Episode 125: Accents with Valerie Fridland
Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected. Punctuation and formatting are not perfect.
Marcie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Endless Knot Podcast.
Aven: Where the more we know
Marcie: The more we want to find out
Aven: Tracing serendipitous connections through our lives
Marcie: And across disciplines
Aven: Hi, I'm Aven.
Marcie: And I'm Marcie.
Aven: And today we're talking about accents with Valerie Fridland. Valerie Fridland is a sociolinguist, author, public speaker, and a professor of linguistics in the English department at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Marcie: A two-time National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and the recipient of the Linguistic Society of America's Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award, Valerie's work explores how social change, linguistic forces, and psychological tendencies reshape our language over time, impacting the way we think about and talk to one another.
She writes a monthly blog on language-related topics for Psychology Today, is a regular guest writer [00:01:00] for the popular Grammar Girl podcast, and has a lecture series, Language and Society, available with The Great Courses.
Aven: We interviewed her three years ago when her first public linguistics book came out, Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English.
Now she's written another one, Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents, about the evolution of human speech, why accents develop, and how they shape our professional and social lives. Here's our chat with her
well welcome back Valerie. It's great to have you.
Valerie Fridland: I'm so delighted to come back. Thank you for having me.
Marcie: You, join a very small and select group of repeat guests on the show. This is very exciting. and it's not surprising because you write such excellent books.
Valerie Fridland: Oh, thank you. But I, yes, I love being asked back. I figured that's the ultimate compliment. If you want me back, that's a good sign.
Aven: it's been almost exactly three years. I was just checking back to see when we put out the episode [00:02:00] before when we talked to you about like, literally, dude, so three years. That's, I feel like that's extremely productive personally. So you're back with a new book.
Valerie Fridland: am.
Aven: So
Valerie Fridland: It's one of those things, you know, and I think time, space, weirdness, but it felt like a
Aven: yeah,
Valerie Fridland: and a short time at the same time.
Aven: I understand that. Same here actually for different reasons. But same here.
Valerie Fridland: So it it was a quick write this new book in the world of relative writing. But it, you still have to always slog through a book when you're writing it. There's
Aven: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: but yes, it is done and it is out in the world. My, my second baby. so I'm happy I could share some of it with you.
Marcie: Excellent. So can you.
tell us about this new book then?
Valerie Fridland: Sure it's called Why We Talk Funny, and it's all about everything you've ever wanted to know and wondered about accents. And I, my first book I took sort of the cues from the questions that people always ask me. So what, when I was out giving talks, did people come and ask me about what were the [00:03:00] questions they had about language?
And this book really is if I could write. The book that I wanted to write, the book that was
Aven: Hmm.
Valerie Fridland: the questions I had growing up as a child, or, being raised in the south, going to school outside the south. All those experiences I had linguistically, this is the book that I would've liked to have that, that early formative period of life where accents were something I was really aware of and how they shaped my own history and my own interactions with people.
So this book is really a kind of passion project of my own background and my own interest. But I think the more I've talked to people, the more I realize that everybody relates to the story of accent. Whether you think you have an accent or not yourself, which of course, we all know that's a myth.
Everybody has an accent, but we all. Relate to other people from the sound of their voice in ways that bring us together and sometimes pull us apart in ways that make us [00:04:00] think of warmth and family and friends and love or formality and stiffness and stress. know, there's just all these different emotions that we have with accents.
And so this book is really about the history and the science behind all the accents we have around us in our lives. And so going back to our ancient ancestor accents, to our accents as babies, the process of acquisition to all those accents we talk about around us. So regional accents, accents, having to do with social class, ethnicity non nativity, all of those things.
I put into this book along with my heart and soul.
Aven: Yeah. This is, one of your main areas of study is, or has it been?
Valerie Fridland: this is
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: more directly,
Aven: Yes. That's what I thought.
Valerie Fridland: The most of the work that I've done in my field.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: Accents of American English
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: My dissertation was actually on accents in the south and whether they were disappearing, how they had changed [00:05:00] from the traditional descriptions and what sort of spurred that.
And then when I moved to
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: coast, I expanded to looking at first West coast accents. And then my more recent work was actually looking at all the three dialect areas, not only in how they spoke and how that was changing, but also how that was affecting the perception that people had. So yes, this is much more aligned.
I've worked in all areas, but this one
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: where I've done a lot of my work as a researcher.
Aven: Yeah. Yeah, you, you talk in the book about a formative early experience, which you've touched on just now to some extent about your own experience with accents and mm-hmm. And in particular as many of us are, we are brought to hyper-awareness of our own accents by moving away from mm-hmm.
Where we are in the majority. Obviously there's other experiences with accents we have, but you talked a little bit about. The mismatch between the stereotypes of Southern American speech and your own experience of such speech that you encountered when you moved away from the south. Is that a good
Valerie Fridland: Yes, absolutely,
Aven: Yeah. [00:06:00] Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: I was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, which is an urban area of the South. So it
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: you know, at the time of my birth, it had changed drastically from the
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: had been in our imagination. You know, This
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: of the south that people carry with the, that we see in a lot of media that we see in old movies that we think about when we talk, think about Southern speech. It had changed a lot, and of course it's changed even more since I left, 25, 30 years ago. But even at the point where I was there, there had been a lot more industrialization. Air conditioning was frequent, which people laugh at maybe because, you think of, okay, of course you have to have air conditioning in the south.
But really I, it was, in the mid 20th century that air conditioning became widespread. So that altered the interactions people had the kind of industries that could set up shop there, and that really spurred a lot of changes. So there was, a whole lot of different forces at work after World War II in the South that kind of made it a different place than the [00:07:00] place that we think about. Made it sound different than the accent we think about, but. sort of Were stuck in the past with the Southern accent. Because the friends that I had and my own accent as a product of the South were not at all what people thought of. And I think if you go to any major city in the south today, like Atlanta or Raleigh and maybe to a slightly lesser degree Memphis, 'cause it's a little more inland, I think, and maybe less industrialized than those two in terms of immigration.
But still people there, young southerners do not sound like you think they would. And so my dissertation really focused on how it was changing in that area. But yes, it was absolutely when I moved to go do my doctorate in Michigan and my college in Washington, DC that all of a sudden I was like, hello, you all sound funny. But actually it was me that sounded funny. 'cause it, I, even though I didn't have a heavy southern accent, I still said things differently than people there. And I sounded slightly different and in a way that people picked [00:08:00] up on.
Marcie: Mm-hmm. and even before that you, you mentioned that you grew up with a different accent than your parents who spoke English with a French accent,
Valerie Fridland: and you'll appreciate this. My mother's actually French Canadian
Aven: Ian? Aha.
Valerie Fridland: know, we can go and I'm actually a dual citizen, so whoop for Canadians. But yes, my mother's French Canadian and my father was Belgian. And he did speak both Flemish and French, but his dominant language was French. So they moved to the United States for a job and I was born after they moved and my father took. Uh, Job at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, and that's why I grew up there. So it
Aven: right.
Valerie Fridland: was still a different south than maybe the one we imagined, but it wasn't all that different in the sense that they didn't have a lot of foreign migration at the time.
