Accents and dialects
It’s still March for a few days, so I can still call this the March newsletter. Here in Berlin, the weather is becoming nicer, the days are getting longer, and the plants are beginning to flower. There’s a tree that I think is a decorative plum below my window, and it’s got lovely dark pink flowers on it. There are more birds now, too.
News
I don’t have any news to share right now. I got my plane tickets, so I’m going to be attending 4th St Fantasy Con in Minneapolis in June. Maybe I’ll see some of you there!
My friend Clarissa C.S. Ryan finalized the cover design for Filling Your Worlds with Words, which means the book plate design is ready, and I just need to get them printed.
I didn’t define what language is, because linguistics hasn’t really figured that out yet; a language vs. a dialect is often a political distinction, not a linguistic one.
What’s the difference between an accent and a dialect?
This is the question that a writer friend raised in a chat that sparked this series of posts. The answer to that is actually not terribly complicated, once you’ve established what a dialect is.
Accents are about phonetics (the way the sounds sound); dialects also include differences in grammar and vocabulary. Many dialects have accents associated with them.
Everybody has an accent.
There is no such thing as “accent-free speech.” The accent may be identical to a standard one, so it might be unobtrusive or not noticeable, but it’s still an accent.
Accents in language learners
As a former language instructor, and as a language learner, I have some conflicted opinions about “non-native” accents. I want to sound as German as I can when I speak German, or at least not like a US-American, and I am pretty successful at it. (I get “foreign, but I can’t figure out exactly where,” and an Austrian woman thought I was German, probably because I didn’t sound Austrian, so she stuck me in the box of “sounds weird; probably German.”) But should “accent-free” speech be the goal for all language learners? Does it really matter, as long as people can understand you? (And, remember, there is no such thing as “accent-free” speech; everyone has an accent.)
There are stigma attached to speaking with any non-standard accent, which includes non-native ones. I don’t think this is the way things should be; there should be no stigma attached to any way of speaking. But it’s the way reality works, so changing that would require a massive change in society, basically, and that’s a tall order.
What makes an accent?
The most noticeable differences between accents are in the vowels. Several of the key features of Southern (US) accents involve vowels, whether turning diphthongs like I and oi into ah and oh, respectively, or “breaking” monophthongs into di- or even triphthongs, like now becoming na-yow. (See issue 2, “Shakespeare with a southern accent,” for more.)
But it’s not only vowels that can be responsible for accents. The way consonants are articulated in the vocal tract can also be part of an accent.
Rs are wack
One of the easiest ways to recognize a native US-English speaker is the way we say R. (Unless you’re from Boston or New York or another area that drops Rs, of course.) The most common US English R is either an alveolar approximant or a retroflex approximant. An approximant means that the tongue approaches the roof of the mouth but does not make contact. Alveolar means that the point where the tongue doesn’t quite make contact is the flat spot behind the front (upper) teeth; retroflex means that you’re not quite touching the roof of your mouth with the underside of your tongue.
Fun science interlude: To find out which way you make the R sound, say “word” and freeze on the R. Using a toothpick, carefully slide it between your teeth until you touch your tongue. If you poke the top of it, you use the alveolar approximant. If you poke the underside, you use the retroflex approximant. (I use the retroflex.)
When a sound (a phoneme) can be produced (articulated) in different ways but is still interpreted by the hearer as the same phoneme, linguists call them allophones. The US-English R is an example of an allophone, because it can be articulated as either an alveolar or a retroflex approximant, or even not articulated at all, if you’re someone who pahks the cah.
Then there are so-called “R-colored vowels.” When a vowel is followed by an R, the R might not be completely articulated, but it gives a distinctive character to the vowel. (This is why park and pock sound different when spoken by a Bostonian, even though the vowel is the same.)
But wait, there’s more! In Scots English, the sound represented by the letter R is an alveolar tap. A tap is when your tongue makes very brief contact to the roof of the mouth. (For a US-English speaker, you’ll do this when you say atom or edit.) This is also the way the Japanese sound transliterated as R or L is produced.
