The Rise of ‘Be Like’

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Ben

Like ColaWe dialect nuts scrutinize features of individual dialects, while perhaps ignoring features emerging in many dialects simultaneously.  One of these is the meteoric rise of the phrase ‘be like‘ in many types of English.  You may not recognize what these words mean, so examples of its conjugated forms may help:

‘It was like, really dark outside.’
‘There’s like, maybe two or three of them.’
‘She tells me she’s wearing that blouse, and I’m like, are you kidding me?’
‘He was like, ‘I really need you to talk to me.’

You’ll notice several things about ‘be like.’ First, it’s typically used in narrative contexts or hypothetical narrative contexts. That is to say, it’s a function of storytelling. Second, it often becomes a quotative verb, meaning that ‘be like’ takes the place of ‘I said,’ ‘She said,’ ‘They say’ etc. It’s a very flexible term.

There is a fascinating body of sociolinguistic research on ‘be like.’ In 1982, linguist Ronald R. Butters noted one of the more interesting uses of ‘be like,’ as a way of revealing ‘unuttered thoughts.’* As someone who uses ‘be like’ quite a bit, I recognize this in my own speech. For example:

‘She says she wants to have a meeting, and I’m like, ‘didn’t we just have a meeting?’

Here ‘I’m like’ suggests what I was thinking rather than what I said. ‘Be like’ reveals the inner monologues of storytellers.

Research has also shown** that ‘be like’ is no mere American phenomenon, but becoming salient in the speech of British youth. Whether this indicates American influence I can’t say, but it’s clear that the construction is on the rise in several world Englishes.  I can only speculate, of course, as to why this is the case. But for me, ‘be like’ is tremendously useful, although prescriptivist grammarians will (obviously) disagree.

I argue in favor of ‘be like’ because it implies an active relationship with one’s thoughts, feelings and statements. ‘Be like’ breaks down the boundaries between what you say, think and feel. ‘I thought it was scary’ or even ‘I thought, “it is scary”‘ do not have the same oomph as ‘I was like, this is scary.’ The latter suggest that I’m embodying that thought in a very personal way, that I’m simultaneously thinking, feeling and living it.

In a world that increasingly prizes immediacy, then, ‘be like’ is a very attractive tool in the linguistic box. The term dramatizes situations rather than simply repeating them, and allows us to access emotional states not easily captured by staid verbs like ‘I thought’ or ‘I felt.’

Still, that doesn’t quite answer the question: why is ‘be like’ so in vogue in so many parts of the English-speaking world?

*Butters, R. R. (1982). Editor’s note to Schourup (1982). American Speech 57, 149.

**Tagliamonte, S., and Hudson, R. (1999). “Be like et al. beyond America: The Quotative system in British and Canadian youth.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 147–72.

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American Ash

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Ben

First Page of BeowulfIt’s time for us to talk about ash.

‘Ash’ refers not to the product of burnt charcoal, but rather the ‘short-a’ vowel symbolized by æ in the International Phonetic Alphabet.  In both the British Received Pronunciation and General American dialects of English, this vowel is found in words like ‘trap,’ ‘cat,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘knack.’  The phoneme dates back to the earliest days of the language we call English, conveniently represented by æ in the orthography of Old English.

As indicated by its symbol, ash is pronounced between the /ɛ/ in ‘dress’ and the /a/ in Spanish ‘para.’  In English, however, ash exhibits a lot of variation, to the extent that I find it one of the most relative of vowels.  In older types of Received Pronunciation (i.e. the ‘Queen’s English’), for example, it was arguably closer to the ‘e’ vowel that modern Britons use in ‘dress.’  In the trailer for the film Atonement, Keira Knightley emphasizes this feature in the line, ‘Come beck to me.’  In many modern British accents, we see the opposite: ash has moved toward /a/ or sometimes toward the vowel in ‘strut.’

