Remembrance of accents past
Apr 25th 2011, 12:37 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
MOST people whose accents shift around are a bit sheepish when they realise it, or talk about it. Tourists who visit other countries find themselves mimicking the local rhythm or a few sounds, and when they see they're doing it, get embarrassed. (It's so common that they really shouldn't be.) And I've noticed people who have moved far from home lapse back into a more home-inflected accent when they talk to family. I do the same myself; I think I speak a sort of General American most of the time, but I get distinctively southern-inflected talking to family in Georgia, whose English is not demurely "inflected" but is full-on (lowland) southern English.
Both of these are examples of "accommodation": we tend to talk like the people we're talking to. It's true of other features like speed or volume. Talking to a motormouth, most people speed up themselves, for example.
But I noticed something interesting when trawicks at the Dialect Blog featured "transplants", people who have lived away from home a long time. Exhibit A is Bill Bryson, a journalist and author from Iowa who has lived most of his adult life in England. I hadn't realised just how English Bryson's accent had become until I heard the first clip. Around :21, he says "it is, you know, it is, it is, every bit" with a pronunciation of the t sound that sounds extremely English.
But later, he starts to describe a hockey jersey he had played with as a child as part of a superhero costume. At about 1:16, you can hear him say "it" again and again, referring to the jersey. It sounds quite different, sometimes still British-influenced, but often sounding perfectly American. This is just one example of my overall impression: telling a story that happened in America, he sounds clearly more American than he had at the beginning of the interview. He almost certainly didn't think about doing it, but the memory of Iowa is reflected in his speech.
Both of these are examples of "accommodation": we tend to talk like the people we're talking to. It's true of other features like speed or volume. Talking to a motormouth, most people speed up themselves, for example.
But I noticed something interesting when trawicks at the Dialect Blog featured "transplants", people who have lived away from home a long time. Exhibit A is Bill Bryson, a journalist and author from Iowa who has lived most of his adult life in England. I hadn't realised just how English Bryson's accent had become until I heard the first clip. Around :21, he says "it is, you know, it is, it is, every bit" with a pronunciation of the t sound that sounds extremely English.
But later, he starts to describe a hockey jersey he had played with as a child as part of a superhero costume. At about 1:16, you can hear him say "it" again and again, referring to the jersey. It sounds quite different, sometimes still British-influenced, but often sounding perfectly American. This is just one example of my overall impression: telling a story that happened in America, he sounds clearly more American than he had at the beginning of the interview. He almost certainly didn't think about doing it, but the memory of Iowa is reflected in his speech.
I've noticed the same many times. An Irish colleague who has lived in New York for a long time can sound nearly American most of the time. But when I stick my head in her office and ask about language back home in Ireland, I could always swear that even the thought made her accent shift towards a much more Irish one. I wondered for a while if it was my imagination. Now the Bryson video makes it seem obvious: we accommodate not only to where we are and whom we're talking to, but where we are and whom we're talking to mentally, too.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/04/accent
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