A Brief Look at Jamaican Creole

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Ben

I’ll begin today’s post with a wonderful video of the The Night Before Christmas spoken in Jamaican Creole (a.k.a. Patois):

For non-Jamaicans the clip above is probably so hard to understand that it seems like a different language.  Which is because it is a different language.

Total dialect novices would be forgiven for asking: Don’t Jamaicans just speak English?

Well, of course they do.  But the strongest variety of English spoken on the island differs enough from Standard English to be classified as a creole: a blend of different languages, in this case English with good deal of grammar and syntax derived from African languages.*

Jamaica is a country with a dialect continuum: at one end of the spectrum are people who speak Jamaican Creole, at the other end is the more mainstream accent you would hear from, say, a Jamaican co-worker in the States.  Then there’s a large number of dialects between these two extremes.

Now, I used to assume that Jamaican Patois was just a very strong accent of English.  Some phrases in Jamaican would seem to confirm this at first glance.  For example:

The English phrase, “A shortcut draws blood, the long road draws sweat.”

Becomes in Creole …

Shaat kot jraa blod, lang ruod jraa swet.

Try to read that sentence aloud a few times, and you’ll realize that it’s simply “short cut draw blood, long road draw sweat.”  So it’s not much different than the Standard English version, minus some verb conjugations and articles.

But let’s look at a different example.  Standard English “No matter how high the john crow flies, it has to come down to eat,” becomes:

No mata ou ai kiangkro flai, ihn afi kom a grong fi niam.

Which could only be rendered in Standard English as “No matter how high kiangcrow fly, in halfee come a ground fi nyam.” In other words, I can’t even transpose it into “plain English.”  This is simply a different language.

And then there are phrases that are almost completely divorced from Standard English, such as:

Aadiez pitni niam raktuon.

Which roughly translates to “Stubborn children eats stones.”  Now we’re completely into foreign language territory.

The above examples, by the by, were from a fantastic website about Jamaican Creole, jumieka.com.  It’s an great resource for people interested in Carribean English, with info about the history and current status of Creole.

Given all the actor talk on this blog of late, I’d also say this is a good resource for actors who need to learn Jamaican accents.  Studying the Creole/Patois helps you grasp the origins of all types of English spoken on the island.

That’s all for now.  I know far too little about this language to get more in-depth.  Any Jamaicans care to elaborate?

*There is a much more detailed explanation for what a “creole” is, but I’ll save that for another day.

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New York City: Accent of Champions!

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Ben
Tenements, New York City

Wikimedia

I like to think of myself as good at accents. I say this in all humbleness. Objectively speaking, I’d say my Cockney, Manchester, and Dublin are quite nuanced for an American. I can even do the more obscure accents, like working-class Cardiff or rural Northern California. I am, in short, a hopeless dialect nerd.

Which is why I am sad to say that the one accent I have trouble with is not some obscure regional patois spoken on the Hebrides, nor some inscrutable dialect off the West Coast of Ireland, but rather, an accent spoken less that three hours from where I grew up: New York City.

I have already spoken about the reasons why this accent is less prevalent in television and film.  I’d like to add another, indirect factor:  the New York City accent is incredibly hard to do.

What is it about this accent that has confounded actors for generations? I attribute this to several problems:

1.) There is no single New York Accent. Not even close. There are ethnolects (Jewish New York, African American New York, Irish New York), sociolects (working-class,upper-middle-class), and ideolects (New York siblings rarely seem to have the same accent).

2.) The accent has changed tremendously over the years. A film set in New York from even 30 years ago can be a misleading reference. The New York accent has evolved and continues to evolve. You need to be incredibly specific about time period, because each decade of the past century has produced its accent innovations.

3.) New York accents are inconsistent. The most obvious example of this is non-rhoticity. A New Yorker might say “Park the car” while dropping the r in park, but pronouncing the r in car. Actors are trained to be consistent with dialect work, and yet inconsistency is very much a part of contemporary New York English.

But the trickiest part of doing a New York Accent?

