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What's the deal with accents? · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from how Stuff Works
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
0:13
Speaker 1: and there's Charles to w Chuck Bryant, and there's Noel
0:16
Speaker 1: on the Wheels of Steel, So that makes this stuff
0:20
Speaker 1: you Should Know the podcast. So Chuck, Yeah, how you feeling?
0:25
Speaker 1: I before your answer, I am so excited about this
0:29
Speaker 1: one because there's just no way it's not going to
0:32
Speaker 1: be a Chuck accent Bananza. Well, I am super excited
0:40
Speaker 1: about this because I love accents almost more than anything
0:45
Speaker 1: in the world. I know it. Man not doing accents
0:48
Speaker 1: because sometimes I'm okay, sometimes I'm terrible, but I'd like
0:52
Speaker 1: to try, right, I just mean hearing. There's nothing in
0:55
Speaker 1: the world I love more than talking with someone who
0:59
Speaker 1: has a really heavy accent of some kind. I love it.
1:03
Speaker 1: I love it, I love it. I love it. So
1:06
Speaker 1: if you encounter somebody with a heavy accent that you're
1:09
Speaker 1: having trouble understanding, how do you feel, oh, like in
1:14
Speaker 1: say Scotland, Sure, well, what do you mean, Like, are
1:20
Speaker 1: you just like, gosh, this is fascinating, or are you
1:23
Speaker 1: like do you start to sweat and get nervous because
1:25
Speaker 1: the communication is breaking down? No, I'm delighted beyond words,
1:31
Speaker 1: and I will like laugh and say, man or a lady,
1:37
Speaker 1: I like, I can barely understand you, and I love
1:41
Speaker 1: it so much. I can hardly stand it. That's great,
1:43
Speaker 1: that's a great way to handle it. It's just the best. Man.
1:46
Speaker 1: I love it all accents, I mean there are very
1:50
Speaker 1: I can't think of one accent I don't like hearing.
1:53
Speaker 1: Uh what about Uh? No, I got nothing like. I mean, sure,
2:01
Speaker 1: there might be some accents that might be a little
2:03
Speaker 1: grating to your ear on a personal level, but I
2:07
Speaker 1: even like hearing those just because it's just it's so
2:10
Speaker 1: that person in that region, and especially when we travel
2:14
Speaker 1: and for these shows and get to speak with fans
2:17
Speaker 1: from you know, from Boston or from the Midwest or Canada. Yeah,
2:25
Speaker 1: god's the best. I love it. Or on the UK
2:28
Speaker 1: towards I was just like flipping out, you were I
2:31
Speaker 1: had to calm you down, like every few minutes. It's
2:34
Speaker 1: just amazing, and it makes me like, it makes you
2:37
Speaker 1: feel a little self conscious that I have such a
2:41
Speaker 1: non accent, but you do have an accent, you just
2:45
Speaker 1: can't hear it. That's one of the hilarious parts of accents.
2:49
Speaker 1: Is that person with the accent can't hear their own accent.
2:53
Speaker 1: It just sounds normal than them sort of. But it's
2:57
Speaker 1: like everyone has an accent, they even say in this article.
3:01
Speaker 1: But unmarked speech technically is what we're talking about, which
3:06
Speaker 1: is it doesn't have a hallmark sign of geographic area. Yeah,
3:13
Speaker 1: because that's, if anything, what an accent is. It's a
3:16
Speaker 1: telltale giveaway of where you where, where you live, where
3:22
Speaker 1: you're from, where you were raised. Usually, Yeah, you don't
3:25
Speaker 1: have I mean again, it's you know what I mean.
3:27
Speaker 1: But you don't have an accent either. Now we have
3:30
Speaker 1: those things are pretty unmarked. We have non regional accents,
3:34
Speaker 1: non regional American accents, I think, yeah, or jen am,
3:38
Speaker 1: I've heard it called general American. That makes sense. That's
3:41
Speaker 1: that's good. It's lovely. I mean, listen to us right now.
3:45
Speaker 1: I love this accent. But and I may have told
3:48
Speaker 1: the story before. I heard a cassette tape of myself
3:51
Speaker 1: as a like a twelve year old a couple of
3:53
Speaker 1: years ago, and it was heavily southern. Oh really yeah.
3:58
Speaker 1: And I didn't try to lose it. I didn't work
4:01
Speaker 1: on it. I never thought about it. Um, where did
4:04
Speaker 1: go Chuck, I have no idea what you do. I
4:07
Speaker 1: don't know, I really it just I was shocked. I
4:11
Speaker 1: was like, that's not me. Wow, that's really surprising because
4:14
Speaker 1: I mean from from and we'll talk about it a
4:17
Speaker 1: little bit, but accents they tend to develop in childhood
4:23
Speaker 1: and they tend to stick. I don't know, man, I
4:27
Speaker 1: can't explain it. That's pretty interesting. The only thing I
4:29
Speaker 1: can say is that at the time, I was friends
4:33
Speaker 1: with a lot of rednecks. Oh, I guess, and I'm
4:37
Speaker 1: not now, even though I love the right kind of redneck.
4:41
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong, Um, I love the right kind
4:45
Speaker 1: of redneck, the salts of the earth. Good to each
4:49
Speaker 1: his own kind of redneck. Yah. Sure, that's a good
4:52
Speaker 1: redneck good the best. Plenty of other kinds too, plenty
4:57
Speaker 1: of other kinds. Um, boy, do you know what? This
5:00
Speaker 1: is kind of off topic, but you don't hate More
5:02
Speaker 1: than anything is when a fellow like I'll just go
5:08
Speaker 1: ahead and say it, when a fellow white dude thinks
5:12
Speaker 1: you think like them just because you're a white dude.
5:15
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and they you don't know them, and they'll
5:17
Speaker 1: just start saying stuff right, And I'm just like, dude,
5:20
Speaker 1: that's awful. I'm not like that, and please don't presume
5:24
Speaker 1: them like that. You just throw your hands to your
5:26
Speaker 1: ears and stomp up and down and go no, no,
5:29
Speaker 1: no until they run off. That's the worst. I hate it.
5:33
Speaker 1: It's pretty bad. We're all that way. Yeah, all right,
5:38
Speaker 1: let's get into this. Oh we're not into it already. Well,
5:43
Speaker 1: I guess the first thing technically we should say, uh,
5:46
Speaker 1: is that dialect and accents are two different things. Yeah.
5:50
Speaker 1: Accent is how something sounds when you talk. And again,
5:53
Speaker 1: it's usually related to where you're from and usually where
5:58
Speaker 1: you're raised, right, yeah, and in your family too, Yeah, yeah,
6:03
Speaker 1: and a dialect you're probably going to pick up from
6:05
Speaker 1: where you're from, from your family, that kind of thing.
6:08
Speaker 1: But dialect more has to do with the vocabulary you use,
6:11
Speaker 1: the like, the words you use, the slang, that kind
6:14
Speaker 1: of thing. Um, there's grammar rules that that can be
6:18
Speaker 1: different than you know, the standard grammar of the language.
6:23
Speaker 1: So it's it's more like, what you're saying is dialect
6:27
Speaker 1: how your how you sound when you're saying it. That's
6:30
Speaker 1: the accent. That's the big difference. Yeah, have you ever
6:32
Speaker 1: taken one of those dialect tests online? No, it's pretty neat.
6:37
Speaker 1: And the New York Times has one where you basically
6:39
Speaker 1: go through like twenty questions that say things like, um,
6:43
Speaker 1: what do you call the the strip of land between
6:47
Speaker 1: two streets? Or what do you call a house on
6:51
Speaker 1: the opposite corner of your own? Um? And stuff like that.