America doesn’t quite exhibit the diversity of accents and dialects that the UK does.  I’ve come to accept that.  In terms of ash, however, I think we have may give England a run for its money. Just take a look at the linguistic landscape. In Northern states like Wisconsin and Michigan, extreme accents may render ‘fad’ so that it is homophonous with British RP ‘feared (i.e. IPA fɪəd).  In some Southern accents, ash may become a triphthong: ‘bad’ becomes ‘bay-uhd’ (IPA bæjəd).  In New York and Philadelphia, this vowel has split into a breathtakingly complex pair of phonemes.  Over in California, meanwhile, young people with the most advanced features of the California Vowel Shift may pronounce this with a more ‘cardinal’ /a/ vowel, so that ‘tap’ overlaps with the way many other Americans pronounce ‘top’ (IPA tap).

It’s worth noting that in American English, ash might almost be thought of as a ‘long’ vowel.  For the novices out there, that means most Americans pronounce ‘bad’ with a vowel greater in duration that the vowel in ‘bid’ (or other short vowels).  One study* found that ash is, on average, pronounced longer by American English speakers than any other vowel, at least in their Midwestern sample.  This differs from many British accents, which have traditionally been thought to have a short vowel for ash.

Likewise, ash is often described as ‘tenser’ in American accents.  ‘Tenseness’ is a difficult concept to describe (and subject to a lot of debate), so I’ll offer myself as an example here.  In my own accent, my tongue, jaw, and lips are fairly taut and rigid when pronouncing this vowel; when I imitate someone who speaks British RP, on the other hand, I instinctually relax these muscles.  Why we Americans tend to be more laborious with ash is unclear.

Then there are the many quirks of American ash, which are too numerous to fit into one post.  There’s the way Americans pronounce ash before nasals with a raised vowel, as in ‘Pam’ and ‘pan;’ the way many Westerners rhyme ‘bag’ with ‘vague;’ the way older New Englanders maintain a slight hint of the British ‘bath’ vowel; the way some Southerners rhyme words like ‘can’t with ‘ain’t.’  Ash is a vowel that’s all over the map.

What is your ash like?

*Hillenbrand, J., Getty, L. A., Clark, M. J., & Wheeler, K. (1995). Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 97, 3099-3111.

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‘Son’ in African American English

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Ben

I don’t have time for a lengthy post today, so I’d like to briefly mention a dialect curiosity that has befuddled me for over a decade: the use of the word ‘son’ in African American Vernacular English.  The word is used as a sign of familiarity among young men, as evidenced by such phrases as these (all of which I’ve heard within the past few months):

‘I’m going to work, son.’
‘You gotta be careful, son.’
‘That ain’t right, son.’

None of these utterances would be conspicuous but for the fact that such ‘son’ uses are frequent among young African American men speaking to other young African American men.  An older friend referring to a much younger man as ‘son’ makes some sense, even if the two are not blood relations.  But the ‘youthful familiar’ use of ‘son’ between adolescents is rather puzzling.

My perception is that this is a fairly new phenomena, arising perhaps within the past three decades.  I don’t recall hearing many examples of ‘youthful familiar son’ in films before the 1990’s: I know for certain it was alive and kicking as a feature of AAVE by the end of that decade, as I had a roommate who used ‘son’ in this manner my freshman year in college (ca. 1998).

And yet quests to discover when and why young men started calling each other ‘son’ have been futile.  The word is so common that searching for the first ‘use’ of it in an engine like Google NGram Viewer is like finding a needle in a haystack.  Likewise, searches for scholarly articles yield virtually nothing.

And so I’m left with the vaguest of hypotheses.  Any ideas?

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An Amish dialect?

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Ben

I spent last week in southeastern Pennsylvania, near the heartland of the Amish, an isolated religious group which shuns modern dress and lifestyle.  This resulted in the strange experience of spotting teenage girls in a local mall clad in clothing more typical of 18th-Century Europe than 21st-Century America.  And me being me, I couldn’t help but wonder what an ‘Amish dialect’ of English might sound like.

