Richard III’s “Brummie Accent?”

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Ben

427px-King_Richard_III[Ed. note: An earlier version of this post had an embedded sound clip of Philip Shaw reading a letter by Richard III in a historically accurate accent. Unfortunately, I’ve had a few embedding issues since updating to the latest version of WordPress, so for now, click on the link four paragraphs below this one to hear the relevant interview.

Experts confirmed this week that a body found under a Leicester parking lot/car park belongs to Richard III. It’s an exciting discovery and a crucial step in establishing the differences between the historical king and Shakespeare’s less-than-flattering portrait.

Accent enthusiasts may be puzzled, however, by a series of news stories about RIII’s “Brummie Accent.” Most quote University of Leicester professor Philip Shaw, who has this to say on the matter:

Unlike today, individuals were more likely to spell words in ways that reflected their local dialect. Therefore, by looking at Richard’s writing, I was able to pinpoint spellings that may provide some clues to his accent.

To be clear, though, Richard III did not have anything remotely resembling a contemporary Brummie accent. Nor is Shaw suggesting this. Listen to this wonderful interview, in which he gives us an idea of how the king would have spoken.

Needless to say, this is hardly classic “Brummie,” as headlines suggest. We’re talking about the earliest stages of the Great Vowel Shift, when the language would have sounded foreign to most contemporary ears.

Whatever marked a West Midlands accent at the time would not necessarily have  been what marks that accent now. Brummie today is noted for its lack of several distinctions common in England’s South (the FOOT-STRUT and TRAP-BATH splits) and a number of vowels which somewhat resemble strong, vernacular Cockney (i.e. the long trajectory of the diphthongs in KITE, GOAT, and FACE). It’s unlikely any of these features would have been sociolinguistic markers in the 15th-Century.

We are accustomed to seeing films about Henry VIII or Richard III in which everyone speaks the Queen’s English, but it bears repeating that this is a dramatic convention divorced from reality. It is doubtful contemporary Standard English-speaking time-travellers would be able to easily understand their own language until at least Shakespeare’s time. So needless to say, “Brummie” means something very different here!

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Irvine, The Prince, And Military Dialects

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Ben

Food Network addicts will recognize the inspiration for today’s post, Robert Irvine, the energetic host of Restaurant:Impossible. From the moment I heard Irvine speak, I was more struck by his odd idiolect than his culinary acumen:

Irvine is an Englishman who has spent years in America, and his accent can largely be attributed to cross-Atlantic accommodation. But is that all there is to it? He speaks with a mix of features that come and go as if in a game of dialectal whack-a-mole, sounding at one moment rather like a Geordie, another moment vaguely Scottish, and at other times more at home in his adopted state of New Jersey.

Irvine is apparently from Wiltshire, in England’s West Country, which wouldn’t make my top ten guesses. But further biographical details are sketchy. IMDB claims his place of birth as Trowbridge, while Wikipedia goes with Salisbury, a not-inconsequential drive of about an hour. His Food Network bio mentions only that he is a “native of England,” but offers the provocative suggestion that he “joined the British Royal Navy at the age of 15.”*

That last detail got me thinking: what impact does military service have on one’s dialect? If at all? The question also popped into my head while watching a recent Prince Harry interview about his well-publicized Air Force tenure. His is a far less peculiar accent than Irvine’s, but it still caught my attention:

The Prince’s accent is clearly within the RP family, but some finer details suggest other influences. The vowels in TRAP, BATH and START sound very retracted (“that’s the most bizaw question I’ve ever been awsked…”), for instance, and the diphthong in words like MOUTH seems somewhat inconsistent, ranging from conservative RP (mɑʊθ) to Sheffield (ma:θ). Does any of this have to do with his mixed military peer group? Or is this just the product of an unusual upbringing?

The fact is, I don’t know nearly enough about either Irvine or Prince Harry’s background to assess whether or not their military service played any part in their accent. Both obviously come from slightly abnormal circumstances (Irvine a transplant, Harry a royal). But this nevertheless got me thinking about the role that wars, armies and service play in language.

