How do you talk black?

Great Debates
1

In keeping with this thread, where Biggirl questions the validity of widely-held stereotypes:

I used to work in customer service for a utility company (cable television). Around 75% of the staff were African-American. All contact with our subscribers was through the telephone.

Lots of people would call up to make appointments for installation, payment arrangements, whatever. Sometimes it was necessary for them to call back to confirm something. As many of you who have worked in this type of job can testify to, nobody ever remembered the name of the last person they talked to. They would say “I made an arrangement with someone at your office yesterday”, to which I would reply “Do you remember who it was?” and they just never did.

But I got a lot of this: “I don’t remember her name, but she was a black lady.” Now obviously, the Customer Service Rep is not telling people “Just call back and ask for the black lady. I’m black, in case you didn’t know…” So customers are getting an impression, erroneous or not, of what race the Rep belongs to just by talking to her.

One black woman used to get irritated by this. She said she always wanted to say to these people “Oh? Did she tell you she was black?” I can see that it’s not really polite to talk about a “black accent”, but I must admit that these impressions always went both ways.

By this I mean that when I would talk to customers, a profile of that customer would form in my head, not because it was necessary, just because of instinct. I would know with relative certainty, for instance, whether I was speaking with a man or a woman. On the other hand, I would never presume to assign a characteristic like eye or hair color to this person I’ve never seen.

But in most cases, I would get either a “white” impression or a “black” impression from a caller’s voice. I was never able to test whether my impressions were correct, because I never had face-to-face contact with my customers. But I do know that I’m not the only one who gets these impressions, because of all the people who’d call up looking for “the black lady I spoke to this morning”.

And the woman who would get irritated with our customers’ voice-based racial profiling? If I closed my eyes and listened to her, I’m confident that I would have gotten a “white” impression, even though I knew she was black.

So the debateable question is this: Is there an African-American accent? And if so, what does it sound like? How can it be compared to other accents? I remember that when I was a little kid, I thought that most black people seemed to have what I considered “Southern accents”. Is the hypothesized “African-American accent” a variation on the accent of people in the American South?

I’m interested to see what you all have to say, although I won’t be able to post again until tomorrow.

2

I was once accused of being racist over the phone (I was trying to enforce my companies rebate policy). That is one I could never figure out…how could she have figured out my race and I hers while connected soley through the phone lines?

3

I read somewhere that the “Southern black accent” was described by dialogue coaches as “plantation”, but I can’t find a cite for it. I did, however, find this.

http://www.bypass.com/~dasinc/

http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/miscpubs/naeyc/position.htm

And if anybody wants to look up more stuff, I got to this from a Google search for “speech coach regionalisms”.

4

Hey, Duck? Not to be a pain, but what the heck do those links and excerpts tell us about the OP’s question? I mean, I admire your ability to be first on the scene with a Google cite as much as anyone, but other than the mentions of Black English, what’s the direct relevance here?

Don’t mean to be confrontational; just asking. :slight_smile:

5

Seems pretty relevent to the bolded section.

6

No, there are several. There are also several Anglo-American accents.

7

I don’t think that there’s any question that a certain number of black people have recognizable voices and I have never figured out what the “racist” implications are supposed to be.

A large number of black people in the U.S. have throatier sounding voices than the majority of whites in the U.S. Combine that with the “Southern” accent that colors much speech used by blacks and you wind up with a recognizable speech pattern among many blacks. The same can be said for detecting nasal qualities in the speech of many Chinese and Japanese immigrants or the back-of-the-mouth/sinus tones used by many whites.

There is no way to guarantee that one can identify everyone, sight unseen, by their voice, but most people can play the averages pretty well. (If there is no difference between “black” and “white” speech patterns, how does Eddie Murphy get laughs by talking “white”.)

Any absolute rule on the subject would be foolish. I know throaty-voiced whites and more-nearly-nasal blacks. The general throatiness or nasality of the speakers is related to dialect, not physical attributes. Blacks are not “naturally” throatier or whites “naturally” more sinoid, but the speech patterns that have developed in the various communities tend to reinforce different ways of speaking. Living around Detroit, then Cleveland, I am familiar with neighborhoods that are heavily populated by people whose parents or grandparents moved North during WWII. Sixty years later, young people from many of the neighborhoods that are derisively referred to as colonies of Kentucky (Detroit) or West Virginia (Cleveland) use a noticeably higher-pitched, almost twangy, speech pattern. There is nothing “white” about a nasal twang, but the association lingers because the neighborhoods were sufficiently coherent to maintain a distinctive speech pattern.

8

If Bryant Gumbel and Al Roker were radio personalities instead of TV presenters - I don’t think I would know that they were Black unless they said so…
By contrast there is a DJ on our local “Hip Hop” radio station. One day me and a friend went to a club concert where he was the emcee.
Both of us believed he was black, but he wasn’t. We were pretty surprised that he was white. He really sounded “black” to us. And he wasn’t phony and over the top, but he had a very natural accent.