My parents were probably the only French speakers they knew, there. And so we stood out in a way that got noticed. And I remember very young in life, either people constantly [00:09:00] asking my parents where they were from or my own speech having been affected in ways I didn't realize by my parents speak a a substrate effect, which means that I picked up some aspects of their speech that they had from French and brought it into my own English.
And one of the things that I talk about in the book was that I, I didn't aspirate my h sounds early in life
Aven: Right. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: French doesn't have hs, right?
Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: So words like huge, which now I have learned after being teased mercilessly to aspirate I would pronounce huge.
Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: there are accents in the United States where you hear that as well, but it's
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: And it
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: a little girl in like kindergarten teased me about it that I realized I did it. But that sort of speaks to this idea that accents are so impactful on our social identities
Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: bad ways, in both nurturing, loving, and harmful ways. And that was one of [00:10:00] the reasons I wanted to write this book.
Aven: that really, you know, resonated with me because my parents also, you know, spoke with different accent than I do. The, neither of them are, have English as their first language. So my mother, also French Canadian, and my father from India. So, and English was the, the common language that they had, but it wasn't either of their first language.
Mm-hmm. And I, yet, I grew up in a predominantly anglophone community. So that was the language I spoke. Mm-hmm.
your accent doesn't particularly show, I mean, again, there might be little traces here and there, but as you talk about in the book, Valerie, like that your peer group is so much formative mm-hmm.
For accent development that, you know, I don't think anyone would hear that in your, in your speech. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: Now that doesn't mean we don't pick up small traces. And in
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: A lot of substrate influence a lot of things that we recognize as a native English a, a native English accent but maybe with some slight differences. Like a Spanish English [00:11:00] accent or the Minnesota accent that
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: substrate, right?
When you have a lot of people together whose parents didn't speak English, a lot of
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: children will carry on some traits even though they'll sound native and they'll have a different accent. But
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: an individual like Marcy and myself growing up with parents that have these sort of disparate accents, and especially if they're not the same one,
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: tend to find is the peer group is most influential.
And that doesn't mean you don't have some small traits. So you might say a certain word or a sound here or there like your parents do, but your peer group kind of knocks that out of you fairly early in life and. Something that we call vernacular reorganization, if you wanna get fancy. And so that's why, I think a question people have asked me a lot is, why is it that we don't sound like our parents? And it's because the peer group is actually a lot more influential on your long term speech development than your parents are. Even though the parents are not without merit they do some [00:12:00] valuable stuff, and I don't wanna knock parents 'cause they actually do. But if anybody's ever had a teenager,
Aven: yep.
Valerie Fridland: are not cool after about age eight.
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: cool people influence you more than the not so cool people.
Aven: Mm-hmm. And I imagine there's a sort of an interesting thing
that happens if you speak a second language of your parents that is perhaps their primary language, and maybe it's a second language to you growing up or another home language there, I presume. I would just guess that you do pick up your parents' accent because you won't have.
The peers who speak it that may have been phrased very confusingly, but I am you know, if you, if you'd learned Tamil from your, from your dad Marcy, you would've spoken his accent. You would not have learned a Canadian Tamil accent. Yeah, yeah,
Valerie Fridland: no, you would have no other input
Aven: yeah. Or not enough of one. Yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: But there you actually might depend, that's a really complex issue really.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: on how dominant that language is in your speech.
Aven: Yeah. In your culture. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: if you're speaking it to other people other than your [00:13:00] father and it's more of a community based accent, then you probably will
Aven: Still.
Valerie Fridland: on some other people.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: your father, whoever you're having a lot of interaction with and how you unconsciously admire.
If it's only your dad, then it's probably gonna be a pretty minor language in your background and you
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: actually have some English Tamil accent because it's
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: But yes, it is, it's a really interesting question. It would depend that one would really be situationally dependent on who you're interacting with the most, but absolutely that, that, and they. accents certainly
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: the same patterns because you just don't have the access to the community of speakers.
Aven: Right.
I think those are the kinds of things like little particular vocabulary words, I suspect maybe stick around longer than
Valerie Fridland: Yes.
Aven: traces. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: and actually one word that my father used to always say, and I cannot trace it because he said it was French and I, we always called my parents, would call something, pick pics. It was a sort of the gizzard of [00:14:00] the, 'cause my parents were
Aven: Okay.
Valerie Fridland: one of the, one of the things that I always found as a child at growing up in the South, not that the Southerners didn't eat some odd stuff, but my parents would eat way more parts of the animal than anybody around
Aven: Right,
Valerie Fridland: And this was intensely embarrassing to me as a child.
Aven: course. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: My father used to love what he called the pick pics and. always told me that was French. And I still think, I don't even, I think it's, I think it was the gizzard, what Americans would call the gizzards, but it's so impressed into my mind that's just the word.
But I have done research and actually can't find that in French.
Hopefully someone somewhere can solve that mystery for me.
But it was my goal in life to sound nothing like my parents.
Aven: Right. Of course, differentiation is very important to a teenager. Yeah. Yeah. Understandable. So that, I mean, I think that you've already really touched on it, but you know, this idea of accent discrimination or we, maybe not just discrimination that, I mean, that's a subset, but the, the way we act, react to people on, on the basis of their [00:15:00] accents to ourselves, our, you know, how communities, that sort of thing.
I feel like that's maybe one of the connections between this book and your previous book in a larger. Like, so I was thinking about the themes, and I know that you weren't, these aren't just series Exactly, but it just made me think of, of your previous book when I was reading this one the sort of social context of language, the idea of judgment or prejudice, those social interactions.
I see that as a a through line, and I just wondered if you see that, if that's intentional or it's just something you've always been interested in.
Valerie Fridland: I mean my, i, my field is sociolinguistics,
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: if it has social in it, I'm interested. And, there have been a lot of different aspects of the work that I've done as a researcher and that starting from looking at language and gender was a big interest of mine.
When I was younger, and in fact I did two dissertations in the sense that I started a separate dissertation earlier than I did my ultimate dissertation on language and gender as a topic and published several chapters. [00:16:00] and then I did more of the socio phonetics, like the sounds. So I had an interesting, both like the discourse level stuff, which is what my first book was about, and then also the sound based stuff, which is what this book is about.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: to both of those are the how social aspects of our lives, the people we interact with the places we grow up, the way that we see each other as members of groups, the personality. That we admire or want to aspire to be the level of comfort we have with each other. All of those set social aspects affect patterns in our speech, and that has always been my interest.
And then because of the way that society's set up and certain people have more power and authority in that society, their language then gets imbued with those senses of that they're not just socially lucky to be powerful and authoritative or dominant. They're actually somehow socially more deserving of it.
And that gets [00:17:00] bound up with their speech as well, that sort of this belief that instead of being socially lucky, they're socially deserving more than other people, right? This idea that somehow because they inhabit more illustrious positions, that they must deserve it somehow, right? This is a belief we have socially, and that actually gets then attached to the different speech styles and accents that we have.
