There are a couple of anchors in the Reno area (don’t know where they are from) that I can’t understand half of what they say.
And then there is lily-white Native Nevadan Rebecca Kitchen, who speaks like she is in mid-stroke. Tosses a word salad about every third story. Incredible.
This reminds me of the not-sure-it’s-true story of John Kennedy touring the Midwestern states during his election run, and asking an assembled crowd in his heavy New England accent, “What’s wrong with the American fah-mah?”
Someone yelled back, “He’s stah-ving!”
And everybody had a good laugh, including JFK.
The late Jim Vance of NBC4 in D.C. used to have a slight AAVE accent and delivery.
The outrage wasn’t over their using it but over their claim that it was an African based language unrelated to English (with, however, a lot of English borrowings). This is a fatuous claim and it still outrages me. It is simply a dialect of English with its own phonetics and some variations in grammar and even vocabulary.
I got to Barbados every winter for 2 or 3 weeks. The native “Bajan” English is essentially incomprehensible to me. But Bajans (almost) all have a second dialect that is more-or-less comprehensible to me, although not if spoken too fast. But their news and other announcers speak with an exceptionally clear English of the sort I call mid-Atlantic. Basically standard American with slight British overtones.
Who, exactly, was making that claim?
It certainly wasn’t Robert Williams or the cohort of scholars who originated the term “ebonics.” It was, rather, an overt attempt to describe AAVE (and some related things) in non-derogatory terms. At least, that’s my understanding.
Most of the time when I hear an anchor or new report speaking in an accent, it’s someone in sports. Ever hear Myron Cope? Now THERE was an accent.
According to the Wikipedia article on AAVE, the Oakland Unified School District passed a resolution recognizing it as an independent language. But I believe Oakland’s resolution was intended to recognize AAVE in order to teach students how to speak standard American English rather than some effort to make it the norm.
“Them snakes is straight assholes, you can tell by the way they lookin’”
“I think he a Geico. If he a Geico he got a 15% chance of makin’ it up outta there.”
Thanks for the link.
From PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores:
I think that’s a reasonable starting point. There’s plenty of people here in the NY area who have a strong ‘NY accent’ but that’s really mainly a sub-cultural (working class) and ethnic (Italian*) accent. Some NY station newsreaders have a detectable level of it, including ones who are not white but grew up in NY (many news readers grew up somewhere else, graduated from the ‘farm system’ of their networks to land jobs in NY). But it’s rare for it to a strong one. You hear it more from people who are personalities on local infotainment shows rather than news readers.
I notice same looking at TV news at hotels when I’m in the South, strong Southern accents are unusual among news readers.
So it’s like a lot of other things to do with race/ethnicity. It might be fair to argue that black ‘accent’ and moreover speech pattern of lower socio economic origin is unfairly more frowned on compared to other ethnic and/or lower socio-econ related accents and dialects. But it’s not as if homogenized middle class American English, spoken with a geographically nondescript American accent, isn’t favored generally: it is generally.
In fact now there’s sometimes an inversion there IMO. It’s generally IME still socially acceptable for example to mock the lower class Italian/NY accent/dialect (sometimes partly on the excuse that it’s just mocking NY, but I think a lot of people doing it at least partly realize that’s not really what they are doing), but anything but positive expressions about black accent/dialect are much more sensitive. Again like lots of stuff with race/ethnicity, history arguably gives some justification for double standards now. It’s in the eye of the beholder whether the disparity is always completely justified.
*though also elements of Jewish and other big immigrant groups from the last big wave prior to current one. My NY Irish ‘ethnic’ grand parents’ generation had a somewhat different Brooklyn accent than the one in TV and movies about NY Italian gangsters now the standard perception of ‘NY accent’.
Most TV and radio reporters, especially anchors, try to affect a “neutral” American accent, which is usually thought of as being somewhere in the midwest. Dan Rather was a good example, although when interviewed off the news, he reverted to his native Texas drawl. There is nothing unique about African Americans who also adopt this way of speaking on the air.
I have been listening to Ayesha Rascoe since she started hosting NPR’s Sunday morning show. I like her and think her competent and capable. I do cringe sometimes listening to her. It’s not her accent. It’s her inflection. No sane American could criticize her for a ‘blaccent’.
New NPR announcers have almost always changed their voice over time, becoming smoother and silkier. This is normal. Radio almost demands it.
I am listening to her right now and this change is already apparent. Or maybe I am getting used to her. It is probably a bit of both.
I have never turned her show off.
For sports and entertainment, absolutely. It would be strange if they didn’t in the case of things like Sportscenter and halftime/pre-game shows and so on. For “news news” it’s more rare.
I am a white guy. If you heard me speak with newscaster voice, I wonder if it would seem “forced.” I ask because my natural white guy speaking style is a lot closer to AAVE than white guy newscaster voice, for sure. That goes for 90% of white people I know, though in many cases it’s more rural, midwestern, country, beachy, or whatever.
The Oxford dictionary is coming out with new Black language entries. They said a grill is like a dental bridge that is cosmetic. Is that common to say they have a new grill?
“Grill” meaning a cosmetic piece of metal worn on the teeth has been part of mainstream language for at least 20 years now, and started back in the 1980s if not earlier. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.
Thanks for your guidance! Actually I’ve never seen anyone in real life with as you may have meant uhmm metallic symbols purposely embedded on the surface of a bridge/overlay. My peers and I rarely have had surplus income to pay for extra dentistry. That being said, I wondered if the word ‘grill’ could easily describe a regular upper bridge that a lot of people with extractions would get. I want to use the term right and not misappropriate it.
IANA expert on these linguistic issues, but AFAICT a decorative dental “grill” (or “front”) refers exclusively to a form of obviously artificial metal mouth-jewelry. If you used the term to refer to a conventional dental bridge that’s made to resemble natural teeth, I think most people wouldn’t understand what you meant.
That said, some people do appear to be using “grill” humorously to refer to conventional orthodontic braces, so who knows how the term will semantically morph in the future.
Occasionally “grill” also refers to the mouth, teeth. lips area of the face in general.
As in the phrase “all up in your grill” equivalent to “getting in your face”.
And yes, some will facetiously refer to orthodontic braces as their “grill” because why not. (Which BTW one observes that the automotive grill from where the phrasing seems to come, these days is seldom metallic.)