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.
In fact, accents similar to Boston's--found in New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts--are growing more distinctive and different from one another, according to Naomi Nagy, a University of New Hampshire linguist. She found that in Massachusetts, fewer than 33 percent of those surveyed said that the second letter in father and bother sound the same. Just over the border, in southern New Hampshire, 34 to 67 percent said the words rhymed--that there was no distinction between the a in father and the o in bother. The fact that more people in Massachusetts considered the sounds separate, Nagy says, shows a desire for individuality and reflects a guarded animosity between the two states.
"The people in southern New Hampshire have more contact with Boston, so for them it's more important to be different," she says. "It's a way of expressing identity. As long as people don't see themselves as one big happy family, they will continue to be different."
Difference is not the whole story, however. In Dallas and Atlanta, Labov has found that the migration of Northerners into these cities has had a significant effect on accents: Young people in Dallas and Atlanta say I, not the Ah that is traditional Southern speech.
In general, the more transient segment of the population--especially those who have had some higher education--often uses TV-news-anchor English, which sprang from the old speaking style of the Midwest but no longer has a regional identity.
Labov didn't focus on rural areas or small towns, where other researchers have found that some accents are fading. Linguist Walt Wolfram, for example, has been recording the Ocracoke, N.C., dialect because he believes infiltration of tourists may have endangered it.
And there are some scholars who don't believe they are seeing a regionalist renaissance. The data-gathering process of charting an accent trend can take years, so it's hard to form a picture of an entire country before speech patterns begin to change again--and that makes for disagreements. William Stewart, for one, is a linguist at the Graduate School of the City University of New York who believes the language is moving toward homogeneity. "I don't like it, but I see that is clearly the trend," he says, pointing to Charleston, S.C., as one example of a place where young people aren't speaking in the strong brogue that some old-timers do. Data supporting the homogeneity theory are scarce, but Stewart says that's because linguists look for differences. "I detect a nostalgia in people," he says. "There's something romantic about it. People want [accents] to be there."
But University of Texas linguist Guy Bailey, who also has researched accent trends, agrees that regional differences are flourishing. "`Labov has a national survey. I have a national survey," he says. "When you talk to people . . . you can tell" that they have accents. "The notion that they are disappearing is overblown." The reason, says Texas A&M University linguist Lisa Ann Lane, is simple: "As long as identity is important, then we're not going to see homogenization."
The way we talk now A team of linguists is compiling an atlas of American dialects. Among their findings:
Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo. A shift in the pronunciation of the vowel e in Ked (as in the sneaker) makes the word sound more like cud. The word pat now sounds like piat; the o in pot now sounds like the a used to sound in pat.
Birmingham, Ala.; Tulsa, Okla. Though each Southern state has unique versions of twang, most hold tight to a distinctly Dixie pronunciation: A change in the letter e means Ked sounds more like kid or key-ed.
Philadelphia. The letter l is disappearing from the middle of words like cellar and dollar. So if you walk into a Philadelphia sneaker store and ask for "New Bounce," you will be shown a pair of New Balance shoes.
This story appears in the January 25, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.