posted by Sandeep
What do you drink?
No, I’m not interested in your bar habits. I’m asking about the fizzy pop in your can at lunch. The sugar-rush soda you drink to stay up late. The caramel-colored coke in your cup. Which one is it?
According to linguistic surveys, the name of your soft drink is determined by your geographic origins. People in the Northeast and the West call it “soda”; people across the Midwest largely know it as “pop”; and Southerners call it “coke,” no matter the brand.
(credit: Pop vs Soda)
The emergence of a mass-market American image in the last few decades has reduced regional differences like these. With mainstream newscasters and sitcom stars speaking in essentially the same dialect and accent, successive generations concerned with embodying a normative American identity have readily adopted linguistic traits that were once confined to certain regions in the central Midwest. They created a General American standard that now defines “average” in this country. This dialect of English is so unconsciously “normal” in the U.S. that speakers of General American identify themselves in a vacuum of identity: “I don’t have an accent.”
Please. General American isn’t a monolith; it’s a heterogeneous amalgam of related accents. Don’t believe me? Try these simple tests.
Pronounce these words: “Mary,” “merry” and “marry.” Are they all the same? You are seemingly in the majority, at least in America. The Mary-merry-marry merger is associated with rhotic dialects—that is, those that pronounce the written “R” at the ends of words or before consonants. General American is a rhotic form of English.
But I grew up near coastal New Jersey, and although I didn’t speak with the non-rhotic Jersey Shore—excuse me, Jersey Shwa—accent, my schoolteachers and my friends’ parents did. I was surrounded by it. Speakers of non-rhotic accents usually pronounce the three words differently—and so do I. Although neither my friends nor I speak with a Jersey accent, this anomaly has stuck with us.
Here’s another: “cot” and “caught.” If they are indistinguishable, you’re in the same boat as about 40% of Americans and nearly all Canadians. According to linguists, you’re probably from the Midwest, New England or farther north. Most other Americans pronounce the two slightly differently. The cot-caught merger is associated with a large shift in vowel pronunciation that occurred around the Great Lakes—a transformation that gave us, among other things, the much-maligned folksiness of one Sarah Palin.
Okay, one more: how do you pronounce the ubiquitous suffix “–ing”? Many people drop the velar closure “ng” and say “–in.” Others, like my Pennsylvanian roommate, pronounce it “een,” stretching out the vowel. Sometimes it’s situational: you’re “chillin,” but other times you’re “relaxing.”
It can be stunning to see how different we are, even when we fall under a “monolithic” label like General American.
It’s just the same with those accents that are associated with very broadly painted geographic regions (“Southern”), ethnicities (“African-American”) or classes (“redneck”). To ascribe a certain linguistic destiny to swaths of people based on one aspect of their identity is foolish: we all know people who break the mold of stereotypes. Everyone’s accent is formed by multiple experiences and sources. And like other traits, it can be intimate and treasured.
When we enter a world in which our accent is unusual, though, how do we react? With exaggeration or with assimilation? When I was abroad in Australia, I swung wildly between the two. Sometimes I would find myself emphasizing my accent, amplifying my “R” pronunciation and stubbornly using American vocabulary; other days, I’d yearn to fit in, studying the bizarre intricacies of Australian vowel production. In New York City, a speech coach market has emerged for those desperate to part ways with their distinctive accent, complaining that their “tawking” colors their professional and social relationships.
When the General American dialect is taken as a homogeneous, normative identity, some react by emphasizing their “heterodox” accent. Others can’t hear the difference. Still others assimilate. Universities pride themselves on diversity—but in truth, to be associated with a regional linguistic idiom can be crippling because it forms a lens through which others perceive you, often to the exclusion of other aspects of your identity.
Those who fall under the General American normative umbrella are privileged in this country to be evaluated first on non-linguistic traits. Many, if not most, other speakers are not. This discrepancy is antithetical to a mission of diversity.
Maybe my examples of linguistic heterogeneity are just fun quizzes, but maybe they’re a little more, too. Perhaps even a small understanding of the diversity within a so-seen monolith of identity like General American gets us somewhere toward an appreciation of larger, non-standard deviations from the norm.
It’s interesting, after all, to see how some of the last vestiges of regional linguistic idioms—minor pronunciation differences among General American speakers—are humorous, whereas bigger dialectal differences can be personal and professional handicaps.
