Accents

things on the side of your head. Okay, this might work slightly better if you have a British accent, but I'm gonna give it a go. Yes, yes, I love that, I love it. Okay, here's another language parlor trick may be suited better for a new world accent. Say the words rise up lights in quick succession, rise of lights, rise of lights, and boom you're an Australian sand razor blades. I am fascinated by accents and regional dialects, and I

think a lot of us are. We like knowing how other people swear, the kind of slang they fling around that the American zucchini is the British Courgette that in India, the opposite of postponing something is to prepon it, to hear our own familiar language. The substrate of our thoughts made new and novel is just a little electric thrill. So how exactly our accents forged? Can they change? And how might they affect the trajectory of our lives? You are listening to deeply human and I am Dessa hereby

asking the question why do you talk like that? My name is John Ball. It rhymes with however you pronounced the words l A w or or saw. That takes into account than any different regional accents. So if someone is from the South, is John Bower, you know? Or if it's a New Yorkist, John Blow? All right? So it rhymes with law and so. John ba is the president of the Linguistic Society of America and a professor

at Washington University in St. Louis. Lawyers sometimes called John to ask for his help in what's called linguistic forensics, legal analysis of speech to help shed light on a crime. He's been asked to serve as an expert witness for more than one trial involving homicide, and, as he puts it, a person's accent could be the difference between life and death. Let's back up to a pivotal moment in his career. In the nineties, he became particularly interested in an insidious

phenomenon now called linguistic profiling. So linguistic profiling occurs when someone calls for goods or services over the telephone and site unseen, the person who receives the call denies those goods or services based on stereotypes about the person's speech. And this interest wasn't entirely academic. John himself was making calls looking for a new apartment, and in a few instances, when I showed up in person, I was told that

nothing is available. You know, and I'm African American. A lot of people can't tell that from my professional voice. And no one said, oh, I am so sorry. Had you sounded African American over the telephone, I would have never given you an appointment, right, I mean that that's a slam dunk lawsuit I win. So they would always come up with some other excuse. But you know, I was suspicious, So he decided to run a formal experiment. Yeah,

I can modify my speech. So I grew up in l A you understanding the in the city, and in Los Angeles I had a lot of Mexican American friends, So in the experiment I modified my own speech and used, Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper. And I'd say Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper, or along coming about the apartment you have advertised in the paper. The sentence was always the same, and John was always the person calling,

so the voice was the same. The only difference was the accent. As you might guess, the accent made a big difference. Landlords were screening out potential renters whose speech implied they were from minority communities, and as a general rule, the discrimination was worse in affluent neighborhoods. And it's international. We've done these experiments in South Africa and Brazil, in France, and you know, every place that's an advanced industrialized society

has its own version of this. Linguistic profiling is also bigger than ray. Other research revealed that female voices calling to ask about an open executive position in a bank were informed that it had already been filled, whereas mail callers were more likely to be told it was still available. Gay men have also reported being denied goods or services because of the way that they speak. Okay, quick self interruption here to note that none of us speak in

exactly the same way at all times. The way that you'd voice frustration at having been cut off in traffic by some ding dong in a miyata with flame decals is not the same way that you'd voice frustration in an all staff meeting. What's commonly called code switching, though john Ball might more accurately call it style shifting, is the way we change our speech based on context or company.

The ability to identify even really subtle details of dialect has made John Ball a powerful expert witness and criminal court. In one particular case, a murder case, he was called in to analyze the recording of a phone call. If you're arrested and you go to jail in the United States, any phone call that you make can be recorded by law enforcement, and anything you say during that phone call can be used against you in a court of law.

A crucial bit of the prosecution's case centered on the content of a call in which the defendant spoke to his cousin on a jailhouse phone. Both speakers were young black men, and so his cousin thought that it would be to his advantage to have a speedy trial, and he asked him, He said, well, why don't you do a speedy trial. The defendant's answer to this question, according

to the prosecutor, was a smoking gun. The prosecutor produced a transcript that said, why would I want a speedy trial when I know I committed this ship And that for the prosecutor was the admission of guilt that the prosecutor needed in order to pursue the convict sction aggressively. But when John heard the recording, he wasn't sure that's what the defendants said at all. He heard a totally different sentence, which will explain in a moment, because a

particular vowel caught his ear. Both speakers were using what scholars referred to as African American vernacular English, and John wondered if the prosecutor just didn't know how to interpret it. Maybe the confession wasn't a confession at all. The prosecutor likely wasn't very well acquainted with a dialect used by

the young man on trial. Our accents and patterns of speech can vary dramatically, even for people who live very near one another, and often those differences are perpetuated on purpose. People from Boston don't want to sound like people for New York. Right, If you're a Red Sox fan, you don't want to sound like a Yankees fan. That is

