133: Why We Talk Funny (with Valerie Fridland)

0:00like um what do we call it usually um don't put your tail in your water sorry um i don't think we call it that no it's always the orange cat isn't it it's always the orange cat

0:30hello and welcome to because language a show about linguistics the science of language my name's daniel medley let's meet the team first up my co-host my cohort only one letter different ben ainslie hey ben how's it going hello everybody happy 2026 sorry i wasn't here last week it's so good to see you all you too welcome back for another year i'm looking forward to it good i was thinking about how um i'm good at some daily word games but i'm weirdly bad at other daily word games what do you suck at um i'm good at jizznip and i suck at um shuffle low you caught

1:07that didn't you hedvig you you saw what happened there i said what did you suck at and he immediately went i'm good at that's not leading with the good thing that's right so what do you suck at and the the answer somehow contained jizz i'm just saying what an own goal uh dear kermit squinchy face i'm giving you kermit squinchy face right yeah fair enough so ben let me ask you is there a game or a sort of skill that you're weirdly bad at even though you're good at maybe like other nearby things um let's see spelling the word bureau oh

1:43well that one's easy we talked about that one no it's not easy it's not easy it's not because have you forgotten we've sorted my mnemonic much like yes i have obviously but much like search not being a solved problem my brain's capacity to spell bureau not a solved problem oh my god rhythm rhythm rhythm's the other one rhythm's kind of fun bureau is really hard to spell and i would like to also propose that like i think my spell checkers are somehow getting worse yeah what do

2:15you mean you don't know that i'm trying to spell bureau when i tap b and then a random assortment of vowels and an r somewhere i go like b e a r o u x and i'm like like bordeaux i'm like some what could i and i put cracked crackedic at the end i'm like what do you think what do you do okay so imagine that you're so frustrated with trying to spell this word that you just get up on the desk and you take a huge we all over that desk right there's now urea all over that bureau the word bureau

2:53has urea right in the middle of it this might actually help this go ahead what i think is crazy here is that daniel thinks this is helpful go ahead well spell bureau so so do you think it's b u r e a oh and then finish up with a well okay you have to finish up like in that case finish up the last letter is a u so just remember that you've got urea all over the desk and you

3:25is there no e there is it's in urea so it's b urea u oh sorry yeah urea yep anyway this was not supposed to be this big a digression how about i give you an alt daniel a different answer um i occasionally find connections bafflingly hard like sometimes i absolutely smash it and then every now and then with connections i'm just like i i see no system here there is there is only random hap stance very good yeah okay thank you and linguist and co-host hedvig hiragard hedvig same

4:03question is there anything you're weirdly bad at oh um uh there's a cooking thing i get very scared by fire and very hot oil you are not alone in this i i this is a oft spoken about yeah that's a scary but also me and my husband are you know in our middle eight like we really like cheese fondue so there's always a like i'll exit the kitchen while you figure out the fire because i am not

4:34and if i were to try it i would be so anxious that i would mess it up i don't does that count as something you're bad at i'm just scared of it nope that's that's that's fine that's great if it helps you hedvig i don't know if you've watched the bear but io at a berry when she was training for the bear in an interview was like the thing i had to learn was to not fry things by being like yeah well what's coming up on today's show we're always fascinated by accent here on because language why we have them why we switch them and what we're trying to perform in our lives by using accents

5:09so for this episode we're having a chat with linguist and author valerie friedland she's got a new book out called why we talk funny the real story behind our accents and we're asking her all our accent questions that's going to be fun i don't have an accent though so what what do people like me do well there are ways that you can get one like for example you're gonna buy one at the accent store no just find a person who doesn't look like you and imitate them right right that always goes

5:41overwhelmed i single white female someone got it do that do do not do not do that do that to anyone that was not a documentary bad idea hey thanks to all our patrons for all the ideas you bring us we've been taking all of them and funneling them into the show some of you have been with us for years so we're really thankful to have you if you'd like to become a patron and join us have chats why don't you we are patreon.com slash because lang pod we'll see you there

6:14sorry i should segue somehow i don't know how that was a great sprux daniel now onto the news oh god that was a great segue ben let's do some news now this one was suggested by diego on our discord you know we just toss stories around and this was one that i kind of liked it was about bad bunny uh excuse me flag on the play say it properly baboni baboni baboni yes and nicole holiday on tiktok has done an excellent job of explaining why puerto rican speakers say it that

6:49way so i guess you could say a bad bunny or you could say a baboni but you know what i loved having a spanish-speaking artist perform at the super bowl i actually watched a little bit of it it was pretty cool i think that the the the fact that people are amazed is like showing a little bit of a low bar but that's me it is but that's okay also tiktok is full of europeans making fun of americans for being so proud when like eurovision has a lot of different languages but as we know