6:55
Speaker 1: It's not just like soda pop um. I gotta okay, Yeah,
6:59
Speaker 1: that would be interesting. Like I say median, I say
7:01
Speaker 1: kitty corner. Oh, I say catty corner. No, see, that
7:04
Speaker 1: was one of the choices, but I would say median
7:06
Speaker 1: as well. Right, some people say devil stra. One of
7:09
Speaker 1: them was interesting was what do you call it when
7:12
Speaker 1: it's No, that's a thing. That's not a thing it is.
7:16
Speaker 1: What do you call it when the when it's raining
7:18
Speaker 1: with the sun shining? Apparently that's highly regional raining with
7:23
Speaker 1: the sun shining. I didn't even know there was a
7:25
Speaker 1: name for that. Yeah, people call it different things. We
7:28
Speaker 1: grew up calling it the devil's beating his wife. But
7:31
Speaker 1: what's up with all this devil's stuff? Don't know, it's
7:34
Speaker 1: all the devil's beating his wife? Is what you call that?
7:37
Speaker 1: When rain it's coming down while sun was shining. That
7:41
Speaker 1: crazy yeah, anyway, it's got It has an interactive map
7:46
Speaker 1: that as you answer the question, it turns different colors,
7:49
Speaker 1: like from red to blue. How heavy You're like, no, no, no, no,
7:53
Speaker 1: it's like that went back, well not politically, um. And
7:56
Speaker 1: then eventually after the last question, the reddest hot zones
8:00
Speaker 1: will be where you are from. And mine was like
8:04
Speaker 1: Atlanta or not Decator specifically, but Atlanta Decatur or Atlanta, Birmingham, Alabama,
8:12
Speaker 1: and I think like Nashville. Huh, so I was in
8:15
Speaker 1: the zone. So cosmopolitan southern is your dialect? Basically it
8:19
Speaker 1: sounds cosmo southern. Yeah, southern Mo. Anyway, I highly recommend
8:23
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a fun test. Yeah, it sounds pretty fun.
8:26
Speaker 1: But nothing to do with accents. What what I mean?
8:28
Speaker 1: Can you put like not applicable for the one about
8:31
Speaker 1: the rain when the sun shining? Yeah? Most of them
8:34
Speaker 1: have an option that says I know what this is,
8:36
Speaker 1: but I don't have a name for it. Gotcha, Okay? Cool,
8:39
Speaker 1: Well then yeah, i'll take it. I'll take it right now.
8:43
Speaker 1: All right, So we've established what dialect is, we've established
8:47
Speaker 1: what accents are, and apparently now that we're diving into
8:51
Speaker 1: that world of accents. If you are a linguist, there
8:55
Speaker 1: are basically two categories that you would put accents into.
9:00
Speaker 1: If you want to start talking accents with linguists, they're
9:03
Speaker 1: gonna be like, wait, wait, wait, are we talking about
9:06
Speaker 1: the accent that a person has when they're speaking their
9:08
Speaker 1: native language or are you talking about the accent of
9:11
Speaker 1: person has when they're speaking what is not their native language.
9:15
Speaker 1: Explain yourself, says the linguist. Right, and when you go
9:20
Speaker 1: to learn a second language as a a non you know,
9:24
Speaker 1: developing infant, like let's say high school, middle school, or
9:28
Speaker 1: beyond um, you have to I mean, you took language
9:33
Speaker 1: class in high school, right, sure, French? But was this
9:37
Speaker 1: in Georgia or yes? And there are plenty, plenty of
9:42
Speaker 1: thick Southern accents speaking French and it is about as
9:46
Speaker 1: grading as it gets. Well, it's funny because that's a German.
9:49
Speaker 1: It was the same thing. And I always had a
9:52
Speaker 1: knack for Um speak and a Deutch. Yeah that's how
9:57
Speaker 1: it sounded. And it was always funny to me because
9:59
Speaker 1: our teacher would you know, dictating or say something in
10:02
Speaker 1: perfect German and we would repeat it back individually. And
10:05
Speaker 1: I always had a pretty good knack for not accents,
10:09
Speaker 1: but just sort of parenting. I'm much better if I
10:11
Speaker 1: hear someone say something, I can kind of say it
10:13
Speaker 1: back like they say it. And I just figured, like,
10:17
Speaker 1: just do that and then you're speaking correct German. And
10:21
Speaker 1: some of these dudes would, you know, prekin ze Deutsche
10:24
Speaker 1: And I would just be like, how can you just like,
10:27
Speaker 1: can you not pretend to speak German, like with a
10:30
Speaker 1: German accent? And they couldn't, And it's just fascinating. I
10:34
Speaker 1: just thought everyone could pare it something back, and that's
10:36
Speaker 1: when I realized, no, not at all. Well they have
10:39
Speaker 1: those people have very well formed, non plastic synapses, is
10:44
Speaker 1: really what it comes down in a lot of ways.
10:47
Speaker 1: Do you, uh, you want to take a break before
10:49
Speaker 1: we get into the development of accents? I guess, so, well,
10:52
Speaker 1: let's do that, m all right, Chuck. So, there's been
11:23
Speaker 1: a lot of study about accents about when we developed language.
11:26
Speaker 1: There's a lot of debate about whether we're born with
11:28
Speaker 1: a language instinct or if it's just something we we
11:32
Speaker 1: naturally develop as a result of being social animals. Who knows,
11:37
Speaker 1: but one of the studies on accents specifically has found
11:42
Speaker 1: that apparently babies they recognize accents in the womb. They've
11:49
Speaker 1: tested newborn kids. I don't know what parents let this happen,
11:54
Speaker 1: but apparently in the delivery room or shortly after um delivery,
11:59
Speaker 1: the baby was born. It's another way to put it.
12:02
Speaker 1: They've had people speak with different accents to the baby,
12:06
Speaker 1: and the baby just based on their gaze, tend to
12:09
Speaker 1: prefer the accent that they heard while they were in
12:12
Speaker 1: the womb. It is pretty interesting, right, And apparently from
12:16
Speaker 1: that moment on, even from the time their brains developed
12:21
Speaker 1: enough to to start hearing and soaking this in, and
12:25
Speaker 1: then after they're born, they're they're taking all of these
12:29
Speaker 1: these little things we take for granted when we speak,
12:33
Speaker 1: when we use dialect, when we when we um form
12:36
Speaker 1: an accent. All of the stuff is sinking in their
12:39
Speaker 1: little baby brains and it's helping them develop UM what
12:45
Speaker 1: is called basically a map, a language map, a dialect map,
12:49
Speaker 1: and accent map, and they're hearing how to talk, learning
12:53
Speaker 1: how to talk just by listening to the people around them,
12:56
Speaker 1: even before they're six months old. Yeah, this UM researcher
13:01
Speaker 1: UH speech professor named Patricia cool k u h L
13:06
Speaker 1: you dub go Huskies um. She said that she was
13:11
Speaker 1: describing the map, and she said, you know, the sounds
13:14
Speaker 1: they don't hear, their synapses aren't firing when they don't
13:18
Speaker 1: hear those sounds, so they just sort of fall away.
13:21
Speaker 1: And you can think of it as like pruning of
13:23
Speaker 1: that network of the brain, which I thought was really interesting.
13:27
Speaker 1: It just makes sense. You know, the sounds they hear
13:29
Speaker 1: most often will be reinforced over and over, and that's
13:33
Speaker 1: how a dumb little baby gets an accent. And there
13:36
Speaker 1: there's a really good example, if not a super stereotypical one,
13:40
Speaker 1: but um speakers of Japanese have a very hard time
13:45
Speaker 1: saying L making the L sound right. So rather than lake,
13:51
Speaker 1: they may say rake, they tend to they tend to
13:53
Speaker 1: replace the L with an R sound. And it's simply
13:57
Speaker 1: because that's what they were exposed to growing up up
14:00
Speaker 1: and there they didn't learn to make the L sound
14:04
Speaker 1: just in the same way that you and I might
14:06
Speaker 1: have a lot of trouble rolling our rs, where if
14:09
Speaker 1: we had been raised in a society or a group
14:12
Speaker 1: or a family even that rolled there ares we could
14:15
Speaker 1: probably roll our rs perfectly. But all of for all
14:18
Speaker 1: of this research is starting to show that accents are
14:23
Speaker 1: just acquired and developed, and they're reinforced through through exposure
14:29
Speaker 1: by hearing other people around you and then speaking that
14:32
Speaker 1: way yourself. And that map that that's formed starting before
14:36
Speaker 1: even six months old. Um, it's what you it's what
14:41
Speaker 1: you use to navigate through through spoken communication with the world. Yeah.
