"Black" English in non-US countries

Factual Questions
1

Apologies in advance for my generalizations. I do not intend this question to be racist in any way.

Do black people in non-USA, mostly-white, English-speaking countries have a distinct manner of speaking that differs from the way the white citizens speak?

Here in the US, it often easy to tell when an unseen speaker is black, simply by the way they speak. I’m not talking about grammar or slang so much as simply inflection and tone. Is this the case in, say, England?

In the rare instances where I’ve heard a British black man speak (say, while watching the Olympics) I honestly cannot hear any difference between the way he speaks and the way a white British man speaks. I assume that a British person would hear any difference much better than I could.

Of course, I’m limiting this to black people who are several generations removed from “immigrant” status. i.e., English is the native language for them, for their parents, for their grandparents, and their ancestral “native tongue” is no longer a significant influence on their accent.

Most of the time, there are regional accents within a country - in the US, it’s fairly easy to distinguish between a “Southerner” and a “New Englander” and a “West Coaster”. But it seems that I can identify a “black” voice, regardless of where that person is from. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and a few years ago I shared an apartment with a black man close to my age, who was born and raised in St. Louis, MO. I also sat in a college classroom with some younger black men who were mostly from the Seattle area. While my classmates and my roommate differed in the slang they used, and in many speech patterns, they shared the same “tone” of voice that was immediately identifiable as “black”. Same deal with the older black man who sometimes plays drums with one of the musical groups I play with.

Heck, there are very few black people in my small town, and yet even the ones I’ve met who were born and raised here sound a bit different from the local whites.

And yes, I’m perfectly aware of black people who don’t “sound black”. Television news anchors for example (though I suspect their lack of “black” voices is often due to voice training in broadcasting school); former San Diego Padres batting legend Tony Gwynn - I was really surprised by his voice.

2

I’ve frequently been able to identify an Englishman as black by the sound of his voice (and I’m referring here to born-and-raised Englishmen, not Afro-Caribbean immigrants).

It is something in tone, but I couldn’t say what exactly.

3

I’m in the UK, and the only difference I’m aware of is that young London black people seem to have developed a way of speaking all their own (I’m thinking a la Miss Dynamite here).

Not sure about 2nd/3rd-generation black people from other parts of the UK … can’t say I’ve ever noticed a difference in speech, such that I could tell they were black just from hearing them.

Julie

4

There is a sort of UK Black vernacular mainly spoken in London (Miss Dynamitee-ee herself is actually quite well-spoken, I’m thinking more of the So Solid Crew and Tim Westwood and to some extent Ricvhard Blackwood) influenced by the Jamaican and general Carribean accent/ slang and the US black vernacular but quite distinct from them both and defintely flavoured by the English of South-East England.

5

The first time I heard this guy’s radio show it was obvious to me that he was black, from African (not Caribbean) recent ancestry, that he was from the Manchester area, or at least had been educated there, and that he’d been to a good quality school.

That was all gradually confirmed by contextual information, but it was clear just from his voice alone. The “black” part was from the tone of voice.

What you ought to bear in mind, though, is cases where you speak to someone on the phone and never meet them and where you can’t tell what they look like. That might happen without ever being recognised and there’s no way of measuring how frequently it happens.

6

You’re absolutely correct. The place I usually hear “unseen” speakers is on the radio. I listen to the Seattle Mariners on the radio rather than on television, and I don’t spend a lot of time hunting down photos of the ballplayers. As a consequence, I don’t know what several of my own team’s players look like. More than once, I’ve just assumed a new player was white (why I make that assumption, I don’t know) and then I’ve heard him being interviewed on the postgame show and his voice immediately tells me that he’s black. Again, there are exceptions.

What’s interesting is that I don’t notice this phenomenon with, say, 3rd or 4th generation Asian-Americans. Those Asian-Americans I’ve met usually have voices that don’t stand out. Same with many 3rd or 4th generation Mexican-Americans I know.

Somebody once suggested to me that many American blacks pick up their manner of speech from the media (movies, TV, etc). That they essentially assume that they’re “supposed” to talk a certain way because they’re black. I guess that theory makes it a “cultural identity” thing. I can easily see why blacks who grow up in a black community would take on a certain vocal tone common to their peers, but this “media” theory could explain the tone being present in blacks who grow up in predominantly white communities.