In most contemporary Western societies, active military personnel comprise a relatively small part of the country’s population. But this was not always so; how may the great wars of the 20th-Century have impacted speech? RP was a notably less “conservative” dialect after World War I–did the aristocrats suddenly fighting alongside butchers and farmers have something to do with this? Did GenAm and Estuary spread after World War II for similar reason?

Such ideas are speculation, but there are more rigorous hypotheses that suggest radical changes during and after major conflicts. The first century of the Great Vowel Shift, after all, notably coincided with the Hundred Years War. Linguists who study American Southern English note that many features we consider “Southern” seem to have become more prominent after the Civil War. It’s not hard to see how bringing thousands of young people together to risk their lives together can result in tremendous linguistic innovation.

*A caveat here, which I don’t bring up to slander Irvine, is that he caused a scandal a few years ago after apparently padding his resume to impress financiers (among other whoppers, he allegedly claimed knighthood). This only adds another layer of mystery.

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Different Kinds of “Ah”

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Ben
Harvard

Photo: John Phelan

In linguist Tom Roeper’s excellent book on language acquisition, The Prism of Grammar, he makes this observation about Boston accents:

In Boston, there are two forms of r-lessness, heard in two ways of saying ‘Harvard:’ ‘Hahvid’ and ‘Haavid.’ The first is upper class and the second is decidedly lower class. A person from elsewhere in the country may not hear or notice the difference, but those who live in Boston will immediately detect it.

To put that more precisely, Roeper is suggesting that lower-class Bostonians pronounce “Harvard” with a front or central vowel, while the upper-classes opt for a back vowel.

I half-agree with Roeper, although I feel the statement needs slight modification. Bostonians will probably find “Hahvid” (hɑ:vɪd) to be both upper-class and old-fashioned. But if you lived in the city in the 1920’s, you would probably find that a Back-Bay Brahmin played a game of “cahds” (kɑ:dz), while an Irish-American Southie played “caads” (ka:dz).

Many accents seem (or once seemed) to follow similar lines. My impression is that those elusive old “Cultivated” Australian accents preferred ɑ over a, for instance. “Upwardly mobile” Britons from the North of England, I find, eschew the vernacular Northern a to the more RP-like ɑ*. In Dublin, the local pronunciation of “car” as kæ(r) is stigmatized by “non-local” Dublin English speakers, who lean more toward the rather American-sounding kɑɻ.

There are, it should be said, countless exceptions to this trend. For instance, I find that many younger middle-class New Englanders from traditionally non-rhotic areas rhoticize the vowel in “car” but maintain its frontedness: kaɹ. Nonetheless, there seems to be a cross-dialectal preference for ɑ (“ah”) over a (“aa”).

I don’t think there is much of a mystery why this is the case. The world’s great prestige accents, GenAm and RP (or perhaps, in the 21st-Century, London generally) opt for ɑ over a. What’s remarkable, though, is how extremely subtle this can be as a sociolinguistic marker. In most accents with ɑ, the vowel is already somewhat fronted: ɑ̟. And yet, this difference–between an open, near-back vowel and an open central vowel–is one that many careful listeners can nonetheless distinguish easily.

*I knew a young woman from Cheshire, for example, whose pronunciation of “nice bar” as na:ɪs bɑ: stuck out to me. The first word has very much the classic fronted, elongated Northern KITE vowel. The second word, however, opts for the more “Southern” ɑ. 

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“Prime Ministaw:” Jamaican Rounded Schwa

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Ben
Portia Simpson-Miller (wikimedia)

Portia Simpson-Miller (wikimedia)

Most Anglophone Caribbean nations have dialect continua, with an English Creole at one end and some variety of Standard English at the other. I find Jamaica’s continuum particularly fascinating for the ways in which “Jamaican English” (i.e. Standard English as spoken in Jamaica) dissociates itself from the nation’s creole. One of the most noticeable examples of this is the Jamaican “rounded schwa.”*

Jamaican Creole largely lacks the schwa, that little “throwaway” vowel in words like “comma,” “afraid” or (in non-rhotic accents) “father.” Instead, Creole speakers often use the same vowel as “trap,” so that “bother” is bada and “better” is beta.