14:47
Speaker 1: She found out this is cool still in studying babies
14:51
Speaker 1: in Sweden, Japan, US and other places that at six
14:55
Speaker 1: months old, Japanese babies could distinguish between the elm are
14:59
Speaker 1: just American babies, but by the time they were one,
15:03
Speaker 1: they had lost that ability again because that was just
15:06
Speaker 1: sort of pruned away. Yeah, and I looked into this,
15:08
Speaker 1: I'm like, how how would you set that up? And
15:11
Speaker 1: this is actually pretty clever. Right, So they would put
15:14
Speaker 1: these babies in a room and let them all hang out,
15:16
Speaker 1: and then they'd be like a loud speaker and then
15:19
Speaker 1: over the loud speaker, hopefully it a normal normal, right,
15:25
Speaker 1: they would say they would just have a voice, a nice,
15:27
Speaker 1: pleasant voice saying like la la la la la la
15:32
Speaker 1: la la la la la la, right, and then every
15:36
Speaker 1: once in a while the voice would say la la
15:38
Speaker 1: ra la la, right, And when that r would come
15:41
Speaker 1: out instead of a la a like a bear would
15:46
Speaker 1: light up and start dancing and playing like a drum,
15:49
Speaker 1: like something that babies would love would happen, right, So
15:52
Speaker 1: they came to associate rather the like the what would
15:56
Speaker 1: be construed as an error in the act center the
16:00
Speaker 1: dialect um with something going on with the bear. So
16:05
Speaker 1: the babies that were Japanese by the time they were
16:07
Speaker 1: a year when there was an error, they wouldn't look
16:10
Speaker 1: over at the bear any longer because they stopped hearing
16:14
Speaker 1: that that la la la and just heard it as
16:17
Speaker 1: la la la. Interesting, isn't it. Yeah, And apparently they
16:21
Speaker 1: found that babies crying can even sort of mimic the
16:25
Speaker 1: intonation of their nationality. So like French babies, apparently French
16:33
Speaker 1: speakers go up an intonation toward the end of the sentence,
16:35
Speaker 1: and so French babies would when they cried, I guess,
16:39
Speaker 1: would go why wawa and go up at the end,
16:43
Speaker 1: whereas German babies would go down just like Germans. Yeah, wow,
16:51
Speaker 1: all right, they wouldn't say law no. Uh. Super interesting though, yeah,
16:57
Speaker 1: And so all of this forms of the basis of
17:00
Speaker 1: a lot of people already know but you might not
17:02
Speaker 1: know why. But it is way, way easier to learn
17:06
Speaker 1: multiple languages when you're younger than it is, say when
17:10
Speaker 1: you're in high school. And there's a big push among
17:12
Speaker 1: American educators to start language development second language, third language, uh,
17:19
Speaker 1: when you're much younger, like even as young as nursery school,
17:22
Speaker 1: rather than waiting until high school, which is little baby
17:25
Speaker 1: is being raised bilingual from birth. Yeah, and that's a
17:29
Speaker 1: really good way to raise a smart kid like you.
17:32
Speaker 1: May speaks Japanese in English. She was raised in a
17:34
Speaker 1: household that spoke Japanese in English, right, And I mean
17:38
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. There's I read another article about
17:41
Speaker 1: a woman who was raised in the Philippines and her
17:44
Speaker 1: father was raised I think her father spoke Tagalog, which
17:49
Speaker 1: is the national language, and then her mother spoke a
17:50
Speaker 1: regional language. And um, so she spoke two forms two
17:55
Speaker 1: languages from birth and then learned English as an older person. Yeah.
18:00
Speaker 1: So the whole idea that you should wait until high
18:02
Speaker 1: school to learn language because then you're old enough to
18:05
Speaker 1: understand is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
18:09
Speaker 1: Like you're supposed to be teaching kids multiple languages from
18:12
Speaker 1: a very young age because that's when their brains are
18:15
Speaker 1: plastic enough, and they wanted to know how that's possible.
18:19
Speaker 1: It turns out that you your brain creates multiple language maps.
18:25
Speaker 1: So you have a language map for your native language,
18:27
Speaker 1: you have another language map for this other one you
18:30
Speaker 1: learned in school, than another one that you're for the
18:33
Speaker 1: language your grandmother speaks, and you can just switch between
18:36
Speaker 1: them depending. Amazing and that So when you do learn
18:40
Speaker 1: another language, though, Um, and I guess it's probably true
18:45
Speaker 1: for any age, but as an adult for sure, or
18:48
Speaker 1: a teenager for sure, when you already have your your
18:50
Speaker 1: own home language solidified, there's something called language transfer that
18:54
Speaker 1: can happen, or that always happens, uh, And it can
18:58
Speaker 1: be either good or bad. So, depending on what your
19:00
Speaker 1: language is and what language you're learning, it might be
19:04
Speaker 1: a little bit easier to learn that language and say
19:07
Speaker 1: certain words, or it might be a little harder can
19:09
Speaker 1: depending on how close it is to your native tongue
19:12
Speaker 1: and accent. So Um, like a German learning to speak English,
19:19
Speaker 1: UH may have a tougher time with the th h sound,
19:22
Speaker 1: and they may say like a like a t z
19:25
Speaker 1: or or harder s in place of it, like instead
19:28
Speaker 1: of the German z Germans right or if you're Italian
19:34
Speaker 1: and you're learning Spanish, you might have an easier time
19:36
Speaker 1: because those are a little more similar, uh, like with
19:40
Speaker 1: especially with the ps in Spanish, right, because in Spanish
19:44
Speaker 1: the P is a non aspirated, short onset time sound right. Um.
19:50
Speaker 1: In English we would have a hard time with the
19:54
Speaker 1: P because we say P. We aspirate it, right, P
19:59
Speaker 1: like your breathe when you say it he um, and
20:04
Speaker 1: it's it's a It has a long on set time right.