Aaron Dinkin. He teaches socio linguistics at San Diego State University, and he focuses on variations in American English dialects and how they change over time, features of linguistic variation, just get all of this subconscious social freight assigned to them, not just in terms of regional dialects, but also in

terms of gender and social class and ethnicity. That word dialect describes all the features of a manner of speaking a language, our pronunciation, rhythms, melodies, and the particularities of our vocabularies. So think of the British lift versus the American elevator, or the British adjective hinch versus the American honky, the British fly tipper versus the American. Okay, admittedly, I just learned that word this morning, and I think it's a person who dumps a lot of trash without paying

for proper disposal. I'm not sure we have those in America. Well, I'm sure we have people who do that, but I don't think we've given them a proper name, So the just call them garbage scoundrels. Anyway, your accent is shaped not only by where you're from, but by all sorts of super fine tuned markers. Aaron told me about this one study by a researcher named Suzanne Wagner that illustrates how a single vowel sound can serve as a hook

on which all sorts of identities are home. So we're talking about the long eye vowel in words like fight and price and rice. It has been found that statistically in Philadelphia, there is a change in the pronunciation of that taking place where what was originally I as in fight and rice is changing more towards that I as

in fight and rice. And it has been found that again statistically, not like a hard and fast distinction, but just you know, on average, men are more likely to pronounce the vowel a little bit closer to A as in fight and rice, and women are more likely to pronounce it a little bit less far along that curve and it sounds so brey right, so it got that

associated with it. But she found that that I pronunciation was a little bit more common among the girls who were less invested in conforming to conventional femininity and who were more invested in like appearing tough, or the ones who were more likely to get into fights, which is

perceived as a masculine thing. And there was an ethnic correlation as well, because for the most part, the more conventionally feminine girls in this neighborhood in South Philly were Italian American and the Irish American girls were more interested in seeming tough. Word broy freaking. This one vowel, even just a little, really meant something. It meant something about Irish roots versus Italian ones. It meant something about the relative merit of trying to be fem versus trying to

be tough, and the girls knew it. I read some of their research interviews. It was like two worldviews competing for dominance in that little dot above a lower case I. The vowel change in South Philadelphia is a subtle one, but accents can diverge enough to cause confusion between speakers of the same language. If I were watching a movie whose character spoken like Scottish brogue or something, I'd probably have to turn on the subtitles to track the action.

Which brings us back to John Baw, the expert witness in the murder case and the defendant speaking African American Vernacular English on a call with his cousin. To study the roots of that dialect is to understand the extreme pressures that forged it. The linguistic heritage of slaves in the United States is unique in comparison to every other group. Slave traders separated slaves whenever they could based on language.

Beginning in the slave factories on the West coast of Africa, people who spoke the same language were forcibly kept apart. If you don't share the same language, then you're less likely to be able to, you know, foment an insurrection. So that explains why no African language survived the Atlantic crossing. Intact, We've got lots of communities where Polish is spoken, or German is spoken, or Italian is spoken, but there's no

community where TWEE survived. And then it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write African American vernacular English can differ from the kind of English that's taught in textbooks in many ways, in part because of this interrupted heritage, and it's also the product of a lot of really

varied linguistic influences. If I say i'll be i'll be done, told this story a thousand times, Okay, That use of be done can be traced back to Scott's Irish dialects and the indentured servants that introduced that to the slaves. The dialect that's considered standard or correct, or the Queen's English, or whatever you want to call it, that kind of status is really usually just the product of the fact that the classes in power consider their own way of

speaking as correct. But linguists recognize that, at least from a purely theoretical point of view, all languages and dialects are equal, but they do vary. And the dialect spoken by the defendant on trial for murder was not the same as the one spoken by the prosecutor. John took the taped call, which included the so called confession, to his language lab and he slowed it down to analyze every sound, and he began some research with speakers of