By contrast, many “Jamaican English” speakers go in the other direction and use rounded vowels in schwa positions that we wouldn’t normally associate with roundedness. So for instance, in A Handbook of Varieties of English, Hubert Devonish and Otelemate G. Harry mention ‘comma’ being pronounced kɔmo (“commaw”).

One can hear plenty examples of this in the inauguration speech of Jamaican prime minister Portia Simpson-Miller earlier this year. For instance, around the 19-second mark Simpson-Mill pronounces “former prime minister” so the last word sounds to many Americans like “ministaw:”

I would say that Miller’s “rounded schwa” is actually a set of different allophones, not just o, but also phones like ʊ, ɵ, and ɔ (I’d need a few more listens to confirm). It would be very interesting to chart the course of this unusual variant: is it due to dissociation alone? Or is there some other reason it entered Jamaican English?

*I’m not expecting any awards for “best new sociophonetics term” here. Schwa has two definitions, in a way: there’s schwa the IPA symbol/phone (ə), which refers to a mid-central vowel of indeterminate roundedness. Then there is schwa the concept, which basically refers to a class of reduced/unstressed vowels. When I’m talking about “rounded schwa” here, I’m building upon the latter definition.

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Lincoln’s “Anachronisms”

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Ben

Abraham_Lincoln_standing_portrait_1863

[UPDATE: Benjamin Schmidt has an excellent in-depth response in the comments which is well worth reading. He also has an FAQ on his website that answers a number of questions about his process.]

I am obviously fascinated by historical dialects and historical language in general. How did the founding fathers speak? How about Lincoln? What did a Mississippi twang sound like in the Antebellum South? Did the Puritans sound like modern East Anglians?

I was excited, then, to find historian Benjamin Schmidt’s discussion of the linguistic anachronisms in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln over at the Atlantic. Unfortunately, I was left baffled by Schmidt’s analysis. Take this quibble, for instance:

When Congressman Ashley frets that the amendment is “absolutely guaranteed” to lose, he’s speaking in the language of late 19th-century newspaper advertisements, not mid-century politics.

I’m not sure what Schmidt is getting at here, but “absolutely guaranteed” was clearly used in government documents spanning the 19th Century. But even if it weren’t, it would be less an “anachronism” than a run-of-the-mill noun phrase.

Apparently ordinary adjective phrases are also up for debate:

Same goes for priggish language: Almost no printed books use George Pendleton’s phrase “highly unusual” until 1900 or so.

But there are any number of examples of the term being used in texts before the Civil War (such as this one). Again, Schmidt’s gripe is so easy to prove wrong that I have to believe he’s attempting to express something that I’m not grasping.

At least in one case, even a single page of Google Books results contradicts his observations:

“Peace talks,” [Screenwriter Tony Kushner’s] favorite, was used widely to describe negotiations involving the IRA and the PLO, but doesn’t seem to have much history before Vietnam.

Except it has lots of history. “Peace talks” dates to at least the early 19th-Century (with second-hand attestations dating to the 18th), frequently used in reference to negotiations with American Indians. For instance, here is a description of Native American customs dating from 1820:

Peace is determined on and concluded by the head chief and his councilors, and “peace talks” are always addressed to them. In some cases, when the resentment of the warriors runs high, the chief and his counsellors have been much embarrassed.

It’s possible history shows Lincoln didn’t favor the term in this context (there were no Native Americans involved), but again, that’s quite different than terming said phrase “anachronistic.”

