Rhyming Slang

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Ben

Grub Street, London, 1871It was inevitable: if you write a blog about English dialects, eventually you will write a post about Cockney rhyming slang.

For you confused Americans out there, here is the basic jist of rhyming slang:

1.) Take any word in the English language. Like “bed,” for example.
2.) Find a two-word phrase which rhymes with this word. In our case, we might choose “soda bread” to rhyme with “bed.”
3.) When you use the original word in a sentence, replace said word with the first word of the rhyming phrase. So instead of saying “Henry, get in the bed this minute!” say, “Henry, get in the soda this minute!”

I probably mangled that. Forgive me, Londoners. I am an American who knows not what he does.

Here are some better examples:

Apples = Stairs (as in “Apples and Pears”)
Dickie = Word (as in “Dickie Bird”)
Goose = Cheque (as in “Goose’s Neck”)
Pete = Wrong (as in British DJ “Pete Tong”)

You can also say the entire phrase if you want (i.e. “It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong!”) But I don’t find that as much fun.

There are many theories about the origins of rhyming slang, none supported by much hard evidence. The first is that the slang was a way of maintaining the identity of the Cockneys, a deliberate code created to keep outsiders at a distance and maintain an upper hand on the aristocracy.

Another plausible hypothesis posits that rhyming slang began as a kind of crude business jargon. By speaking in code, storekeeps, bartenders and vendors communicated with each other and their employees without being understood by customers.

There is also a derogatory, classist explanation, which is that rhyming slang was the language of thieves.  But that strikes me as part of the British upper-crust tradition of treating all lower stations as criminal.

One thing I find intriguing about the first two ideas (the “community code” theory and the “business jargon” theory) is that they remind me of theories about the origins of Yiddish. Like rhyming slang, it is often suggested that Yiddish was a way of asserting financial and cultural independence from the Germanic communities that surrounded Europe’s Jews.

Not for nothing, but East London was a major immigration point for Jews in the 19th-Century. It’s possible that Rhyming Slang was part of a broader European Jewish tradition of using language to strengthen communities and do business with hostile locals. Then again, the bulk of Jewish immigration was in the late Victorian era, long after rhyming slang had been established.  So this is just speculation.

There is an unfortunate dearth of academic literature about this topic, so I open up this discussion to anybody in the know: Is rhyming slang still alive and kicking? Any other theories as to where it came from?

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Dialects at the Oscars

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Ben
The red carpet

Courtesy Alan Light

As has been noted more than a few times, last night’s Oscars telecast was a veritable cornucopia of accents. Best picture nominees features Boston English, Ozarks English, California English, Texas English, Received Pronunciation and, if you want to broaden the definition of “dialect” a bit, Tech Speak (i.e. The Social Network).

Does anybody else feel like Oscars and fake dialects have gone more hand in hand recently? I did some simple number crunching and realized that for 18 of the past 20 Best Picture winners, at least one of the top two billed actors was doing a dialect other than their own. Looking at the previous twenty years (1970-1990), this number was only 7 (by my count).

Do regional dialects impart some kind of prestige upon movies these days? Are we perhaps more accepting of foreign films and actors than we used to be? It’s an interesting, if puzzling, trend.

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Australians do the Best Accents

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Ben
Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art

Sydney's National Institue of Dramatic Art (Wikimedia)

I often use Google News to write this blog. Crude source of inspiration it may be, but searching for permutations of “dialect,” “accent,” or “language” gives me a wealth of material to ponder. There is one exception to this, however, and that is when I search for “Australian Accent.”

That query yields the same results again and again:

  • Australian actor loses his accent for American TV show
  • Australian actress loses her accent for American TV show
  • Australian needs to lose accent for American TV show!
  • So, Australian actor, what was it like learning an American accent for this new American TV show?

You get the idea. These headlines illustrate a well-known fact: there is an extremely disproportionate number of Australian actors in American television and film. Disproportionate because Australia is a small country (it only recently cracked 20 million), as far from the United States as anywhere on earth, and has an accent nothing like an American dialect.