I do have an accent—we all do. I just hope that I’m far more interesting than my choice of soft drink. (Soda.)
johnwcowan, 
Bander Alfraikh, 
Richard White, and 3 others are discussing. 
komfo,amonan, 
The Diacritics 10:22 pm on September 28, 2011 Permalink |
Interesting! Also, what about colloquially referring to the United States as “the states”? The last instance of “the states” as referring to the U.S. in the OED is in 1890. Of course, people still do use it today. I have a hunch, though, that “the states” is more common outside of this country than inside it. I wonder if that’s a cultural thing that’s associated with the post-Civil War shift you reference here. –Sandeep
The Diacritics 1:05 pm on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Sandeep, here’s a test for whether “the states” is being used as the states collectively or as a shortened form of “the United States” (so “the States”)
(1) I’m from the states, which is a good place to live.
(2) *I’m from the states, which are a good place to live.
(3) I’m from the states, which is currently experiencing difficult economic times.
(4) *I’m from the states, which are currently experiencing difficult economic times.
I like (1) and (3), thus the asterisks before (2) and (4). Those really do sound wrong to me. If you agree, then it does just look like we’re saying “the States” as a shortened form of the singular United States.
I chose those examples, because, interestingly enough, I have trouble with the simpler sentences you might think to use as a test, in (5) and (6) below.
(5) ?The states is an awesome place.
(6) ???The states are an awesome place.
I think the fact that these sound weird, but (6) worse than (5), is evidence that we are trying to use “the states” singularly. But it gets complicated, and thus the sentences sound weird, because “the states” is typically a plural syntactic object (unlike the United States, which is now a singular entry in the lexicon). We get around this problem by placing some syntactic barriers between “the states” and its verb (i.e. the complementizer ‘which’). This lets us use “the States” (as a stand-in for the United States) without confounding it syntactically with the homophonous “the states.” Or something like that….
John
The Diacritics 6:24 pm on September 29, 2011 Permalink
The Indiana Journal in 1895 had some strong words about whether to use “is” or “are”… they called the former “ungramatical” (sic): http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30F15FA3B5D15738DDDAD0A94DE405B8585F0D3
Sandeep
Sam 10:47 pm on September 28, 2011 Permalink |
Here’s a quick-and-dirty check of Google Ngram Viewer, which appears to support the claim (though with a transition date in the 1870s rather than 1860s): http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/graph?content=The+United+States+is%2CThe+United+States+are&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
(The search is case-sensitive, so the uppercase “T” in “the” eliminates noise from occurrences within phrases like “the powers of the United States are,” which otherwise will swamp the signal.)
johnwcowan 11:23 pm on September 28, 2011 Permalink |
Americans refer to “the States” only when they are somewhere else.
The OED cannot be safely trusted for 20th-century quotations. Even though the upper right corner says “Second edition, 1989″, only new words and new senses were added in that edition; that text is almost certainly unrevised OED1. Volume 9 part 1, which contained state, was published in 1919, but the underlying fascicle or installment containing the word, namely standard to stead, was published in 1915, so it’s unlikely that any quotations would be added thereafter.
The Diacritics 6:25 pm on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Do you have a source for your first assertion? That’s what I suggested in my earlier comment above, but I don’t have any actual data.
Sandeep
Bander Alfraikh 3:29 am on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Perhaps the most current word during the Civil War was Union, a singular word harbingering the shift from plural to singular in reference to the “States”. The shifts and shades of meaning words receive are often socio-cultural in nature as in this case although it is syntax that is affected here.
Josiah 3:55 am on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Love this post. Something I’ve been thinking about, particularly in light of all the current political happenings in our country. I’m not sure if I remember correctly but I think “Remember the Titans” referenced on this idea once. Awesome post!
Richard White 8:29 am on September 30, 2011 Permalink |
Cf., inter alia, the following Language Log entries: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1794 and
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1831.
Richard White
Bander Alfraikh 2:45 am on October 3, 2011 Permalink |
I am also reminded here of similar constructions in Old English. The word “woman” was treated as masculine simply because the word ends with -man. Similarly, the United states ends in a plural, therefore, it should take the verb in the plural. This was the prevailing view of the prescriptive grammarins then. It would be equally interesting to find out if a word like “police” took “are” or “is” during the same period, the late 1890′s.
johnwcowan 11:31 pm on October 11, 2011 Permalink |
Not “simply because”, but because “woman” is a compound of “wife” (meaning “woman”) and “man”. Compounds take the grammatical gender of the last element in all Germanic languages that retain grammatical gender.