20:07
Speaker 1: So which is That also explains why native English speakers
20:11
Speaker 1: often have trouble distinguishing between P and B when they're
20:16
Speaker 1: listening to Spanish being spoken. Yeah, and so depending on
20:20
Speaker 1: if it's um easier or harder, it's called negative positive
20:23
Speaker 1: transfer or negative transfer um. And I remember in German
20:28
Speaker 1: learning to roll those rs was probably the hardest thing
20:31
Speaker 1: for most of the kids in the class. Sure, right,
20:34
Speaker 1: And again it's the same thing. It's like the the
20:38
Speaker 1: with the southern accent with German. Right. So their language
20:42
Speaker 1: map is so well formed and so immovable that they
20:48
Speaker 1: are following the rules of that language map even when
20:52
Speaker 1: they're trying to speak this foreign language. Well, languages don't
20:56
Speaker 1: have the same maps, which accounts for different languages and
20:59
Speaker 1: accents and all all sorts of things like that. So
21:02
Speaker 1: on the one hand, it's cognitive, but on the other hand,
21:05
Speaker 1: there's also um differences in in motor function. Right, just
21:09
Speaker 1: like when you say L but not are as a
21:12
Speaker 1: kid and there they seem interchangeable to you. When you
21:15
Speaker 1: grow up, you have trouble actually making the the the
21:21
Speaker 1: L sound like making your tongue make the L sound instead,
21:26
Speaker 1: it wants to make the R sound right, So you
21:28
Speaker 1: have the cognitive trouble with your language map applying your
21:32
Speaker 1: language map to this new language, and you also have
21:34
Speaker 1: the physical trouble of actually making your mouth and your
21:38
Speaker 1: tongue in your airway do the things that it has
21:43
Speaker 1: to do to make those sounds like rolling in our Yeah,
21:46
Speaker 1: it's just it's simply unpracticed in doing so. Yeah, but
21:49
Speaker 1: that's it. That's what the good thing about it is
21:52
Speaker 1: that you can learn a good accent, You can learn
21:55
Speaker 1: to speak another language. It just is harder because your
21:59
Speaker 1: brain is pretty well set. You can retrain it, though,
22:03
Speaker 1: it just takes practice. And apparently, from what I saw,
22:06
Speaker 1: the best way to learn an accent and to learn
22:08
Speaker 1: a new language is lots and lots and lots of
22:12
Speaker 1: listening up front, that you shouldn't just jump in and
22:16
Speaker 1: start trying to speak. You should spend a lot of
22:19
Speaker 1: time just sitting around listening to it first. Yeah, I'm
22:22
Speaker 1: way out of practice now with remembering German and speaking it,
22:26
Speaker 1: but I got pretty good at one point to the
22:29
Speaker 1: um to the point where I went. When I went
22:31
Speaker 1: to Germany, I had Germans saying, you know, you speak
22:35
Speaker 1: very good German. And that's like the best best thing
22:39
Speaker 1: that can happen when you traveled to a different country
22:41
Speaker 1: and you're trying is for someone to say, wow, you
22:43
Speaker 1: speak really good uh, French or German or whatever. Here,
22:46
Speaker 1: have a schnitzel on me. It's funny. My buddy and
22:50
Speaker 1: I Brett, who did my first big Europe trip with,
22:53
Speaker 1: we went to a beer garden in Germany and um
22:57
Speaker 1: in Munich and got uh had a lot of beers,
23:02
Speaker 1: a lot of steins because this local dude who didn't
23:05
Speaker 1: speak English and I spoke very little German. And we
23:09
Speaker 1: drank with this guy for about four hours and bonded
23:12
Speaker 1: in two different languages over the music of the Beatles,
23:16
Speaker 1: and it worked somehow, and got our picture with the
23:19
Speaker 1: guy and it was just one of those travel moments
23:21
Speaker 1: that just one of the best travel moments of my life.
23:24
Speaker 1: And I always wonder if this guy remembered that at all.
23:29
Speaker 1: And that guy turned out to be christof Walls, Yeah,
23:34
Speaker 1: I have a feeling this guy didn't remember. It's one
23:36
Speaker 1: of those things like as a young American, I was like,
23:38
Speaker 1: oh my god, that was a posting. Ever I could
23:40
Speaker 1: see that happening in Germany. In France, no French person
23:44
Speaker 1: has ever said, hey, your French accent is pretty good.
23:47
Speaker 1: Exactly what's gonna help you? Right? Um, Well, let's talk
23:52
Speaker 1: a little bit because this, to me is one of
23:54
Speaker 1: the more fascinating parts of accents is the fact that
23:58
Speaker 1: uh British English, uh and in England, as colonizers all
24:04
Speaker 1: over the world, we still ended up with so many
24:07
Speaker 1: variations of the English accent. Yeah, which makes sense, fascinating,
24:14
Speaker 1: but it's basically like, um, Britain went around the world
24:18
Speaker 1: and said, oh, we're we're gonna have an illegitimate child here,
24:21
Speaker 1: and we'll have an illegitimate child here, and in an
24:23
Speaker 1: illegitimate child here, and they all just kind of look
24:25
Speaker 1: like us a little bit. Right, Okay, it's a little
24:28
Speaker 1: bit like that, but language wise or accent wise. So
24:31
Speaker 1: everybody um who speaks English, I should say, in India
24:35
Speaker 1: and in Australia and in Canada and in the United States, UM,
24:40
Speaker 1: they all speak English. All of us speak English. Were
24:42
Speaker 1: speaking the same language, but we um speak it with
24:46
Speaker 1: different accents. And when you start to look into why,
24:49
Speaker 1: it just becomes extremely fascinating. Like you were saying, like Australia,
24:53
Speaker 1: all right, the Australian accent. Anybody in the world can
24:57
Speaker 1: pick out an Australian accent no problem, and it's such
25:01
Speaker 1: a unique accent. But it's also a hodgepodge of English
25:04
Speaker 1: accents because you had so many people coming from England,
25:09
Speaker 1: UM in different parts of England fourth together in this
25:15
Speaker 1: you know, these small pockets over this large geography, but
25:18
Speaker 1: relatively small pockets of of um uh like cities and
25:23
Speaker 1: towns and stuff, and they're disparate regional English accents came
25:28
Speaker 1: together to form a common, unique one which is now
25:32
Speaker 1: known as Australian English. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I've always
25:36
Speaker 1: heard that UM English actors have an easier time picking
25:41
Speaker 1: up the Southern American accent because they're so similar, and
25:45
Speaker 1: there's actually a lot to that. I read this great
25:47
Speaker 1: article from PBS called Our Full Southern that's the letter
25:52
Speaker 1: R f U L Southern U from John Fought and UM.
25:56
Speaker 1: It basically kind of lays out the history of UM,
26:02
Speaker 1: the Southern American dialect, where it came from, and how
26:07
Speaker 1: it's changed over the years, and the fact there's kind
26:10
Speaker 1: of two different ones there. They call one the are
26:12
Speaker 1: less Southern accent and one the R full meaning UM
26:17
Speaker 1: with words when you have an R before a consonant
26:21
Speaker 1: um are less accents you drop that are altogether. So like, uh,
26:29
Speaker 1: there are different variations UM. Because you see this in
26:32
Speaker 1: like in New England, like in Boston, and then you
26:35
Speaker 1: actually see it in places like coastal South Carolina, in
26:39
Speaker 1: coastal Mississippi and Alabama. Uh, And so you think, well,
26:43
Speaker 1: that's weird, But when you think about it, it's true.
26:47
Speaker 1: If if you're talking about you know, poc in the
26:50
Speaker 1: CA you're dropping the R as with that hard Boston accent,
26:55
Speaker 1: but you can also pock the car in South Carolina. Joe, Sorry,
27:03
Speaker 1: I get fired up, but it's the same thing and
27:06
Speaker 1: it and it came from the same thing. So what
27:08
Speaker 1: happened was these coastal plains of uri early European settlements. Um,
27:14
Speaker 1: and we're talking not New York City and not New Orleans,
27:17
Speaker 1: but all these other places came from our less areas
27:20
Speaker 1: of southeastern England. And so as they were settled, they
27:25
Speaker 1: set up shop, uh, and farmed around the coast, and
27:30
Speaker 1: the coastline didn'tvert venture very far inland. And so then
27:35
Speaker 1: there was the second wave that started coming from our
27:38
Speaker 1: full areas and this started to change apparently. Um. And
27:43
Speaker 1: what we're talking about is rhotic R H O T
27:46
Speaker 1: I C and non rhotic dialogue or dialect. Rhotic is
27:50
Speaker 1: where the R is hard, yes, like park and non
27:54
Speaker 1: rhotic would be like poc. Yeah. And apparently in England
27:57
Speaker 1: and especially in southeastern England, when they colonized America, they spoke,
28:03
Speaker 1: or they sounded a lot more like what you would
28:05
Speaker 1: think of as an American accent today. Yeah, probably a
28:08
Speaker 1: lot more that we probably sound very much like they
28:11
Speaker 1: sounded back then, which is just knocked my socks off man.
28:16
Speaker 1: Fact of not just this podcast, maybe fact of the year. Yeah.