But let’s face it: Australian actors are really good at accents. If I were an American TV producer I might hire an Australian without worrying whether they had the American accent down. I would just assume they had it mastered, the way I would assume my doctor has a medical degree. It’s a given.

So then, why are Australian actors so good at accents? What is it about this friendly island nation that breeds dialect savants?

Frankly, because Aussie actors have to be at accents. We Americans and Brits can afford to be lazier. As drama students, we have the bulk of contemporary drama at our disposal. If an Aussie actor want to be considered for the greatest roles in English speaking drama, on the other hand, that actors needs to get out of his dialect comfort zone.

This is the theatrical equivalent of why a “Scandinavian monolingual” seems as mythical as a unicorn: if you want to spend your entire life in the greater Copenhaagen area, so be it, but eventually you might want to visit Amsterdam. The more culturally small and isolated a community, the more that culture broadens its linguistic horizons.

This isn’t about geography, it’s about cultural dominence. Living in New York City, I often forget that I am only 5 1/2 hours from a province (Quebec), where the native language is French. But as members of the most widespread culture on earth, we Americans don’t feel an instinctual need to learn other languages, even those close by.

By contrast, everything is stacked against Aussie thespians in terms of accent proficiency. Their own dialect is unusual and phonetically bizarre. They are isolated from all other accents of English. Immigration from other English-speaking countries, until fairly recently, was limited. And yet, as whole, they are the most accent-proficient actors on earth.

But I am sure Aussies are not the only example of this trend. What other small or isolated countries seem especially good at languages or dialects?

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Dialects and Population Density

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Ben
Sattelite image of Phoenix, AZ

Phoenix, AZ, an low-density American city (NASA)

Since posting Americans: Intolerant of Regional Dialects? a few days ago, I’ve received a flurry of comments and questions about why Americans are less “accent conscious” than the British.

There are many reasons that we don’t recognize the differences between dialects in our own country (history, settlement patterns, the media, etc.), but I would like to focus on what I believe to be an important factor in this: population density.

I am going to compare two pictures to make my point (bear with me!). The first is a photograph of the main street of a small Welsh town of just over 6,000, Welshpool:

Welshpool, UK

Main Street, Welshpool (courtesy Manfred Heyde)

This next photo is of the main street of a comparably-sized American town, Monmouth, Oregon:

Monmouth, Oregon

Main Street, Monmouth, OR (Wikimedia)

Now this is no slight to Monmouth, a lovely town in arguably the most beautiful region of North America. But the difference between a British “small town” and an American “small town” is glaringly obvious here. The UK main street is a bustling town center full of businesses and small flats. The American main street has no noticeable houses, mostly comprises of low-density buildings, and tapers off into suburbia a few hundred yards down the road.

Technology accounts for this difference. Most development in the UK occured before the advent of the automobile. Small towns in the British Isles were built as densely packed communities surrounded by land used for farming (or later, mining). Because there were no cars, towns had to be built like this to be economical. And these development patterns have remained into the 21st-Century.

In America, on the other hand, most of our major development occurred in the twentieth century. That means we built most of our homes and businesses at a time when dense communities seemed unnecessary thanks to cars. We built sprawling suburbs instead of tight clusters of neighborhoods. And in my opinion, this has a LOT to do with why we are less conscious of dialects.

The linguistic implications of these patterns are large. In Britain, dialects are packed together in tight little clusters because that is how cities and towns are built. In [many parts of] America, dialects tend to gently flow into one another over long distances. Because that is how America was built.

In short, dense development creates unique dialects. When people live close to a town center, when they walk to work, walk to do their shopping, in short, when they INTERACT with other people in the same small area, dialects form into concrete local phenomena. Growing up in small town America, by contrast, I would travel ten miles for a doctor’s appointment, fifteen miles to go to the mall, and my local high school had students from towns thirteen miles away. In America, dialects are [often ]dispersed, scattered to the wind, diluted by the force of suburban and auto-centric sprawl. And because of this, in my opinion, it is hard for us to perceive major linguistic differences.

