Washington Post, Friday 10/15/1993 p. D5 (Style Section)
Why Things Are
by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post Staff Writer
James R, Odom of Olney asks:
"Why do people in different sections of the country speak with regional
accents?"
Dear Jim: We passed this question along to Cathy Ball, a linguist at
Georgetown University, and she then sent it out to the Internet (you know,
that big web of computers that spans the globe) to her colleagues in the
American Dialect Society.
We learned that accents are basically a product of immigration.
German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, English and French
immigrants and African slaves in the Deep South, Scotch-Irish settlers in
the hills of Appalachia, Scandinavians in Minnesota, and so on. Accents
can mutate over time. "Members of lower socioeconomic classes often
imitate the speech of those in the class above them. The class above them
then adopts other features to distinguish them from the classes below
them," notes Robert Wachal of the University of Iowa. (Before the
Thurston Howells developed that lockjaw accent, they said "y'all" just like
everyone else.)
What surprised us most is that almost everyone said that
Americans don't have a great diversity of accents or dialects, at least not
anymore. Accents are preserved by geographic isolation, and with the
advent of mass media, many accents are melting away. Soon we'll all
sound like Tom Brokaw (but without the slight lisp). "The diversity of
accents in the U.S. is fairly narrow compared to, say, the diversity of
accents within just London proper," says Donald Livingston of the
University of Washington.
So maybe everyone should vow, this moment, to start pronouncing
words in a peculiar fashion (pronounced puh-KOOL-ya FATCH-un).
The above is supposed to be a joke, right?
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Linguistics, U. of Chicago
s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu
312-702-8531
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 10:20:57 -700
From: Keith Russell wkr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CPU.US.DYNIX.COM
Subject: Re: song
On Tue, 16 Nov 1993, Donald M. Lance wrote:
Doesn't 'south' collocate with 'down' and 'north' with 'up' in general?
Would any of you ever say "up south" or "down north"?
We use 'out' with 'east' and 'west', and 'down' with 'east'. We wouldn't
say "out north" or "out south" or "down west", would we?
These seem to me to be set expressions, and certainly mapping practices
contribute to these uses, but map directions don't explain "down east".
DMLance
I agree with you on 'down' and 'up.' 'Out west' is also fine, but 'out
east/north/south' and 'down west/east/north' are not. 'Back east,'
however, is fine.
Keith Russell
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 12:55:56 CST
From: Mike Picone MPICONE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UA1VM.BITNET
Subject: Re: linguistic nationalism
In response to Alan Slotkin's request:
English only policies were established with regards to education in the
Louisiana public schools in the early 1900s in order to supress varieties of
French (which had the simultaneious effect of suppressing Creole and Native
American dialects).
A good overview of the evolving situation, concerning French at least, is
available in the following:
Ancelet, Barry Jean. 1988. A Perspective on teaching the problem language in
Louisiana. The French Review 61:345-356.
Mike Picone
U Alabama
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 13:07:00 CST
From: Cynthia Bernstein BERN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DUCVAX.AUBURN.EDU
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
The article Sali mentions, claiming the disappearance of American
dialect diversity, reminds me of one that appeared last February in
the New York Times. I'm afraid it's the impression of the media that
the media are making us all sound alike. Some of us may soon be seeking
other employment.
Cynthia Bernstein, Auburn U
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:08:00 EST
From: "Dennis.Preston" 22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
I hope that Sali Mufwene is right and that the putative newspaper article on
'dialects' is a joke.
If not, it perpetrates two of the silliest unprofessional notions around (ones
my beginning undergraduate Language and Culture students could refute). 1)
That linguistic change is instituted by the upper classes and then abandoned
after lower status groups begin to sound like them. See any of the intensive
socioinguistic work on change in the last three decades to show that all
carefully studied change we are aware of beings in lower status groups and
works its way up (unless it is noticed and clobbered, of course). 2) Careful
studies (even of lexicon!), for example Ellen Johnson's recent dissertation
from Georgia, show that dialect areas are just as differentiated today as
thjey were when the were first studied in the 30's - quite a long time for the
media to have had an effect - NOT. That they were never as distinct as some
European dialects is granted, but that information is embedded in a popular
rather than scientific view. (The reasoning bhind all this, of course, is that
we learn our basic lanuage patterns (our 'vernacular' if you will) from
interaction (peers, siblings, other family) not from talking heads on TV.
I hope Sali is right; dialectology has a bad enough reputation among 'real'
linguists.