28:20
Speaker 1: But at some point, uh, And I think there's a
28:22
Speaker 1: little bit of debate on exactly when there became a
28:25
Speaker 1: conscious shift in England for uh kind of to draw
28:29
Speaker 1: class distinctions, to to have a more posh sounding accent,
28:32
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, there's something called so the
28:35
Speaker 1: typical British accent. When you listen to say, someone like
28:38
Speaker 1: you Grant speak what you think of as like kind
28:42
Speaker 1: of classy British, that's called Grant, right, classiest guy around
28:48
Speaker 1: at the very least, he's one of the most charming, um,
28:51
Speaker 1: which is how he gets away with so much. But uh,
28:54
Speaker 1: that that that accent is called received pronunciation, and it
28:58
Speaker 1: developed in England as kind of an aspirational accent among
29:03
Speaker 1: the middle class. The middle class was starting to grow.
29:06
Speaker 1: Um from what I saw that it was the mid
29:08
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. I know you saw something like the sometime
29:12
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century, but regardless, it came out of
29:15
Speaker 1: the middle class in England getting a little wealthier, sending
29:19
Speaker 1: more and more middle class English kids off to boarding
29:22
Speaker 1: school where they were kind of being instructed in this
29:26
Speaker 1: received pronunciation accent, and it it became the the educated
29:33
Speaker 1: southern England accepted way to speak, right, it was British
29:38
Speaker 1: and that really got cemented in the nineteen twenties when
29:43
Speaker 1: the BBC started broadcasting and they actually held a panel
29:47
Speaker 1: to try to figure out what accent or accents their
29:50
Speaker 1: broadcasters were going to speak in, and they settled on
29:53
Speaker 1: received pronunciation. It became the one accent that all BBC
29:58
Speaker 1: broadcasts were done in from nineteen twenties to the nineteen
30:02
Speaker 1: seventies or eighties. It became quintessential British accents, despite the
30:07
Speaker 1: fact that something like less than ten percent, maybe even
30:11
Speaker 1: less than that, of the population actually speak with that accent.
30:14
Speaker 1: But that's what everybody else in the in the world
30:17
Speaker 1: typically thinks of when they think of a British accent.
30:20
Speaker 1: It's fascinating and it's again, this came after America was colonized.
30:26
Speaker 1: It came from what I understand, after Australia was colonized.
30:30
Speaker 1: So at the time Americans and the British um sounded
30:35
Speaker 1: very much like we do today. Yeah, So starting in
30:39
Speaker 1: about picking back up with the R lesson R full
30:42
Speaker 1: stories UH. Starting in about the middle of the eighteenth
30:45
Speaker 1: century and for the next hundred years or so, you
30:48
Speaker 1: had more people coming over from UH like northern and
30:54
Speaker 1: western England, UH and Scotland and Ireland, and they appear
31:00
Speaker 1: cly started entering the US, not along the coastline but
31:04
Speaker 1: through like the port of Philadelphia, which um that was
31:07
Speaker 1: the busiest in the nation at the time. So these
31:10
Speaker 1: folks move inland instead of hanging around the coast, and
31:13
Speaker 1: then west and southwest, and uh they had the r
31:17
Speaker 1: full accents. And so you had these inland varieties of
31:21
Speaker 1: accents that were are full, these coastal that were are
31:24
Speaker 1: less and are less was far more prominent for a
31:28
Speaker 1: long time just because of the way, um migration happened
31:32
Speaker 1: and immigration happened. And then are full has since sort
31:35
Speaker 1: of taken over. Our full Southern has taken over and
31:39
Speaker 1: our full Northern because it's you know, sort of the
31:43
Speaker 1: same version of the two different versions of the same thing. Uh,
31:47
Speaker 1: and now are full is what you kind of think
31:49
Speaker 1: more of us that sort of red nicky Southern accent
31:52
Speaker 1: um like orange glad I said orange like that? Sure? Okay,
32:00
Speaker 1: Uh what they say here in this PBS article is
32:03
Speaker 1: is the prevailing prevailing dialect of like Nascar. You think Nascar,
32:08
Speaker 1: you say that hard are instead of Nascar Nascar. I
32:13
Speaker 1: feel like I'm going to yeah, just think of Judy
32:17
Speaker 1: Davis and Barton Fink. Okay, well Boughton, you know that
32:21
Speaker 1: kind of Uh, I always think of Charleston for some reason.
32:25
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because Charleston is super are less in that respect.
32:30
Speaker 1: And yeah, I think just like in say England or
32:33
Speaker 1: the UK, that um are less is associated with higher society.
32:38
Speaker 1: I think, oh yeah, for sure, the non rhotic speech,
32:42
Speaker 1: for sure. So then the sun Belt UM gets populated
32:46
Speaker 1: and people keep going inland and more inland, and our
32:49
Speaker 1: full accents, both northern and southern sort of became the
32:53
Speaker 1: dominant UH speaking style in the United States. Well, you know,
32:58
Speaker 1: you said that a lot of those UM those immigrants
33:01
Speaker 1: came to the U. S and State in the coastal
33:03
Speaker 1: areas or went inland. There's been a lot of um
33:08
Speaker 1: a speculation that there's pockets of of UM accents, say
33:14
Speaker 1: like tucked away in the Appalachians or in the Outer Banks,
33:18
Speaker 1: or just kind of in less populated or trafficked areas
33:23
Speaker 1: where those original accents were captured and kind of frozen
33:27
Speaker 1: in time. Which apparently all of that's been debunked. Um
33:31
Speaker 1: that that you can't find the original colonial slash British
33:35
Speaker 1: imperial accent in you know, the people in the Outer
33:39
Speaker 1: Banks or in the Appalachians. But it's pretty romantic to
33:42
Speaker 1: think of and I have to say, I gotta say this,
33:46
Speaker 1: speaking of the Appalachian accent. Um, I've said before, you
33:50
Speaker 1: know that that that airline pilot talk, how all airline
33:55
Speaker 1: pilots sound exactly the same, and they're all actually doing
33:59
Speaker 1: Chuck Yeager, Chuck Yeager, whose Appalachian accent was kind of
34:03
Speaker 1: famous because he broke the sound barrier. Um, all pilots
34:08
Speaker 1: kind of aspired to sound like him. So that's why
34:11
Speaker 1: all airline pilots sound exactly the same on the intercom,
34:15
Speaker 1: because they're all, whether they know it or not, trying
34:18
Speaker 1: to emulate Chuck Yeager, who actually did talk like that.
34:21
Speaker 1: And that raises like something pretty pretty significant, Chuck is
34:25
Speaker 1: you can acquire an accent just by aspiring to sound
34:29
Speaker 1: like somebody. And that's how a lot of accents have
34:31
Speaker 1: spread over time. That's how we received pronunciations spread. People
34:35
Speaker 1: listen to the broadcaster on the BBC and said, I
34:38
Speaker 1: like the cut of that guy's jib, and they started
34:41
Speaker 1: mimicking him, and that's how that accent spread. You want
34:45
Speaker 1: to take a break, Yeah, we'll take another break and
34:48
Speaker 1: we'll talk about media and the movies and um, how
34:53
Speaker 1: accidents can affect the perception of a person right after this,
35:22
Speaker 1: all right, So I got a call one day from
35:26
Speaker 1: John Hodgeman. Yeah, and he, uh, if you don't know,
35:31
Speaker 1: as a writer and actor and more and more so
35:34
Speaker 1: an actor, and he was auditioning for a part where
35:38
Speaker 1: he had to speak with a Southern accent. So he
35:41
Speaker 1: called me up and was like, dude, I need some help. Um,
35:45
Speaker 1: what what do I do? Because I think he's heard
35:48
Speaker 1: me complain a lot about bad Southern accents and movies
35:51
Speaker 1: and TV and how that's just such an immediate turn
35:54
Speaker 1: off for me, Like that's why I couldn't watch House
35:56
Speaker 1: of Cards because Kevin Spacey. Oh his accent you mean?
