Dived vs. Dove in American Dialects

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Ben
Dive vs. Dove

wikimedia

The past tense of “dive” exemplifies the quirky differences between American and British English. In Britain, this word is ostensibly “dived,” while Americans increasingly prefer “dove,” the latter likely formed via analogy from drive/drove (Insert joke about America’s auto-centric culture here).

However, it seems that the dived-dove distinction used to be something of a dialect marker in America. E. Bagby Atwood’s 1953 study A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States found that dove was chiefly Northeastern, used as the dominant form in New England, Upstate New York, and the Northeast corridor as far south as Wilmington, Delaware. In Central Pennsylvania, northeast Maryland, lowland areas of South Carolina, and a few other pockets, dived and dove were relatively interchangeable. Elsewhere in the Eastern US, presumably, dived was typical, along with more unusual forms like div and duv.*

So what’s happened since then? Well, I would hazard to guess that weird, wonderful old dialect forms like “div” and “duv” have waned significantly. But speaking purely from impression, it seems that “dove” has increased exponentially in the sixty years since Atwood’s study. It’s very difficult for me to say this with certainty, however, as we’re discussing an irregular past tense of a rarely used word for which I’ve found few straightforward studies.

So what kind of evidence can be found? Although I’ve often used Google’s NGram Viewer to examine unusual words, I have very little faith in their “American English Corpus.” So I attempted a wholly unscientific test which I call the “first 100 tweets” experiment, whereby one searches for a word on Twitter, looks up the first 100 tweets that use said word, then breaks down the tweets by nationality. After looking up 36 tweets, the ratio was a whopping 17 tweets in the UK using “dived” vs. only 2 tweets from America.

I unfortunately gave up at that point, when it became clear that data (so to speak) was going to be skewed by two important factors. First, the majority of tweets using “dived” involve Association Football (i.e. Soccer), and given the sport’s greater popularity in Britain than North America, it would likely distort things; it’s reasonable to think that, given that “dive” is a word with a particular meaning in the sport, American soccer fans might use “dived” as well.

Second, “dived” is almost certainly used by Americans in compounds such as “scuba dived,” “sky dived,” and “nose dived,” (as opposed to the bizarre-sounding “scuba dove,” “sky dove,” and “nose dove”), which again, would almost certainly make American “dived” usage difficult to assess.

So although the repeated assumption is that “dove” is the unmarked form in America, I can’t be 100% certain there aren’t still Americans who use “dived.” Yet if “dove” is now widespread in the US, why did “dived” so quickly recede? And why did this not occur in Britain?

*An important caveat: I have not read the study itself (it’s old and unavailable online except for the odd used copy sold on Amazon), only its description in R.L. Trask’s Historical Linguistics. 

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The Death of Drama School Accent Enforcement

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Ben

Although I enjoy the series Downton Abbey, I know little about the personal lives of its cast members. So the other day, after watching a program on PBS, I was startled by a promo interview with the actress who plays Mary Crawley, Michelle Dockery*:

Dockery is from East London, and her accent, though leagues from Cockney, is less “stuffy” than how she speaks on the show. Dockery’s starting point for the diphthong in words like “right” is further back here than in than the Crawleys’ post-Edwardian RP (aɪ vs. ɑɪ), she frequently uses a glottal stop for /t/, she vocalizes /l/ frequently (note “teww you” at :13), and the diphthong in words like “day” is a fairly open and lax.

Anyway, what I find interesting about Dockery is not that her accent is unusual (it isn’t), but rather how different it is from Lady Mary’s. She very much “affects” an accent when she steps into the shoes of her television counterpart, rather than simply tweaking a vowel here or there.

Dockery attended the prestigious Guildhall School, and thus exemplifies a real change from the way things were sixty years ago. Of course, there have always been British actors with regional or vernacular accents (particularly after World War II). But for Michael Caine to posh up his accent in Zulu (rather than restricting himself to playing Hackney gangsters) was slightly unusual for the time; more typical of the early 60’s was Peter O’Toole, who, despite his Yorkshire upbringing, spoke in interviews more or less as T.E. Lawrence would have.

