Well since the internet seems to not know the actual race or identity of that Youtuber in question, mind sharing how you, a South African, are so sure the speaker is White?
And it seems pretty obvious to me that when someone says something about the differences heard in peoples voices, they mean the from sounds spoken. I don’t know how else to read that other than meaning their dialect/accent/whatever. If “voice” is used to mean a different thing in South Africa than in America then maybe that is where the disconnect is coming from.
Yes I am talking about hearing someone’s sounds spoken from their mouth and the slight variations in those spoken sounds.
American dialects and accents are influenced to a far greater degree by ethnicity than Britons’. Simply put, a black person and a white person who grow up in the same town, with the same economic background and the same education, will typically still be distinguishable by the way they speak. In the UK, there is also a tendency for nonwhites to be clustered in cities where the underlying accent may be so thick as to “muffle” the speaker’s race.
My old boss (a lawyer) had an assistant who had worked for him for something like 25 years. She grew up in Ohio, and moved around the South a bit when she was young. She talked to the same people over and over for years while scheduling events. Without fail, every time we met people who hadn’t seen her in person before they did a double-take (or remarked to me) because they were surprised she was black.
And if you look at John McWhorter’s work on the matter, he talks about how black American accents arent likited to “stereotypical blaccents” as menrikned upthread. Yes, some black people have very strong black accent s that’s are easily distinguishable.
But many “blaccents” differ from white accents of the same region/class in only very subtle ways, and Americans will pick up on the “blackness” of the speech often without being fully aware of what the specific pronunciation features are.
McWhorter says in the podcast linked above:
You can generally tell whether somebody is white or black even if they’re just reading from the phone book. And so it’s not about slang and although there is a black English grammar, a black person can not use that at all and yet I think any American knows—and I think many of us are taught to feel guilty about it or to suppose there’s something racist about it—but any American knows in their heart of hearts that there is a such [sic] thing as a black voice and many studies have shown that Americans are very, very good at identifying after often just a few syllables whether on earth is white or black.
Notice this use of “voice” by a highly trained linguistic scholar talking about pronunciation.
He indicates that the differences are mostly in “tiny little shadings of vowels.”
And of course the reason we have this situation in the United States, in which white people and black people have different accents, is the severe segregation in our society.
Partly the issue is the algorithm giving you what it thinks you want to see.
The other part of it is these guys have been in the youtube game a long time. They have hit their stride and have a lot of subscribers. Many of them have been doing youtube since the early days. They are the OG contingent.
His real name and picture did the rounds in a Maker FB group a couple of years ago. Of course, it may have been a hoax, but the picture was of a middle-aged White guy. The group doesn’t exist any more, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
When I hear “voice”, I assume pitch and all the other vocal effects like fry and vibrato etc. Like, if most Black people in a place spoke the same broad accent as Whites but with a noticeable falsetto tone, I would call that a “voice” but not an “accent”.
All the examples he gives have to do with systematic vowel differences. How is that intonation as opposed to accent/pronunciation? And it’s all in the context of a conversation that repeatedly uses the term “blaccent.” What hill are you dying on here?
I’d say “tiny little shadings of vowels.” are intonations, whereas stuff like saying “ax” for “ask” is pronunciation.
Not dying on any hill, just explaining what I consider the difference between “voice” and “accent” so as you’ll get where I’m coming from in objecting to someone saying Black people have a distinctive “voice” as opposed to a different “accent”.
IMO, if they had a different “voice”, it would carry across accents. You’d be able to identify me as PoC even when I speak without any stereotypically Black accent. That’s what I understand by the word “voice”. Like I said, if you mean “accent” when you say “voice”, I’ll happily acknowledge that you’re in good company (well, academically good company) while still saying it’s a confusing usage and the word “accent” is way less ambiguous.
Just the structure of a person’s face can affect the way they speak, to the extent that researchers have been able to train machine learning algorithms that can reconstruct fairly striking likenesses of a person’s face, based only on a small sample of their speech
This has descended into absurdity. We are now quibbling over definitions that are wayyy beside any point that can be me made in this thread.
And the distinctions you’re making are both (1) wrong and (2) irrelevant.
Why do you keep saying “stereotypical”?
I already told you that when I said “voice” I meant pronunciation an accent. I am not interested in this diversion to voice. And it is also very clear that John McWhorter is talking about the same thing I am.
“Shadings of vowels” is almost an exact definition of “accent.” This conversation has become silly.
Under this standard, all accents are stereotypical. So “stereotypical” is redundant.
There are some stereotypes regarding accents, and you might see black characters in movies stereotyped as having a certain manner of speech.
But we aren’t talking about such stereotypes. We are talking about the existence of actual accents in the United States. The use of the word “stereotype” here is misleading.
No, that’s bullshit - some accents are stereotypically attached to ethnic groups, others are much less so. For instance, there’s a range of South African accents that are stereotypically Black or White or Coloured or Indian - but there are others that are strongly cross-ethnic, like the Model C accent and the Namaqualand accent.
Misleading? Now you’re all about clear language, when you’ve just spent how many posts ardently defending ambiguous wording?
“Ardently” is an interesting word for you to use here.
You’re using the word “stereotype” to accuse is of ethnic stereotyping. It’s no more or less stereotyping than to hear someone with a French or English or South African accent and think “that person is probably French, English, or South African.”
This is a reality in the United States. Just as there are regional accents, there are also African-American accents. And these are genuine accents, not ethnic stereotypes. Some of the characteristics of these accents are regional, but in some respects black American accents apply accross geographical regions, such as English Received Pronunciation.
You’re accusing us of ethnic stereotyping simply for bringing this to your attention.
I used a word. You misunderstood it. I explained my usage and gave you an example of an expert using it in the same way. This should not be an ongoing issue.
There’s a lot of variation in Southern accents, both black and white. I wouldn’t be surprised at all that they might sound the same to an untrained ear, or that the white/black version of them might also not be distinguishable.
I mean, I can mostly tell where someone is from in Texas, and whether they’re from some other state. Sometimes I can tell that someone’s from Louisiana. But I’d be hard pressed to tell a Mississippian from an Alabaman for example. But I’m absolutely sure they can tell each other apart.
Is the problem here that you see the word “stereotype” exclusively as some sort of pejorative?
Yes, those would also be stereotyping.
Maybe I’m more tuned to it being stereotyping because I always get wrongly stereotyped in voice-only conversations.
And I said I accepted the usage of the word. Yet you’re still posting about it. So clearly just saying “yes, I accept that the usage of the word is valid” is not enough for you.
Are you expecting me to say it wasn’t an unclear usage? Because that’s not going to happen, I’m not in the habit of lying - it was unclear in a way that “accent” is not.
Having said that, I’m dropping out of the thread because I’ve already commented on the actual topic and you’re clearly just looking for a fight that I have no interest in giving you.