This is not the say that we Americans don’t have different dialects. But because we [sometimes] have to travel far to find ways of speaking that differ from our own, we think of other accents as being from faraway lands, remote from our experience. We have many dialects in the US; they just aren’t within driving distance.

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Why There are Less New York Accents in Movies

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Ben
The Brooklyn Bridge

Courtesy Ad Meskens

I hate how the mainstream media discusses dialects and accents. Journalists routinely fudge basic linguistic terminology, misquote experts, and indulge in all kinds of classist and/or racist assumptions.

Case in point is this article Academy Award filmmakers need to make movies with New York accent, in New York’s Daily News, which is a tie-in to the upcoming Academy Awards. The thrust of the piece is that are too many Boston accents in movies these days, Boston accents are annoying, and there should be more New York accents in movies.

Wow. It’s a wonder that print media is lagging behind the internet.

And yet this ridiculous editorial poses a valid question: why does it seem like there are so many Boston accents in films, and so few New York City accents?

Just a few decades ago, the opposite was true. In the 1970s, New York accents were everywhere (thanks to Pacino, DeNiro, et. al.). Likewise, I recall few films featuring the Boston accent until very recently. So what gives?

Here’s why I think New York accents are rare in movies these days:

1.) There just aren’t a lot of NYC accents in New York City anymore. It’s hardly a secret that the New York City dialect has mostly moved to the suburbs or to the further reaches of the Outer Boroughs (Canarsie, Bayside, etc.). In other words, it is becoming a suburban dialect. Those gritty New York dramas from the 70s are from a world long gone.

2.) It is hard to set crime dramas in a city without much crime. Local city dialects have usually appeared in films about crime. I’d say 75% of classic New York films feature crime as a central theme: On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection. Now that New York City is one of the wealthiest and safest cities in North America, it’s not a goldmine for gritty crime sagas.

3.) The Jewish middle-class is leaving the city. Another big source of New York Accents in film was the Jewish Middle-Class. I’m thinking Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and others of their generation. Sadly, much of this contingent has left the city for the suburbs or, if they have stayed in the city, their children are likely to have much milder (or even non-existent) accents.

4.) There aren’t as many local actors. In the 1970’s it seemed like every other actor in films had a New York Accent. The most famous actor training programs in the country were in New York, and attracted lots of local talent from working-class backgrounds. Not nowadays. Almost all of these schools have long since fallen from prestige, replaced by academic graduate schools. Acting in New York has become a profession for the wealthy and educated. And with this change, actors with New York accents have become a rarity.

5.) The Classic New York accent has become stigmatized. Between The Jersey Shore, The Sopranos, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, popular culture has not been kind to the accents of the tri-State area. (I realize these three examples take place in New Jersey, but that’s because many of the people on those shows are originally from New York).

6.) The rise of multi-cultural New York English. In the poorest communities of New York, something I vaguely term multi-cultural New York English has overtaken the traditional New York City dialect amongs younger generations. Features of African American Vernacular English have been adopted by young people of many backgrounds. New York English is waning fast in the inner-city.

So then, why is Boston English more common in films these days? In my mind it’s a result of various talents “making it big.” There are now several Boston actors who have become major players in Hollywood (Mark Wahlberg, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon) in addition to a Boston author (Dennis Lehane) who has become one of the biggest providers of source material for crime films. I don’t think there is any sudden affection for Beantown amongst Hollywood producers.

It’s interesting, though, how accents go in and out of “popularity” in film. Can you think of any others?

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Americans: Intolerant of Regional Accents?

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Ben
A Map of General American English

The region where dialects are closest to "General American" (Wikimedia, based on William Labov)

I often assume that the British are more accent-conscious than we Americans are. Let me put that more bluntly: I assume the British are more accent-intolerant than we are.

There is a good bit of evidence to support this. Brits have made accent mockery an art form. Whereas in America, we refer to “Southern Accents” or “New York Accents,” the British have a special taxonomy for this kind of thing. You don’t speak with a “Liverpool Accent” or a “Birmingham Accent” or a “Newcastle Accent;” you speak “Scouse,” “Brummie” or “Geordie.” And those terms are often unflattering.