Although English is common in this culture, the Amish dialect seems out of step with the surrounding ‘native’ English.  Note the unique accents heard in this BBC Two documentary about ex-Amish leaving their society for the modern world (speech samples begin at :38):

I would note a few salient accent features here. I was struck by the young woman’s entirely non-American pronunciation of ‘says’ as if it rhymed with ‘ways’ [i.e. IPA seɪz].  She also exhibits some apparent German influence in her pronunciation of ‘decisions’ as ‘dezisions.’  Note too the frequent use of a glottal stop for the letter ‘t,’ a feature more typical of many types of British English than Pennsylvanian.  The intonation of this accent is unusual as well, unlike the patterns typical of Americans.

By the way, it should go without saying that by ‘German’ I don’t mean the type of ‘standard’ German spoken in contemporary Germany.  Rather, the Amish dialect of the language is a type of High German that would be entirely incomprehensible to someone from, say, Berlin.  (Although it maintains some similarities to another language derived from High German, Yiddish).

That being said, the German language is not what comes to mind when I hear the accents in the clip above.  Rather, it seems the Amish dialect of English is a unique variety that, while it exhibits some foreign influence, has a number of entirely innovative features.  In fact, one would be forgiven for mistaking the accent spoken in the clip above for some obscure type of Irish or British English (albeit one exposed to American speech).

Any other impressions?

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A Lexical Beef: ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘Girlfriend’

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Ben

SweetheartsI have been away from this blog for several days, due to a single reason (no pun intended): I got married yesterday. Since my single life has come to an end, I’d like to take a brief pause from discussing dialects to air a lexical complaint related to singlehood: I really dislike the terms boyfriend and girlfriend.

Don’t get me wrong.  If 14-year-old sweethearts refer to each other in this manner, it doesn’t bother me. But I’m an adult, and there’s something juvenile about referring to a significant other as a ‘girl’ or ‘boy.’  And yet these appellations have had seen very little competition, at least in American English.

Not that there aren’t some limitations in the alternatives. I certainly wouldn’t prefer lover, for example, which has adopted an overtly sexual connotation.  Nor am I fond of the hopelessly vague partner.  Nor still the sappy sweethearts.  Still, I wish there were some way to refer one’s fully grown better half without misclassifying him/her as a ‘girl’ or ‘boy.’

Etymology Online dates the term “boyfriend,” meaning “woman’s paramour,” to 1909. However, the term has an earlier platonic sense.  The first use I managed to find in Google Books, from an obscure 1850 publication titled Friends’ review: a religious, literary and miscellaneous journal, describes the friend of a young man, not the lover of a young woman:

Though daily occupied with his drudgery as a farm servant, he began to instruct himself in Latin and Greek. A boy friend lent him several books necessary in these studies…

Girlfriend seems to have had a similar trajectory, beginning as a term for a young female friend, only taking on romantic connotations after the conversion of boyfriend.  Intriguingly, the original sense of girlfriend is still alive and kicking, as one can hear in phrases like, “I’m going to spend some time with my girlfriends this weekend.”  I can’t say for sure why the platonic meaning of boyfriend didn’t also survive.  Perhaps some consider it un-masculine to refer to your drinking buddies the same way their girlfriends do?

The construction ‘my + [man/woman synonym]’ to label one’s better half has had various incarnations over the years.  Such examples include my guy, my fella, my man, my woman, or my lady.  However, these terms have never moved past the stage of informality: when introducing your boyfriend at a work function, would you say, “This is my man, Dave?”  Probably not.

Then there’s the semi-ironic lady friend.  I’ve heard people my age use this phrase, entirely in jest.  One might object to the use of ‘lady,’ a word greatly devalued in a post-aristocratic society.  But I really don’t see how calling a 40-year-old woman a ‘lady’ is any sillier than calling her a ‘girl.’  Unfortunately, lady friend also lacks a suitable male equivalent, since gentleman friend is quite unwieldy.

Why, then, in most mainstream dialects of English, are boyfriend and girlfriend the best terms we can manage? Aren’t there any more mature options?

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Marry, Merry, Mary

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Ben

A Bride[Ed. Note: In an earlier version of this article, I suggested I pronounce ‘marry,’ ‘merry’ and ‘Mary’ differently.  The opposite is true.  I pronounce them alike.]