36:00
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I just heard it off and how you
36:03
Speaker 1: meant just Kevin Spacey in general. Now he kind of
36:05
Speaker 1: bugs me in general these days. Yeah, I don't see
36:07
Speaker 1: Baby Driver then, Oh no, I love Baby Driver and
36:10
Speaker 1: I liked him in it. And that's the first thing
36:12
Speaker 1: I'm really in a long time. Yeah, I thought it
36:15
Speaker 1: was standard Kevin Spacey. Oh well it was, but I
36:20
Speaker 1: used to love Kevin Spacey and what the oh just
36:25
Speaker 1: in the early days like usual suspects and uh American beauty.
36:29
Speaker 1: He was okay, no no qualms here, with American beauty. Yeah,
36:34
Speaker 1: he just kind of just got tired of it. Yeah.
36:36
Speaker 1: I think Pay It Forward really killed it from You
36:40
Speaker 1: should go see it. Go see it, yeah, go to
36:45
Speaker 1: my bedroom. Yeah that wherever you have to see it.
36:47
Speaker 1: See it. Well, Baby Driver was great though. How about
36:50
Speaker 1: that movie? Yeah, no batting Southern accents, and they're really
36:55
Speaker 1: I mean they were, although the whole thing was shot
36:59
Speaker 1: and setting it Atlanta. Yeah, I mean baby and the
37:04
Speaker 1: oh yeah, the waitress had a bad Southern accent. It
37:06
Speaker 1: wasn't bad. I thought it was okay, Okay, it wasn't
37:09
Speaker 1: too bad by my standard at least. So anyway, Hodgeman
37:13
Speaker 1: calls me and I told I basically told them that
37:15
Speaker 1: even someone like me, who um doesn't have a very
37:19
Speaker 1: strong Southern accent at the very least, there's still something
37:22
Speaker 1: we do in the South, which is, um, we soften
37:26
Speaker 1: our tease generally. Um. Many times tease become d's and
37:31
Speaker 1: sometimes they become ends. Like no one from Atlanta says
37:37
Speaker 1: Atlanta Atlanta. It would be spelled A D L A
37:42
Speaker 1: N N A. You know it's funny, is it's exactly
37:45
Speaker 1: how people from Toronto's Toronto Toronto. But like we're so
37:50
Speaker 1: we live in Atlanta, but we say Toronto, right, But
37:54
Speaker 1: whenever you hear someone say Atlanta, you just think, you know,
37:58
Speaker 1: get the stick out of your butt, pal, Relax, don't
38:02
Speaker 1: be so formal. Yeah, so I went through and I
38:05
Speaker 1: took Hodgman's pages and sort of rewrote them phonetically. Well,
38:09
Speaker 1: I hope you charged for this, No, of course not
38:13
Speaker 1: um and yeah, and it kind of helped him out.
38:15
Speaker 1: I think I don't think he got the part. But um,
38:17
Speaker 1: that's because of his acting, not because of my just kidding. Uh.
38:24
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's just it's an interesting lesson in that
38:28
Speaker 1: um accents. I think oftentimes regional accents of the same
38:32
Speaker 1: language often come down to such subtleties as softening certain
38:36
Speaker 1: letters or dropping certain letters ours or teas or whatever.
38:41
Speaker 1: But you also, yeah, you raised uh, you raised the
38:44
Speaker 1: point earlier where you know, people in Boston and people
38:48
Speaker 1: in Alabama both dropped their rs. There are lists, but
38:54
Speaker 1: you would never confuse um in English speaker in Alabama
38:58
Speaker 1: with an English speaker in Boston. In so there's a
39:01
Speaker 1: lot more going on there. Well, it's just like the
39:04
Speaker 1: Irish immigration in Boston that had a big impact because
39:07
Speaker 1: they weren't immigrating to uh mobile, right. But I mean, like,
39:11
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot more going on accent wise to
39:16
Speaker 1: just dropping the R. But that's the reason why that
39:19
Speaker 1: one has brought up so much is because it's such
39:21
Speaker 1: a a common and identifiable beginning point to differentiate different accents. Yeah,
39:28
Speaker 1: and I guess that's probably a good place to talk
39:30
Speaker 1: about perception um because whether we like it or not,
39:35
Speaker 1: if you hear a very thick like old school New
39:41
Speaker 1: York Brooklyn thing or a very southern kind of Nascar talker, like,
39:47
Speaker 1: you're gonna get stereotype like it it sucks. But you
39:52
Speaker 1: have a very hard Southern accent, people are gonna think
39:54
Speaker 1: you're dumb. That's because of the hookworm than anything. But
40:03
Speaker 1: I think any really really heavy accent can um very
40:07
Speaker 1: much affect what a person thinks initially when they talk
40:09
Speaker 1: to you. Well yeah, um, so accents are at their
40:13
Speaker 1: base and in group out group marker. Right. And we
40:18
Speaker 1: despite how long we've been living in a larger, more
40:21
Speaker 1: integrated society UM full of more and more people that
40:25
Speaker 1: we interact with from different groups every day, Uh, we
40:30
Speaker 1: still have this kind of evolutionary spark where we are
40:35
Speaker 1: aware of people who are different from us, right, and
40:38
Speaker 1: we surmise different things, whether correctly or incorrectly, based on
40:42
Speaker 1: some of these markers. And one of the big easy
40:46
Speaker 1: to identify markers that says, oh, you're from a different
40:49
Speaker 1: group than me. Let me just put a little barrier
40:51
Speaker 1: between us here is the accent. Yeah, for sure. Um,
40:56
Speaker 1: they've even done studies. Uh, I know that the is
41:00
Speaker 1: it babel or babel babel b A b b e
41:04
Speaker 1: L the the language app. They've done studies and they've
41:08
Speaker 1: um had people mark like what accents they thought were sexy,
41:11
Speaker 1: which accents they thought were annoying, which ones they trust
41:15
Speaker 1: and don't trust, And of course, like a French accent
41:19
Speaker 1: was more favorable, the German accent was the least favorable. Um.
41:25
Speaker 1: Just generally, they've done tests that find that people are
41:29
Speaker 1: distrusting of someone with a foreign accent period. Yeah. And
41:33
Speaker 1: I don't know if that has to do with the
41:35
Speaker 1: fact that it is in group out group, or if
41:39
Speaker 1: there's a UM there's like a kind of a much
41:42
Speaker 1: lighter hearted explanation for it, which is that we tend
41:45
Speaker 1: to prefer people with our own accents or people who
41:49
Speaker 1: sound like us are close to us because that's what
41:52
Speaker 1: we're used to. So we're just physically more comfortable hearing that, right,
41:57
Speaker 1: makes sense, not in hearing something different puts on edge
42:00
Speaker 1: or guards up or we're just a little more, um,
42:03
Speaker 1: a little less comfortable physically just from hearing somebody speak
42:07
Speaker 1: with an accent. And then another study suggested that cognitively,
42:12
Speaker 1: we're having to work harder to um understand what a
42:17
Speaker 1: person with an accent that's foreign to us as saying,
42:21
Speaker 1: and uh that and one way to put is that
42:25
Speaker 1: we kind of resent them for making us work harder,
42:28
Speaker 1: so we're less trusting of what they're saying, right, which
42:33
Speaker 1: is just weird. Well, yeah, and all of this is
42:35
Speaker 1: reinforced and um borne out of and reinforced by movies
42:41
Speaker 1: and television to a large degree, because anyone who's ever
42:46
Speaker 1: seen a movie, they have these kind of go to
42:49
Speaker 1: trope accents depending on what kind of character it is, um,
42:53
Speaker 1: whether it's the dumb Southerner or in the case of crime,
42:58
Speaker 1: um like this this new arc accent for like petty criminals,
43:02
Speaker 1: whereas the criminal mastermind will usually have a British accent. Yeah,
43:07
Speaker 1: I read an article on that about villains having accents
43:10
Speaker 1: and usually it's British and apparently that's just kind of
43:17
Speaker 1: lazy filmmaking in a way, like many years for sure. Yeah,
43:21
Speaker 1: And so like the the no matter if it was
43:24
Speaker 1: like on another planet or Russian villain, the villain typically
43:29
Speaker 1: has a British accent, and they the article was saying
43:32
Speaker 1: that they had to do with one. It's just an
43:36
Speaker 1: easy cheap way of saying this person's foreign, this person's other,
43:40
Speaker 1: so right there that they're the bad guy, right um,
43:46
Speaker 1: and then secondly that it was British, so that we
43:49
Speaker 1: can understand what they're saying still very easily, but on
43:53
Speaker 1: an unconscious level again there other their foreign and then um,
43:58
Speaker 1: the the In America, there's something called cultural cringe. It's
44:02
Speaker 1: in America, it's in Australia that there's this idea that
44:06
Speaker 1: the British colonized this country and they were originally like
44:10
Speaker 1: the parent country, and there's still some kind of unconscious
44:14
Speaker 1: resentment of them. So that making the villain British taps
44:17
Speaker 1: into that unconscious disdain for British people, which obviously don't
44:24
Speaker 1: have consciously. But it's called cultural cringe where you're just
44:28
Speaker 1: kind of like unconsciously comparing your culture to their culture
44:32
Speaker 1: and like irritation comes out of it. Yeah, it's funny.