And so that's a fundamental part of what socialist. Look at, which is how do these associations that we have with, like low, lower status speakers, somehow being lazy and uneducated. And,
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: competent, those kinds of things. If you ask, there's been some interesting studies done that if you tell someone's story about a person, a hypothetical story and you tell them that person's lower class in one version or middle class in another version, and part of the story is that they lost their job or they, somehow ended up having bad luck at a job, then what we find is when you ask people why they lost their job, if you had described them as lower status, they say [00:18:00] it was because they were intrinsically lazy or some personality quirk.
When you say they're middle class, they're more likely to see it as bad luck.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: I'm really interested in how that affects our speech
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: both how our social lives affect the way we talk, but also how our social lives affect the way we listen. And so that is the throughway in both of these books.
Aven: Yeah. And of course the, you know, that kind of thinking leads to the, the faulty view that. One type of language is somehow intrinsically better than another type of language, rather than it just being a reflection of, you know, the status of the group that happens to speak one variety of English.
Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: I wanna say if you're hearing some strange moans from over here, it's the Great Dane who is being very noisy in her comfortable sleeping. So just to clear that up, it's not me, but yes, what, you know what's really, I think uh, another. I'm trying to talk about in this book [00:19:00] is we're, I'm looking at the science and history.
So this is not a lecture. I'm not trying to tell you you're, you know, what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong in your worldview on language. What I'm trying to tell you is, look let's, let's understand where accents come from, how they
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: we
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: they're important, what they do for us, the good, the bad, and the ugly, right?
And why we feel the way we do in about different accents. And then also, you know, what, what mitigates it, what changes that view? If we look at sort of the history of how accents develop. We have a 7,000 or so languages that exist today. There were probably a point in the past where we had up to 10,000 different languages because languages are actually dying.
Not increasing in diversity at the moment right now. But if we had presume that all these languages started from an original source language in Africa, 150,000 years ago, maybe you know, some theories would say three, three languages. You know, It's not necessarily. All, everybody agrees there was one source language.
Could have been a couple of times this happened, but the [00:20:00] idea being that, we started pretty much with one basic language or two basic languages that everybody spoke in a small area where humans were. And then as humans dispersed their language went with them. accents are the traces of how we disperse.
They're the traces of how we lost touch with each other. They're the traces of how we recognized each other. Natural selection probably favored the development of accents, which happened because of natural propensities in our brains and our mouths that causes linguistic variation wherever language exists.
And so this would've been selected by natural selection because it actually helped with human survival. If you could recognize someone who would help you in a time of need by the sound of their voice, by yelling for someone and having someone answer you, and something that you recognize that would be helpful. In the same way, it would be helpful if you didn't recognize it, that you thought, oh, maybe I should move along right or not be here. there's nothing. [00:21:00] Nothing wrong with the fact that we speak differently and we notice that, I think, from an evolutionary perspective, it made a lot of sense.
It was actually very useful to us. But that's not the same thing as disparaging people because of the way they sound. So I think what we wanna get away from this idea that it's not okay to notice that people have accents, but. It's the difference between, oh look, we have something about our experience that was different, but it's not a marker that everything in our experience is different or that our qualities of as humans are different.
And that's really some of the aspects I dive into in the book is how is it then that those associations happen? And that's where it's really bound up with aspects of history that sort of happened by either, quirks we talk, I talked about the development of the American accent, Versus the British accent. And some of the differences developed because of the timeframe of migration. A lot of changes that happened in British speech happened after some of the primary migration to the new world. And so the colonists in America didn't have certain features like r [00:22:00] dropping in the awe instead of, ah, that the British later developed.
But those did exist in Australian English because that was settled later. So that sort of quirks of history, but others are quirks of sociohistorical evidence of power struggles and of historical events that were catastrophic to some and beneficial to others. So you know, when we brought enslaved people to the new world, and that is the roots I follow in the book, the roots of the African American English development. And from the time
Aven: the.
Valerie Fridland: 1619 when really the first enslaved people were brought to Jamestown to modern. African American English and how there were a number of pivotal events in the development till period of the colonies to the modern era. Things like where most of the African Americans prior to the 20th century lived, which was in the rural south.
And then the great migration of the 20th century, which brought 50% of the African American population of the United [00:23:00] States to northern urban areas and caused a, a much more concentrated interaction and a valuing of this unique culture. And that really spurred a lot of what we think of as modern African American features.
So there's a lot of different history and just e evolutionary development that we see in different ways, depending on whether we have the perspective of history or the perspective of one moment that we're living in. And what I'm trying to fill in the book is that past history.
Aven: Yeah. These are, these are contingent things. They don't happen for no reason, but they also don't happen for we often try to assign Yeah. We, it's tried to, tried to assign as it word, like narrative coherence to language change there's a, a purpose, you know, like, like we do with evolution sometimes. Oh, people evolve towards X for such and such a reason. No, they evolved because they changed and it happened to work. You know, it not, it's not moral. There's no moral quality to it, for instance.
Yeah. Yeah. [00:24:00]
Valerie Fridland: really. But I think, what I'm trying to do in the book is people come to their experience with language from a perspective of the modern a perspective of the one they learned in school. It's a very
Aven: Yes.
Valerie Fridland: perspective.
It's not a wrong perspective, it's just an a not fully informed perspective. You know, I, I don't wanna discount people's experience with language in the modern world that has truth to them. But I also think what we forget is that's not the whole story. And sometimes, when you find out the whole story, it reshapes your perspective of the modern, and that's the goal of this book.
Marcie: Now one of the, things that you address, you know, early on are the, different but related concepts of accent and dialect. could you talk a little bit about that?
Valerie Fridland: Sure. You know, I think a lot of people think they're the same thing. And we use them fairly interchangeably. But dialect is a broader term for a variety of a language that differs from another variety or another dialect on a [00:25:00] number of levels. So that can include pronunciation, but it also includes things like having vocabulary differences.
So for example, when I walk into a restaurant and I want a Sprite, I'll order a Coke 'cause I'm from Memphis.
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: might order a pop or a soda. I think Canada's a more
Aven: Soda. Yeah, yeah,
Yeah. Wear soda on this side of the Canada. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: And my husband's Midwestern family I still cringe to this day, but they order pop.
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: I still love him, but it's pop is just wrong. But anyway that's another level of dialect, but also morpho syntactic features. So the
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: sentences. So in the south, as a dialectal southern speaker, I can say things like, I might could do that, but if as a
Aven: Right. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: differences. And accent is a similar in the sense that it's it causes us to notice two varieties being different, but it only is referring to the way they differ on the sound level. So when I merge pin and pen in, say pin pen. the same way, that's an accent difference. When [00:26:00] I say I might could that's at a high, a different level.
And so that's a dialect difference. Dialect includes pronunciation, but accent only includes pronunciation, if that makes sense.
Aven: So one's the larger and the other's a subset, as it were. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: is probably the most salient thing. So we notice that people within 500 milliseconds of hearing someone talk, they start making decisions about them in terms of social characteristics and per personality traits. So obviously saying hello is really only the sound that you're getting a message about. So accent is pretty significant in determining how we respond to people.
