Do You Speak Bostonian?
Scholars say U.S. regional accents are alive, well--and getting stronger
Allyn Partin is standing in front of a roomful of hushed linguists, playing an audio recording of a Southern California man: "I took a trip recently to go to Atlanta . . ." the man says, and that's enough for Partin to make her point, which is that the word go in this instance sounds more like "ga-ow": a mix of the sounds of "cow" and "toe."
"It's the kind [of o] you'd hear from a Valley Girl in totally," Partin explained to the group later.
That inflection, used by many Southern Californians, shows that the local dialect is alive and well, Partin said at the American Dialect Society annual meeting in Los Angeles last week, where she presented new research on that area.
But Southern California is one of several regions where regional accents are thriving. Local dialects are stronger than ever in some parts of the country, according to new findings from a nationwide canvassing of English speakers. Despite theories that an increasingly transient population, immigration from other countries, and the pervasive mass media are chipping away at dialects and accents, University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov and his colleagues have found that regional accents are growing even stronger in many urban areas.
"In almost every city there is active change in pronunciation going on," says Labov, "so the dialects of Chicago, New York, Birmingham, and St. Louis are much more different from each other than they ever were."
That's a comforting sign to those who bemoan the homogenization of the American vocal landscape. Regional accents ensure "cultural variety within our larger civilization," says Alan Jabbour, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. "If we're all doing the same thing, where does the innovation come from?"
Labov has now begun studying smaller cities and plans to publish all his findings next year in a phonological atlas. The first of its kind, the atlas--targeted to both professional and lay readers--will chart accents in cities across the United States and in Canada. There will also be a CD-ROM with audio clips and accompanying data. Already, preliminary results are available on the Internet at www.ling.upenn.edu/phonoatlas/home.html. One of the important potential uses of the research: helping companies develop voice-recognition technology for, say, home computers, that can discern different North American accents.
To cover the entire country, Labov's team--relying on grant money from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Nortel Networks, an Ontario-based telecommunications company--spent three years calling residents of different cities to hear how people were talking. Using census data and local phone books, they located the dominant ethnic groups in each locale and interviewed and recorded those who said they were native to the area--the people who are speaking with the strongest accents are often those who stayed where they were born, keeping their ties to the community and therefore keeping the identity of the local dialects and traditions.
Where they say it. Using a software program that analyzes vowel usage and illustrates speech patterns on-screen, Labov's group found that in the cities of the Great Lakes region--like Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester, N.Y.--Philadelphia, and most of the South, accents are getting stronger (box, Page 56). The Boston accent, characterized in part by the dropping of r's from the middle of some words and the addition of r's at the end of others (as in "pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd" or "Santa Monicker, California"), also remains healthy.
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