Shakespeare with a Southern Accent
For this month’s newsletter, I want to talk a little bit about Southern US accents in relation to a delightful video where a man reads Shakespeare with a Southern accent, then relate it to social meaning of language.
I grew up in central Maryland, which is not southern accent territory, but after college, I moved to North Carolina, where I lived for nearly 20 years until I went to Georgia for grad school. I was never proficient at saying whether someone came from the mountains or the coast, but I had friends from both sides of the state, and they definitely talked differently from each other.
Southern Marc Antony
A video has made the rounds on tumblr a bunch of times where Jake Phillips, a voice actor from Mississippi, does Marc Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”) in a Southern accent. If you haven’t seen it, or if you have and want to refresh your memory, take three minutes and watch it now (apologies for tiktok). While you watch, take note of the features that say “Southern” to you.
Features of (general) Southern US English
Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t one Southern accent; there are many. Trae "Liberal Redneck" Crowder is from Tennessee, and he talks very differently than my classmates or students from Georgia, who talk differently than my friend from Appalachian North Carolina, who talks differently than my friend from eastern North Carolina. And all of them talk differently than Jake Phillips.
There are, though, some broad features that are characteristic of Southern accents (unfortunately, none of the embedded videos are working for me right now. Maybe you will have better luck, or maybe they’re just broken and in need of updating.).
First up is the PIN/PEN merger, which is audible in this clip and in others on Phillips’ channel. You hear it in words like men, which may sound more like “meeyun” (see discussion of “breaking” below).
Next up is the monophthongization of the vowels /i/ and /oi/, in words like I, bike, and boil. If I wanted to spell the dialect phonetically (sometimes called “eye dialect”), I could write something like “Ah rode mah bahk to the Low Country Bole” in place of “I rode my bike to the Low Country Boil.” In the video, you can see this early on, when he says “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” and at the end, when he says “My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,” for two examples of many.
The next thing listed is what linguists call breaking, which is a diphthongization (or even triphthongization) of vowels. Breaking is one of the sound changes that occurred historically in the Germanic languages (Old Norse, Old English, Middle High German – German came late to the vowel breaking party, but it got there eventually), and any sound change that occurred in a language historically can occur again. (Some linguists, notably Otto Jespersen, have argued that language change occurs in cycles; they could be right. Also, the same sound change in the PIN/PEN merger (pre-nasal raising) took place historically in the Germanic languages as well.)
Breaking in modern US Southern English occurs in words like man, now, sound. In the video, you’ll hear it every time he says that Brutus is an honorable mayun.
(I absolutely love it that Southern accents turn some diphthongs into monophthongs while turning other monophthongs into diphthongs. It’s such a great example of how language change can’t be predicted, only described.)
The next features she lists aren’t really evident in this particular video, because there aren’t any words in the monologue where you would hear it.
Non-rhotacization is not saying the R when it appears in a particular environment. It’s also associated with Boston (“pahk the cah”) and many British accents. There’s one example of this in Marc Antony’s speech, when he says the poor and it sounds like “the po’uh,” but I didn’t notice any others. The MARY/MARRY/MERRY non-merger is not evident in this video, but based on the handful of other videos I watched, he has the merger. (Most US English speakers do.) There was also no evidence of WITCH/WHICH distinction in the sampled videos.
But G-dropping (or, more accurately NG-fronting, because phonetically what’s happening is the velar nasal [ŋ] is being replaced by the alveolar nasal [n], which is located toward the front relative to the velum) is evident in some of the videos I watched, if not necessarily this one.
This article mentions variations in pitch accent in comparison to standard US English that “[contribute] to the perceived melodicity of Southern speech.” The speaker has a different cadence or sentence rhythm than you might expect; however, he is also acting, which alters the way we talk as well.
One thing this article mentions is “prevoicing” of voiced stops like [b], which you can hear when he says Brutus. It’s that kind of “mushy” sound you hear. Without getting into things like Voice Onset Time and aspiration (because it’s complicated), “prevoicing” means that he’s beginning to add [voice] to the stop while his lips are still closed, which is not the standard way of doing it. (The technical explanation would take several pages, so please just take my word for it.)
Why is this so compelling?
Shakespeare is associated with high culture, and Southern accents with low culture and “earthiness.” When we think of famous Shakespearean actors, we (I, but maybe also a lot of you) think of Sir Patrick Stewart or Tom Hiddleston or Dame Judi Dench: very British (very English, even), and very proper. A very specific accent and mannerism while declaiming great poetry. But of course there are Shakespearean actors who don’t come from the UK. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to find a US-American actor who’s doing Shakespeare than one from the UK.