Marcie: I, I just amused when you brought up the you know, the double modal there. 'cause I always get very excited when I hear it in the wild. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: I used to have double mods more in my speech, but somehow when you move out of the south, the looks on people's faces, train it out of you pretty quickly. Every once in a while, if my husband will say something, I'll say, yeah, I might could. and then he just gives me a little, yes sweetie type look like I, there's [00:27:00] my southern girl he'll there.
Or he'll say something like, you can take the girl outta Memphis. But yes. I love a do double modal.
Marcie: Oh, they're great. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: useful.
Aven: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. But you're just, you're just prejudiced in favor of modals Marcy, because you did your dissertation on them.
Valerie Fridland: there you go,
Aven: Well, to some degree anyway.
Valerie Fridland: we'd get along.
Aven: Yeah. So just a little sub question especially in your more academic approaches to it, how does one study accent, what are the tools for describing, comparing, labeling, quantifying accent? I mean, you talk about this to some extent in the book, and obviously it's the sounds of speech.
Sure. But obviously those are also infinitely variable and to a certain extent, idiosyncratic and all the rest of it. How, I don't want you to, you get too technical maybe, but like how does, how did you do that lumping and splitting
Valerie Fridland: That's
Aven: and work?
Valerie Fridland: great question because I think, I've done it for my career so much that I forget that it is a weird
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: To think how do you measure a [00:28:00] sound and how do you measure that someone's different in that sound? The way we've done it has changed depending on the technology.
It's very technologically advanced now. So you do it with equipment. So you actually measure, you record someone speaking and then you actually do make a kind of visual of their speech and you can measure different wave forms in their speech
Aven: Okay.
Valerie Fridland: we measure two key characteristics in a lot of the work that people like me do, which are called the first form and the second form, which simply talk about points of measurement on a waveform and
Aven: Okay.
Valerie Fridland: to sort of the mouth position that you're making when you're making a certain sound.
And then by estimating your mouth position, we can kind of estimate what that sound is. So then we can basically. Compare this person's mouth position with that person's mouth position. And what we find is there's very significant patterns that emerge. Say if I take a Northerner and a Southerner and a Westerner and I measure their mouth position by using these for, or they're positioning of the tongue and lips [00:29:00] when they're saying these sounds, you will find that aren't gonna differ. if I measure them against someone else from the same area, they'll be much closer. So I can actually put a dot on a chart, a vowel chart, and you can actually see vis visually who's patterning together in the, where they put their sounds
Aven: Mm.
Valerie Fridland: separate. And it really is cool when you get a hundred northerners, a hundred Westerners and a hundred southerners, and then you plot them. So you put
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: of them are pronouncing their sounds and you'll see oh look there, all the northerners are hanging out and look there, all the southerners are hanging out. Nope, they're the westerners. So you may not even hear if you were talking to them. Oh, this is definitely a Southerner, northerner, westerner.
But when you look at their pictures, you're like, holy crap. They really do pattern together. So it's, right now it's very technical. You basically. Record them. You do an acoustic measurement technique to get sort a point that you can plot that tells you, oh, this person has a more front pronunciation, so it would be more, [00:30:00] e versus eh, that kind of thing.
But back in the day before they had computational techniques like that, you would actually have trained people like me that would code vowels for high position, low position, or mid position in the mouth. So a lot of vowels are made by where the tongue is placed in the mouth. And so you can actually, if you get trained hear it, you can hear they have a higher tongue, a middle tongue or lower tongue, or a backer tongue, and they would code, oh, that's, here are five different variants that people can make of this vowel.
And that's a high one, that's a low one, that's a back one, that's a mid one. So people would just code auditorily. But people don't really do that anymore. It's all done on computer programming now.
Aven: The lost arts.
Valerie Fridland: know, I know back in the day when I first started, there were, that was just sort of this is
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: fairly recent, these instrumental techniques,
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: I did learn the instrumental techniques, but they did make us do impressionistic coding as well because it [00:31:00] was still something people did and you would read studies that had been done that way, so you needed to understand it.
But I don't, I
Aven: Right,
Valerie Fridland: that they ever teach that anymore because it's just a bygone era.
Aven: Well, and and much more labor intensive, obviously. I imagine there were an awful lot of grad students who spent an awful lot of time doing that coding
Valerie Fridland: So
Aven: over the years.
Valerie Fridland: Oh my gosh, so bad. But you know What's interesting is we still do see some work in that way. So there are certain things that you can hear, the type of measurements I'm talking about, a non linguist wouldn't be able to do. But there's actually been some studies that looked, for example, at how the, vowel in Iraq and
Iran are pronounced.
And so
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: vary between Iraq and. and
Aven: Right. Or Iraq. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: Yes. So that would
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: on two levels so that you could hear and people could still impressionistically code that and get some useful information. And in fact, they did in congressional hearings in 2007, they coded that
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: they found that the pronunciation coded as either a or [00:32:00] awe. so Iraq, or Iraq. And they also looked at the first vowel as well. They saw that it correlated with a congress member's political persuasion. So you
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: do useful stuff in impressionistic way, but
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: that's not how it's done.
Aven: Right. the's sort of like, the more, this isn't a word, but I'm gonna say it anyway. The more shi the
Valerie Fridland: Yes. I love
Aven: the
Valerie Fridland: the way you used that word.
Aven: the, the more salient it's going to be to a sort of non-technical audience. Right? So the, the reason I hear Iraq as a thing is because it became. maybe only among nerds, but still it became a, a talking point that the Bush led, you know, group of Republicans, people who identify, who are pro pro-war went to Iraq and people who were anti-war were against the Iraq war,
Valerie Fridland: Absolutely.
Aven: And, And
that was a, a, a salient enough point because it became an ingroup, outgroup thing that Yeah. A non nonprofessional could could notice it.
Valerie Fridland: [00:33:00] And
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: do a slightly more subtle one so that,
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: who's familiar with that variation could
Aven: Right?
Valerie Fridland: but someone who isn't probably, would might respond to it unconsciously, but wouldn't recognize it. You know what I'm thinking of a T drop, when you drop t.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: if someone says got or what?
Aven: Right. With a glottal stop instead of a t. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: that actually, you could code without instrumental measures. In fact, that kind of thing is harder to measure instrumentally. And so most people probably wouldn't think about it, but they've noticed it at some level.
They have noticed people saying what instead of what. And so it's still codeable, even if it's not salient, but absolutely the more hy ones to use your word, which is a great word, something I talk about in the book that would be easily accessible for people that are not linguists to measure.
I.
Aven: Yeah, I would imagine those, the instruments you're talking about I mean, you're talking about vowels, so when you get to consonants, I mean, they may well be ways, but you're not gonna get consonants by definition, [00:34:00] don't have wavelengths. Sort of,
Valerie Fridland: Right now
Aven: sort of
Valerie Fridland: You
Aven: point. I mean, they do sort of, but Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: I mean, there's, so vowels really the first thing that got 'em instrumentally measured. But now there are some good techniques to measure continents because you actually can see often the way they affect the way form of the vowel is the way that you measure it, or with fricative.