It’s also worth noting that the title of Schmidt’s article is “Nobody Said ‘Racial Equality’ in 1865: The Anachronistic English of ‘Lincoln’.” But in fact, people did say this in the 1860s, and in precisely the way it is meant in contemporary times. Here is a passage from a racist anthropological text from 1866, only a year after Lincoln’s death:

Either the one of the other would dissipate his day-dream of racial equality within an hour of its acceptance. The inferior character of the Negro is as distinctly stamped on his organization as on his destiny, and only minds blinded by the idol of preconceived ideas could fail to see the one as well as the other…

Take what I’ve said here with a grain salt: several of these texts are British, not American, and I’m not debating that some of these terms may have been infrequent back in the 1860s.

But therein lies the problem. If you are going to criticize the “anachronisms” of a work of historical fiction, they should be actual anachronisms, not simply language that was “uncommon.” A dramatist of Tony Kushner’s talent, after all, is not in the business of writing “everyday” dialogue.

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That’s What She Said!

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Ben

VaudevilleI’m going to veer off-topic today, and discuss jokes. Or rather, a joke that has swept through American pop culture for years, the allusive “that’s what she said” gag.

The premise is that by inserting “that’s what she said” after innocuous (but unfortunately worded) phrases, dirty associations arise. Here’s an example:

Person A: How was your exam?
Person B: Easy. I thought it was going to be much longer and harder.
Person A: That’s what she said!

TWSS is a fun game for linguistically-rich (if gutter-bound) minds. It requires one to be on the constant lookout for semantic ambiguity, of which our language has plenty when it comes to sex. We English-speakers eroticize the simplest words: hard, do, inside, bottom, top, come, take, in, have, job, make, blow, it, and many others. So there are infinite ways simple phrases can adopt lascivious interpretations.

The joke spiked in popularity after numerous appearances on the American version of The Office. Since I’d watched the original British version, I long assumed TWSS was an American translation of an old British music-hall-style gag employed by Ricky Gervais: “the Actress said to the Bishop.” (Same gist; the phrase makes preceding words sound filthy). Hence my interest: it seemed as if the joke crossed the Atlantic to be reworked in American English.

I was very wrong in this assumption. It slipped my mind that Mike Myers used the joke in Wayne’s World. This suggests another misleading etymology (uh, joke-ymology?). Myers is a Canadian comedian of British parentage with a nuanced understanding of English culture. Did he adapt this old joke for American audiences?

Apparently not. An astute Wikipedian notes that the American version is described accurately in a book from 1973. So it appears to have been around before Myers, Carrell or Gervais had anything to do with it. The question remaining is whether this is the same joke or two jokes that emerged independently.

I’m inclined toward the latter hypothesis. After searching pages upon pages of Google Books results, I have yet to find a single instance of “as the actress said to the Bishop” in American letters*. The wording is hopelessly British; we have bishops in the US, but their dominance within the Anglican ministry makes them a quintessentially English joke staple. I just don’t see much potential for a crossover, so I’d guess these are similar but independently concocted gags.

Furthermore, there are jokes with a similar premise to TWSS such as the “in bed” game played while reading fortune cookie predictions (“You will encounter lasting happiness and satisfaction … in bed!”). Along similar lines, Jimmy Kimmel has a recurring bit on his show in which he “bleeps” out words from various broadcasts, lending a vulgar connotation to everyday statements. There is a whole category of humor, then, involving the moral degradation of innocent language.

Man’s appetite for dirty puns is universal.

*With the exception of explicit references to “That’s what she said.”

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Piers Morgan’s “Hoity Toity” Accent

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Ben

Politicians have a curious habit of mocking their own markers of privilege. How else does one explain Mitt Romney slamming Obama for attending Harvard, Romney’s MBA alma mater? Or G.W. Bush describing the “intellectual arrogance” he encountered while at Yale? (I’m sure there is a liberal example that I’m forgetting).

Such self-contradiction extends to talking heads as well. A few days ago,  British commentator Stuart Varney took umbrage with, of all things, Piers Morgan’s British accent (as reported in a dailycaller.com piece):

“It makes me very uncomfortable,” Varney said. “And I don’t think we should do that. I don’t think British people should come over here with that hoity-toity accent, talk down to Americans and tell Americans that there is something wrong with their society.”