4.) The tense-lax split. If you’re an American or Brit, you probably pronounce cap, cab, batch and badge with the same vowel, right? Not so in New York City, where these a words are pronounced in two ways: tensely (meaning the vowel is pronounced slightly higher in the mouth) or laxly (pronounced slightly lower).

What’s the rule for which words are tense and which are lax? It’s so simple, really …

The vowel is tense before nasals, voiceless fricatives and voiced stops, except in open syllables and function words, in which case the vowel is always lax, not including a large number of “exception” words which rules dictate should be lax but are in fact tense, AND words learned later in life, which are always lax.

Confused? Yeah. Me too.

The bottom line is, if you need to learn a New York accent, try to find somebody very knowledgeable to help you. All accents can pose their challenges, but New York City can foil even the most talented of dialect savants.

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Stage Accents vs. Real Accents

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Ben

Queen VictoriaAs per recent discussions of American actors doing British accents, I’d like to make an important distinction: Authentic accents vs. stage dialects*.

For about 90% of situations in which an American actor needs a British accent, that accent is probably Received Pronunciation (or Standard British). I’d say most of these circumstances center around Victorian or Edwardian playwrights: Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Gilbert & Sullivan, not to mention any number of modern plays set during that era.

Actors use Received Pronunciation because that is what people spoke back then, right? Not quite.

Take a listen to this recording of Virginia Woolf, who grew up in the late Victorian era:

This accent, often referred to as high RP or more colloquially as the Queen’s English, is quite different from what your average dialect coach teaches. The Received Pronunciation that I and other actors learned in drama school is a modern variant that became widespread after WWII.

There are, in fact, even more anachronistic uses of this accent. Restoration comedy is typically performed in RP, even though English as it was spoken during the Restoration would have have hardly sounded like modern British English.

So why do we use a modern accent for plays written a hundred (or 300) years ago? Convention.

The world of a play (or film) is not the same as the actual world. Hence the notion of stage dialects. We use slightly artificial accents because the real thing would be distracting or incomprehensible.  If we Americans watched a production of The Importance of Being Earnest with Ms. Woolf’s accent, it would drive us toward the exits in about fifteen minutes.

On the other hand, there are times when I think stage dialects are taken too far. I have read the work of dialect coaches who recommend using a standard Irish accent for the plays of Seán O’Casey, which I think waters down the power of his plays. I find it absurd to use something other than a Dublin brogue for plays clearly written in the vernacular of that city.

I think there are indeed some situations where 100% authentic accents don’t serve the needs of a particular play or film. On the other hand, I don’t think you should discard reality entirely. It’s a tricky balancing act.

*This is technically an erroneous use of the word “dialect,” since the only thing you are learning is an accent (i.e. way of pronouncing words).  But “stage dialect” is nevertheless the more frequently used term among voice and dialect coaches.

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A Quick Update

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Ben

I’ve received a lot of great feedback in the comments about yesterday’s post, Mastering the Trap-Bath Split. With that in mind, I’ve made some minor revisions to the post to eliminate points of confusion.

I’ve sensed there is an unwritten rule in the blogosphere that you aren’t supposed to revise posts once they’re done (outside of crossing things out, which I find to be a clunky convention).

This is a rule I am going to break, for a few reasons:

1.) Blogging is a medium conducive to mistakes.
2.) I don’t want to leave inaccuracies uncorrected.

And most importantly:

3.) I really like getting feedback from others, and putting that feedback into practice.

With that in mind I’m working on developing something of a “revisions” page that explains what has been changed in various posts. But that’s still in the works.

Anyway, I’m really thankful for all the kind words and great tidbits of info. Keep it coming!

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Mastering the Trap-Bath Split

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Ben
Recieved Pronunciation Chart

Vowel Chart for Received Pronunciation. The short-a vowel is the /æ/ vowel, while the broad-a is the /ɑ:/ vowel (Wikimedia)

[Update: I made a few slight revisions to this post based on feedback.]

(NOTE:  This post uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For information about the IPA, please visit my page of IPA Resources.)