Being a Yank, I have always thought this to be a relic of Britain’s class system. All those Victorian aristocrats sneering at Dickensian workhouses, those DH Lawrence novels about ladies seduced by coal miners. We have no history of this in the US, right? We find Southerners charming! The Bronx accent is rugged but treasured!

But it was reported this week that British singer Cheryl Cole was told to “lose the accent” in order to appear as a judge on the American version of the BBC’s X-Factor. Now Cole is from Newcastle, a city with perhaps the trickiest dialect to understand in the English-speaking world. But this accent is just as difficult to scrutinize by Brits as Americans. So what’s with the “lose the accent” memo?

Perhaps this speaks to a dirty secret: for all our friendliness, we Americans may actually be less tolerant of regional dialects than the British are. Given, we don’t mock you mean-spiritedly because of your accent. We just politely ask you to “tone it down.”

What leads me to this conclusion is our media. In the UK, TV shows boast a variety of regional accents. EastEnders, Coronation Street, and Queer as Folk all feature characters with stigmatized accents, yet these programs have enjoyed wild popularity. There are TV hosts with Northern accents, celebrities with West Country brogues, and when Irish or Scottish characters appear in British films, other characters rarely comment on their dialect.

In the US, on the other hand, it seems that 99% of the actors on TV talk with the same dialect. All newscasters talk the same. All commercial voiceovers sound the same. There is a relentless, maddening sameness that pervades the speech of anybody in the public eye. Indeed, there is little “regional” media presence. There are no soap operas set in small towns in the American South. There are no TV crime dramas set in Boston with authentic accents. We seem to have made a collective decision that regionalisms are best left at home.

In short, I suspect that Americans are developing ideas about what consitutes “Standard English,” while Brits, conversely, are starting to shake off these notions. (This change may have begun years ago: when I was a child, I remember my grandmother, a fan of BBC radio, noting that news reporters spoke like “Cockneys” these days.) America and the UK seem to be going in opposite directions. British accents are becoming more similar to one another while, paradoxically, the British public is tolerating regionalisms more. Meanwhile, American accents are becoming more fractured, while we cling more and more to “standard American English.”

But maybe I’m generalizing. Do you think we’re less accepting of accents that we used to be? Or more?

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Dialect Profile: The Cork Accent

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Ben
Sheeps Head, Ireland

Sheeps Head, County Cork (Wikimedia)

(In this series, we discuss different dialects using actual video or audio samples.  This page uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For information about this notation, please visit my page of IPA Resources.)

In Ireland, Cork means something more than the stopper on a wine bottle. It is also the name of the city of Cork and the surrounding county, also named Cork. (“Cork” has nothing to do with the aforementioned wood by-product: It is an anglicization of Irish “Corcaigh”).

Cork is known for its rugged beauty, its rich history, and (of course) its unusual accent. The Cork dialect is often described as musical, and indeed, it has an oddly “sing-songy” ring to it that is mocked by some and beloved by others. To give you an idea of popular Irish conceptions of this accent, here is comedian Tommy Tiernan giving his comedic overview:

Ouch. Joking aside, what is the actual Cork accent like? Like many other dialects in Western Ireland, this accent seems more closely related to the Irish language, with a number of sounds obviously imported directly from Irish.

Let’s take a listen to a sample. Here is an interview with a local of Bantry, Co. Cork, footballer Graham Canty:

Pretty unusual, huh? A touch of Jamaican, perhaps a bit of Welsh. It is recognizably an Irish accent, but not the “leprechaun” accent you hear in popular culture. Here are a couple of observations:

1.) The dialect is fast, and sentences seem to run into each other. Everything is phrased differently, in other words, than most dialects of English.

2.) Words like “top” and “lot” are pronounced with a quite front, unrounded vowel: IPA a or ɐ (“tahp,” “laht,” “naht,” etc.). This feature is somewhat reminiscent to U.S. Great Lakes dialects like Chicago or Cleveland.

3.) The vowel sound in words like “goat” and “rope” can have a very open pronunciation, close to IPA ɔ: (hence “goat” sounds like gawwwt).