So
Aven: Yes, of course. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: you get a lot of high frequency noise, so you actually can see it looks like white noise and where that noise is. So where
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: of noise happens, whether it's high or low on the image actually tells you which sound it is. So there are actually
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: do it now, but yes, it's a little trickier for sure.
Aven: No, that's really cool. Thank you. That was, that was something I was curious about. I mean, you know, I'm used to the labeling from the other side, like you can put it in IPA when you're describing it, of, so yes.
there's ways of describing the phenology and we just spoke, to Danny Bate about the Alphabet book just was our, our
Valerie Fridland: yes.
Aven: most recent interview [00:35:00] before this.
And, you know, so we are talking about the phonology and, and, you know, talking, he, he had a fun line about how because he used IPA in his book and he decided he was going to do that. 'cause talking about the changes in the sound of each letter of the alphabet over time was just he couldn't figure out a better way to do it.
that wasn't as complicated as anything else. And that was fine, and it worked great. And then he started to read the audiobook and suddenly that wasn't a problem. But now describing how the the letter forms had changed over time became a total nightmare.
Valerie Fridland: Yes.
Aven: So,
Valerie Fridland: gosh. I, it's so funny because I had that same experience,
Aven: yeah.
Valerie Fridland: write about sounds, that's actually when I proposed this book after my first book, and they had said they wanted a new one. They said, they were very open about, you tell us what you wanna write and then we'll, you
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: see it.
And so I told, I suggested this book and my editor said. Prove to me you can write about sounds in a way. I'll understand and you got it. And so I
Aven: Yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: a sample [00:36:00] chapter describing
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: in a way that an everyday person would easily get it to prove that I could do it. But it is definitely a challenge.
And I did not use the IPA
Aven: No, and I noticed that. Yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: is a very general audience book. And I hopefully was successful in coming up with other ways to describe the sounds. But I ran into the same problem reading the audio book, that there are
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: you know, the spelling and the sounds that I'm talking about in the book that are actually visually easier to describe.
And yeah, you can't win when you're talking
Aven: No, no, and I think, I think, you know, you had at least the. Benefit of mostly being, talking about English sounds that therefore could be represented with English words. Dan, Danny was also trying to talk about, you know, Greek and Venetian and Semitic languages and once and
Valerie Fridland: gosh.
Aven: sounds that don't exist in English.
Yeah. And all the rest of it. So,
Valerie Fridland: No.
Aven: I
Valerie Fridland: have one
Aven: different choices being made, made sense for those contexts, I think. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: to spell out all the words. Yes. Because
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: section in my book, I talk about spelling, most of the book is [00:37:00] just about speaking, but there's
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: where I talk about spelling and I'm talking about these spelling changes that came into English.
And I, in the book, it was easy 'cause I've spelled it out, but in the audiobook I was like, oh crap, I have to read all these out. You have to figure out how to
Aven: I have to tell you how many Ls there are in this word or whatever. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: Yeah. Yeah. That the, yeah, that was a fun process, but challenging at times.
Marcie: Yeah. I, I mean, I, I definitely remember having to think about these issues when I was designing an online. Linguistics course. but fortunately, the internet, the way it, functions, makes it possible to include both visual and mm-hmm. Auditory information, so Yeah. But you were able to do both?
I was able to do both. Medium, yeah. Yeah. Which is very lucky.
Valerie Fridland: would be, I think that will be the, our future, right? When everybody's walking around with their Google glasses and
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: you say, play me that sound, and it
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: into existence. But yes, for now, we're not quite there. One of the interesting things about the audio book is I only read a couple chapters.
I actually don't really enjoy it [00:38:00] reading my own books. I'm a writer, I'm not a reader. I think is, I do to
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: not, I feel like I do a better job of writing than I do of reading it aloud. I also think it. Makes sense in a book about accents to have the people with the accent read the chapters about themselves.
And
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: was
Aven: Yes.
Valerie Fridland: we got to do this. So every chapter that it makes sense to have an accented reader read, you hear the accent. So that helps bring it to life in a way that I'm really happy with because you get to experience the reader reading in an accented voice. So I'm really excited about that.
Marcie: That's, that's excellent actually. Yeah. I, I, you know, that's not something you see often audio books read by different voices, so that, that's really exciting.
Valerie Fridland: were really, they have been super, I was not sure they would go for it, but they
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: incredible at embracing it. And we actually auditioned a bunch of speakers to capture the right exact accent. And
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: know, one of my favorite is the reader of the book on ancient [00:39:00] accents where I kind of trace from Proto-Indo-European through Germanic accents to finely English. And so it just made sense to me to have a German or Scandinavian speaker in
Aven: Nice.
Valerie Fridland: And oh my gosh, that was so fun because just the name, their names alone were like so perfectly Scandinavian. I just, I was like, oh my gosh. This book, I think it was Magnus Rook that we. I just love the names themselves.
Made me want to listen to them. So yes, it's a fun audio book. I'm really happy that we got to do that.
Marcie: Oh, there you go. Dear listener. Maybe consider buying the audio book. Mm-hmm.
Aven: That makes it sound very appealing. Yeah. 'cause yes, we've only read the, the, the print book,
Valerie Fridland: which was
Aven: sadly.
Valerie Fridland: also enjoyable. And
Aven: oh, absolutely.
Valerie Fridland: You can imagine the voices. But if you need, if you
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: the visual, then that's probably where it, or the audio, that's probably your best bet.
Aven: Yeah. Okay. So another question I wanted to ask. And you talked about how accents arise and I mean, I don't wanna go into every single [00:40:00] thing that's in the book, but you do talk about how that works and you've already sort of gesture to it. Are there any, this is a bit of a leading question 'cause I know there are some, but are there any myths about accents that you particularly would like to debunk?
Either about the origins of accents, the ones I'm thinking about to lay my cards on the table, like the Elizabethan English in the south in the us. Another one I'd heard about, it's the Australian accent comes 'cause they were all drunk. I dunno if you've heard that one.
Valerie Fridland: yes.
Aven: The Midwest speak that way 'cause they can't open their mouth because it's so cold.
I don't know if there's other
Valerie Fridland: Yes, there are.
Aven: Things like that.
Valerie Fridland: think the one that I, I found I find people are most surprised by, there are all of those, there's so many myths that people have that I think they'll be surprised to learn. Don't hold water. Actually, these
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: lore that people have heard
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: you named a lot of them.
But I think the one that people will find most surprising is that if you go back to, 17th century colonies in the United States, in, in a, in the new [00:41:00] world, in what was gonna become the United States, there were not regional accents. People, have this
Aven: Yes.
Valerie Fridland: a
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: that somehow accents have been here for the eternity in terms of
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: accent regional divide. But those are actually quite recent. And I think the things that will surprise people the most is the southern accent, what we hear as the southern accent. All those things like the southern drawl and the saying y'all, and the far for fire that is so in
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: envision that accent.
Those are incredibly new compared to the long reach of American language. So those did not really come about until after the Civil War. So they're really,
Aven: Hmm.