What is the #1 thing American actors screw up doing British accents? Four little words: The Trap-Bath Split.

Let me explain. In most American accents, we pronounce trap, cat, and bad with roughly the same vowel as ask, can’t and laugh.  This is what we refer to as the short-a sound.

In many British accents, however, these are two separate vowels: the first group of words (i.e. trap) are pronounced with a short-a,  (IPA æ) as in America ; but the second group (i.e. bath) is pronounced with a broad-a, IPA ɑ: (i.e. “ah“). Hence the Trap-Bath Split.

To put it in crudely, Americans would say The cat took a bath so that cat and bath are pronounced with the same vowel.  For many British people, however, only cat would be pronounced with this vowel;  bath is pronounced with the same broad-a vowel as father or palm.

This is tricky for Americans to master.  There are no easy rules for which words fall into these two categories. For example, the word chant is pronounced with broad-a in Standard British English (IPA ɑ: or chahnt), but the word ant is pronounced with the short-a.

That is why I have watched many great American actors do flawless British accents until they they let loose an American pronunciation of last or can’t. Ouch.

So, American actor, how can you avoid being a victim of the Trap-Bath Split? Well, first things first, make sure the dialect you are doing actually has the split.

A number of British accents, contrary to popular belief, do not feature the split.  And furthermore, the split is used in accents outside the United Kingdom. For handy reference, then, this is a list of accents with the split and those without:

Accents with the Trap-Bath Split:

  • Received Pronunciation (Standard British)
  • Cockney/London English
  • Australian English*
  • New Zealand English
  • South African English
  • Old-fashioned New England Accent (Down East)

Accents without the Trap-Bath Split:

  • Nearly all American and Canadian Accents
  • Scottish English
  • Northern English Accents
  • Carribean English (usually)

To make matters more confusing, there are some dialect regions where it’s mixed. Some speakers have the split in these places, some don’t. I would say these are:

  • Midlands English (Birmingham, etc.)
  • Welsh English
  • Irish English (depending on many factors)
  • Boston English (still a feature in some very working-class dialects)

My rule of thumb? If you’re playing a character who speaks with Received Pronunciation or of a character from the London area, always use the split. With pretty much any other region in England, do research that is as specific as possible.  It can really vary in this day and age.

When you have confirmed that your character indeed has a Trap-Bath Split accent, such as Standard British (RP) or Cockney, here are a few pointers:

1.) Understand which words generally fall into the Bath category. Here are the types of words that usually are pronounced with this broad-a:

  • -aff: staff, chaff, etc.
  • -aft: daft, after, draft, etc.
  • -alf: half, calf, etc.
  • -ample: example, sample, etc.
  • -ance: dance, lance, etc.
  • -anch: ranch, branch, etc.
  • -ans: answer, etc.
  • -ant: can’t, chant, advantage, etc.
  • -aph: graph, etc.
  • -as or -ass: ask, trespass, grass, etc
  • -ath: bath, path, etc.
  • -augh: laugh, etc.
  • -aunt: aunt, etc.

Again, there are many individual exceptions to the list above. The important thing is to know where the broad-a tends to appear in British English, not to memorize every single word that is pronounced like this.

2.) If you’re having trouble mastering the split, circle every instance in your script where these kinds of words appear.

3.) Get your hands on a copy of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. This is an indispensable volume of British and American pronunciations edited by British linguist John C. Wells. For trap-bath words, it clearly marks whether British English pronounces these words with a æ (trap) or ɑ: (bath). (You can also use dictionary.com, but I prefer the Pronunciation Dictionary because it’s portable, back up by decades of research, and more complete in general).

On a side note, you may be wondering where, exactly, this split comes from? And why do Americans not have the split? Unfortunately, I have no clue. The split seems to have fully developed in Southern England some time in the early 19th-century or thereabouts. That explains why Americans don’t have it: most British immigration had dried up by the time it emerged**. But like a lot of phonological changes, there is unlikely to be a clear, logical explanation.