AND! German and French use a uvular fricative to make the R sound. (Examples of fricatives in English are s, sh, th, and f.) Spanish makes Rs by trilling the tip of their tongue. German has an alternative R that’s a uvular trill (think about Chewbacca).
All of these sounds are spelled with an R. I know; it’s wild, isn’t it?
So R is a good example of how consonants can be a noticeable feature in an accent. It’s also an example of extreme allophony, but that’s another matter.
Accents are the way you pronounce consonants and vowels.
Basically. But it’s easier to perceive differences in vowels than in (most) consonants.
What makes a dialect different from an accent?
A dialect has different grammatical structures and/or different vocabulary. For example, people from New England call a water fountain a “bubbler,” and people from much of the South use double modal constructions (e.g., might could).
Dialectology
Linguists have been fascinated by dialectal variation since the field was still called philology, and people have written about the way other people speak as long as there has been writing.
One method of gathering data involves going to different places and writing down (before we had recording devices) the words people used for different things. Another method involves sending out questionnaires and asking people to fill them out. With modern technology, you can set up a website where volunteers fill out questionnaires about whatever topics you’re focussing on right now.
A French dialectologist named Edmond Edmont bicycled around France to collect data for an atlas of French dialects. And, as Atlas Obscura suggests in the article linked above, if you’ve ever taken an online dialect quiz, you may be in his debt. The article has a nice summary of the history of dialectology, so click through.
Germans love dialectology
The Atlas of German Day-to-day Speech is on its thirteenth questionnaire. Previous rounds have addressed what you call the inedible center part of an apple, how you pronounce the number 15, and what you call playing (soccer) football. I don’t believe there’s an English version of the site, but you can click to expand the different rounds and choose a random word to look at the fun little maps.
I really like this one that shows what people call a pancake (crepe), because it has both regional variation and evidence of borrowing/language contact. Most of Austria uses a Germanized form of the Hungarian word palacsinta, and the parts of eastern Germany where the Sorbs, a Slavic minority, live and which are really close to Poland and Czechia use a word related to blintz/blini. And then there’s Switzerland, which calls it an omelet.
Doubly fun is the reason why eastern Germany calls them Eierkuchen (egg cakes): Take a look at this map, where they call a jelly donut Pfannkuchen. (Yes, this is the word that the JFK jelly donut joke is about.)
To sum it up
Accents are the way people pronounce things in their dialect; a dialect includes not only pronunciation but also vocabulary and sometimes grammar. What gets called a dialect versus a language is largely a matter of politics and power. Some dialects are more standard (are associated with more power) than others.
Clear as mud?
Media I have enjoyed
I have Apple TV+, so I’m watching some shows on there. I enjoyed the new season of Prehistoric Planet, because I was into dinosaurs as a kid, and they’ve learned so much more since then. The pterosaurs are so weird. It’s all CGI, of course, but if you ever wanted to hear David Attenborough breathlessly narrate dinosaur hunting or mating habits, you should definitely give it a watch. There’s a little “behind the science” at the end of each episode, where a paleontologist talks about the evidence for one of the things in that episode, and that’s super cool.
I’m working my way through Discworld, thanks to the Humble Bundle of all of it that came out a couple months ago. I’d read a very random selection of Discworld books before, using the time-honored method of “this is the one they had on the shelf, so I bought/borrowed it,” so they were mostly the later books, so I’m starting at the beginning. (And it’s true; the early books are really rough, with stereotypes played up for laughs. But fortunately for everyone, he learned better and did better as time went on.)
One of the things Pratchett was known for was his wordplay and puns, and he had a very clever and sideways way of describing common things that made them seem not so common after all. I also appreciate how with some of the books, like the one I’m reading now, Wyrd Sisters, you can go, “Oh, ok, so he’s doing Macbeth on this one.”
Next time
I’d like to talk a bit about why writing isn’t the same as language and how standard written language is an ideology, not something inherent to a language. Unless I decide to write the “everything you think you know about German is wrong” that’s kicking me in the head instead. Let's find out!
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