Between the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the English language underwent the “Great English Vowel Shift” which dramatically altered the spoken language. I have a reasonable understanding as to what the vowel shift was and how it affected spoken English. My question is this: has anyone ever come up with a reasonable explanation as to why this change came about? The references I see ususally call it a mystery.
I think the answer is simply no, no one has ever come up with a convincing answer that clearly rises above other explanations.
The greatest period of change seems to have been in the early 15th century, followed by a long “chain reaction” period as vowel sounds continued to sort themselves out in the process of redifferentiation.
Two historically dominant factors in linguistic shifts are population shift (immigration/invasion) and, quite simply, fashion. Because the former is more easily documented than the latter, my WAG is that changes in perception of which dialect was more prestigious is the most likely culprit in this case. Nowadays, of course, we can add mass-communication technologies with audio components into the mix.
I’ll be interested to see other posts on this subject, but I don’t think there’s a clear-cut answer out there.
I saw this documentary a few months ago that said there is a large vowel shift going on in many northern USA cities right now.
http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Northeast/ncshift/ncshift.html
This is even more odd to me that those of the past because we all get the same mass-media. I thought we would all be converging to the “America-neutral” accent like you hear on all the sitcoms.
It’s the fashion-effect again. People distinguish themselves by language in the same way we do with clothes. I recently heard an interview w/ Linda Perlstien, author of “Not Much, Just Chillin’”, and her discussion of middle school speech, especially neo-Valley speak, was really fascinating. I was a counselor at a large summer camp a few years ago, and the cool way to talk was slightly Butthead-ish with neo-surfer fading in and out.
I took a sociolinguistics class a couple of quarters class, and since Rochester is one of the cities affected by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, we spent a good bit of time discussing it. Think back to the old “Da Bears” sketches on Saturday Night Live, and you’ll have a good (though exaggerated) example of the accent.
Unlike the aforementioned dialects which are cool, and imitatible, NCVS is more of a working-class accent. Upper-class people don’t really have it at all. Having said that, I have rarely met anybody from Rochester (regardless of social class) who spoke with an NCVS accent all the time. Most of the time they could pass as somebody from Michigan or Indiana, but get them excited and watch all those O’s turn into broad A’s (Kamm Annnn!)
Also, the NCVS seems to have skipped my hometown of Toledo, OH entirely. Buffalo and Rochester, NY have it, Detroit has it, Chicago has it, but not Toledo. According to Balduran’s cite, Cleveland has it, but I haven’t met anybody from Cleveland who sounded like that.
Erm, that first sentence should read “a couple of quarters back”.
Cool is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. Sometimes, the working class accent is the one being imitated.
E.g., I can’t remember who or where it was, but one doper on one thread referred to our President’s “aw shucks” act, which I thought was very apt. I know we all move among various registers, but personally, I find his “y’see” folksiness grating and unbecoming of the gravity of the office.
Before I’m accused of being knee-jerk liberal, I’m not a Democrat and formerly supported the Iraq War… but Bush and his Chickenhawks have since totally alienated me.
Absolutely no cite for this but…
I do recall reading that the American accent was reckoned to be closer to the English accent as spoken in Shakespeare’s time than the current Standard English accent.
Like I said, no cite and it was a few years ago… anyone else heard of this? It could be some crackpot theory, but in some ways it makes sense…
I’m from Detroit, and I don’t recognize this at all. Granted I work with professionals, but I *do[i/] use services like car wash and grocery and all the standard fare. And until recently worked among working (well, I mean union) folk.
In the following, I mean colloquial speech. As I said, I work with professionals in a professional context, and there is a lot of mode switching. So I mean generalities. So… what we do have here, though, amongst the African-Americans is the run-of-the-mill “black” accent. There are (I detest this word but have heard it) “wiggers” which are, uh, non-black people that intentionally try to speak “black”, and then pretty much everyone else who speaks perfectly normally.
Okay, perfectly normally to me is the nightly, national news. CNN. Fox News. People on TV that aren’t stereotypes.
This is something that really, truly interests me. I’d love to see anything online that has specific, credible references about this. I’ll be hooked. THANKS.