Trust me, I know it’s hard.  As an actor, I still looked up trap-bath words long after I had mastered all the minutiae of certain accents. The rules are so illogical that it requires constant refresher courses.

The bottom line is, the Trap-Bath Split is one of the biggest Achilles heels in learning RP or similar British accents. Without mastering it, it is a dead giveaway that an actor isn’t a Brit!

*As a commenter kindly pointed out, the split is somewhat incomplete in Australia.  I would say it’s widespread enough, however, that you can put Oz into the split category.

**Actually, the split began to occur before this. It began with certain vowels being “lengthened” and it was only later that these vowels become the “long-a”. For what it’s worth, it is often suggested that the “tense-lax” split in New York City is a relative of the Trap-Bath split (But that’s a post for another day).

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Techspeak for Evil

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Ben

MalwareThe information age has produced something of a dialect.  Techspeak (if you want to call it that) has a vast trove of unique vocabulary, its own grammatical and syntactical rules, and represents a very real culture.  And I am fascinated by an interesting subset of its vocabulary:  words used to describe evil presences on the internet.

I mention this because it’s been a difficult week for blogging.  A wave of DDos attacks hit WordPress just before the weekend (I’ll explain what “DDos” means below).  Then, just yesterday, another of these attacks hit my web host. Rrrrrrgggh.

Since I’m in webmaster hell, I might as well have a barbecue. While I don’t typically discuss etymology, I’ll make an exception today. Here is a look at some words we use to describe the scary things on the internet, and where these terms come from.

Virus: The oldest of “e-villainy” words.  This word dates back to at least the early 1970s, although the concept of a malicious computer program was posited by computer godfather John Von Neumann in the 1940s.  It’s one of the most brilliant tech words in history, emphasizing the terrifying similarity between computers and living things.

Cyberterrorism: This is an uncreative blanket term referring to all malicious attempts to wreak havoc on the internet.  This word has been on the rise in recent years, probably because “terrorism” makes people take things a little more seriously.  And cyberterrorism is getting to be a serious problem.

Malware: Similar to a virus, Malware refers to a piece of software that infiltrates computers or softwares without consent.  It dates from the ’90’s and I’d love to know who created it.  I like the deft use of the prefix “mal-” — it’s a cut above your typically unimaginative piece of tech jargon.

DDoS: A Distributed Denial of Service attack is usually an attempt to overload a server with thousands of hits to slow down its system.  Like I said, I got hammered with a few of these in the past few days.  DDos isn’t the most interesting acronym.  What about calling it a “party crasher?”  It’s basically the equivalent of some guy who’s mad at you showing up to your party uninvited with a bunch of his drunk, belligerent buddies.

419: Ever received an email about how a Nigerian prince has $800,000,000 and will give you a cut if you “would be so kind wire money order to him?”  This is a 419 Scam, referring to the part of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with internet con-artistry.  Interestingly, the term denotes a kind of urban pride in Nigeria (akin to how rappers will mention their area codes in songs–only more evil, obviously).

Spam: This word is so ubiquitous that I almost forgot to list it.  Spam, if you’ve been living on Jupiter, refers to the emails you get from strangers promimising to make your bank account and certain appendages larger.  Unlike most tech words, this one has a very specific etymology–it dates back to a discussion among usenet users in 1993.  I’m not sure why it shares a name with a vile meat by-product, but it’s pretty appropriate.

Troll: This word refers to ugly creatures who live under bridges and terrorize people.  Oh, and it also refers to some kind of mythical creature.  Har har har.  Seriously, though, this is another borrowed word that’s just perfect: it describes the kind of people who hang around on blogs to stir up trouble with incendiary comments.  Believe it or not, this usage didn’t begin with the internet: the usage of “to troll” to mean “to bait” predates Shakespeare!

Weasel Words: I love this one, a term specific to Wikipedia.  A weasel word is a way of making an unverified statement without it appearing as such.  For example “Some people think …” or “It has been suggested that …”  As in “it has been suggested that 99% of linguistics-related pages on Wikipedia are full of lies.”