But its definitely not a “natural” characteristic, I mean black British people often sound no different from white British people.
As for the throaty vs. nasal, Brazilian Portuguese is often very “nasal” (a lot of ão, õe sounds) and is “sinoid”, even when spoken by 100% African Brazilians.

9

Kareem Abdul Jabbar wrote about being amazed to find out that that famous DJ, “Wolfman Jack,” was white. After hearing the wolfman on the radio, it never occured to Kareem that the guy could even possibly be white.

It’s better to try not to make assumptions.

10

i am not sure, but i tink ebonics may be what you are looking for. try google search engine and use ebonics as keyword. there are 31,000 sites. i lived in memphis tennessee from 1964 until about 18 months ago. memphis (city limits) is now 73% black. i have worked with many blacks and have many friends that are black. one tends to pick up a lot of their dialect by having conversations with them.

i agree that there is a close relationship between the dialect of southern bred whites and blacks. i think it is genetic since both are from warm to hot climates. i think the dialect is temperature related because white people from the south and blacks in general speak with the least expenditure of energy as possible (example yall instead of you all), if you try this you will see that you have to use your lip mulcles to say you, but when you say yall, all you have to do is drop your lower jaw.

i think it is pretty well accepted that southern people do not have as much energy as northern people, again this is temperature related. there are many other indicators that verify that temperature has an effect on energy expenditure besides energy expended for speech. macrobiotic (yin/yang) theorems and philosophy goes into this in some detail if interested in further research. typing and not using the enter key or shift key to capitalize is also much more energy efficient.

jesse

11

jesse, I’m afraid that a lot of your suppositions are simply not supported by actual analysis. (They have the additional unfortunate trait of echoing earlier racist literature, so laying those claims out without citation is simply asking for someone to come by and jump on your case.)

The “less energy in Southern climes” idea is one that was swished around over a hundred years ago to “prove” the superiority of the Northern Europeans to the Mediterranean peoples–especially as the U.S. was dealing with new waves of immigration from the Mediterranean region. It ignores the fairly easily demonstrated fact that the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians, and a whole raft of other people were obviously very industrious.

It is simply not true.

There is a “laid back” attitude that appears more frequently in the U.S. South than in, say New York city. I can assure you, however, that that same laid back attitude can be found in Ireland or the several regions in Northern states. (That attitude toward lifestyles has no bearing on whether the people are actually industrious, either.)

The dialects that have arisen in the South and that have come into different areas of the North in the great black migration of the 1920s and 1930s and the great WWII-fostered white migration from the middle states do, indeed, have a bearing on how people sound to each other.

If you go to areas of the South with recent industrialization, you will find a lot of Northerners who have migrated. They have all moved to the same places, but some have adopted Southern lifestyle and speech patterns and some have maintained their Northern traits. If there was a physical source for these attributes, then everyone who migrated North should have changed to “talk Northern” and everyone who has recently moved South should be changing to speak with a Southern accent. They are not because there is not.

None of them have a physical source (and none of them have a genetic source).

12

Some additional thoughts:

I think we can all agree that “having an accent” should be considered a value-neutral characteristic. Lots of extraordinarily well-spoken people have very identifiable accents. Bill Clinton comes to mind.

jesse morrison, I think what you might be referring to is the Oakland County, CA schoolboard’s initiative to recognize that alternatives to Standard American English are just that - alternatives - and not inherently wrong in and of themselves. “Ebonics” is a neologism that got a lot of ink a few years ago from self-proclaimed saviors of education who IMHO didn’t really understand the issue. The strawman argument against teaching “Ebonics” in schools is just so much political nonsense, as nothing other than Standard American English was ever proposed to be taught in schools. As regards the rest of your post… Please don’t think me rude, but is there a possibility you could be in slightly over your head here? I don’t know, I’m only asking.

Besides, My original post wasn’t intended to refer to alternative sentence structures or use of the past-participle or anything like that. It was about the phenomenon of human speech (not even so much about language) across different subcultures. What tomndebb said was most relevant, offering descriptive words such as “sinoid” and “throaty” to describe people’s speech where I didn’t have such words in my post.

13

Um, how about “proving that the OP isn’t a total idiot, that there is such a thing as ‘talking black’”? :wink:

…thereby forestalling an ugly hijack about racism.

14

DDG: Okie dokie. Personally, I didn’t get the sense that cuautemhoc came across as an idiot at all; I don’t know that finding a mention of “Black English” on a webpage or two really vitiates him one way or the other, even just to the extent of validating the existence of an African-American accent. Your mileage apparently varies. :slight_smile:

15

Here’s a favorite site of mine. The Dictionary of American Regional English. They have a link to some dialect maps. In our last linguistic thread I wondered aloud of there was a national black accent that overlayed or mingled with a person’s regional accent.

There is a American Broadcast accent. Some people believe it comes in two flavors, the Tom Brokaw flavor and the James Earl Jones flavor. I think the difference is more in the pacing than in the actual sounds.

