In this thread, there was a side conversation in which it was discussed whether it might be possible to determine (or get a feel for) the profession of a person by listening to them speak.
This makes sense to me; we can tell, sometimes with quite startling accuracy, the geographical area where a person comes from, just by listening to them speak - by their accent and dialect and probably other nuances - and those things come about as a result of people being grouped together by location and interacting a lot - so why not other kinds of groupings such as profession?
I’m thinking that this might especially be true in cases where the profession explicitly involves speaking - police officers who have to speak on the radio; TV presenters; pilots, teachers, lawyers etc - of course, there is still a difference between speaking on duty and speaking casually off-duty, but surely one would affect the other.
Even with people whose role doesn’t specifically involve a type of speaking could still be affected by some sort of professional dialect or dialect-like tendencies - doctors, botanists, accountants - all have their own professional language and terminology, and using specific language must rub off in some way into casual off-duty speech, right?
Is this a thing? I thought about putting this in FQ but I’m not even really sure how to frame it as an FQ question.
Also, I don’t suppose the question needs to be limited to people who are grouped by profession - for example people of the same religion might have ‘tells’ in their speech or mannerisms, even when they’re not talking about belief.
If not about the topic of the conversation, could it have been about word choice? Not even so much jargon, but if they include words that might be in general use, but get used in a particular way by creative writers.
I haven’t had the experience described in the quote, at least not that I’ve noticed. Partly because in casual conversation with people I don’t know, I mostly don’t find out what they do, either for a living or as hobbies.
I think it was a combination of things. A casually wide vocabulary not used to impress, an intelligent voice, a quality that’s hard to describe but writers have this underlying confidence in themselves (easily dashed but hard to entirely quench – to be any kind of an artist you have to overestimate your abilities or you’ll never make it) together with a discernible sense of irony. And more I can’t name. Maybe it’s just, it takes one to know one. When I reflect, I think it probably was easy to hear it than if I was speaking to them in person.
I don’t think that either is true in the case I was describing. Remember, I was just trying to screen people so that they wouldn’t waste their own time and ours. I had been in a lot of writing critique classes by then (it was my major in college) and I had fairly good radar for how serious writers spoke as opposed to those who thought it would be a fun easy class to pad out their courses.
Many people think of writing groups as places to get others to read their scribblings and say nice encouraging things about them. Writing support groups, as it were. Real writers use writing groups to become better writers. There’s a big difference. I daresay that this difference is discernible in many other learning situations, and the serious can be readily distinguished from the dilettantes. Since a writer’s medium is words, that’s why I could distinguish them by their speech.
I think it would be hard to disentangle the person’s choice of words versus some kind of accent or nonverbal style of speaking in casual conversation. Especially if you are deliberately trying to detect whether a person is a writer, naturally you will be looking for cues in their vocabulary, syntax, etc., perhaps partly at a subconscious level. I guess a more controlled test would be to have people read a prepared text. Although even then, a person’s style of speaking is different when they’re reading versus just speaking naturally.
That’s exactly I was thinking. Put an Army uniform on me and I speak completely different than I do otherwise. Speak patterns are different and the vocabulary becomes about 75% profanity and 25% acronyms.
I hate that new “accent” (I guess thats what it is). The Kardashian speak, my daughter calls it.
Younger person, usually female and they have a weird low pitched growl and flat delivery to their speech pattern.
No inflection. Minimal mouth movement.
I just hate it. I dismiss (in my mind) anything anyone says to me like this.
Funny, I was thinking about this a couple of hours ago.
It’s basically what sociolinguistics are about, i.e. the study of how ethnicity, social class, gender, job and religion affect one’s language. There’s actually a word for this : sociolect.
I’ve seen references here and there to a “military accent,” as in this Quora post:
There is certainly a distinctive “military accent.” It’s a little bit Southern, but faster and more clipped than most civilian Southern accents. One way to describe it might be “Southern pronunciation, Eastern rhythm.” There are a couple of factors at work here. One is the disproportionate number of Southerners in the military; most people in the military aren’t from the South, but people in the South join the military at a higher rate than people in any other area of the country. The other is the need for fast, clear communication, which is where you get that staccato rhythm that sounds more like New York than Georgia.
Each service also has its own variant. The Army sounds the most like the deep South. The Marines are further up the East Coast, almost mid-Atlantic. The Air Force sounds very Midwestern. The Navy has an overlay of New England. (I don’t know what the Coast Guard sounds like, but they probably sound deliberately different from the Navy.) If you look at where the traditions of each service developed, this makes a lot of sense.
Now that I think about it… I worked in a close-knit team for about 8 years with a bunch of ex-navy guys (in a civilian role) and although I can’t put a finger on any specific language I absorbed from them, I do get people asking me if I’ve served in the navy (I haven’t).
From my time in USAF it seems that about 3/4ths of the folks sound like they’re from Texas and the other 1/4th from Oklahoma. I used to joke that the Red River valley was the official USAF accent.
Of my 8 years in the service I only spent 1 year actually in OK, and the rest well outside the Midwest OK/TX region. But boy did I sound like one of those OK/TX guys by the time I got out.
Agree with the articles you cite: Midwest / southern vocabulary and inflection, but higher speed, more aggressive delivery. Also agree with @Loach: lotsa acronyms and some profanity depending on who you’re addressing about what.
I’m British and have what would probably be called a ‘BBC’ or ‘Received Pronunciation’ accent. The sort of accent BBC announcers used 50 years ago. Considered generic educated UK speech.
Though not quite… my father was from the north of the country while my mother was from London, so a few of my vowels are a bit ‘harder’ than typical southern English.
I suspect just from hearing me speak someone would conclude that I work in some professional capacity… which is true, I was a software engineer before I retired.