-bait:  This is one of the internet’s most widespread productive suffixes.  It usually refers to “baiting” somebody to get some kind of reaction out of them.  “Tweetbait,” for example, is when you tweet somebody with a lot of Twitter followers in the hope they will respond to you. I suppose the natural end to this would be “Obamabait:” tweeting the president to get him to tweet you back (which would increase your number of followers, indeed).

Apologies for the slightly off-topic post here. My frustration at the internet Gods is ebbing. I’ll get back to “caught-cot mergers” and “labiodental r’s” soon enough!

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The Cot-Caught Merger

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Ben
A Cot

A Cot! (Wikimedia)

One of the major distinctions in American English is something called the Cot-Caught Merger.  This is exactly what it sounds like: some dialects merge the sounds in words like cot, lot and Tom with the vowel in caught, paw, and thought.  Dialects in the Western United states almost always have this merger; most dialects in the Eastern half of the US do not (with the exception of Northeastern New England).

So, whereas somebody from New Jersey might pronounce cot and caught as IPA kɑt and kɔt (“caht” and “cawht”), somebody from Los Angeles might pronounce these words as IPA kɑt and kɑt(“caht” and “caht”). In other words, the same.

Seems like not a big deal, right? And yet you’d be surprised at how much passion it provokes in people. English-language geeks like myself will spend hours discussing the precise dimensions and specificities of the merger.  I was once part of a (now-defunct) language forum where there were three-hundred-page debates over this piece of linguistic minutiae.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating.  But let me get to the point here:  I think I’m cot-caught merging.

This seems strange.  I grew up in Connecticut, which is not a Cot-Caught merged state, and I lived in New York City, perhaps the least Cot-Caught merged place on earth, for 13 years (cot is IPA kat whereas caught is IPA kʊət — that is, caht and caw-uht). But I’ve recently noticed that my vowel for cot (or lot or cod) has started to take on a more rounded and backer quality, while the vowel in caught has begun to inch a little forward.

And I’m not the only one. Upon listening to a recording of my beloved significant other, a voiceover artist, I noticed that she tended to pronounce both sounds with a slightly rounded vowel (IPA ɒ). And she grew up in greater Philadelphia, which is another area of extreme difference between the two phonemes.

So what’s going on here?  Well, confession time: my girlfriend and I were both trained as actors, and let’s face it, actors aren’t great examples of “normal” dialect behavior. But I have read that the cot-caught merger is spreading like wildfire. Why?

As with all language change, there are bound to be numerous contributing factors, but one possibility I would posit is the rise of the technology sector over the past thirty years. Dialect changes tend to gravitate from where the money is, and until the housing boom, the money was in tech-driven areas like California and Washington State.

Then again, in most parts of the US, the Cot-Caught distinction wasn’t that great to begin with. In places where these sounds are kept distinct, Caught is often only a very slightly rounded version of Cot.

Anybody else feel like their “cots” aren’t all that different from being “caught” these days?

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Dialect Savants on YouTube

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Ben

I have been with the family for a few days and haven’t got a chance to post anything substantial.  So I figured I would quickly comment on the recent rash of “dialect savant” videos on YouTube.  The most trafficked of them is this young woman:

But there is also:

 

 

I mean no disrespect to the creators of these videos, but I am never all that impressed by the “around the world in x number of accents” routine. In my opinion, people are wowed more by the fact of somebody changing their voice repeatedly than the accuracy of the dialects being performed. Which is not to say that all of the accents in the above videos are poorly done.

What I admire in dialect work is endurance. If you can convince me you are from another country for an entire play, or movie, or TV show, that is much more impressive than rattling off a sentence or two in every regional twang under the sun.

Thoughts?

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Pahk Yuh Cah: Non-Rhotic in New England

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Ben
Harvard Yard

Harvard Yark (Wikimedia)

A few years back, I was sitting in a restaurant in my hometown of Willimantic, Connecticut*. A few booths over, a late-middle-aged man was talking to a young woman paying at the counter. Here is my paraphrasing of the conversation:

Him: Where did you go to school?
Her: I went to Kramer. Then Windham High.
Him: Yeah? What year did you graduate?
Her: 2004.
Him: Beat me by fifty years. I graduated in 1954.