16

If that were true…this would be the language of the Saharan natives.
“Wa wuh ya wuhuh wah uh wahwah”
:slight_smile:

17

jesse morrison said:
“i think the dialect is temperature related because white people from the south and blacks in general speak with the least expenditure of energy as possible (example yall instead of you all), if you try this you will see that you have to use your lip mulcles to say you, but when you say yall, all you have to do is drop your lower jaw.”

Oh dear, where do I start? Um, I’m from the South and damn proud of it, and I must say that I am intellectually offended at your essentialization of the richness of the variations of Southern speech as due to the hot climate. I can drawl with the best of them, but I can guarandamntee you my drawl is not in any way determined by how hot it is outside. I’m sitting here wondering how if you’ve lived in Tennessee for over 30 years, you could have so little a clue about variations of Southern speech. First, let me just tell you something about language in general, and you can find this in any standard textbook on linguistics, which btw, I’d suggest you pick up and read. One good one is the latest edition of Language: Introductory Readings, by Virginia P. Clark, Paul A. Eschholz, and Alfred F. Rosa. But even if you don’t read a general introduction to linguistics, use some common sense. Language is constantly evolving so that it GETS EASIER TO SPEAK. One of the ways that this happens is in contracting forms of words. I’ve studied Spanish, Japanese, a little French, Black Vernacular, and Standard American English. They all use contractions. In Standard American English the thought process of constructing “we’re” from “we are” is no different from the thought process of constructing “y’all” from “you all.” Does this make sense?

Now to address this idea of climate a little more, :rolleyes: It’s hot in various places in the world. It’s hot in Spain, in Mexico, Central, and South America. It’s hot in Hong Kong, in places in China, in Vietnam . . . It’s hot and humid in Japan. Yet the folks who speak Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, . . . speak those languages very rapidly. If you really listen to folks speak variations of American Southern English, even with the drawling going on, them folks be talkin’ fast too. I’ve run into folks from some parts spoke so fast, I didn’t have a clue as to what’n’a hell they was talkin’ ‘bout. But it sho’ was fascinatin’ listenin’ to 'em. :slight_smile: Temperature does not determine how fast or how slowly one speaks any given language.

As far as determining what is Black English, there is a body of scholarship out there on it. Geneva Smitherman comes to mind. I think the latest she’s written is Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (1994). She also wrote Talkin’ and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, but I can’t recall when that one was published. I also think Claudia Mitchell-Kernan wrote something about the process of signifyin’. J.L. Dillard wrote Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (1972). While Dillard’s book is a little dated, it’s still worth reading, for he does investigate the historical process of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its impact on the creation of the MANY varieties of Black English. Think about it. When enslaved Africans were taken to the West Indies to be “broken” and made into slaves, one practice was to separate Africans who spoke the same language and put them with Africans who spoke another language. This way they could not communicate effectively and had to come up with a new language based on English, the language of their captors, which btw, they were not taught, to survive. There were no classes where enslaved Africans could sit down and learn how to conjugate verbs . . . They had to learn or die. And many, many of them died. But the ones who survived, went on to create pidgins and creoles, and from those pidgins and creoles, came the many variations of black English that are spoken by black people in countries beyond America too.

I’ve said all this to say that if you want to understand what Black English is, then you need to understand the historical process of its formation, as well as its linguistic features.

18

Again I am talking about “ultimate cause”, not “proximate cause” (see my thread Emotions—theory). I know very little history, so someone can correct me if I am wrong. Humans started in Africa, then migrated to Northern regions and Southern regions. Every thing else being equal, Northern
and Southern languages and dialects evolved over thousands or millions of years with the differences being caused by climate and diet.

I think what the OP is getting at, is why do people with a Southern accent get no respect from people with a northern accent, or a very proper British accent, whether they are black or white does not matter. Example—While I was living in LA I was acquainted with a Black male from England. I am a white male from Tennessee with a pronounced Southern accent. Since we both had about the same amount of obscure useless knowledge, in our debates we would always break about even, but he would always make fun of my Southern accent, and I would feel shame. The question is why did I not make fun of his British accent. We all know why, it’s all about Class. Why are there no TV shows comparable to “The Beverly Hill Billies”, or “HeeHaw”, with the actors using Northern accents. These shows were about accent not content, although I am sure I will be challanged on this assumption.

Personally, my accent has been laughed at, ridiculed, and snickered at, by Chicago natives, LA natives, Santa Fe, NM natives, and Northern immigrants to Tennessee, all causing me great shame and embarrassment. My question is, are there other assumed traits that go along with a Southern accent that gives these people the right to disrespect us Southern Folks.

If all of this was not what the OP was geeting at, then I apologize, but I still think it is worthy of debate.

jesse

19

A black manager at my former company instructed black employees to sound “white” on the phone.

20

cuautemhoc, this issue has come up several times in the past – run a GD search on “ebonics” or “Black English” and I’m sure you’ll come up with plenty of information.

I won’t rehash what’s been said before, but I did want to point out that what you are referring to is not an accent but rather a dialect.