44:36
Speaker 1: Even the Star Wars universe, it was uh a long
44:40
Speaker 1: time ago in a different galaxy, and yet you have
44:43
Speaker 1: like some American accents and some English accents, and it's
44:47
Speaker 1: kind of all over the map. Like uh, I mean
44:50
Speaker 1: even in the in that first Star Wars movie, Carrie
44:54
Speaker 1: Fisher sort of vacillated between English accent and regular Americans.
45:00
Speaker 1: He almost adopted a mid Atlantic accent. Yeah, so that's, um,
45:04
Speaker 1: we're not talking about Maryland. Um. In the early days
45:08
Speaker 1: of the movies, they called it mid Atlantic, which basically
45:10
Speaker 1: meant just somewhere between England and the United States. And
45:14
Speaker 1: that's how almost all of the early movie stars spoke. Yeah,
45:18
Speaker 1: and um, I think from what I saw, you could
45:21
Speaker 1: trace it back to a single um dialect coach who
45:25
Speaker 1: taught I think Katherine Hepburn to speak that way. And
45:30
Speaker 1: that combined with Carrie Grant becoming a star and he
45:33
Speaker 1: was born in England and raised there until he was sixteen,
45:36
Speaker 1: and then moving to America. Those two becoming big stars
45:39
Speaker 1: at the same time made this mid Atlantic accent just
45:42
Speaker 1: spread like wildfire because that's what people saw in the movies.
45:46
Speaker 1: That's what they aspired to. So some people started talking
45:49
Speaker 1: like that, Yeah, super interesting. There was um a woman
45:53
Speaker 1: named Nancy Elliott that did a sample of American actors
45:58
Speaker 1: in American movies from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen seventies,
46:02
Speaker 1: and she showed a steady decline and are dropping in
46:07
Speaker 1: the artless accent, which would support that what you're talking
46:10
Speaker 1: about with the mid Atlantic from sixty percent of actors
46:13
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties to zero percent in the nineteen
46:16
Speaker 1: seventies dropped their rs. And then she saw within people's
46:20
Speaker 1: individual careers that had long careers in movies, they modified
46:24
Speaker 1: their pronunciations over time. Really interesting. Yeah, so what one
46:29
Speaker 1: more thing about the British villain or the villain no
46:33
Speaker 1: matter where he's from, having a British accent. This article
46:36
Speaker 1: called out and I thought, very very rightly, so um
46:39
Speaker 1: inglorious bastards as doing it right because there's like whole
46:43
Speaker 1: scenes that are spoken in German or Italian with subtitles.
46:48
Speaker 1: So the Nazis spoke German, which they would have spoken German. Right,
46:52
Speaker 1: you you have to read along English with the British accent,
46:55
Speaker 1: right right? Yeah, exactly. That's pretty funny. I thought this
46:59
Speaker 1: was interesting. Sing with the singers um generally, and there
47:03
Speaker 1: are exceptions like the Proclaimers, an Oasis and Madness at
47:10
Speaker 1: times Phil Collins, people that would sing with a distinct
47:14
Speaker 1: British accent of some kind, but generally what you hear
47:19
Speaker 1: on the radio is what this one linguists called pop
47:23
Speaker 1: music accent, which is there are a couple of theories
47:26
Speaker 1: on why you can't tell from Mick Jagger to Adele
47:31
Speaker 1: to George Michael that they're um not American um. And
47:35
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of debate over the years, but
47:38
Speaker 1: there seemed to be a couple of accepted reasons. Um.
47:42
Speaker 1: One is is that this is just the pop music accent.
47:45
Speaker 1: This is what's popular, this is what sells, and so
47:48
Speaker 1: this is what people do when they sing, no matter
47:50
Speaker 1: where they're from. Uh. And the other is that intonation
47:55
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with vowel quality, length of
47:59
Speaker 1: your vowels, and that when you sing, you follow a
48:02
Speaker 1: melody which sort of just cancels out or negates the
48:07
Speaker 1: uniqueness of the accent. That one makes sense to mean
48:11
Speaker 1: both of them do. Actually, yeah, I think it's pretty interesting.
48:14
Speaker 1: I think I think you almost have to work. Well
48:18
Speaker 1: maybe not. I was gonna say these bands and singers
48:20
Speaker 1: that still sound very British are doing that on purpose,
48:25
Speaker 1: and that may be the case. I don't know. Like
48:27
Speaker 1: The Darkness, the guy from the Darkness sounds super British.
48:31
Speaker 1: They're from Suffolk. Yeah, and then have you heard any
48:34
Speaker 1: Have you heard of the genre UK grime? No, Apparently
48:39
Speaker 1: that came along in out of East London the two thousands,
48:42
Speaker 1: and it's sort of a descendant of Drummond bass and
48:46
Speaker 1: dance hall and stuff like that. But it's just this
48:49
Speaker 1: really heavily accented rap. Dizzy Rascal is the UK grime
48:54
Speaker 1: I think, So okay, Well, then I have heard it
48:56
Speaker 1: and kind of like it because I'm not hip at
48:58
Speaker 1: all to this stuff, so I had to look it
49:00
Speaker 1: all up, and I think he was on the list.
49:03
Speaker 1: I listened to a couple of tunes from some of
49:05
Speaker 1: these people and yeah, yeah, yeah, Dizzy Rascals, cool roots maneuver.
49:12
Speaker 1: Check him out too, I think he was on the list. Yeah, man, okay, yes,
49:15
Speaker 1: I like UK grime. Um speaking of Great Britain apparently,
49:22
Speaker 1: like so here in the States, if you have a
49:24
Speaker 1: different accent or whatever, especially if you have like a
49:27
Speaker 1: southern drawl and you just kind of sound slow. People
49:31
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the country think of you as slow. That's
49:34
Speaker 1: just how they take you initially, until you have you
49:37
Speaker 1: have to work a little harder to prove yourself, right. Um,
49:40
Speaker 1: that's kind of aside from maybe like valley girl or
49:44
Speaker 1: valley guy accent, that's really the only accent that's super
49:47
Speaker 1: discriminated against hearing the States, but apparently in the UK
49:52
Speaker 1: accents are taken very seriously and discrimination is quite possible. Um.