But for the past 50 years, British drama schools have largely moved away from the fundamentalist doctrine which demands all regionalisms be obliterated an actor’s personal life as well as his stage speech. In her The Actor Speaks, voice coach Patsy Rodenburg describes this evolution:

There was a period in British drama training (roughly up to the 1960s) when every student actor was told that he or she must speak RP and that his or her own accent was irrelevant, unintelligible or, at worst, ugly. Actors who learned RP in this way could often sound disconnected and false. Their own natural voices, full of regional variety and sounds, had been lopped off crudely. Since the 1960s most voice and speech teachers have accepted that this rigid and somewhat elitist attitude to RP is morally wrong and artistically unsound.

And thank goodness for that.

So Dockery is an actress with an accent already within the RP family who must nevertheless alter her own speech quite a bit in order to play an RP speaker from 90 years ago. In other words, it seems likely that “mid-Century” RP, an accent which many actors once spoke both on- and off-stage, is increasingly going to become an something which young British thespians have to “put on.”

*This is a different interview than the one I saw on PBS, obviously.

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Northeastern PA’s “Un-Northeastern” Accent

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Ben

While a college freshman, I assumed one of my classmates to be from Minnesota or Wisconsin (my accent-dar was unsophisticated back then). She hailed from Scranton, Pennsylvania, however, a city a mere two hours from New York City. You might forgive my error after listening to former Scranton police chief Dan Duffy:

If the Great Lakes-ish sound of Scrantonians puzzles you, remember that The Electric City is only two hours from Syracuse. Even so, this is a remarkable testament to how rapidly accents change on the Eastern Seaboard–a town less than a hundred miles from both New York and Philadelphia is closer, speech-wise, to Chicago than those Northeastern megalopoles.

Scranton is also in the “highlands,” so to speak, where I find speech patterns to be especially diverse (there is more geography to impede the transmission of accent features). This seems especially true in the mountains of Northeastern PA.

For example, Scranton is only about 30 miles from Hazleton (as the crow flies), yet having spent time with Hazleton natives, I find the two accents quite distinguishable. For instance, whereas in Scranton the vowel in “lot” seems to be fairly central and unrounded (i.e. a), this same vowel is back and occasionally rounded in Hazleton (cardinal ɑ or ɒ). Listen to words like “common,” “stop” and “top” in this interview with Hazleton mayor Lou Barletta to get a sense of the difference*:

Bordering most major regions east of the Mississippi, PA exhibits lots of linguistic variation. But it’s still remarkable that one state encompasses an accent often mistaken for Brooklynese (South Philly), accents similar to the Great Lakes (Northern PA), accents that verge on inland Southern (Southwestern/Central PA), and at least one accent that resembles little else in the English-speaking world (Pittsburgh). It’s ironic that the state with arguably more dialect areas than any other has so few regionalisms recognizable to the rest of America.

*This is clearly inconsistent, though. Hazleton seems to be on a kind of border between the back, rounded vowel typical in Central/Western mountain towns like Altoona and the advanced, unrounded vowel more common East of the Alleghenies.

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Jane Austen’s English

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Ben
Emma Jane Austen

Illustration from Emma, by C.E. Brock

A reader recently wrote me with a question about the language in Jane Austen’s novels:

I see you’ve talked a little about accent in Shakespeare’s time, but do we know how English people sounded during the Regency era? I think it’s watching all the Jane Austen adaptations that makes me wonder which things the adapters have gotten right and which ones they’ve totally messed up.

Good question! In my opinion, the era’s pronunciation dictionaries and guides provide abundant evidence (albeit circumstantial) for how “elite” English was spoken during Jane Austen’s lifetime. It was arguably during the Regency that such accents started resembling Received Pronunciation as we recognize it today. But of course, there were striking differences.

One obvious such difference was the vowel in “goat” and “go.” In adaptations of Austen’s work, actors tend to speak with a centralized diphthong, in line with contemporary RP (gəʊt, or crudely, “geh-oat”). In the early 1800’s, however, this almost certainly would have been a back vowel, resembling either that of a conservative American accent (goʊt) or the pure monophthong common in rural Irish English (got).