Valerie Fridland: new. And it was actually the reconstruction period after the Civil War that really brought those out and forged a common sound to the south. So that's one thing that I think people brought surprise. The other is the Pennsylvania Dutch accent is actually German.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: Dutch. And that's actually from a [00:42:00] misunderstanding of Deutsch, which meant
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: So they were the Pennsylvania Deutsch, the Pennsylvania German that got hurt
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: So that's another fun little myth buster. I think in there, in the book. But yes, same thing. We talk about the Elizabethan theories both with African American English is actually the opposite. I think people don't realize that it actually has a lot of traits from Elizabethan English,
Aven: Right. Right.
Valerie Fridland: the South
Aven: Hmm.
Valerie Fridland: more traits from Elizabethan English than the other American accent.
It's sort of this flip of myths. So those are just a few of my favorites.
Aven: Yeah, I really found the part about how the sort of homogeneity of early American English, very interesting. You know, and you explain a lot of the specific cultural and sort of almost technological reasons for it in the sense of lack of mobility and, you know, all that sort of stuff. I found it really interesting because I don't know that I thought about it a lot, but I probably would've assumed that the, some of those splits happened early.
Because we're so [00:43:00] used to, you know, there's so many regional differences between such tiny neighborhoods in England that you kind of think, oh, maybe that's just how we work. in early times people sounded different, every village to every village. But it's not that straightforward.
It's not. There's a, there's more issues in involved. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: fact
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: in Britain is one of the key reasons why the American language originally sounded so uniform.
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: because you had such variety in Britain, then you had a lot of feeder dialects that came in with the early colonists that were all in the same place. And that's not completely true because actually in the Jamestown colony and the new, the Massachusetts or New England colony, a lot of the early, the predominant sort of settlers were Southern British.
But even within that group, there was still a great diversity. And there were also other. varieties like Irish and Welsh that came in at the
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: And it's in many ways this incredible intense diversity of the early settlers in this [00:44:00] shared task of building a new place to live with survival as your main goal and a need to collaborate and cooperate across lines, right?
A across class lines in a way that it didn't happen in Britain. A across regional accents. In a way it didn't happen in Britain that caused what we call a linguistic leveling or a loss of
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: different features, which is what exactly what made the speech so uniform at the outset. So in, at seven, in 1700, the comments were not, oh my gosh, listen to all these dialectical variations in the new world, how cool it was.
Wow. Listen to how everybody in the new world sounds the same and sounds so good. That's what people often commented that they sounded. As if a lot of these class differences and regional differences had been erased and they didn't sound like they were from Britain anymore, but they also didn't sound that different from each other.
And in fact, there were a number of writers that say, you could walk in anywhere in the New World [00:45:00] colonies and come across people and understand them without any problems. And they would sound very similar. But I go and do the same thing in Britain and I can't understand a person from one town to the next.
So that was the contrast in the 17 hundreds, and it really isn't until the 18 hundreds we start to see those regional divides having existed for long enough with cultural divides that we end up with these regional differences that we now know as the, north, south, and western dialects of American English.
Marcie: Fascinating. You just have to give it a bit more time to develop. It's not happen right away.
Aven: Well, and also this, but it's, but also specific cultural. Mm-hmm. You know, because people start to identify into subgroups rather than one larger group. yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: we interact with and what we feel about them and what our goals and our practices are and when those are more similar then we speak more similarly when those are more different than we speak differently. And then we also start disliking the people that sound different.
And that's how
Aven: It's a, it's a feedback loop. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: that how those divides grow. Absolutely.
Aven: [00:46:00] Would you say that the linguistic leveling like that, is a, obviously not the same, but a similar process to the creolization or the ification of a language in the sense that when you have multiple languages, you do things like simplify and drop certain kinds of grammatical forms and vocabulary so that you can all understand each other.
Is that,
Valerie Fridland: I
Aven: is that pushing it too much or,
Valerie Fridland: don't think so. I would very much argue that the way that we refer to Creolization as a sort of specialized process is in some ways related to the feeder languages and the sort of exoticization of them
Aven: right.
Valerie Fridland: in a way that, I, in all these different cases, what's really happened is either in that case different languages come in contact, in
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: American English case it was different dialects coming in contact, but the sort of leveling of, highly differentiated features and also the keeping of highly frequent features that, some dialects might not have had at all, and [00:47:00] others had, but used frequently.
That process works very similarly. And, some have argued that actually with the the Norman invasion, it, there
Aven: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: a creolization of English
Aven: Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's sort of what I was thinking of to some extent. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That, that's something that happened. It's happened multiple times in English, really. You can say the Norman, but also before that. Right. There's a, a bit of a creolization with Nors and, and old English to some extent.
Marcy.
Mm-hmm.
Marcie: Yeah. Well, and even before that on the continent. Right. You know, we talk about some creolization happening in, certain German areas on the continent, so mm-hmm. As, because there's mm-hmm. Because there's so much movement at certain periods in those with migrations and stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: The basic lesson here is whenever people come together things change and that includes
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: Right? And
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: a great testament to the power of language to unite us. I think.
Aven: Mm-hmm. Well, talking of language change, much of the book is focused on historical processes and historical specifics. What [00:48:00] about media? So, you know, we often talk about how language change is or isn't affected by globalization and other sort of, and travel and, you know, all sorts of changes to the way we interact, the frequency with which we interact, all of those things.
How does media affect accent? And when I, I mean that really broadly, like. Do you think about how when radio was introduced or TV and we can stick to America, you know, American English for the moment? Just give you, make it slightly less of a broad question. 'cause this is a very, very broad question. You know, radio, then we have tv, then we have movies, we have social media now.
Like, does that affect the speed of change? Does it increase variability, decrease variability? Is it more just about the status of those media?
Valerie Fridland: You know that it's a really interesting question and also yes, a pretty large one. And
Aven: so don't, you don't need to answer at all.
Valerie Fridland: it's the type, it really depends on the type of technology you're talking about. I
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: just the way that we see texting, texting [00:49:00] has really changed the way that we interact in many ways.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: fact, it's a technology that was introduced. Not only does it introduce a lot of words that people now use in their speech because of
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: in texting, but there was a really interesting study done that measured a corpus from I think it was 2001 or something to 2016 some period, and actually found that the numbers of words people spoke a year had decreased by like 3000 words a year.
And it seems. Like it was tied to the amount of time people send on screen. So that doesn't actually, that's not a change in the way that we're saying a word perhaps, but it's a massive change in our communication style. And then the less we talk, the less we share interactions in person and the more we're interacting with our phones and our social media.
So that can also introduce another variable that will affect our speech from something that isn't local and might even be a really interesting study of global networks that affect our [00:50:00] speech. I think that the story of social media is yet to be written in terms of its impact on our speech beyond. Viral language. So viral memes and viral
Aven: Right, right.
Valerie Fridland: like Riz or six
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: Those things would not have spread like they have without social media. So there's absolutely no question that the impact on the words we say with
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: and the internet is enormous. And I think even if you go back to radio and television, you would've found vocabulary is probably the main medium that is being
Aven: Right,
Valerie Fridland: by those.
But the really fundamental difference I think now and then is that television is not interactive in the way that social media. Is
Aven: right. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: impacts there are actually think about radio and think about television in the early part of the 20th century and how it really made the transatlantic accent, the ac
Aven: Yes. That's one of the things I was thinking about. Yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: did have an impact. But did everybody, did people really speak with that in their daily life?