The age gap between these locals was apparent from more than their conversation. It could be found in words like “Kramer” and “Year.” He spoke with a non-rhotic accent, meaning the letter “r” was dropped at the end of these words (I.e. “Kramuh,” “Yee-uhs,” etc.). She spoke with a rhotic accent; like most Americans, she pronounced every “r:” “Kramer,” “Years.”

This snippet of dialogue confirmed a suspicion of mine: In Willimantic, people born before World War II tend to “drop their r’s.” Among those born after WWII, however, these pronunciations are quite rare.

Willimantic is a small town with a linguistically important location: it is smack dab on the traditional border between Western New England and Eastern New England. The difference between these two sub-regions is that the West is rhotic (“Kramer”), while East is non-rhotic (“Kramuh”).

But the interaction above suggests that within two generations this line has receded greatly. Non-rhoticity, once as part of New England’s culture as Cape Cod or the Red Sox, is quickly disappearing throughout the region. I doubt that it will vanish within my lifetime, but I can’t say it will last another hundred years.

To give you a good idea of how much r-lessness is shrinking in New England, take a look at this study from NYU. The researchers analyzed a variety of locals from Boston, Massachusetts. To give one startling piece of data, men over seventy only pronounced final “r” 11% of the time; for men under 40, this rate increased five-fold, to 55%.

That’s remarkable. As a New Englander, I have always thought of Boston as the last great hold out for non-rhotic accents. I have been to Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and most middle-class people my age have pronounced their “r”s. But Boston? I figured Beantown would “pahk it’s cahr in Hahvuhd yahd” forever.

What is to account for this change? Obviously, all the corporate relocation that occured after WWII explains some of it; all those “nuclear families” moving to New England from Iowa and Nebraska.

I have a different theory, though. I believe some of the erosion of non-rhoticity is due to an increase in college education. Young people head off to other parts of the country and lose stigmatized dialect features, or they go to universities nearby where students from all of the country attend. And they stop dropping their “r”s.

Whatever the cause, though, it’s sad to see non-rhoticity go. It was one of those pieces of proof that Americans do not, in fact, all speak alike. And in a strange way, it was one of New England’s treasures.

*Side note:  I actually grew up in a few towns in the area, but Willimantic is where my parents have worked for nearly 30 years.

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Cheryl Cole’s Accent: You Decide

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Ben
Cheryl Cole with Simon Cowell

Alison Martin

I don’t want this to turn into a pop culture site, but it is hard to ignore the recent hubbub surrounding Cheryl Cole. As I mentioned a few days back, Ms. Cole is a pretty pop singer from the UK who was told to lose her Geordie (Newcastle) accent before appearing on the US version of her hit TV show, The X Factor.

Yesterday, this piece in the BBC’s magazine explored the issue, with this pointed quote from Critic Kevin O’Sullivan on Americans’ perception of British dialects:

“Americans have two British accents that they recognise – standard-issue received pronunciation and Cockney, as long as the latter isn’t too pronounced. No-one over there can understand strong northern accents.”

My pedestrian observation? I don’t find Ms. Cole that hard to understand. Her accent is already a watered-down version of Geordie. It’s certainly not the classic Geordie accent, where the phrase “I drove down to the Tyneside” would sound like “Uh druhv doon to the Tanesade” (IPA ə dɹɞ:v du:n tə ðə tɛɪnsɛɪd).

And forgive the tabloid purience of what I’m about to say but … isn’t Cole’s accent part of her “swoon factor?” It would make as little sense to tell Colin Farrell to drop the brogue in interviews.

Okay. I’m going to stop now, before this post verges into Daily Mirror territory. Because I don’t have the most typical “American ear,” I’ll let you guys decide for yourself: below is a video clip of Cole speaking to an American interviewer. Would her dialect fly in the States? Or would it be a hindrance?

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