Then there’s the matter of /r/ and whether it was pronounced or not at the end of words like “car,” “nurse,” or “care.” As I’ve mentioned before, late-eighteenth-Century pronunciation guru John Walker advocated a pronunciation in between the firmly r-ful Irish English and the r-lessness of London speech. I’m not sure what Walker meant by this “in between” /r/, but it seems r-lessness would have been at least fairly common among the gentry by the time Austen published her masterworks.

Then there is the matter of the TRAP-BATH split, a salient feature of many contemporary English accents whereby words like “bath,” “dance,” and “demand” are pronounced with the “broad a” in “father.” One of the more perplexing sections of Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary concerns this question (emphasis added):

This sound of “a” was formerly more than at present found before the nasal liquid “n,” especially when succeeded by c, t, or d, as “dance,” “glance,” “lance,” “France,” “chance,” “prance,” “grant,” “plant,” “slant,” “slander,” &c. … The hissing consonant “s” was likewise a sign of this sound of the a, whether doubled, as in “glass,” “grass,” “lass,” &c. or accompanied by “t,” as in “last,” “fast,” “vast,” &c.; but this pronunciation of “a” seems to have been for some years advancing to the short sound of this letter, as heard in “hand,” “land,” “grand,”&c. and pronouncing the “a” in “after,” “basket,” “plant,” “mast,”&c. as long in “half,” “calf,”&c. borders very closely on vulgarity.

In other words, Walker advocates using the “broad a” in half, path, bath, and calf, but is less enthusiastic about “broad a” in dance, prance, plant, and similar words. Although I can’t say for sure, it seems likely that the split would have been somewhat inconsistent among England’s gentry in the early 19th-Century.

The bottom line, though, is that these differences are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. It is far less an anachronism for Kiera Knightly to speak Received Pronunciation in Pride and Prejudice than for Jonathan Rhys-Meyers to do the same in The Tudors (not to mention his being an strapping guy in his early 30s). English has certainly changed over the past 200 years, but, one could argue, not as radically as it did in the time between Shakespeare and Austen.

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A Strange Chapter in “Wog”s Hateful History

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Ben
L. Ron Hubbard in 1950 (wikimedia)

L. Ron Hubbard in 1950 (wikimedia)

“Wog” is an offensive term in British English which refers to various immigrant groups. Its etymology is debated. One theory suggests acronymous origins, along the lines of “Worthy Oriental Gentleman” (which is less pejorative than contemporary usage would suggest). More plausibly, it may be an abbreviation of “Golliwog,” the racist doll popular in the Victorian era. Regardless of wog‘s provenance, it seems resolutely British; I’ve never heard an American use the term.

It did, however, seem to have been picked up by one of America’s most famous and controversial religious leaders, L. Ron Hubbard. Many associate his faith, Scientology, with the United States (and sun-belt states like California and Florida), but Hubbard spent the bulk of the 1960’s living in Essex and many of the Church’s ardent early proponents (such as David Gaiman) were British.

It was presumably in England that Hubbard began to describe non-followers as “wogs.” In her expose Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman elaborates:

Non-Scientologists were called wogs, a term thrown around liberally among church staff: “wog ideas,” “wog justice,” and “wog science.” Hubbard began to use this offensive British slang term in 1953 to denote any person who was not a Scientologist, in his estimation a “run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid.”

Hubbard is notoriously enigmatic, so it’s a mystery why he would have borrowed such an offensive epithet. It’s possible he wished to evoke the inherent “foreignness” of outside institutions (this was a time when he was on the wrong side of various government organizations).

Or it’s possible that “wog” was a reinvention by a man famous for his ability to redraw the definitions of common words. Hubbard used everyday terms like “technology,” “ethics” and “open-minded” in a rather different way than what we are accustomed to. Controversies aside, I find him one of the more fascinating of 20th-Century’s word coiners for that reason; he created his own language, assembled from pieces of (but strikingly different from) everyday English.