Many people find this type of juxtaposition amusing in a laugh-at-them way, but if you look at the comments on the video, you’ll see that a lot of people said they didn’t really get Shakespeare until they heard it in a Southern accent. It felt more real to them and was easier to understand. There are also several comments about how the extreme passive aggressiveness of the speech is well matched with a Southern accent (because Southerners are very polite even if they’re wishing you ill, right?). (I didn’t read all 1700+ comments; just a few pages to get a flavor.)
Sociolinguistics
One of the first things you do in a sociolinguistics class is fill in a map of your country with what you associate with the language in various regions. Sometimes the maps have the states outlined on them; sometimes it’s just blank. Your assignment is to draw lines and label the map. Typical maps for the US have words like “fast” in the Northeast, “surfer” or “Valley Girl” on the West Coast, and “slow” or “drawl” or “twang” in the South. There might be a “normal” on there in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, or Northeast, regardless of where the person is from. (This article, which was also linked above, has two examples of this!)
Nobody likes to admit it, but we all have preconceived notions about what people are like based on the way they talk. The most common ones about people who speak with a Southern accent are that they’re uneducated and hold a particular set of political and/or religious beliefs. This is, of course, inaccurate, though there are obviously people who hew to stereotype out there. Trae Crowder has built his comedy career on the perceived dissonance between a guy who talks like that and the viewpoints he espouses.
Social meaning
One of the things sociolinguists want to understand is what it means, socially, culturally, linguistically, for a person to choose to use a particular variation at a particular time. People who come from places whose accents or dialects are considered uneducated or otherwise of a lower status work to get rid of them all the time. People from the South get rid of or reduce the most noticeable features (the twang, the monophthongization); people from certain parts of New York or New Jersey get rid of or reduce the nasality and put the Rs back in.
So why would people not get rid of them, or stop hiding it? Maybe you have a friend or had a roommate who’s from somewhere else and when they talk on the phone to people from back home, they sound completely different. (Maybe that friend is you.) It’s about identity. You can relax and be yourself when you’re around other people like you, who won’t judge you for “talking funny.” Or maybe you’re trying to assert your belongingness and build rapport with someone.
This is one of those things that many people do unconsciously – I know that when I’m talking with other North Americans here in Berlin, I relax and stop talking in a more standard US accent. After living in the South for 20-odd years, I picked up some more Southern features, and those come out when I speak more naturally. But I also know that for non-native speakers, it can be difficult to understand people who speak with an accent that isn’t the one you learned in school or see in Hollywood movies all the time, so in order to communicate effectively, I try not to break my vowels.
You can also do it consciously, of course; you can assert your membership in a group by choosing to speak the way they do. For a non-phonetics-based example that a lot of us here can probably relate to, when you join a fandom group, you can signal your membership in the group “SFF fan” (or “fan of particular media X”) by quoting from your favorite episode or making the Vulcan hand sign and saying “Live long and prosper” or wearing a t-shirt with an image or quote from the media. You’ll probably also pick up slang relating to your favorite media or that the fan group you’ve joined uses, like ship names (Spuffy, Destiel, JediStormPilot…). Somebody with more time on their hands and enough funding could write a dissertation or five on the way tumblr talks.
It's an extremely fascinating subject, because you (the researcher) have to really think about what's happening socioculturally, and there is so much variation between cultures.
There are a few articles I want to discuss in my book which get into the relationship between stylistic choices in language and (sub)cultural identity. I have one of them queued up in my to-write topics list, so stay tuned for that.
More resources
The Language and Life Project, from North Carolina State University, which documents the ways of speaking in the South, including the documentary Talking Black in America.
Do You Speak American?, from PBS. It’s from 2005 (and the site design looks it), but it’s still a good layman’s introduction to dialects and social meaning.
The News Part
I’ve had one piece of good news about submissions, but the contract isn’t in hand yet, so when I have more information to share, I will. Hopefully in December’s newsletter!
I’m hard at work on Filling Your Worlds with Words, though I hit a wall and needed to rethink the structure (again). I think I’ve finally got a structure I can work with, and I probably won’t have to throw out everything I’ve already written. Some of it, yes, but not all. Thankfully.
The grey days have begun in Berlin, but the trees are still turning color, so it gets broken up by huge oaks and birches in yellow and orange. Birds still come visit my suet feeder, which entertains my cat.
Next time: Weird English facts and Millennia of Language Change (probably).
Thank you for reading!
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