4.) Words like “about” and “round” are pronounced with a very tight diphthong, close to IPA ɔʊ. Thus, Cork “bout” nearly rhymes with American “boat.”

5.) This accent boasts the “classic” Irish r. For casual readers, this is essentially a “regular” r except with the back of the tongue raised slightly. For the more knowledgeable, this refers to a velarized alveolar approximant (ɹˠ) or a velarized alveolar tap (ɾˠ).

This last feature might be where Mr. Tiernan gets the notion that this accent sounds vaguely French.  The letter “r” in this accent has a very “throaty” quality to it.

Oddly, I haven’t been able to find a lot of really good samples of Cork English online. There are plenty of Dublin accents, Belfast accents, and what not, but Cork is a bit elusive. It seems this is yet another dialect that locals lose the minute they move away from their home town. Which is a shame, because it’s quite a pretty accent.

That being said, our sample speaker is on the young side (Mr. Canty was born in 1980).  So it’s safe to say Cork English isn’t fading anytime soon.

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The Wild World of the English “R”

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Ben

The Letter RCompared to other languages, consonants in English don’t vary that much from dialect to dialect. Our vowels are all over the map, but our consonants don’t change much. For example, the English “m” hasn’t budged since the days of Old English. By contrast, the “ou” vowel in “house” has gone through hundreds of permutations.

There is one exception to this generalization: the letter “r.” This sound is subject to all kinds of variants throughout the English-speaking world. There are trilled r’s, tapped r’s, labial r’s, and retroflex r’s.

Consider these varieties of “r” (and these are just the ones I’m aware of!):

The “Standard” R: /ɹ/ (Alveolar Approximant) This is probably the most common type of “r” in English. It’s created by placing the tip of the tongue close the ridge just behind the top row of teeth. You can hear this “r” in numerous British, American, Irish and Australian accents.

The “American” R: /ɻ/ (Retroflex approximant) Similar to the “velar approximant” described above. It is pronounced the same way, except the tongue is curved back just behind the alveolar ridge. You hear this most commonly in American and some Irish accents.

The “Scottish” R: /r/ (Alveolar trill) This is like the “r” in Spanish, Russian or Italian. In English you don’t hear this commonly except in a few strong Scottish or Welsh English speakers.

The “Northern English” R: /ɾ/ (Alveolar tap or flap) This is the “tapped” r that you hear in the Spanish word “cara.” This is fairly common in Scotland and many part of Northern England.

The “Irish Gaelic” R: /ɾˠ/ (Velarized alveolar tap or flap) This is the like the “tapped” r above, except that the part of the tongue furthest back in the mouth (velum) is raised slightly. You can hear this “r” in one place: Ireland, especially in the West.

The “Cockney” R: /ʋ/ (Labiodental Approximant) This sound is made with the bottom lip positioned close to (but not quite touching) the upper teeth. This is a somewhat stigmatized pronunciation, which can be heard in the Greater London Area and some areas of the northeastern United States. Outsiders often hear this sound as “w.”

The “Northumbrian” R: /ʁ/ (Uvular Fricative) The rarest of r’s in the English language, this sound is similar to the “r” in standard French: it is pronounced with the uvula (back of the throat). This used to be heard in Northumbria in Northeastern England, but has almost completely died out at this point.

Then, of course, there is the question of whether an accent is “rhotic” or not: whether the “r” is pronounced in words like “car,” “after,” and “core” (as in American English), or whether the “r” is dropped (as in most British English).

What is it about English “r” that is conducive to so much variation? I haven’t read enough about the subject to begin to answer that question. And ideas from you linguists out there?

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Is the Southern Accent Leaving the cities?

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Ben

Immediately upon posting yesterday’s dissection of “y’all,” I came across a recent piece in North Carolina’s Cary News, titled Y’alls’ accent is fading. The article discusses the erosion of the traditional “Southern Accent” in urban areas. This passage sums it up:

Walt Wolfram, NCSU’s William C. Friday distinguished professor of English linguistics, says the South isn’t losing its identity in terms of speech – it’s reconfiguring. The South, particularly in urban areas, has transformed itself during the past 30 years, Wolfram said. Cities have been more influenced by outsiders, and this vowel shift is partially a product of that change. And it’s more subtle than natives might realize.