Aven: Mm-hmm. [00:51:00]
Valerie Fridland: But
Aven: No, no.
Valerie Fridland: it more as the posh accent? Absolutely. So it affected perception, but it, no one went home and, after they watched Carrie Grant and started talking that way, if they wanted to still have friends.
So
Aven: Right. Might practice it in their bedroom occasionally to sound cool, but yeah. That, yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: everybody is interacting with Carrie Grant on social media in a different way, in the more interactive kind of parasocial way we are now, that then Might
Aven: Might have,
Valerie Fridland: affect speech. So I think, I think it's definitely impacted speech beyond vocabulary in a number of different ways.
Is that it has, led to different thinking patterns that then can affect the way you speech. I think
Aven: right?
Valerie Fridland: Alexi just wrote a book about the viral algorithms that then propel extremist views and thinking, and that,
Aven: Yeah. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: the way that you talk. But that's more, that's really not about language as much as it's about the thought processes behind language
Aven: Cognition. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: but I, I think what we have seen is it may not spread an accent [00:52:00] as much as it will distance us from the accents we already have, if that makes sense. Something I talk
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: is we're losing is rootedness. And when we lose our ties to our local communities, then the things that are most enforcing of accents get lost. which is
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: finding regional accents dying, which we are. Most studies this, last decade or two have shown that American regional accents are fading away in big, in cities predominantly.
Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: the impact of social media, it's not all that's at work there. There's actually a number of factors that I discussed that lead to that, that started with Generation X.
So before social media was a big thing, but social media has certainly accelerated it and it's because of this lack of rootedness we're interacting and we are also admiring. a way that we used to do people in our high school now social influencers in a way that impacts language. So, I don't think we can predict what that will be, the end result in our [00:53:00] speech, but I do predict that it will be something and it will be probably something that lessens certain divides and increases others in the way that we talk.
Marcie: Yeah. And of course, while earlier social media tended to be more text-based, more recently things like TikTok and Instagram are becoming more and more you know, central in, in the social media world, so, mm-hmm. Now that's accent, not just vocabulary. Yeah. That, that can now affect things like accent.
Valerie Fridland: not only
Aven: Yeah. So, yeah.
Valerie Fridland: ai, right? With the
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: that are
Aven: All right. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: interestingly, I, my prediction with that generative AI voice will be that people tend to loan out their voices for it. So it's probably gonna replicate actual voices that are in the world. But chances are there'll be less dialectically variant choices that
Aven: They're not gonna be
Valerie Fridland: Yeah.
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: So again, you have this other reinforcing of this accent less in, in the imagination form, which simply means not that there isn't an accent because there is absolutely an accent that's getting introduced there. So the [00:54:00] accent is one of, whiteness often, right? Of middle class of, Americanness versus British English, right?
So there is an accent there, but in terms of salient regional differences, there tend to not be as many. And that would probably be what we hear more. And then how will that affect our speech? You know, There are a lot of really interesting, outstanding questions, I think.
Marcie: One interesting thing that, I noticed, it was probably about. A decade ago now, but there was a, a sort of trend on YouTube of posting accent tags. And so you would read out a list of especially selected words and that would kind of highlight particular features in different accents.
And that maybe at least made people more aware of, the differences. Mm-hmm. But it was a, a particular moment. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: I, think you still see some of that, but Absolutely. I know exactly the accent tags you're talking about. And I
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: Marcy, that I love your previewer raising. I, you said accent tags. It's [00:55:00] so lovely and Canadian of you and I love it.
Aven: Yeah. We're very we're, we're Ottawa Valley, which means that we are not, we're not Toronto, which is the sort of most, but, but Ottawa Valley is pretty, pretty much the, the Canadian accent that a lot of people think of as Canadian accent. Mm-hmm. Like, we're pretty central to that, to a lot of those qualities Ontario in general, but outside of Toronto in in particular tends to be, yeah.
So we're gonna, we're gonna fall into those,
Valerie Fridland: love
Aven: On that note of regional accent variability, potentially decreasing and obviously you've basically spoken to this to some extent already, but like accent as a subgroup marker, you, and that's a lot of what you're talking about, ingroup outgroup marker, but as a subgroup rather than geographic, so.
the one that I think is probably the most obvious one is like the gay accent. Right. That's a particular, that's not a geo. While there must be geographic distinctions too, it's nonetheless a sort of intentionally differentiating accent that is about a subgroup [00:56:00] within
Valerie Fridland: I
Aven: city.
Valerie Fridland: really
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: predict to, to that will predict that we're going to be more similar just because we all watch the same social media and we don't. You curate your own social media and you're doing subgroups on that. So while I think we're, our tie to particular places might be lessening in ways it impacts our language. Our ties to specific social spaces are
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: and that
Aven: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: is going to continue. And sort of what I talk about in the book is the future of accent is maybe not
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: but it's no less diverse than it is. So I,
Aven: Yes,
Valerie Fridland: there's I
Aven: absolutely.
Valerie Fridland: In both for fortunate and unfortunate ways. The world is not moving closer together and people have our subgroup interests.
And this is really the fundamental part of being human right, is finding your
Aven: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: And part of finding your people is talking like your people. In fact, it's a fundamental part of our nature to, of speech accommodation. We find at really fascinating levels that when we're talking to someone, especially someone we wanna have a good interaction with and we like [00:57:00] and we admire or, have some tie to, we actually move our speech closer to there.
So when you have a
Aven: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: doing this right, you sound start sounding more and more alike. So there's absolutely no reason to believe that accents are dying. It's just certain accents are dying.
Aven: Right. Yeah. We, we aren't becoming homogenous. That's not what's happening. It's just the lines that people are drawing. Consciously or unconsciously might be different. 'cause Yeah, the, the gay accent. There's also a lot of people have been talking recently online about, I, I'm shamefully addicted to TikTok and I just have to put that out there.
I'm very not proud of it. But people talk about the influencer accent, for instance. There's a specific accent and you know, that, that a group of sort of social media influencers, TikTok influencers have, and again, it's not like the gay accent. I would, the gay, there were many gay accents, but, you know, I think we know what I'm talking about.
But it's a sort of semi-conscious thing that is, there is an, an explicit and deliberate effort to, to, meld or to [00:58:00] sound like the other influencers or to the other people in your community. But also it comes about because of, you know, there's a, you want a high variation in your pitch and you want an excited tone and you have to sound cool so that people listen and, you know, so there's certain,
Valerie Fridland: I, think you're right. That's a very performative
Aven: that, yeah.
Valerie Fridland: So that one is I think in many ways we could make the sort of influencer accent have a little more in common with work related jargon, work related. Accent because that really is a very performative accent. I would argue that the accent, the gay accent that you're talking about, even though actually it's been pretty hard to measure.
So there are studies that have been done to
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: what are the traits of that? And that's probably because there's not one uniform
Aven: No, it,
Valerie Fridland: And
Aven: yeah.
