Pretty sure. As ruadh said, be wary of The Story of English. It wasn’t written by linguists. See if you can find “Language Myths” in your local bookstore. One of the essays in it by J.K. Chambers, a sociolinguist, is about the myth of television’s influence on our speech. It’s not the most in-depth essay, but it should be easy to find and has pointers to other stuff if you’re interested. Be interested!
Sometimes Received Pronunciation is called BBC English, since they use it, but it didn’t originate with the BBC, and its status the model of “correct” English pronunciation in the British Isles doesn’t derive from the fact that it’s used by the BBC. TV is a red herring. Think social upheaval from the industrial revolution and how accents are class indicators. If you’re a middle-class Englishman for whom the aristocracy is out of reach and you would sooner die than be mistaken for a working class bloke, using RP is a good way to go. I won’t say any more because my memory is hazy and I might be making this up as I go along. Personally I think they should use Mark E. Smith as the model for correct English pronunciation-uh.
A tangerine-flavored anecdote: When I was in Montreal, even the Anglo speakers would assume I was from Toronto. Pretty shameful accent-wise for a Texan. I later found out that assuming someone in Montreal is from Toronto is something of a left-handed assumption. It’s like asking a Texan if they’re from Oklahoma
Both my parents grew up in Nap Town (pronounced NA [sub]yuh[/sub]P taown) (i.e., Indianapolis) and lived there until their early thirties–as did all their brothers and sisters. The family is a complete melange of accents with several people carrying their down home twangs into their 60s while both older and younger siblings had very little discernible accent, sounding more like Chicago or Detroit.
Neither of my parents (who only moved to Michigan at 34 and 33) was ever picked as a non-native in the Detroit area (except when my mom would let fly with cattywampus to mean diagonal).
The same thing was repeated in the next generation who stayed in Indy: my Dad’s older brother had no “down home” accent, his middle son did, while his oldest and youngest sons did not.
Here’s an interesting article from Smithsonian on language: Accents Are Forever
“By their first birthday, babies are getting locked into the sounds of the language they hear spoken”
This article is about how infants 6 months old can distinguish sounds not used in the local language, but by one year of age, they can’t anymore. For instance, a Japanese six-month old can tell the difference between “la” and “ra” but not a one year old.
So we get back to the same question - where are your parents from and where did you live before you were three?
My parents aren’t from N.C. (mother from Chicago, father Florida); before I was 3 we lived in California, Michigan, Tennessee, and Michigan (again!). Per responses and the quote above, I would expect to speak some conglomeration of mid-Western and deep Southern- but I don’t have either. My sister, though, one year younger, had a real mid-West twang at first, then changed to the local drawl.
We had the same environment- same household, same schools, roughly the same age, etc., but she tawks suth’n, I don’t. (Or, rather, she did until she moved to the Southwest- she’s lost much of it since!)
I’m originally from rural northestern Illinois, about 90 miles south of Chicago, but went to high school near New Orleans. My geometry teacher had a strong drawl, some of which I picked up. I now speak with a strong Midwestern nasal mixed with a drawl and can really bring out the drawl when necessary, like when singing “Jambalaya”. I once was on an Amtrak from DC to Chicago; after hearing me speak with the attendants and a few words to him, my seatmate asked if I was Canadian. He seemed a bit confused when I said I wasn’t. Admittedly, I do have a odd accent, but Canadian?
To answer samclem’s questions, my parents were both born and raised in South Boston (just a few blocks frome ach other, actually), attending Southie High. I believe their parents were also from Boston. I know that both of my grandmothers, at least, have the Boston accent.
If my accent’s turned off, it’s been turned off for a long time now. Ever since I started school, maybe. I think I just never acquired the accent…
That’s right; I always wanted to be Luke Skywalker.
hazel-rah, see my earlier post for why I think I lack/stopped using my native accent. Your guess is as good as mine! (I do often wonder why I don’t talk the way I should, though…)
robby, it’s always been “soda” to me, although I’ve started saying “pop” since Ontarians look at me funny for the former. My whole family all use “soda” … I think “tonic” is a much older word, even in the Boston area.
There seem to be a couple of folks here who know sibling groups with mixed accents.
That’s an interesting article, Zyada. I can readily believe that language acquisition begins that early, I would be surprised if we didn’t discover it begins even before that. But it seems misleading to say that and then say “Accents, in whatever language, stubbornly hang in there for years, decades, a lifetime, without being easily rubbed out.”
That could imply that the language or accent you learn in the first year or so of your life is the one you are stuck with for potentially all of your life, and that doesn’t jive with what I know about child language acquisition, which is basically that kids can pick up new languages and dialects without half trying up until they hit puberty, and with sufficient immersion, will speak them with native speaker proficiency because in effect they are native speakers.
Going from the example you quoted, to my knowledge, although a Japanese one-year old will lose the distinction between /r/ and /l/, if you later expose them to a language where that distinction is morphologically significant, like English, then they will learn to distinguish it again. For example, a bunch of Japanese families moved into our neighborhood when I was in the first grade, and we had Japanese kids in our class that didn’t speak a word of English. By high school you would never guess they hadn’t been here their whole lives. No trace of a Japanese accent.
On the topic of accents within the same language, I spent the first two years of my life in England. Then we moved to Texas. I have no English accent at all. All my favorite bands seem to come from there, however.