Dennis Preston 22709mgr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]msu.bitnet
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:15:57 -0500
From: "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr." billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
While the newspaper article may not be a joke, the media are still capable
of noticing dialect differences: WSB, the 50,000W Atlanta AM station,
interviewed me during the playoffs so that I could explain the funny
accents up in Philadelphia. (Needless to say, I found irony in the
request on *many* counts). I didn't hear what WSB edited out of the
phone interview, but it was scheduled to play the morning of game 5.
******************************************************************************
Bill Kretzschmar Phone: 706-542-2246
Dept. of English FAX: 706-542-2181
University of Georgia Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu
Athens, GA 30602-6205 Bitnet: wakjengl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:26:49 -0500
From: Cathy Ball CBALL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
For those who may have joined the list after I posted my original request ...
The Washington Post called me for help answering a reader's query, and I
passed on the query to ADS-L. The request generated a number of responses,
which I faxed to the Post, and they chose several. Voila. Actually, the
end result is not as bad as some of the things the media do with our input.
And as for the absence of 'change from above', noted by one of the recent
'is this a joke?' messages, I may note in passing the entry of 'who' into
the restrictive relative paradigm.
-- Cathy Ball (Georgetown)
cball[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:47:53 -0500
From: GURT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
Well said, Dennis Preston!
And a recent thread on the Sign Language Linguistics list concerned
hearing children of deaf parents. According to the studies cited, these
children apparently don't learn to SPEAK from listening to the television.
I thought one of the things we learned from Genie is that children
learn language from *interaction*, not from mere exposure.
I remember as a child asking my cousin in South Carolina why she
talked like that, even though nobody on TV talked like that (i.e.,
everybody on TV spoke (more or less) standard American English). She
insisted that she didn't talk any differently than people on TV -- my
impression at the time was that she was arguing that she couldn't hear
a difference between her dialect and the standard.
Can we infer that you learn your dialect from interaction, not mere
exposure, AND that dialects spoken by people you don't interact with
don't sound like different dialects?
Joan C. Cook
Department of Linguistics
Georgetown University
gurt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 17:41:54 -0500
From: Cathy Ball CBALL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
Dear Salikoko -
The above is supposed to be a joke, right?
If you meant the whole message, no! But the Post column in question is
a more-or-less tongue in cheek one - I can send you the original ADS
postings that underlie the column, if you're interested.
-- Cathy
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:59:30 CST
From: salikoko mufwene mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
In Message Mon, 22 Nov 1993 13:07:00 CST,
Cynthia Bernstein BERN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ducvax.auburn.edu writes:
The article Sali mentions, claiming the disappearance of American
dialect diversity, reminds me of one that appeared last February in
the New York Times. I'm afraid it's the impression of the media that
the media are making us all sound alike. Some of us may soon be seeking
other employment.
Cynthia Bernstein, Auburn U
Sorry, Cynthia. I made a comment on the report from Cathy Ball. Making
allowance for media distortions in reporting academic positions, I just
thought the intention must have been to entertain subscribers to the ADS
List.
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Linguistics, U. of Chicago
s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu
312-702-8531
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 21:04:23 -0700
From: Rudy Troike RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
Response to Dennis Preston's note:
Don't forget the 'parachute effect' in modern conditions, when
Chicago vowels jump to Phoenix without, as in olden days, traveling across
the intervening farm and ranch country. It is almost certainly NOT the media
which are responsible, since they are often the LAST to reflect such changes.
But change is occurring constantly at all social levels; which mutations
survive and spread is often a matter of the particular local circumstances.
Were it not for the influence of the upper class in post-Norman England, we
would not have so many French words incorporated into English, and would
still be using more of the good o
Old English vocabulary. It would make German easier to learn. Older upper-
class usages in turn survive in relic areas. Unfortunately, American English
IS being homogenized at the lexical level, with so few people left on the farm,
and most people getting 'school-larning', if not in school, via their 7 hours
a day of TV and the supermarket.
--Rudy Troike
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 21:15:41 -0700
From: Rudy Troike RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET
Subject: Re: Diversity of accents
Joan,
It's not so simple as we dialectologists, always going for the larger
picture, like to make out. Individuals will be individuals, at least at times,
no matter how much we try to squeeze them into our isoglosses or sociolinguis-
tic variables. I remember reading an interview some years ago with someone
who grew up in Brooklyn, in which he commented that his friends early on said
that he was eventually going to leave Brooklyn when he grew up, because he did
not sound like his peers. And he did leave. Unfortunately the interview was
printed, so there was no way to prove this, but it does suggest people are
not Skinner-conditioned, and may select which aspects of the environment they
will attend to as most salient. I have a colleague from Montana who sounds
like a Britisher.
Rudy Troike
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End of ADS-L Digest - 20 Nov 1993 to 22 Nov 1993
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