Valerie Fridland: a hard, many ways it's hard to measure. But when studies have been done, I would argue that's maybe a little more of a subconscious naturally
Aven: Yes. No. Yeah. Yes, absolutely.
Valerie Fridland: influencer accent is absolutely, recognizable, but it's very much tied to this performance of, persona[00:59:00]
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: channel.
But absolutely, I think, the other thing is politics.
Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: read
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: post and just by the way they're using language, tell what what group they belong to in terms of
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: or conservatism.
Aven: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Valerie Fridland: you also can probably hear sometimes people with certain accents and get that same feeling.
There's been some work on that as well.
Aven: Yep.
Valerie Fridland: there it's not, there's a lot of different ways that accents come out and
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: us socially.
Aven: Yeah, no, I think the influence act of absolutely, it's a deliberate conscious thing at the moment, but a lot of people are hearing it. So while they're not necessarily just like the, the Mid-Atlantic accent, that doesn't mean they're gonna come home and suddenly start talking like that. There is going to be an, an effect if you are hearing that accent over and over again from a bunch of different people who are, the title suggests influential in your life.
You know, when imagines that for some subsets of people in much like Valley Talk, you know, valley Speak became influential through [01:00:00] movies or TV shows or, you know, things like that, they, they're gonna have those, those influences too.
Valerie Fridland: if
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: local that reinforces it. So
Aven: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: interesting study on a television show, which was the East Enders based in London that had a,
Aven: Yes. Right.
Valerie Fridland: London accent. There was actually a study on speech and Glasgow and how that had an influence on people that said, they watched that show a lot.
But
Aven: Huh?
Valerie Fridland: of this stuff that really seemed to
Aven: As
Valerie Fridland: were things that were already prevalent, at some level in the, in Glaswegian
Aven: we regian, right.
Valerie Fridland: it made it more pronounced in speakers that also watched that show. And
Aven: oh, interesting.
Valerie Fridland: interesting, between local groups and groups we would find attractive on social media probably that
Aven: Right, right,
Valerie Fridland: each other in interesting ways that make our accents something that are not a dying breed. I don't think we have to cry about the decline of accent, but I don't know that it's true that we're gonna have as many.
And just
Aven: right.
Valerie Fridland: you know, when region is less of an important thing, but that doesn't mean we won't have important ones.
Marcie: Mm-hmm. And. You [01:01:00] know, it's, it's not a particular focus in, in your book obviously, you're, you're focusing mostly on American English, but I wonder, you know, what, thoughts you have about Canadian accent and, how Canadian accents are perceived in the us. 'cause one of the things that, that sort of occurred to me is, is the sort of prevalence and success of Canadians as news anchors.
You know, the, the sort of most famous example being Peter Jennings. And, you know, how, how do you think Americans perceive the Canadian accent?
Valerie Fridland: I think most Americans think it's very charming. Americans love the Canadian accent and I think it also, there are a lot of stereotypes about Canadians that also are
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: and, all this stuff. But it, if you look at studies, it's really interesting, the Canadian accent, and I'm not meaning any offense by this to anybody who is upset about the fact that they might be more moving more towards the US accent.
But the studies have suggested that Canadian pronunciation is getting more [01:02:00] similar in some cases to the US accent. But I don't think that divide is going to die anytime soon. So we'll still hear things that remind us, but I think part of it is it's accent that is. A place we like.
So Americans tend, us. I don't wanna say Americans 'cause I know Canadians are Americans too, but
Aven: No, no, no. It's okay. That that's an non, that's one of those things people say online. Oh, it's a, and they're never Canadians who say that Canadians never call themselves Americans.
Valerie Fridland: time I finish,
Aven: We,
Valerie Fridland: I'm
Aven: it's a, it's one of those talking points that people always have, ah, the whole continent outside of the, the us And I'm
like, no, no, no Canadian will ever call Canadians.
Canadians won't get mad at British. People will get mad at you. Get weird about it for some reason. But no, for US American means people in the United States of America,
Valerie Fridland: Right,
Aven: good,
Valerie Fridland: So I think part of that is its accent of, it has some status. It's not an accent that ha we have overtly negative, past history with. And so for all those, and it's our friendly neighbor, [01:03:00] right?
Aven: right?
Valerie Fridland: it's, there's not really a lot of bad mojo with the, a Canadian accent.
Aven: Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: of it's charmingly distinct, yet non-threatening accent, I think is one of the reasons why newscasters have been popular with it. Because
Aven: Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: know, it, there's no sort of bad experience, no bad anecdotes or stereotypes about it. And that's why
Aven: Right.
Valerie Fridland: pretty popular.
Marcie: Do you think it's, it's useful that it's not tied to any particular region in the US and therefore it's kind of, you know, neutral to everyone,
Valerie Fridland: I am not sure how much that plays a part in it so much as I think it's more that when someone with a Canadian accent is successful, it does, that accent doesn't stand in their way, in the way that other
Aven: right? Mm-hmm.
Valerie Fridland: become successful with that accent. So I think it's not so much that we're seeking out Canadians for their accent as much as Canadians become successful and their accent doesn't hold them back.
Aven: Right, right. it's not enough of a marker to be a bar or to affect [01:04:00] people's judgment of them particularly. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that matches with our, our perception too. I mean there's lots of studies about Canadian raising and and changes in movement my understanding is there's a bit of a movement in the northern States, a bit of movement towards some Canadian aspects and in the, in Canada, some movement towards American that was broadly speaking, like there's a little bit of accommodation maybe going on between
Valerie Fridland: in
Aven: those areas.
Valerie Fridland: to the
Aven: yeah.
Valerie Fridland: Yes, absolutely.
Aven: makes of course sense.
Valerie Fridland: Uhhuh.
Aven: But as long as we keep saying pasta, I think,
Valerie Fridland: You
Aven: We're, we're always gonna stand out,
Valerie Fridland: that, because my mother used to say that when I was little and
Aven: right?
Valerie Fridland: me.
Aven: yeah.
Valerie Fridland: me batty. Now
Aven: and nachos. That also gets, that also gets people going. Yeah. There's
Valerie Fridland: shibboleth for
Aven: Yeah. Really nice. Exactly. Yeah. Well, this has been fascinating, but I know that you have other, calls on your time, and we don't wanna keep you too long, but what a really fascinating and [01:05:00] interesting book. I thought I knew a fair amount about some developments and accents, and I learned a ton of much more specific stuff that was really, really interesting.
So thank you. Yes. It's a gr it's a great book. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And as you all now know, listeners, it is available in both written and audio form, and it might well be worth getting both.
Valerie Fridland: Hey, I'm all for
Aven: So. Yeah, there you go. Perfect solution. Yeah, listen, listen while you read, it'll be perfect.
Well thank you so much. And it's been so much fun three years from now. Yeah. I look forward to the next one, the next book. That's right.
Valerie Fridland: Oh my gosh. I'm not ready to think about that. Yes. But yes, I'll be on, I promise if there's another book, I'll be back here. But thank you
Aven: All
Valerie Fridland: much for
Aven: right. It's a date.
Valerie Fridland: a great conversation.
Aven: A great pleasure. Thanks.
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