49:59
Speaker 1: I wrote a tooth. I was in thirteen article from
50:02
Speaker 1: The Guardian that was talking about a study that had
50:04
Speaker 1: just taken place, and the study found that of the
50:08
Speaker 1: employers surveyed admitted to discriminating against people based on their
50:13
Speaker 1: regional accent, and that of Brits said that they felt
50:18
Speaker 1: discriminated against based on their accents. I didn't see any
50:22
Speaker 1: any study that's found the same thing in America, but
50:24
Speaker 1: I guarantee those numbers would have been in the basement
50:27
Speaker 1: compared to that. Yeah, it's definitely a thing in the
50:31
Speaker 1: UK because I've heard even friends of mine that are
50:34
Speaker 1: English when they talk to someone and also they're like,
50:36
Speaker 1: oh yeah, he's he's a you know, from this area,
50:40
Speaker 1: and not necessarily even disparaging. It's just, uh, I don't know,
50:46
Speaker 1: it's just a bigger deal, I think. Yeah, I think
50:49
Speaker 1: it is too over there. I wish they all talked
50:53
Speaker 1: like Terrance Stamp from The Liney. I like Michael Caine's accent,
50:57
Speaker 1: which apparently I had no idea, yeah that that was
51:00
Speaker 1: a Cockney accent, although once I read that, I was like, oh, yeah,
51:03
Speaker 1: I could hear that. Now. Well, it's funny that I
51:05
Speaker 1: love the Terrance Stamp in The Limey. But I've read
51:08
Speaker 1: an article that where one reviewer said it was like
51:10
Speaker 1: the worst accent they'd ever heard in The Guardian. But there.
51:14
Speaker 1: Did you see that movie? No? I didn't. Man, it's
51:17
Speaker 1: so good, uh Steven Soderberg movie. This is where he
51:21
Speaker 1: and his son built a house together. No, no, no, no,
51:25
Speaker 1: it's uh he's he's plays a kind of a British
51:29
Speaker 1: tough coming over to get revenge for his daughter's murder
51:32
Speaker 1: and ends up working at a pizza place in Connecticut. Nope, man,
51:37
Speaker 1: I know I haven't seen this movie. Yeah, it's called
51:39
Speaker 1: The Limy. It's great, but there's this one scene where
51:41
Speaker 1: he goes off in front of the great Bill Duke,
51:44
Speaker 1: who I think late grade is built up no longer
51:47
Speaker 1: with us. I don't know who that is. You would
51:49
Speaker 1: recognize him, Uh, well build this plays an American. Uh,
51:54
Speaker 1: I think he's a maybe a copper detective in the movie,
51:58
Speaker 1: and Terence stamp has this great scene where he goes
52:00
Speaker 1: into his office and goes off for like a minute
52:03
Speaker 1: and a half straight in this very thick cockney not
52:06
Speaker 1: only accent but dialect um, and Bill Dick's just sitting there.
52:11
Speaker 1: At the end he goes. Bill Duke says, there's only
52:13
Speaker 1: one thing I don't understand. I don't understand every mother
52:18
Speaker 1: fan word that just came out of your mouth. So classic.
52:22
Speaker 1: I gotta see that movie. Oh dude, it's really really good.
52:25
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, Wait a minute. Does Terence Stamp hire
52:29
Speaker 1: himself out as a toy for a rich kid and
52:32
Speaker 1: Jackie Gleeson is the dad? No, that's the toy the
52:38
Speaker 1: Limi Peter Fonde is in it. Okay, I'll go see it. Yeah,
52:42
Speaker 1: it's excellent. Um, you got anything else? No, it's weird.
52:46
Speaker 1: This is one of those where it was even kind
52:48
Speaker 1: of long, and I feel like we just didn't even
52:51
Speaker 1: cover half of what we could have. Yeah, no way,
52:53
Speaker 1: and we definitely didn't. There's a lot to it. It's
52:55
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. We'll do a part two one day. Oh yeah. Um.
52:58
Speaker 1: In the meantime, I would direct everybody to I think
53:01
Speaker 1: wired to look up movie accent expert breaks down thirty
53:06
Speaker 1: two actors accents and this dialect coach is just doing well.
53:10
Speaker 1: He talks about thirty two different characters and um, some
53:14
Speaker 1: are really good, like um, Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Capodi
53:17
Speaker 1: apparently is dead on, and um, Kevin Costner doing Robin
53:24
Speaker 1: Hood is supposedly the worst accent of all time and
53:27
Speaker 1: in movie history. You know who I love a lot,
53:30
Speaker 1: but he can't do an American accent. But I'll still
53:33
Speaker 1: watch him just because I love him. Is you and McGregor?
53:37
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he in uh. In this season of Fargo,
53:41
Speaker 1: he was great and I loved it, but he's just
53:45
Speaker 1: he just has such a hard time that Scott that's
53:47
Speaker 1: Scottish accent just comes through. Yeah. Same with the men
53:50
Speaker 1: who stare at goats. Yeah, he had trouble in there.
53:54
Speaker 1: I mean it was fine, but you've noticed it every
53:56
Speaker 1: once in a while. He really did the wet behind
53:58
Speaker 1: the ears thing. He's so like a although I just
54:00
Speaker 1: I don't care. I just get over it, whereas some
54:02
Speaker 1: people I'm just like, no, I'm not gonna watch it
54:04
Speaker 1: with you. Well, if you want to know more about accents,
54:08
Speaker 1: get out there in the world, meet new people, listen
54:11
Speaker 1: to their accents. Maybe try someone for size who knows.
54:15
Speaker 1: Uh And since I said try someone for size, it's
54:17
Speaker 1: time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this uh switcheroo.
54:26
Speaker 1: And it's kind of funny. It was not really accent related,
54:28
Speaker 1: but voice related. Because we get a lot of comments
54:30
Speaker 1: about people that differently you know, but this this one
54:35
Speaker 1: was interesting. Hey guys, a little funny anecdote thought i'd share.
54:38
Speaker 1: I listened to the podcast for about three years. Ah.
54:42
Speaker 1: Shortly after I started listening, I pulled up a picture
54:44
Speaker 1: of you guys, just to put faces to your voices. Yesterday,
54:48
Speaker 1: for some reason, I pulled up a video he watched
54:51
Speaker 1: our Google Talk at the Google headquarters, um, and he
54:56
Speaker 1: realized that he had been picturing us backwards this whole time.
54:59
Speaker 1: That that was jarring. So that's a little switch on
55:01
Speaker 1: the usual story we get that people don't even know uh.
55:05
Speaker 1: So he said, since I only saw a picture, I
55:07
Speaker 1: guess it just assumed I knew by looking who had
55:10
Speaker 1: which voice. I've had that image for all these episodes
55:13
Speaker 1: as to who is who? Imagine how odd of an
55:15
Speaker 1: experience it was to watch a video I saw Josh
55:17
Speaker 1: speak with Chuck's voice, and Chuck and Josh's by far
55:21
Speaker 1: one of the weirdest moments I've had in recent memory.
55:23
Speaker 1: Thanks for all the great shows, Keep them coming. That
55:26
Speaker 1: is Nick from Indiana. Thanks a lot, Nick, I appreciate that. Um. Yeah,
55:31
Speaker 1: that's all I have to say about that. You just
55:34
Speaker 1: so imagine that it was probably pretty funny. He's still
55:37
Speaker 1: laughing about it. Uh. If you want to get in
55:41
Speaker 1: touch with us, like Nick did, tell us a funny story,
55:43
Speaker 1: We're always down to hear those. You can tweet to
55:46
Speaker 1: us at s Y s K podcast or Josh um
55:49
Speaker 1: Clark can hang out on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck
55:53
Speaker 1: Bryant or Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
55:55
Speaker 1: an email the Stuff podcast to how Stuff Works dot
55:58
Speaker 1: Com and has always joined us at a home on
56:00
Speaker 1: the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more
56:07
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
56:09
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com m.