On Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we hear a lot of stories from listeners. Recently, we asked people to tell us about their accents: what they love about them, things they’ve noticed. The response was huge; we got the most responses we’ve ever gotten.
This was not a surprise to Valerie Fridland. She’s a sociolinguist and author of the book Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. “Accents are something that we share only with those people we most love and hold dear and who we saw ourselves to be in the foundational eras of our life,” she said. “It’s close to us in ways that language more generically isn’t.”
How did the modern American accent develop? And what do accents reflect about us? We answer that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Fridland, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Where did the American accent come from in the first place?
If you went back to [the year] 1600, you would probably think, “What the hell are you all saying around me? Because I don’t understand a thing.”
We start our accent journey in America with the first British colonists that came. It seems odd, because there are other colonists that were here [already], and there were indigenous languages that were here. So that isn’t the first language story of America. But the most pivotal voices for establishing that original American accent were those early British colonists. Those set up what we call “founders effects”: these sort of cultural and linguistic areas that persist through time.
The original American accent was sort of one that had leveled the playing field of many of the salient, noticeable British accent features. For example, the Rs would’ve been there, with the exception of a few Rs that got dropped really early in words like burst and curse, which became bust and cuss. It’s the British R-dropping that came over early.
What we really would’ve noticed is [a language] that sounded sort of British but not like any [particular] British accent. And it was commented on [at the time] — this incredibly uniform American accent that actually sounded quite good compared to the British form. It didn’t matter who you were, what class you were from, what kind of job you occupied — the speech was much more similar among people in America or the New World at that time than it was back in Britain.
It’s interesting that it was uniform, because we have so many regional differences now. When did we see those pop up?
Think about the way that the Atlantic Coast was settled, right at the very top. You had people coming in a lot from East Anglia and Southern Britain, and then you had the Quakers from the north of Britain, and the Scotch Irish and the Germans in the Midland. And then, in the South, you had a lot of people from Southern Britain, a lot of the Cavaliers — those that were loyal to King Charles I. They had a lot of indentured servants and a lot of enslaved people that came from West African backgrounds.
By 1780, we see that enough generations have come through and learned the patterns of this new world that they sounded very different from Britain but also started to sound different from each other.
This was actually something that concerned the Founding Fathers after the Revolutionary War, because the agreement between the states was very fragile. There were a lot of regional rivalries, a lot of state self-interest, and they were really worried that these states that had bonded together in unity against this common enemy of Britain were actually going to fall apart. One of the things they were really concerned about, particularly Benjamin Franklin and also his pal Noah Webster, were that the lack of a uniform language — or having any kind of “regional provincialism” they called them — would cause this [new union] to decay and fray.
I want to dig into the Southern accent a little bit more. It’s so distinct. How did we get it?
That did not come around until after the Civil War. [The war] brought together people towards a common enemy and also a common cultural experience that bonded their speech in ways that we find are really conducive to new accent formation.
Also, the infrastructure of the South changed during the Reconstruction period. And anytime we see a change in infrastructure, a change in the economy, a change in the transportation networks in an area, we generally see a change in the way they sound, as well.
The New England accent, the Southern accent — both get a lot of the shine. But what are we hearing in the Midwest and out West?
The Midwest and West are quite interesting, because they were both a little later. The Midwest had a really unique blending, because it emanated from the Pennsylvania colony. So that’s really the heart of the heartland accent. Over a third of the population of the Pennsylvania colony was the Scots-Irish, and another third were Germans. When you think about the Chicago accent — “da Bears,” that kind of thing — that is actually a very German-influenced accent. There were already a lot of Scandinavian settlers in that area. The Minnesota accent was heavily Scandinavian influenced, but by the time [Americans] get to the West Coast, the vast majority were resettlers from an American dialect region.
So what you get there is already Americanized speech, but truly that’s why we think of the Western accent as being accent-less: because it had gone through so many cycles of leveling out some of the more noticeable features from the East Coast by the time they hit it West.
What about the accents that don’t exist anymore? Do accents die?
When accents die, it’s more like a slow fade and an instant death. What happens is just fewer and fewer people use them. In that case, we actually have a lot of dying accents in America. The one that people think about is that Transatlantic accent.
Yes. Or Frasier. That was probably the later incarnation of that Transatlantic accent. And, of course, [Cheers and Frasier were] depicting pretentious snobs that no one wants to hang out with, and that is exactly why that accent has died out.
The trick is: It was a false accent. It was no one’s native accent. It was a learned accent. It was a fabricated, cultivated accent of the early 20th century, predominantly parlayed by Hollywood, because [those were] the type of roles and iconic images that Hollywood was presenting at that time.
But, by the 1950s, we didn’t want to see that anymore. We wanted to see ourselves. Americans wanted to hear Americans, and they wanted to see Americans that lived like they did. And so the shift in Hollywood was really from these romantic leading man and leading woman kind of roles to these gritty depictions of realism in Hollywood. With that, we really lost the Transatlantic accent, and it became snobby and elitist rather than something aspirational.
Why do we feel so connected to our accents?
Fundamentally, accents are about identity — the people we love, the people we choose, the people that feel like they get us. When we hear people talk about accents, even if it’s not the same accent, it’s something that bonds us, because we all understand how important to our identities, to our feeling of belonging, that accents are. And I think it’s something that is so interesting, because it’s so relevant to all of us. It’s a badge we wear that others can see. It’s sort of like when fashions change, people talk about it. When language changes, people talk about it, because language is fundamentally the story of humanity.