It’s also possible Hubbard misunderstood the word’s offensiveness. Something I find fascinating about cross-dialectal communication is that it is very easy to underestimate the potency of offensive words outside your own variety of English. I am more than aware of how derogatory “wog” is, yet on some fundamental level, I’m not sure I get it.

Likewise, I would use “wanker” in a blog post title with little thought, but I would agonize over the decision to use “the N word,” no matter how objective the context. Yet Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority actually found “wanker” the slightly more offensive of the two terms among the British public (credit to Lynne Murphy for that tidbit of info). So perhaps Hubbard’s use of “wog” was an innocent mistake?

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Drawer-Draw Conflation

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Ben
Photo: Marcus Gossler

Photo: Marcus Gossler

I’ve known New Yorkers who, despite exhibiting few traces of “Brooklynese,” pronounce “drawer” as if it were “draw.”* These are folks, mind you, who pronounce each and every other r, yet still maintain this r-less exception. So what’s with “draw?”

To be fair to my New York friends, most Americans pronounce “drawer” in an “illogical” way. The word technically has two morphemes (smallest units of meaning): draw + er, suggesting a container that can be “drawn” out**. But many pronounce it as if it rhymed with “lore” (i.e. had one morpheme). You’ll likely find first-graders who misspell the word “droar” or “dror” for this very reason.

A simple experiment demonstrates my point. Compare “I opened the drawer” with “Marissa was a good drawer” (one who draws). It’s likely that (if you’re American) these words are not homophones; A Californian, for instance, might pronounce the first word dɹɔɚ (“drore”) but the latter dɹɑɚ (“DRAH-er”).

Another reason we may treat “drawer” as having a single morpheme, I suspect, is because we strongly associate the suffix -er with the agentive case; that is, we add “-er” to words to suggest an active rather than passive noun. The situation is more complex than that (British “trainers” does not describe “shoes that train”). But there is something intuitively passive about a drawer, so again, we don’t tend to think of it as “something that draws.”

Since the word’s components don’t quite add up, then, few of us probably learn the term as draw-er as children. We more likely learn “drore” or “draw” or some other pronunciation that appears to be completely arbitrary.

I’m not entirely sure why New Yorkers say “draw” as opposed to “drore.” But I do know that “draw” is not really more peculiar than “drore.” Both pronunciations are exceptional, both slightly diverting from normal pronunciation patterns. To shift from one to the other requires that you swap one variant that doesn’t make sense given the spelling and etymology to another variant that also doesn’t make sense for the same reasons.

Any New Yorkers out there who conflate “drawer” and “draw?” Or others who have pronounce this word in an unusual way?

*This occurs with Eastern New Englanders and perhaps some American Southerners as well. My impression, though, is that it’s somewhat less common among people from those regions who speak General American English. Given the relative infrequency of “drawer,” though, it’s just not an easy thing to examine.

**”Drawers,” meaning undergarments and/or pants, almost certainly has the same etymology.

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NBC Pronunciation Standards

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Ben
Edward R. Murrow (wikimedia)

Edward R. Murrow (wikimedia)

While browsing in a book shop recently, I found a dusty manual titled NBC Handbook of Pronunciation. From the 1940’s through the early 1960’s, NBC published this dictionary of sorts establishing a “standard pronunciation” for newscasters.

It is clear from the book’s introduction what kind of accent the network preferred:

…when a broadcaster speaks over a powerful station or nation-wide hookup, he will be most readily understood by the majority of his listeners if he uses the pronunciation called by phoneticians “General American.” That is the standard presented in this book.

But is this the same type of General American English that educated Americans speak today? Or has the accent evolved?

There are slight differences between then and now. For instance, the NBC guide prescribes that the final vowel in words like “happy” and “silly” be the same vowel in KIT (hæpɪ and sɪlɪ). This matches my impressions of Eisenhower-era newsmen (“John F. Kennedeh spoke today…”). It’s such a subtle difference that most listeners will hear something “old-fashioned” in 1950s anchor-speech without being able to pinpoint what.