The piece focuses on Raleigh, North Carolina, near where the Cary News is based. That the Southern accent is mild in Raleigh isn’t surprising, since it’s a huge college town (the prestigious Duke University is nearby). Cities with large concentrations of academics and students often become strange little dialect islands due to the presence of so many outsiders.*

But the main point is clear. There appears to be a growing divide between the speech of rural and urban Southerners.

My own direct experience has suggested this. I’ve met middle-class people from cities such as Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, and even Charleston with only the mildest of accents. In particular, I am rarely surprised anymore when I meet someone from Texas’ larger towns (Dallas, Austin, Houston) with no discernable twang.

On the other hand, I’ve encountered transplants from rural parts of the South who still boast thick dialects. I had a co-worker from Eastern Tennessee some years back who had an accent so strong it sounded almost affected. Outside of the South’s major corporate hubs, these dialects don’t appear to be dying out anytime soon.

But those are my own perceptions. I live up North, so I have little direct experience. Any Southerners out there care to share insights about this urban/rural divide?

*The most notable example of this is Oxford. Although we associate this city with the poshest of British English, the local population of nearby Oxfordshire once spoke with a radically different dialect that survived well into the 20th-Century. You can find samples of this accent at the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings.

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The Remarkable History of “Y’all”

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Ben
Frequency of "Y'all" in the United States

The frequency of "Y'all" usage in the United States (Wikimedia)

In contemporary New York City, it is common to hear local teenagers use the word “y’all.” A few decades ago, this word would have been confined to speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), who brought the word with them from the American South. Yet nowadays, with the spread of AAVE, the word has been adopted by young New Yorkers of every ethnicity under the sun.

But where did this strange little word come from? The answer reveals a remarkable (and unlikely) story of language dispersion.

If you’re a little confused about what “y’all” means, you’re not alone. Even people who get the basic jist of “y’all” don’t grasp its grammatical purpose. The word is a “second person plural,” meaning it is a plural version of “you.” So, for example, in the American South (where “y’all” is most widespread) somebody would say:

“You want to go to the store?” if they were talking to a single person. Or,
“Y’all want to go to the store?” if they were talking to a group of people.

How “y’all” got to New York City is quite obvious: at several points in the Twentieth Century, African Americans moved to northern cities like New York for industrial jobs, and brought this dialect word with them from the South. No big mystery there.

But where did “y’all” come from in the first place? A fews years back, historian David Parker explored this question on his blog. For an answer he looked to linguist Michael Montgomery:

…Montgomery claims that “y’all” goes back to the Scots-Irish phrase “ye aw,” and he offers as evidence a letter written in 1737 by an Irish immigrant in New York to a friend back home: “Now I beg of ye aw to come over here.” As I understand Montgomery’s hypothesis, “ye aw” was Americanized into “y’all,” which is indeed a contraction of “you all” but would not have come into being without the influence of the Scots-Irish phrase.

I see little reason for doubting Montgomery’s hypothesis. But I dug a little deeper to see where “ye aw” itself comes from. Turns out I didn’t need to look far: a quick Google search of “ye aw” brings up numerous examples of this phrase being used in contemporary Scots. (Scots is a language spoken in much of Scotland which derives from middle-English. It influences, but is separate from, contemporary Scottish English.) This language was brought to Northern Ireland by Scottish planters, then brought to America by “Scots-Irish” immigrants.

So if we take this evidence seriously, it looks like “y’all” followed a unique path: A phrase in the Scots language was brought to the American South by Scots-Irish immigrants primarily from Northern Ireland. The word filtered down to slaves and their descendants, and became a feature of African American Vernacular English. African Americans moved to the Northern cities and brought this word with them.

And that is the beauty of English: teenagers in the Bronx appear to use a dialect word that comes from an unique language spoken in Scotland. One word. Two continents. Three shores. Four centuries. Five separate dialects. Wow.

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