Varney elaborated on Morgan’s accent, which he said was associated with “snobbery.”

“[The accent] is associated with snobbery,” Varney said. “The worst thing you can do is come over here with a British accent and talk down to people as you’re supposedly giving the news. I don’t think you should do that, period.”

For reference, here is a clip of Varney speaking:

Yup, pretty British. So on the face of it, Varney’s critique is that of a very black pot slandering his fellow kettle. There may be more going on in the subtext, however. For starters, Varney has resided in the States far longer than Morgan, and has the slightly muddled accent to show for it. In my opinion, transplants are the most likely to mock accents reminiscent of their homeland. (For instance, the most vicious Boston accent haters I’ve know are native New Englanders.)

There is also the matter of Varney’s formative years in England. He grew up in Derby, and while he clearly surpresses his East Midlands accent, one can still place him: note the lack of TRAP-BATH split in words like ask and chance, and his occasional (albeit very subtle) betrayal of a raised STRUT vowel. Given, Varney attended the world’s most prestigious Economics school, but he may nevertheless resent native RP speakers like Morgan.

There is a larger context to this story, of course. Varney’s accusation came on the heels of a controversial moment on Morgan’s program in which he called a gun rights advocate a “stupid man” who “doesn’t give a damn about the gun murder rate in America.” One can certainly take issue with Morgan’s choice of words here; it’s definitely one of the more combative things I’ve heard a journalist say during an interview. But such hostility doesn’t strike me as British condescension.

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Where Does “The South” Begin?

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Ben

600px-1864_Johnson's_Map_of_Maryland_and_Delaware_-_Geographicus_-_DEMD-j-64Yesterday I crossed the border from Pennsylvania to Maryland, and was greeted by a road sign for “The Mason-Dixon Line,” the historical demarcation between the American North and South. It’s a misleading distinction from a linguistic perspective, because one does not encounter Southern accents upon entering Maryland (at least east of Appalachia). So where does the South truly “begin,” accent-wise?

Dialecticians define the American South by its glide deletion (i.e. Southerners pronounce words like ‘ride’ and ‘bind’ with a monophthong, so they sound somewhat like ‘rod‘ and ‘bond‘). But do you cross an invisible boundary and find yourself immediately greeted by twangs? Or is this a more gradual process?

Living on the Atlantic Seaboard for most of my life, I find it nearly impossible to pinpoint where “Southerness” begins. My very rough impression is that the first hints of glide deletion start as far north as New York City*, but only before liquids like /l/ and /r/. This is pretty weak tea; after all, /r/ and /l/ often impact preceding vowels in unusual ways. And this type of monophthongization occurs in other accents we don’t associate with glide deletion.

Further south, around Southern New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and some parts of the Philadelphia metro, I’ve noticed the occasional speaker for whom the glide starts to very slightly weaken before nasals like /n/ and /m/. But I still find the feature quite infrequent.

William Labov and team studied glide deletion in the American Midland in their Atlas of North American English. Their observations were similar to mine about the Mid-Atlantic: glide deletion in “Midland” areas of Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio tend to only occur before liquids and nasals. (With the exception of one speaker from Kansas who uses a monophthong in the word “five.”**)

Alas, Labov et al’s findings don’t suggest a clear North-to-South spectrum as far as glide deletion goes. Just look at how all-over-the-map (literally) his findings are: the researchers found lots of glide deletion among Kansans from Wichita and Topeka, but almost no glide deletion among Oklahomans in Oklahoma City and Tulsa; there’s significant glide deletion in a speaker from a relatively northern town in Western PA, yet no glide deletion in the two speakers from the far more southern Evansville, IN.

It’s clear that you can’t simply drive southward and find increasing incidence of “Southernness” as you go. And as many Southern cities are developing markedly “non-Southern” accents, I’m guessing the North-South spectrum will become even more confusing.

*In dialects other than those influenced by African-American English, which is glide deleting throughout the US.