In a similar vein, the guide advocates using a reduced vowel in words like “Tuesday” and “Thursday,” so that these are somewhat more like “Tuesdee” and “Thursdee.” Although still common in some American regional accents, almost all variants of GenAm fully pronounce the “-day.”

Vowels before /r/ seem to constitute the chief difference between mid-century GenAm and today’s GenAm. Unlike many Americans today, the NBC accent distinguished between words like “Merry” and “Marry.” It describes “Marry” as having the vowel in TRAP (mærɪ), while “terry” has the vowel in SET (tɛrɪ). Oddly, however, the guide transcribes the “a” in “arrow” as having the vowel in SET as well (ɛro). This suggests some acknowledgement that pronunciation was changing.

For the most part, however, post-war GenAm is hardly different from today’s GenAm. What has changed the most, perhaps, is our expanded definition of this accent. We allow a lot of variation these days–the Cot-Caught merger, fronting of the vowels in GOOSE and GOAT–while still placing certain accents within the loosely defined spectrum of “standard” American English.

Still, I was surprised by the book’s enlightened attitude toward linguistic diversity. Here is what the introduction says about attempts to speak “correctly:”

It should be pointed out that this book does not pretend to prescribe how words should be pronounced according to some arbitrary standard; it merely records how they are pronounced by educated speakers across the greater part of the United States. Americans have never consented to have “correct” pronunciation laid down for them by a government academy, as is done in several European nations.

This was the era in which General American English was becoming the de facto standard, and from this description, one sees why it took hold in such a populist nation. Perhaps because early proponents of General American avoided proselytizing, we were less averse to “Middle-Western English” as a national standard.

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Thoughts on Language in “Game of Thrones”

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Ben
Game of Thrones

wikimedia

I wrote a post eons ago questioning why characters in fantasy films have British accents. HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation was my impetus, yet I confess I haven’t seen the program until recently.

Aspects of the show’s language are more complex than I expected. Strikingly, characters from the Northern half of GoT‘s world speak with Northern English accents. Since actors Sean Bean and Mark Addy are Yorkshiremen, this might seem a coincidence.

But other actors are clearly affecting Northernness, so this must have been a deliberate production choice. This is obvious when contrasting London-bred actor Alfie Allen’s real accent with that of his Northern-sounding character (Warning: some vague spoilers):

Other cast members use Received Pronunciation, although relatively few are English. Hence Aidan Gillen, Peter Dinklage, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Iain Glen speak RP with a slightly “foreign” quality. I didn’t find this distracting. It suggests regional dialects and perhaps languages that exist beyond the narrative confines. You can get an idea of how Gillen’s natural Dublinese colors his character’s speech in this promo clip, for instance:

(GoT’s writers are from the US, by the way, so the syntax and slang sometimes sounds a little jarring coming from, say, Sheffield-accented lips. Lynne Murphy could probably tally many lexical “slip ups.”)

There are definitely missed opportunities to make the GoT universe more linguistically diverse. But language is arguably less important in this universe than it was in The Lord of the Rings.  It doesn’t strike me as Martin’s strong suit as a novelist: Many character names sound like tweaked English/Celtic monikers (e.g. “Catelyn,” “Eddard”), and some place names sound suspiciously like literary in-jokes*.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Martin’s imagination. Tolkien was a brilliant linguist, so it’s unfair to expect later fantasists to craft entire language families from scratch. Martin’s world is unique as well in that corrupt central governments are as dangerous as supernatural and malevolent forces. Political pressure for linguistic uniformity strikes me as more realistic here than a land where you can’t understand the village next door.

The exception is Dothraki, the constructed language created for the show. Like Klingon before it, Dothraki has become something of a sub-cultural phenomenon, with a Wikipedia page more detailed than those of many real languages. But it sticks out for being a lone minority tongue in what often sounds like a monolingual and mono-dialectal world.

*”Riverrun” is the first word in Finnegan’s Wake; “Casterly Rock,” home to the semi-villainous Lannisters, sounds like “Castle Rock,” home base for the more fascistic schoolboys in Golding’s Lord of the Flies (Stephen King borrowed the name for the fictional town where he sets many novels). It’s possible neither name was intended to be allusive, but astute literature aficionados will make a connection nonetheless.

