Based on comments in this article, is it true that the Brummie accent is the only accent in a minor key? What does it even mean for an accent to be in a minor key, anyway?
The claim that the accent is in “a minor key” is only in one of the comments, and in any case it makes no particular sense. Ignore it. The person making the comment is trying to use the term “minor key” as if it meant “minor, important, trivial,” which it doesn’t.
Taking your second bit first:
No, they’re not - the comment says:
I think it does make sense - Brum accent can be quite a singsong mode of speech, and although I’m not sure it really has any natural key, it can sound quite melancholy. So it’s a stretch to say that, but it sort of makes sense.
To my ear, a Birmingham accent sounds the least “English” and most “American” of any accents.
Really? To me (British), it sounds closest to a caricatured Swedish accent or something.
Until further (extraordinary) evidence is brought, I think you’d better assume this commenter is speaking out of his ass. (Or someone else’s, so to speak)
I have yet to hear anyone speak in such melodic tones that their accent could be said to be in a particular “key.” I mean, what does it mean really? That they speak on the tonic until they get a little bit excited where they slip up to the minor third? But then, how could we tell the difference between that and someone speaking on the major third, because they have a “harmonising accent”, who then slips up to the fifth?
There are no human languages that function on absolute pitch – even tone languages use relative pitch (It’s not the note you hit, it’s whether you went up or down). Even if we make the assumption that Brummophones may be going up or down a half-note instead of a full one (or however you get to “minor,” in this context), we’re still stuck with the problem of deciding what the “baseline” is.
I can only guess that the commenter is relying on the same kind of impressionistic strategy that leads singing instructors to say that one’s voice is “coming from the chest” or “coming from the sinuses,” when in reality it’s coming from the larynx no matter what you do.
I think the English S.Western accent plus maybe the Ulster accent sound closer to the American accent myself.
I agree with you to a certain extent but just want to say there are various “Ulster” accents and although they have certain commonalities they vary quite a bit.
I think you may be right. Cary Grant grew up in Bristol, and I didn’t know he was English born until I saw a documentary of him. Since most of his films that I have seen were comedies, I erroneously thought his accent was a comic affectation, brilliantly imitated later by Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot.
Mangetout writes:
> I think it does make sense - Brum accent can be quite a singsong mode of
> speech, and although I’m not sure it really has any natural key, it can sound
> quite melancholy.
Sounding singsongy doesn’t mean that it sounds like it’s in a minor key, and being in a minor key simply doesn’t apply to the accentual pattern of languages. Furthermore, saying that an accent sounds “melancholy” is arbitrary. No linguist would ever use that term to describe an accent. I spent a lot of time while I lived in England listening to Brummie accents, and I never thought of them as melancholy. The comment may say that “one of his lecturers informed them that the West Midlands accent is the only English accent in the world that is pitched in a minor rather than a major key,” but I’ve never heard or read of any linguist who used the terms “minor key” or “melancholy” about an accent pattern (and I have a master’s degree in linguistics). Until such time as someone can show us a citation that a linguist (in particular, a phonologist) has ever used the terms “melancholy” or “minor key” to apply to the accent patterns of a language or dialect, I stand by my statement that this makes no sense.
Cary Grant’s accent does sound a bit affected and unnatural, even to British ears. It doesn’t sound anything like a Bristol accent.
Anyway, count me as another who is mystified by the idea of an accent having a minor key. These things are in the eye, or the ear, of the beholder. Like in the Times article that the OP links to, where they describe the Brummie accent as “nasal”. People always use that word about unfamiliar accents. What they mean is, “it sounds weird to me”. West Midlands accents aren’t nasal, are they?
While thinking it’s nonsense, I’m not mystified. I’d like to invoke a term accidentally created by one of my pupils: an individual’s speech can sound ‘minory’, with frequent rising and falling through a minor third. A long way from being in any key, though, and it doesn’t necessarily have any relation to a more general regional accent.