**Phoneticians will probably find that this suggests a connection between the glide deletion and the sonority hierarchy.

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Chelsea-Speak

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Ben

While doing some channel surfing the other day, I stumbled upon the reality show Made in Chelsea. I’d describe the program to Americans as akin to The Hills or Laguna Beach (although I don’t recall Lauren Conrad cracking jokes about “phonological ambiguity” over billiards). You know the type: rich kids, fancy zip/postal code, romantic intrigue, etc. etc.

I have no idea if these young people actually represent today’s affluent and monied Londoners (probably not), but they offer an interesting glimpse at how such a subculture might talk. Here is an interview with a cast member nicknamed “Binky” (why do both American and British blue blood types have such strange nicknames?):

It’s striking which local Londonisms the MiC cast adopt and which they don’t. For instance, you’ll note that while the young woman above glottally stops her t‘s, she avoids this in the middle of words (note “hotter” at :13 and “dirty” at 4:57). Also worth noting (and this seems true of several other cast members) is that the vowel in FACE remains rather conservative; it seems that this diphthong’s shift toward the vowel in KITE, typical of London, has little impacted this group.

But where some marked Londonisms are avoided, others are extremely advanced. /l/ is frequently vocalized. Most striking are the vowels in GOOSE and GOAT, at times almost entirely front: y and øʏ. As with California English, fronter variants of these phonemes seems more salient in young woman than young men.

I would still categorize this English as “Received Pronunciation,” albeit a particularly youthful type. I’d imagine that a time-travelling RP speaker from the 1950’s might be aghast at such a categorization. But there is enough cautious avoidance of marked Cockneyisms that I’m hesitant to shove such accents into the “Estuary” box.

Yet unlike mid-Century RP speakers, I occasionally have a hard time understanding what MiC‘s youths are saying. Is it their accent, or is it their age? As I’m in my thirties, I find myself occasionally feeling early symptoms of “the kids don’t talk like they used to” disease. When the Chelsea crew strains my comprehension, it’s usually due to what sounds to me like mumbling (for instance “whannoysmeamosboutJamie” at 4:12 in the video above). Yet I feel the same way, at times, listening to 20-year-olds from New Jersey or California. Is it mumbling I hear, or merely English’s ever-evolving efficiency?

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Joey Barton and “French-English Accents”

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Ben

By now, I suspect many readers have watched Liverpudlian footballer Joey Barton‘s recent interview about his French debut. I have little to say about his accent, other than to remind everyone that this native Englishman has spent but a few months in France:

Although most headlines have cited the man’s “French accent,” the interview’s strangest aspect is not the accent, per se, but rather grammatical “errors” typical of ESL learners, such as Barton’s notable failure to conjugate verbs like “say,” “make,” and “speak.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide why.

There are many legitimate situations, it should be said, in which living in a foreign country can impact one’s speech. However, I’ve found such influences more modest than in Barton’s case. For instance, I’ve noted a subtle French influence on Johnny Depp‘s English (he lived in France for many years):

(I also considered embedding a recent Halle Berry interview here, in whose lect I’d noticed a slight Gallic twinge; she is engaged to French actor Olivier Martinez and has announced intentions to move to France. But on second consideration, I think the jury’s out on that one. Feel free to look up clips and decide for yourself.)

I’ve experienced this phenomenon personally as well. I once had a coworker who spent a long sojourn in Cuba. On her first months back in the States, her accent betrayed a slight  Spanish rhythm. Within a short period, however, her speech returned to that of a native English-speaker.

My impression is that such effects are most noticeable when the language in question has strikingly different prosodic patterns from English’s. Such is the case with French (which lacks lexical stress) and Spanish (which is syllable-timed.) When speaking a romance language, I find myself retraining my brain to produce syllables in a very different way than my English-speaking mind is accustomed to. Such efforts no doubt have an impact on one’s own language over a prolonged period.

Still, I remain confused by the extremity of Barton’s new idiolect. Is this truly how he talks?

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