I’d still go with samclem, guessing that whatever accent your peer group had when you were about age 13-18 will be the accent you take with you. But then some people have a talent for modifying their speech or learning new languages.
one other thing to note:
Sadly, I can think of situations where this can happen. If you grow up speaking a dialect that society deems bad or lower class or stupid, you might quickly learn, either from being harrassed by your peers or being scolded by your parents, to never ever speak that way.
smaft, I grew up surrounded by Texas Twang, but I don’t have one. Not because I don’t like it and consciously avoided it, but because none of my peer group used it. Could this be the case with you? Also, your parents having a strong accent does not mean that you will. Parents don’t influence the accent of their children that much, unless their kids talk to them and them only. Sorry parents!
Well, this doesn’t speak to the overall differences in your family’s accents… But I do know that there are traces of “southern accents” in the Detroit area and other places in MI. Earlier in this century–ooh, wait, it’s 2001, make that LAST century [that’s the first time I’ve had to say that woohoo!]–there was a pretty good migration of Southerners up to MI to work in the automobile plants. There was work up here (this might go for other places in the rust belt, too).
There are still vestiges of the culture here. Our nearby town, Ypsilanti, gets called Ypsitucky a lot because of the southern influence there. And I don’t know if THIS is related to or attributable to that migration northward, but the top money-making concert venue in country & western music is just outside of Detroit.
Anyway, there are still pockets of Southern accents here in SE Michigan, and little traces of former accents are in a lot of people’s speech. So if your parents brought a little bit of Southern Indiana with them, it might not have been noticed as much as it could have been in, say, Albany.
Unfortunately for me, I can assure you my peers were born-and-bred natives of Naw C’lina. Rednecks & white trash everywhere (well, they weren’t all that bad, but quite a few were!)
hazel-rah - I think I agree with you that the thesis of the article is suspect, although the research is very interesting.
For another data point, my mother and her sister grew up together (they are 4-5 years apart in age). When my mother graduated from HS, she stayed in Ft. Worth and married my father who was from West Texas. When my aunt graduated from HS, she moved to central Texas and married a man there. My aunt has a very pronounced Central/East rural accent, while Mom has very little accent, certainly in comparison to Aunt Martha. The main difference between them is that Mom went to work for American Airlines reservations (where she got teased for her accent) and made a concious effort to reduce her accent. OTOH, Aunt Martha became a teacher and principal in local schools.
IMO, all of the reasons listed already have an effect on accent. I doubt that any person is going to have an accent based on only one effect.
smaft - it sounds like there was a distinct emotional component to your rejection of a southern accent. It may be that you rejected the accent because you were unhappy in some way about the move. At that age, it’s hard to say what could have been happening, because most people don’t remember events from that age range well, and most children of that age don’t have a very good perspective on events either.
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Apparently southern Ontarian and northern US accesnts are becoming more similar. Look for an article in the Toronto Star at http://www.thestar.ca/. It’s in the “Canada” section, titled “Language free trade with U.S. is eh-okay” by Peter Calamai.
[sub]The URL just doesn’t work in the SDMB; possible the wordwrap of the entry form introduces newline characters that munge it.[/sub]
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But I still remember the nasal Upper New York State accent on Buffalo (NY) television from when I was a kid…
Interesting…are you sure you’re remembering this right? I always have heard cattywampus as meaning cock-eyed, screwed-up; whereas catty-corner means diagonal. Unless you’ver uncovered a regional variation of some sort.
jsc1953:
Cattywampus, as spoken by my mother, meant diagonal. The word has appeared on this MB a few times, and the four or five other posters who noted it gave diagonal as the meaning.
Since it is obviously a partially invented word with a limited range, I am not surprised to see your meaning applied to it (and would not be at all surprised to see that become the primary meaning if the word survives another decade or two).
CrankyAsAnOldMan:
We lived in Royal Oak before the Kentuckians moved through it (most settling in Hazeltucky to the east) and then lived in Rochester (where there was never a strong influence of the Middle Dialect of the U.S.). Neither of my parents had any sort of twang and we did have a (very few) neighbors with down home accents that were remarked upon.
Listening to the gathered siblings of either of my parents, you would generally come to the conclusion that each family had members raised in at least three separate regions of the U.S., yet my mom and her five siblings and my dad and his five siblings all lived within the same section of Indy throughout their childhood. You can walk the circuit of the four houses where the two families lived from 1909 through the 1940s in about fifteen minutes.
(I lived in Ypsi for a year, but I didn’t pick up any of their speech–of course, I was long out of school when I lived there.)
I was born and raised in Mississippi (and you thought smaft was from the South! and yes, I have the heavy, rolling “drawl” right on down. My mama was born in the Delta, and I have a much rougher and more “country” accent than my city-bred peers.
Phrases like, “Ah’m fixin’to!” are common in my home, as are:
“Ah gaht sumthin’ in mah ah.”
“Shut up in there, ya lil’ haint!”
“Yer buying pickets to the movies? Ya’ll get me some, won’t ya?”
There is a difference between “Y’all” and “Ya’ll”. Notice the apostrophe. “Y’all” is short for “You all”, that clumsy phrase Northerners (or less politely, ‘Damn Yankees’) are wont to use. “Ya’ll” is short for “You will”, as in “You will mow the lawn t’morrow, or yer Daddy’ll tan yer hide!”
And for the record, we never, ever, use “Y’all” in the singular sense. “Y’all” stands for two or more people! I would never say, “David, y’all go get me a coke” unless David has a few multiple personalities.
Interesting story…my mama, my brother (yes, I called him “bubba”. Stop laughing.) and I were vacationing in Florida. We stopped at a steak house and all ordered glasses of tea. The waitress stared at us a second and asked, “What kind?” We ogled her in shock, and then my mama replied, “Sweet! What other kind is there?”
Suffice it to say, the waitress cracked up, and said, “Y’all from Mississippi, ain’t ya?” We were all astounded, and asked how she knew. “The way you talk. And that you ordered tea and expected only sweet!”
