Because some American accents have survived – while others have faded

Hon explain to meVox’s weekly podcast, we hear a lot of stories from listeners. Recently, we asked people to talk about their accents: what they love about them, things they noticed. The response was overwhelming; We had the most responses we’ve ever had.

This was no surprise to Valerie Fridland. She is a sociolinguist and author of the book Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. “Accents are something that we share only with those people that we love and hold dear and that we have seen to be in the fundamental era of our lives,” he said. “It’s close to us in ways that more generic language isn’t.”

How did the modern American accent develop? And what accents reflect on us? We answer this and more on the latest episode of explain to me

Below is an excerpt from our conversation with Fridland, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the whole episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotifyor where to get podcasts. If you would like to submit a question, please email askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Where did the American accent come from in the first place?

If you go back to (the year) 1600, you probably think: “What the hell are you all saying around me? Because I don’t understand anything.”

We begin our journey of accent in America with the first British colonists who arrived. It seems strange, because there are other colonists who were there (already), and there were indigenous languages ​​that were there. So it is not the story of America’s first language. But the most pivotal voices in establishing that original American accent were those early British settlers. Those create what we call “founding effects”: these kinds of cultural and linguistic spaces that persist through time.

The original American accent was sort of the one that leveled the playing field of many of the salient, noticeable features of the British accent. For example, the Rs would have been there, with the exception of a few Rs that were dropped much earlier in words like burst out and cursethat became bust and cuss. It’s the British R-dropping that came first.

What we really noticed was (a language) that sounded sort of British, but not like any (particular) British accent. And it was commented (at the time) – this incredibly uniform American accent that actually sounded quite good compared to the British form. It didn’t matter who you were, what class you were, what kind of job you held – speech was much more similar between people in America or the New World at that time than it was in Britain.

It’s interesting that it was uniform, because we have so many regional differences now. When did we see those pop up?

Think of the way the Atlantic Coast was laid out, right at the top. You had people coming a lot from East Anglia and Southern Britain, and then you had the Quakers from the north of Britain, and the Scotch Irish and the Germans in the Midlands. And then, in the South, you had a lot of people from the South of Great Britain, a lot of the Knights – those who were loyal to King Charles I. They had many indentured servants and many slaves who came from West Africa.

Around 1780, we see that enough generations have arrived and learned the models of this new world that sounded very different from Great Britain, but also began to sound different from each other.

This was really something that concerned the Founding Fathers after the Revolutionary War, because the agreement between the states was very fragile. There were many regional rivalries, many state interests, and they were really worried that these states that had come together in unity against this common enemy of Great Britain were really going to fall. One of the things that really worried, especially Benjamin Franklin and also his friend Noah Webster, was that the lack of a uniform language – or having some kind of “regional provincialism” as they called it – would cause this (new union) to decay and fray.

I want to dig into the southern accent a little more. It is so distinct. How did we get it?

That didn’t come until after the Civil War. (The war) brought people together towards a common enemy and also a common cultural experience that linked their speech in ways that we find are really conducive to the formation of new accents.

In addition, the infrastructure of the South changed during the reconstruction period. And whenever we see a change in the infrastructure, a change in the economy, a change in the transportation networks in an area, we generally see a change in the sound mode, too.

The New England accent, the Southern accent—both get a lot of shine. But what do we hear in the Midwest and out West?

The Midwest and West are very interesting, because they were both a little later. The Midwest had a really unique mix because it emanated from the Pennsylvania colony. So it’s really the heart of the heart accent. More than a third of the population of the colony of Pennsylvania was the Scots-Irish, and another third were Germans. When you think of the Chicago accent—”from Bears“That kind of thing – that’s really a very German-influenced accent. There were already a lot of Scandinavian settlers in that area. The Minnesota accent was very Scandinavian-influenced, but when (Americans) got to the West Coast, the vast majority were resettlers from an American dialect region.

So what you have here is already an Americanized speech, but really that’s why we think of the Western accent as having no accent: because it had gone through so many cycles of leveling off some of the more noticeable features from the East Coast by the time they hit it in the West.

What about the accents that are no longer there? Are accents dying?

When accents die, it’s more like a slow fade and an instant death. What’s happening is just less and less people are using it. In this case, we really have a lot of dead accents in America. What people think of is that transatlantic accent.

Yes. Or Frasier. It is probably the later incarnation of that transatlantic accent. And, of course, (Cheers and Frasier were) that represent pretentious snobs that no one wants to catch, and that’s why the accent died.

The trick is: It was a fake accent. It wasn’t anyone’s native accent. It was a learned accent. It was a made-up, cultivated accent of the early 20th century, mainly parlayed by Hollywood, because (those were) the kind of roles and iconic images that Hollywood presented at that time.

But, from the 1950s, he didn’t want to see us anymore. He wanted to see us. Americans wanted to hear about Americans, and they wanted to see Americans living like them. And so the shift in Hollywood has really been from these romantic leading man and leading lady roles to these gritty depictions of realism in Hollywood. With this, we really lost the transatlantic accent, and it became snobbish and elitist rather than something aspirational.

Why do we feel so connected to our accents?

Fundamentally, the emphasis is on identity – the people we love, the people we choose, the people who feel like they get us. When you hear about the accent, even if it’s not the same accent, it’s something that unites us, because we all understand how important it is for our identity, for our sense of belonging, that the accents are. And I think that’s something that’s so interesting, because it’s so relevant to all of us. It’s a badge we wear that others can see. It’s like when fashion changes, people talk about it. When language changes, people talk about it, because language is fundamentally the history of humanity.