Do you pronounce ‘marry,’ ‘merry,’ and ‘Mary’ the same?  I do, which makes me a fairly typical American.  That being said, I represent a generation shift.  The Linguistic Atlas of New England, published in the 1930’s, showed that the region I grew up in still made a distinction between these three words.  This is yet another New England dialect feature which is receding.

By the way, if you answered ‘yes’ to the opening question, you may not understand how these three words sound different.  In many British (and some American) accents, ‘marry’ (and other ‘-arry’ words) are pronounced with the same vowel in ‘cat;’ ‘merry,’ (and other ‘-erry’ words) are pronounced with the same vowel in ‘pet;’ and ‘mary’ (and other ‘-ary’ words) is pronounced with the same vowel as that found in ‘fair.’

As I mentioned, this three-way split is found in some American accents as well, although it’s a bit mysterious as to why the accents that preserve the distinction do so.  The split can be found in Boston and New York, which might suggest the feature is related to non-rhoticity (i.e. ‘r-lessness’).  But the split is also found isPhiladelphia, a city where the local accent in rhotic (i.e. ‘r-ful’).

It’s not really appropriate to call this distinction a ‘split,’ anyway.  Really, the more important question is why many American accents merged all three of these words into the same vowel (the vowel in ‘fairy’).  My only thought is that it perhaps has to do with the retroflex r common in American English (i.e. an /r/ formed with the tongue pulled back).  I find it slightly difficult to pronounce the vowel in ‘cat’ before this type of /r/, but that’s just a personal observation.

There are also incomplete mergers.  For example, in some American dialects ‘marry’ is kept distinct while ‘merry’ and ‘mary’ have merged.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if some people maintain the distinction only in certain words. For example, I’ve caught myself using the vowel in ‘cat’ in the word ’embarrassment,’ perhaps a rare case of picking up a pronunciation common to New York City (this feature isn’t stigmatized in that dialect, so you can have people maintain the distinction who otherwise have few New York accent features).

Are you an r-mergerer, or do you preserve the distinction?  And why?

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Accents at the Renaissance Faire

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Ben
Ye Olde Chequers Inn, Tonbridge

Wikimedia

Yesterday I went to the Renaissance Faire.  For those unfamiliar with this tradition, the Ren Faire is a type of festival set in a milieu vaguely indicative of the Renaissance, with jousts, fortune tellers, mead, period music, and Elizabethan costumes.  And in an attempt to create an immersive environment, the actors who play the denizens of the faire are instructed to speak with accents.

As you might expect, there wasn’t a lot of cohesion in this regard.  Some actors spoke with a curious mishmash of British regionalisms, others with a silly imitation of Cockney, and still others with Irish brogues.  The actress playing the Queen of England, meanwhile, spoke with impeccable Received Pronunciation.  Which is admirable, if hardly how Elizabeth I would have actually spoken.

So which actors were closest to ‘getting it right?’  Probably those who made some attempt to sound Irish or like Pirates (i.e. used the West Country accent stereotypical of swashbucklers).  English in Britain, even in London, would have had something of a brogue-like sound during the time of Shakespeare.  Words like face and nose would have been monophthongs (fehs and nohs, i.e. IPA fɛ:s and no:z), and the diphthongs in kite and mouth would have have been raised as they are in broad Irish English (kuh-eet and muh-ooth, i.e. IPA kəit and məuθ).

None of this is to say there was no dialect diversity in England circa 1600.  There certainly was.  Probably more than today, in fact, since traditional dialects had not been overwhelmed by ‘standard’ English.  But suffice it to say these dialects did not correspond to the more common types of speech in contemporary England.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I didn’t crave more linguistic accuracy at the Ren Faire.  This is a deliberately anachronistic festival, after all.  Vendors sell cheese fries, India Pale Ale can be found at the taverns as easily as mead, and the day culminates in a ‘human chess match’ in which Shakespeare and female pirates appear as competitors.  Such inaccuracies doesn’t bother me so much.  Heck, bad accents might even be part of the fun.

