The important thing here is that we’re agreed that, often, something as yet undefined (by us) allows a listener to determine whether a speaker is black using only auditory cues.
But it also has to be pointed out that there are many many exceptions. I would, for example, defy ANYONE to listen to Tony Gwynn (ex-baseball star for the non-enlightened among the readers) and determine anything other than that he is male and raised in Southern California. That speech pattern (word choice and rhythm) is still very dominant in my own speech even though it’s getting towards 25 years since I moved away.
Since a good deal of African-Americans have varying degrees of European ancestry, I wonder if people (who say they notice it in people who don’t speak AAVE) hear different degrees of a “black tone or timbre” in voices of people of these different mixes.
Jonathan Chance, I think one of those cues is a small component of a southern accent in many African Americans, ever if they didn’t grow up in the south.
I would ascribe this to the fact that until relatively recently, the majority of blacks lived in the south. Coupled with the fact that for much of the period since their northward migration, they lived in an enforced segregation that preserved their accents.
E.g., a black man born in 1960 in Chicago probably got his accent from people who sounded a lot more southern than a white man who lived ten miles away.
I could probably identify a Native American (Indian) from Canada just by voice. They have a Canadian accent but there is a very special “looseness” and a softer palate in their vocalizations.
UC Berkeley linguist (and African American) John McWhorter explains the connections between the Black English and the regional Southern sound systems in his book Word on the Street. Black English is both a dialect and a sound system for speaking Standard English, and most African Americans are adept at code-switching between the two, depending on the social situation.
More relevant to the OP, McWhorter uses the Cosby Show cast as an example of people who most people, especially other blacks, would identify as sounding black even if heard over the telephone – with the execption of Lisa Bonet.
It’s all learned. A black child raised in China will speak perfect Chinese, of course. And a Chinese child raised amongst African Americans will speak perfect Black English, as well as Standard English with a sound system taken to one degree or another from Black English.
I’m Black and I had a very interesting expericence along these lines a couple of years ago.
I was recruiting for a tennis team and was given the work number of a potential player, which I recognized as one of the major, white shoe law firms in the New York City area.
The man’s first name was Robert and his last name was an obviously Nordic one (with a lot of double consonants (i.e., kj), etc., and double vowels.
When I phoned him, two words into his first sentence to me, I knew there was something, for lack of a better way to describe it, “Black” in his speech. Articulate, well-educated, well-spoken, but still . . .
Upon meeting him in person several phone calls later and getting to know a little about him, it turned out his father was Swedish (if I remember correctly) and his mother was African American. Based on his surname and the law firm firm’s lily-white reputation, I had subconsciously assumed that he would be white (U.S. proportions, that is). (And my saying he was articulate, etc. wasn’t meant to say Blacks can’t be; I know I am.)
I’ve also noticed that I can usually tell. I’ve never really thought too much about why though.
White skin has evolved to help us live at higher latitudes, right? Perhaps there was some mechanism which has altered the voices of those early Europeans which did not have a major effect on those that stayed in Africa. The first thing that jumps to mind is that sapiens’ breathing evolved for the hotter climate of Africa. Move those pipes up to a colder Europe and rather then wanting to get rid of excess heat you’d want a breathing system that conserves heat at least part of the year. That seems major enough to rather quickly create a different enough mouth and throat that it would effect the sound of the voice.
It certainly seems plausible enough to me to deserve study. Although you’d have to avoid people from the Americas who are already quite mixed and go to the isolated parts of Europe and Africa. I’d consider myself surprised to find that there was no difference.
If you need to avoid the “mixed” people of the Americas, you have somewhat conceded that the theory is pretty weak. While it might be true that the pattern of languages around the world was influenced by physical features of the speakers, the fact that such aspects of speech are no longer genetically determined pretty much precludes a current physical origin of the situation. Under the notorious “one drop” rule that has existed in the U.S. for many years (and was actually enshrined in law for many of those years) people with far more European than African ancestry have often found themselves living in black communities and speaking with the same timbre as the people among whom they grew up. That would seem to indicate that it is a learned speech pattern and not a physical manifestation.
(Again, the current situation does not argue against a possibility that there were physiological contributions to the development of languages, but the languages as currently spoken are learned and not based on physiology.)
I dunno if it’s all learned. I was in Tokyo and there was a small group of black guys and Asian guys (I assumed Japanese) hanging outside a train station, having a conversation in Japanese. I don’t speak Japanese, and am bad enough with identifying English accents, so I couldn’t identify where any of them were from or how “perfect” their Japanese were – but, it was clear that it was a casual conversation (they weren’t asking for directions or anything, just hanging out) and that it was all in Japanese instead of half-and-half. The sight of black people speaking Japanese was still so novel to me that I hung out a little bit to watch and listen, and even without knowing the language at all, I could tell who was speaking based on the timbre of the voice.
And to add to the polling segment of the thread: I’d guess that I can identify whether a voice is from an African American around 80% of the time. English black people, I can hardly tell at all.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m innately prejudiced, or it may be just because I have such a finely-tuned “blackdar.” I can almost always tell if a person is black just by looking at him. I can’t explain it; it’s just a talent I have.
Peace.
Yes, I got that joke from The Onion. Consider it “fair use.”
Not necessarily, I only threw that part out since any difference between the two populations would be most pronounced by avoiding those populations which are the most mixed.
Basically my point was that with differences like eye color, hair color, hair type and skin color to claim that there cannot be any real difference in those parts of the body which effect the sound of the voice seems odd. There was a long enough time with little enough interbreeding between the two pops for some traits to diverge. We wont know until we study it. Granted it’s not too important in the grand scheme of things but if it is a real relict of our prehistoric past it should teach us something.