the same dialect. I conducted some experiments with African American men similar background, same age, who were listening to the recording under headphones, and I had them produce at the same pace. You know, I know I committed this ship versus I know I ain't committed this ship. Okay, let's

break that down. That one syllable from the defendant is the crucial detail on which John's testimony hinges and in actuality, what he said in black dialect was whim a dual speedy trial, want to know and committed this ship now when I know I ain't committed is a nasalized dip thong without the tea of the word ain't. What the prosecutor had taken for a confession, John understood is a

statement of innocence. He took the stand and shared that analysis with the jury, and he presented them with an image called a voice print, a graphic that showed the sound waves of both sentences. You can see the different it's more clearly than you can hear the difference. After all the evidence was presented, the jurors went to deliberate, and the stakes of the verdict were really, really high.

The crime that was committed was one where the defendant was eligible for execution, so essentially the single nasalized vowel sound potentially could be the difference between life and death. The jury was asked not only for a verdict, but to decide whether to impose capital punishment a death sentence if they found him guilty. In the end, the jurors didn't vote to equit the defendant. They did find him guilty, but the jury decided not to invoke the death penalty.

So it could well be that John's testimony, undermining the otherwise damning confession, stopped them from issuing a death sentence. Your particular dialect, which can shape your life and reflect all sorts of facets of your identity, probably started to gel before you learned your first word. Okay, we get the idea. You can really only take so much of

that anyway. Researchers led by Kathleen Vermke at the University of Wurtzburg in Germany have found that infants cry and the melody of the language they've heard while in the womb, so French babies tend to produce cries with the rising melody contour, whereas German babies produce more falling ones. Both patterns distinguishable from babies crying in Mandarin. But as soon as we're old enough to spend time with our peers, the parental influence on our language quickly dims in comparison

to that of our own social groups. Back to socio linguist erindiccken to a kindergartener. If there is nobody cooler than a first grader, right, So that's who becomes your new lingualistic models. But the profits of language teenagers, the way that like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year old speak, that is what's in the crystal ball, the nascent trends that will shape the speech of the future, and about of language innovations are first used by women or girls. So

what changes are currently underway? What sort of language forecast are we in for? Well, in the North American corner of the map, there is a front coming in. It's been called the California shift, it's been called the third dialect shift, it's been called the Canadian shift, the short front vowel shift, or the low back Merger shift. So I'm talking about the short O vowel as in c ot cot and then this other vowel as in c A U g h T cont and since I'm from Massachusetts,

I pronounced those two the same already. I say caught and caught, but somebody from New York City, for example, might say c ot cot and c a U g h T court. Essentially, two distinct vowel sounds are collapsing into one single sound, and this is creating a chain reaction all over Vowelville. So other vowels are essentially shifting to fill in the space left by this convergence. Think of how tectonic plates shift and collide and push one

another around. So the third dialect shift involves the short a as in the cat and the hat, moving backwards towards like the cat and the hot the e and dress and the eye and fit those are morphing too, So that's what the third dialect shift is. The short A, short E, and short eye vowels all moving kind of

down and back in the geography of the mouth. So maybe when we hit the ten thousandth episode of Deeply Human will be calling it a podcast as about human behavior, I don't talk about the vowel sounds in English seem particularly susceptible to this kind of evolution. This may be because English, as compared to other languages, has a bunch of vowel sounds somewhere between eleven and sixteen, which means that each of them has sort of a narrow lane, like if you move your tongue just a little bit

one way or the other, you wander into the neighboring sound. Spanish, by comparison, has only five vowel sounds, and Aaron says that some of those have been stable for as long as linguists have been able to trace their history. Okay, speaking of foreign languages, James, that's the signal, James, my guy,

play the next clip. My name's Katie Harris, thank you, and I run a website called Drew of Languages, which is where we help adults learn a foreign language by making it far and making the grammar explanations really really simple. Katie lives in Italy, and I'm told that her Italian accent is pretty think good, like almost native. But it was not always. So I've been living in Italy for a year, nobody had ever told me about the difference

between single and double sounds. So in Italian there's this difference between how long you hold a sound. So, for example, if you say I'm not with two ends, then that means year. But if you say are not with one end a shorter end, then that means anus. So it can be quite dangerous, especially because in Italian, so to say your age, it's like Spanish, where you say I have thirty five years. So I thought I'd been walking around telling people that. Well at the time, you know,