Truthfully, I haven’t heard much NCVS in Detroit either. However, it is one of the cities commonly cited as having it. It’s referenced briefly in this article from the Free Press: http://www.freep.com/news/nw/espeak26_20040226.htm
Once again … there is no evidence that mass media has any effect whatsoever on our accents.
Often confused with the Great English Bowel Shift.
We shall see. Academics fink there might be, innit.
I’ll await their findings with interest. I hope they investigate how this accent shift appears to be only affecting one particular class of speakers, when presumably all are exposed to the same television shows.
I predict that research will show an effect of mass media on accents. But it certainly won’t be across the board. Not only are we not all watching the same shows and listening to the same radio stations, but different groups will show markedly different tendencies toward imitating accents they hear, both because of their esteem for the personalities using them and their willingness to be plastic in their own pronunciation.
As I mentioned above, the influence of Mike Judge and of surfer-speak as portrayed in the media had a definite impact on the pronunciation and inflection of the male kids at the camp. How much, if any, of that “sticks” is anyone’s guess.
Not to labour the point, but you can’t definitively state that the media influenced the kids’ speech. More likely IMHO (unless this research proves otherwise, and I remain sceptical that it will) is that the media simply reflected a trend that was already underway in the real world.
True. I wouldn’t make any such definitive claim. This is just my prediction.
I’m absolutely sure that this does indeed happen (media reflecting actual trends). In fact, it stands to reason imho that the majority of what we hear in the media reflects real-world dialects. But I dunno about Butthead. My guess there is that his manner of speech was invented by Judge, but that’s conjecture (based on the facts that {1} I never heard that style of speech before B&B, and {2} voice artists actively cultivate unique trademark styles for their characters).
But think about this… why are these kids in the rural heartland adopting a bastardized (almost comic) surfer-speak? Their parents sure aren’t speaking it. They’re not hanging out with surfers. In fact, I’d bet that actual surfers would find their dialect laughable, and that they have adopted it largely from a media adaptation of “surfer” accents.
I remember getting out of a taxi in Savannah, just behind a pair of teenage boys who had apparently given a couple of teenage girls a lift. When the girls got out, the boys, very White Southern, started entreating them not to leave – using MTV gansta rap speak! It was ridiculous, and I will bet you any amount of money that they got that style from the media and not from actually hanging out with anyone who grew up speaking that way (or anywhere close to it). Again, can’t prove it, but I would literally bet you any amount of money.
It’s a cyclical relationship, of course. Media picks up all kinds of real-world accents. These are then disseminated, and the ones deemed cool are picked up by other speakers. Media rarely invents styles of parlance, but it does amplify and broaden them. In the case of Butthead, though, my money’s still on invention rather than reflection.
It’s interesting, and hopefully some substantive research will be done. But as I said above, there’s a large fashion component to language, and it seems odd that mass media would not play a role in influencing – by spreading, altering, and sometimes creating – fashions in language just as it does fashions in clothes etc.
Apparently, I just lied. I did indeed propose a “definite” influence from media to speakers. My apologies, ruadh. ::Puts on dunce cap, stands in corner::
My dad’s family lives in Detroit (well, Southfield and Berkley, but Detroit area) and it’s definitely present in their pronunciation. Both my step-sisters have it too, despite having lived in California for several years in their late teens. They live in Milan and Ann Arbor.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “that style of speech”. I can remember seeing B&B when it first came out, and thinking how many people from my high school (which had a substantial “white trash” minority) they reminded me of. I certainly don’t remember thinking there was anything original about the way they talked.
I think you’ve unwittingly hit on it there. It isn’t actual “surfer-speak”, despite the label. It’s just the vernacular of a particular demographic (young white guys) and has spread in the same ways all vernaculars spread.
I’ve heard people bring up examples like these before and I just don’t think there’s anywhere near enough evidence in them to go on. These are strangers who you heard speak for a few minutes at most - neither of us know anything about their background or even if they were using their “normal” speaking voices at the time.
Fashion is a much more superficial phenomenon than language though, I’m not sure there’s any comparison. But as the estimable hazel-rah put it on these boards once: “I know it’s counterintuitive, but most things about language are.”