I suspect that in the USA, the years of segregationist policies was a significant factor in black vocal tone (along with speech patterns) developing differently from white vocal tone. After all, if you’re pretty much forced to associate only with a certain group of people, you’re going to share many characteristics with other members of that group. Was racial segregation common in the UK in the last couple centuries?

7

I can’t find the cite now but on one of the linguistics lists I read, a couple years ago there was a discussion on this subject in which a study (I think done by the University of San Francisco) was mentioned. The study recorded the voices of x number of white people and x number of black people (none of whom spoke “Ebonics”, they were all selected for the lack of any kind of AAVE in their speech) and asked listeners if they could identify the speakers’ races. In general, most listeners could. I’ll take another look for the cite later today.

The problem with the “media” theory is that most linguists do not believe that media exerts much influence on anybody’s manner of speech.

8

I’d say there’s a kind of south London ‘ghetto’ dialect that both whites and blacks from those communities share and that has its roots in black culture, but that’s dialect.

I also think there’s sometimes but not always a tonal difference, and maybe, with some people, even a much subtler dialectic difference based on Caribbean parents or other near-immediate heritage – so that’s three areas; two dialectics and one tonal that I think I hear.

But a lot of black Londoners also sound just like Londoners.

And then there’s Tim Westwood, who’s the classic Ali G white boy trying too hard to be black - a few of those around as well.

9

It would be interesting to find out whether a black Englishman can tell the difference in speech between a black American and a white American.
That difference is obvious to me, but I’m a native. Can someone across the briny tell?

10

i wouldnt say theres much difference based on colour here in england. it depends mostly on social circles. the most recognisable is in hip-hop/rap/garage/whatever they want to call it nowadays culture where you get a load of mostly black (but also an increasing number of white kids thinking theyre black) kids that for some reason seem to have addopted an american/jamaican/london way of speaking. this isnt that bad until you watch saturday morning tv and that “abs” bloke from that boy band starts talking like a jamaican and hes white as a sheet of paper.
in general there are very slight differences which can be sometimes picked up but alot of the time its extremely hard to tell

11

[hijack]

I’ll second that. I’ve been hearing Oregonians and Arizonans on TV for the past 7 years but I still speak like a New Englander which is where I’m from.

[/hijack]

12

In Australia, it would depend what you mean by black.

Aboriginal?
Yes, there is a strong accent / dialect. Well it can be strong. Many don’t have it, of course.

African?
African people aren’t a large migrant group in this country. Because of this, I don’t have much interaction with them, and I’m no expert on the accent. Also, most of them are recent arrivals (last decade or so), and retain a geographical accent, rather than a subcultural African-Australian one. My next door neighbours are African, and all I can detect is a softly-spoken, pan-African accent. I’d have trouble telling the different African nationalities apart, and generally rely on clothing to get a vague guess of northern or southern Africa. I’d say there’s no black accent as such in this country.

13

There’s never been a formal policy of racial segregation in the UK, but resistance to general integration, and the practice of white people ostracising black people on a personal level has been as common in this country as it has anywhere else.

IMHO the tonal qualities of a person’s voice that identify them as being black might be at least partly physiological – to do with shape of larynx, mouth etc. In any case, I’ll offer an example to contrast with the one I gave before: I defy anyone to guess what this guy looked like from his voice alone, but note that he’s from Somalia, not west Africa. In fact I think you should be able to hear him yourself if click this link and scroll down to the story called “Facing the future after the floods” (I can’t check myself because my machine won’t play vids at the moment).

14

Phase42
Was racial segregation common in the UK in the last couple centuries?

Not segregation in the Southern USA / South African sense. But with significant post-WW2 immigration from the Caribbean, there have grown up long-standing communities (e.g. in parts of Birmingham and London) where a shared dialect has persisted. I’ve known well-spoken third-generation people in Birmingham whose speech nevertheless has Jamaican elements, such as pronouncing “little” as somewhere between “lickle” and “liddle”, and phraseologies such as “this HEE-er is…”. And, as others have said, there’s this ‘yoof culture’ Estuary/Rapper dialect.