I had twenty three anuses. It's unfortunate. Yeah, Katie, who I will note also speak Spanish and French and some German and some Mandarin, had to really focus on getting her Italian accent down, whereas it comes more easily to very young humans. Babies when they're born are able to fully, of course, perceive the difference between any sound in any

of the world's languages. It's almost as if their brain starts to lock on to the first language that they learned, so that then it becomes more difficult to hear the difference between other sounds and therefore pronounce them as well. If you focus on learning the sounds of a language in the same way that you focus on learning the words, it's quite possible to train yourself to pronounce new sounds. You have to be patient because it's a bit like

going to the gym. You have to change the muscles in your mouth, so that takes a little bit of time, but it's absolutely possible to learn them. I spoke to an accent coach, Jack Alas, who said that part of the challenge is just to make people aware of all their muscles. So sometimes teachers will ask students to roll a blueberry on their tongue just to get a sense of what's really going on in there. Being a language teacher and learner herself, Katie is dialed into all the

tiny variations of speech sounds around her. For example, my partner speaks wonderful English. He's Italian, but he still has an Italian accent. He asked me about the pronunciation of things, for example, saying, the Italians when they speak English, tend to say because they don't have the sound, and if we just sit and I explain how to make it, he can make it perfectly. It sounds native. And then I asked him why he doesn't actually do it when

he's speaking English, and he said, it feels silly. I feel like I'm trying to pretend to be somebody that I'm not. I don't want to pretend to be an English person. I'm Italian. I'm happy to sound like an Italian. He's speaking English. Okay. By this point you've probably picked up on the fact that identity is a big theme here. So, for example, if I think about chefs who might have been living in the country for twenty thirty years, say

an Italian chef living in the US. For some reason, I've always noticed that chefs always really tend to keep their accents, even if they've been living there for decades. I think it's probably because it's useful to them. They have no reason to adopt a new local identity, because the stronger their accent is, the more that people can associate them with where they come from. So you know, I personally would trust a pizza made by an Italian chef that has a stronger Italian accent than they had

an American accent. Why you talk the way you do, there's a product of a lifetime of layered factors. The melodies of speech that make their way to you while you're still an incubation, the words and phrases learned from your parents, the rough and tumbled talk of the first greater jet set, and then in humorable, fine layers of identity informed by the slang at the girl's table, in the lunch room, the talk in the brake room, maybe

the language of the Sunday sermon. You're like a walking archaeological dig of language, and of course they are your own aspirations to speak like the person you'd like to be. My job as a scientist is to try to have people appreciate and respect that someone who's linguistic background is substantially different from your own is equally worthy of your respect, your kindness, and the assumption that they may be just as intelligent and just as capable as those people that

you prefer in your own linguistic comfort zone. Snaps Wow, landed Man, Well, let me give you your shoutout girlfriend, because you are good. What kind of maniacal, self celebratory podcast host would include that complimentary bit of audio. If you guessed this guy, yes you are correct, Watch out Olivia. Also, let me share a quote from author Amy Chua, but struck a chord with me. Do you know what a

foreign accent is? It's a sign of bravery. Okay, let the record show what a highbrow podcast you are listening to, and that we got almost all the way to the end of this thing before even mentioning the fact that some accents are just really sexy, like unwholesomely charged with pure animal Hang on, we'll come back to that in a second. Got into the credits first. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American Public Media co production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Tessa. Find

her online on Instagram, Darling on Twitter. My French friend who lives in Milatin. When she was in the States for a while, she found the perfect pickup line was to say, I'm French, but they live in Milan. Is she single? Yes? But she wasn't when she was in the States because it was so easy. Everyone would melt

as soon as she said it. If you play music for a nine month old baby, they'll start to squirm and bop around and dance in whatever manner is possible for somebody who can't yet stand unsupported in whose arms are barely long enough to reach over their own heads. Join me Tessa for the next Deeply Human to find out why our bodies respond to rhythm and if you dig the podcast and you've got an extra forty five seconds,

rate us and drop us a review. I read them all, and more than once I have referenced to review while chatting with the team to craft a new episode. Thanks per usual for listening, and we'll see you. Next question.