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The Teesside Controversy

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Ben

Some British school administrators recently sought to “improve” their students’ Teesside dialect by urging parents to correct their children’ speech. The letter prompted outcry, for reasons well-summarized by Stan Carey of Sentence First. This photo of the note in question has circulated the internet:

teesside-school

So what does the school want to correct, exactly? Dialect? Spelling? Pronunciation? True, the letter cites some actual dialect features: “Gizit here” (for “give it to me”) and “nowt” (for “nothing”) are obvious examples. Other “mistakes,” however, involve orthographic mistakes, such as the “you’re/your” quibble. At least in one case, the children’s accent is taken to task, for the “mistake” of fronting “th” so that “three” sounds like “free.” Needless to say, this is a very scattershot approach to language education.

I would also argue that two of the “offensive” terms are acceptable in spoken Standard English. “I dunno” is obviously just a reduced version of “I don’t know,” not a case of non-standard grammar. I also feel that “yous,” while out of place in an academic paper perhaps, can be used in conversation without it “de-standardizing” one’s language. I’ve heard the word used by Irish natives within otherwise academic discourse, just as I’ve heard “y’all” used by Standard-English-speaking American Southerners.

While I abhor prescriptivist attempts to “correct” dialects, I’m more disturbed by how muddled this attempt is. How should parents correct “letta/butta” and “werk/work?” Are these spelling mistakes? Mispronunciations? And what if one’s child genuinely wishes to express that “He was sat there?” (“Someone assigned him a particular seat.”)

The bottom line is, this letter seems to have been written by someone with a shallow understanding of the very language they seek to “correct.”

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“Aristocratic” American, Part 2: Samuel Barber

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Ben
Samuel Barber's childhood home in West Chester, PA (wikimedia)

Samuel Barber’s childhood home in West Chester, PA (wikimedia)

[This is my second post on the non-rhotic accent once spoken by the Northeastern US Elite. My first post on the subject, about Eleanor Roosevelt’s accent, can be found here.

West Chester is an town in Eastern Pennsylvania with a beautiful mix of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian architecture. One of its most famous native sons is Samuel Barber, renowned for his Adagio for Strings. (You’d recognize his Adagio as the sad music from Platoon, the 9/11 Memorial, and The Elephant Man). Curious about Barber’s life story, I located a series of 1949 interviews with him on NPR’s website.

You get a particularly good sense of how Barber spoke in this interview. His accent does not, to say the least, resemble contemporary Philadelphia English. Entirely non-rhotic, with the TRAP-BATH split throughout, this is clearly “non-local” speech. Barber has some relatives from Boston, which might offer a partial explanation, but keep in mind he spent his entire childhood and adolescence in the Philadelphia area.

Located 17 miles west of the City of Brotherly Love, West Chester is in an area that generations ago was a major branch of the Northeastern US elite (America’s “aristocracy sans monarch,” if you will). So it’s possible Barber’s lect is an example of the RP-like accent once heard in parts of the affluent East Coast (and in some cases beyond).

But even so, Barber’s accent was probably atypical. For instance, contrast Barber with this video of another West Chester native, General Smedley Butler. Butler was born nearly three decades before Barber, was from a comparable upper-class background and yet spoke with an accent close to contemporary General American English.

This is perhaps another reason why this type of “American Queen’s English” never caught on as widely as its British counterpart; it was too inconsistent. If you grew up in a wealthy household in England in the Edwardian era and attended elite schools, it is very likely you would speak with a predictable accent.

But clearly, there are wealthy young men from West Chester who didn’t speak like Barber, just as there were no doubt wealthy young men from St. Louis who didn’t speak like T.S. Eliot*, and wealthy young women from Hartford who didn’t sound like Katherine Hepburn.

I can’t dismiss the idea that Barber’s accent was perhaps affect. But it nevertheless suggests the remnants of a linguistic trend that might have taken root had demographics and history gone in a different direction.

*Eliot came from a prestigious New England family, so it’s hardly surprising he didn’t talk like a Midwesterner.

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