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Why Geordie is Hard to Understand

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Ben

Of the many wonderful sections of the British Library site, one of my favorites is this fabulous dissection of the Geordie dialect of English (i.e. the dialect spoken in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne).  It presents, in immaculate detail, all of the salient phonological and grammatical quirks of this fascinating type of English.  And it has sound clips!

Geordie is renowned in Britain as being one of the most difficult to understand of mainstream British dialects. If you’re new to Geordie, this story told by Newcastle humorist/cartoonist Gary Hogg gives a great idea of what it sounds like:

Geordie pronunciation is at least partially to blame for its difficult reputation: bite, bout, and burt can overlap almost perfectly with Received Pronunciation (“Standard” British) bait, boot and bought (IPA bɛɪt, bu:t and bɔ:t).  Such realizations are less common in the 21st-Century, but can still befuddle outsiders listening to the broadest of Geordie.

However, what strikes me about the British Library’s Geordie page is that it’s really the grammatical and lexical peculiarities of the dialect which are to blame.  For example, in broad Geordie dialects, standard English us is often replaced by we.  So, for example, the BL cites this example:

…, she took we, she wouldn’t let we go, I mean, she, she did, she’d always took we on these trips…

That in itself is bound to confound listeners. But I’m not doing this phrase justice: the vowel in ‘we’ is extremely reduced (i.e. becomes a schwa sound; I’d recommend listening to the sample here to get the full effect–it’s about halfway down the page.) So the above snippet sounds a bit like:

…she took wuh, she wouldn’t let wuhgo, I mean, she, she did, she’d always took w’on these trips…

[IPA ʃɪ tʊʔk wə, ʃɪ wʊdn̩ lɛʔt wə go:, ə min, ʃɪ, ʃɪ dɪd, ʃɪd ɑɫwes tʊk wɒn ðis tɹɪps]

Geordie pronunciation and lexicon conspire together to create a phrase inscrutable to outsiders.

Then there are those words that, while comprehensible, have a different meaning in Geordie than in standard English. For instance:

…used to get dropped off, off the bus in the mornings and, uhm, they picked us up on the way back…

The meaning of this seems fairly obvious, until you realize that us in Geordie often refers to the first person singular (i.e. ‘me.’) Hence, a listener might be perplexed as to who this Geordie’s friends are that he isn’t mentioning.

And of course, there are a variety of older dialect words which in rapid speech can cause all kinds of comprehension issues: gan (meaning go), nae (meaning not), clarts (meaning mud), among many others.  Although a city, Newcastle’s local speech features words which are more common in rural ‘traditional dialect’ areas of England.

So, to summarize, three factors make this dialect uniquely difficult for outside listeners.  First, Geordie pronunciation (even in “milder” accents) has many features uncommon among urban English accents.  Then there’s the fact that Geordie seems to undergo an unusual amount of vowel reduction: the vowels in I, it, they, and we often become a schwa or seem to disappear completely.  Then, of course, the dialect boasts a very unusual grammar and lexicon.

Geordie is an odd duck among ‘major’ dialects in England.  It is obviously quite different than the English of Southern England.  But it is also different from other types of Northern English, to the extent that I would almost leave it out of discussions of Urban Northern dialects entirely.  It’s in a category all its own.

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American Dialects: A Red State/Blue State Divide?

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Ben
Red State-Blue State map

2004 Presidential Election Results (At the height of the Red State/Blue State divide)

In a brief piece in Time this week, famed linguist William Labov suggested that American dialects are getting more distinct rather than less.  The article is extremely short, but I was nevertheless intrigued by Labov’s comment on the connection between accents and the Blue State/Red State divide:

It’s not entirely clear why accents are growing stronger, but Labov says that the sound differences are increasingly being exaggerated. His other explanation is that “…dialect differences have become associated with political differences, so that the Blue States/Red States division comes close to the boundary between the Northern and Midland dialects.

For the few readers who missed the “Red State/Blue State” phenomenon, Red and Blue refer to mostly conservative US states (Red) and mostly liberal US states (Blue).  The divide slightly corresponds to the American North and South, although that paints an overly simplistic picture.

