, particularly in urban areas of the United States. This is a really consistent finding of research in the last 20 years: starting with Generation X, each generation following that one — in Generation X, American regional accents are receding. And that's probably due to a number of different factors that are related to social mobility, so she's absolutely right that people are moving more, and whenever you move more, you get different exposure. And particularly if you move as a child, that's going to really influence the way you sound.

But it's not just moving more — it's also differences in our class system. So prior to World War II, there weren't a lot of middle-class speakers. Middle class was a unique thing at that time. There were a lot more working-class people. And then after World War II, it's continually increased, so that there's more and more middle-class and upper-class speakers. So now the big divide has become — you know, there's a very wealthy middle class and then the people that are left behind, and that's a big gulf. But there's a lot more people in that middle-class range.

And whenever we think about what middle-class speech sounds like, we end up thinking about a more formal, more distant kind of variety than the local regional varieties that spell home. They spell solidarity, they spell friendship — that's what they're about. But the whole point of middle-class standard speech is that you sound like everybody else and not like one particular group. And so as you increase the people that are attracted to that, you increase their attraction to sounding like everybody else, which decreases the attraction to local variants.

But of course, in Gen Z and Gen Alpha — which are the ones in which regional accents are almost wiped out in urban areas — we have social media, and that has had a huge impact. Attracting kids who used to actually talk to people in high school, now spending the time talking to their phone, and that can be someone from anywhere that they're looking at and interacting with or identifying with. And that decreases their attraction to local varieties just as much.

[00:46:53]
Brian Mackey: Do you think in a century, people in the Midwest will sound the way we do now to each other? I mean, how — and I guess if you go back a century, you mentioned that the Chicago accent only maybe goes back to the 1950s.

[00:47:07]
Valerie Friedland: The Southern speech as we know it today only goes back to the post-Civil War era. So, Colonel Sanders kind of thing, exactly.

I think what we're really seeing is just an evolution that's happened all through time. If you go back to the speech at the time of the colonial period, one of the really regular comments in the early 1700s on colonial speech was, "Wow, they speak such pure British English," because they all sound the same. And, you know, that was in comparison to Britain, where if you walk 10 miles down the road, you couldn't understand your neighbor. But by that virtue, it was absolutely true that Americans — or New Worlders, I guess, because they weren't Americans yet — sounded much more uniform, because the linguistic leveling that had been involved in the early history of the settlement of the colonies required it.

But that doesn't mean that new changes didn't develop that made us different still. So, you know, back then maybe people in Virginia and people in New England actually sounded fairly similar, but today people in Virginia and people in New England don't sound very similar. So it's just a natural evolution and cycle of language to kind of become more alike and less alike and more alike and less alike.

But we always find people sounding different because of the things that become important to their social identity. And I don't think anybody would say the United States has become more uniform in its ideological stances these days.

My prediction is that politics is actually gonna play a bigger and bigger role in the accents of our future, and we already see that. A lot of rural counties in areas that are very heavily Republican-leaning outside of the South have actually started to pick up more of what we might call traditionally Southern features, whereas in urban areas in the South that are more traditionally Democratic, they have started to lose some of those Southern features. So I think we already see some ebbing and flowing of politics in our accents of the future.

[00:49:00]
Brian Mackey: Oh, that's really interesting. I knew someone who — who is from, I don't know, maybe half an hour outside of Springfield — and we're talking about accents, and she said, "It's not a Southern accent, it's just farm."

[00:49:15]
Valerie Friedland: Country, right? I think what we've redefined — we've redefined "Southern" as "country," and country can be anywhere. So now, what once was not accessible — because if you weren't Southern, you didn't want to sound Southern — is no longer Southern, it's country. And that's a whole different ideological landscape. So then it's more accessible to people that identify with some of those, sort of, maybe more conservative-leaning opinions.

And in fact, when we study speech in the South — even within the South, if we look at people that tend to say that they voted Republican and have conservative-leaning politics — they actually are measurably more Southern in terms of the vowel position than people in the same area that say they're liberal-leaning, who don't sound as Southern. So it's absolutely true that I think we're picking up something in Southern speech that has nothing to do with the region and everything to do with belief systems.

[00:50:05]
Brian Mackey: The book is called "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents" by Valerie Friedland. Thanks so much for talking with us again on the 21st Show.

[00:50:14]
Valerie Friedland: Of course, it's been so much fun. Thank you for having me.

[00:50:17]
Brian Mackey: Once again, you can find our conversation on YouTube. Just search for the 21st Show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm Brian Mackey. Thanks for listening.