The idea that political differences create dialect differences is nothing new. In fact, more than one linguist has suggested that what we think of as the “American Southern” accent emerged as a result of the political divide created by the Civil War.  Here linguist Edgar W. Schneider summarizes the work of sociolinguist Guy Bailey*:

Essentially, Bailey’s claim is that Southern English was shaped not by retentions of British dialect features but by late nineteenth-century innovations, that is, linguistic developments of the post-Civil War, “Reconstruction” period, when Southerners used distinct dialect features to express their regional identity threatened by the presence of large numbers of “Yankees.”

Is something similar happening within the context of America’s contemporary political landscape?

I’m betting Labov’s quote in the Time article is out of context (note that he isn’t really offering an “explanation”). That being said, the Red State/Blue State divide doesn’t strike me as linguistically dramatic as the Red/Blue divide between dialects within regions of the country.  Take Texas for example.  Austin, Dallas and Houston all voted Democrat in the last presidential election**, and all three cities are developing markedly less “Southern” varieties of English than those found in the rest of the state.

But I can’t say for sure if the gulf between American Liberal and Conservative politics is resulting in an equally large linguistic gulf. Have political differences really increased our dialect differences?

*Schneider, E. (2003).  Shakespeare in the coves and hollows?  Toward a history of Southern English. In S. J. Nagle & S. L. Sanders (Eds.), English in the Southern United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

*Their counties did, at least.

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Anna Karenina … in a British Accent?

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Ben
Photo of Anna Karenina

Still from a 1914 Russian film of 'Anna Karenina'

This week, British actress Keira Knightley revealed that the upcoming film adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina will feature British accents instead of Russian.  Quoth Knightley:

“It’s going to be an English accent. It’s always very tricky when you are doing something that is meant to be in another language. Because you are like, what accent should it be, should you do that? Well, if you’ve got a Russian accent, why aren’t you speaking Russian? It’s an English-language film. So we have taken the decision that it’s an English accent.”

I share Knightley’s ambivalence about approaching a Russian-set project with English-speaking actors. Almost any stylistic choice has its limitations.  On the one hand, you can make actors speak with some hint of a foreign accent. This strategy has been employed in such celebrated films as Schindler’s List, The Reader and Before Night Falls.  The advantages?  It helps create a ‘sense of place,’ it avoids the cognitive dissonance inherent in using an American or British accent, and it allows the film to be cast with great foreign-accented actors.

This strategy has its problems, of course.  One might argue that the effect distances audiences from the story, creating a sense of ‘foreignness’ when universality is desired.  And if the dialect work goes awry (as it sometimes does), your film may be more remembered for its bad accents than its story.

The other strategy is to use a British or American accent.  This is perhaps more logical, as Russians and Cubans don’t speak to one another like foreigners.  More ‘standard accents’ (presumably Received Pronunciation or General American English) may bring audiences closer to the story, lending an air of intimacy and modernity to the proceedings.

But this option can backfire as well.  A few years ago, I wrote a play set in 19th-Century Vienna.  The director and I made the decision early on that actors would employ American accents.  And while our preference was better than the alternative, I can’t say it didn’t bring its share of problems.  Contemporary accents can easily make things sound too contemporary, too American, too British, and end up taking the audience out of the story as much as any foreign accent would.

Anna Karenina is my favorite novel, so I’m quite biased here.  But I think the folks behind this film adaptation have the right idea.  Much of the appeal of Tolstoy’s novels lies in the breathtaking immediacy of his writing: characters from centuries past come to life as if they were sitting in your living room.  Having them speak in stilted Russian accents could easily destroy this quality.

Tolstoy also lived and wrote before the Bolshevik revolution.  For better or worse, it will take some time before Americans and Brits shrug off our association of the Russian accent with the Soviet Union.  This was an author writing about a different time and a very different country.  Anything that evokes thoughts of contemporary Russian politics should be avoided.

Of course, there will be dissenting opinions about this.  We won’t know how the accents work (or don’t) until the film comes out.

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