7:21because we've talked to some eurovision experts um eurovision is also becoming more and more english so you know maybe not so much gloating on the other hand we have been subjected to a massive freak out on the part of americans who have a hard time with other languages or other people being represented in media or in fact even existing at all so do you ignore them maybe do you enjoy it when they suffer yes they made some sort of alternative show i don't know i also don't know why like the super bowl is a commercial enterprise right like it's not like state run it's

7:58not run for like the good of like a charity or something they want people to tune into the show and they want people to talk about it um and they calc made a calculated decision that having bad bunny on as a halftime show would get them the most eyeballs which seemed to be true because it was like very high uh viewer numbers i think um it's just a business decision right at the same time it was quality entertainment and this is evidenced by the story that diego pointed us to because bob

8:30bunny has won a grammy for album of the year for his album debí tirar más fotos and it's the first time that a spanish language album has done so very cool is it the first time the first time ever that it's won a grammy a spanish language album the first time that a spanish language album has won album of the year which is a major yeah yeah yeah yeah fair enough there might be songs that have won songs of the year yeah yeah that can happen i don't know although i can't think of any right now

9:01because i don't follow the grammys that closely well yeah second only to the super bowl to be honest okay true so um bob bunny for his part said in english i want to dedicate this award to all the people that had to leave their homeland their country to follow their dreams that's interesting that weaves in a few different narratives about immigration and the american dream that just calls echoes of that for me um can i can i do the thing can i be a bit old and irrelevant when when did

9:34bob bunny start being a famous human that people knew about because i will be honest i had never once heard of this person before the the mole hill mountain of like there's a spanish language halftime show spanish speakers around me were playing it at parties from i would say like middle of last year and there would be some songs and i was like oh this is cool and but but that's when it reached me i don't think that that's when he got famous unless like fame is defined by like head big nose

10:11which well i mean you're pretty cool you're the coolest of us three fingers on the pulse folks i just happened to see a retrospective of him in the last 10 years okay and how he has looked different through those years and so he has been going for quite a while he's not just out of the blue even though he's crashed into a lot of our consciousness i i asked i asked that 100 from the perspective of like how is ben irrelevant in a new and interesting way today same so good on him and

10:45it's good to hear something different some different language once in a while and consider this also your semi-annual reminder that puerto rico is a part of the united states and so is um many other places that don't usually get put on a map like or voting rights or representation yeah that was the hilarious part people saying hey why can't we have a good american artist yay guess what puerto rico great news guys i'm gonna blow your mind so so so now you like it right right yeah no what's up about it okay

11:15um let's go on to a story about ai and boy oh boy i've been having some bad stories lately you want to hear you want to hear a bad story you want to hear a good story uh wait what is the story that you're going to tell the audience i want to hear that story okay the good story is about low resource languages this is a constant challenge in ai if your language has a smaller number of speakers or doesn't have a lot of data you might not have access to tech tools in your language which you might think fine or you might think oh that's too bad but it does contribute to a kind of digital

11:52inequality where language tech brings benefits to a lot of people but not to everyone equally so into this google has launched now i'm not sure exactly how to say it it looks like waxal w-a-x-a-l it's a wolof word it's a word in the wolof language so i could look this up the word for speaking waxal this is a data set for 21 african languages some of the languages are yoruba and hausa acholi and many others it's a way to bootstrap resources for low resource languages but what i noticed about

12:31this was the data set is not going to be owned by google they won't have ownership of it hmm that's interesting the ownership is going to be by the african partners who put the data together is this new like do things not normally work this way in linguistically finis what's your experience had big most of the large language models have come out in the last couple of years have seemed to have been built on like we'll just digitize all the books we find and not even care about copyright even less about like acknowledging ownership right so so that's relatively

13:06common but um google and microsoft as well have done various initiatives in the last like i would say like eight years or something trying to do like good things for lower resource languages i remember when i was at university of sydney there were some microsoft people who were building like corpora for indigenous languages of australia for example um i don't know what exactly has happened with all those efforts but this seems to be in that in lack of a better word it seems like google and microsoft

13:37want to do some things that make them look what's that word when millionaires like virtuous philanthropic philanthropic is the word i'm looking for um and uh and so they partner with these universities and uh it i i i i don't really know i like to be cynical i don't know what's in it for google maybe the ownership is by these african institutions but like google will have a special

14:10use case i mean it could be the case that this could be one of those instances where someone at a very large organization had a passion project and it kind of like slipped past the goalie for lack of a better phrase right and they but it's been a couple of these over the years band it's been a little bit like consistent not large projects um but like i've seen it pop up here and there maybe we should do like a special episode trying to tease it apart um because i don't i i don't there's got to be somebody in

14:44there who cares and who's like standing up for the community and saying okay you know we're good we're doing this but it's really important that we make sure they have ownership and that it benefits the community that kind of thing yeah there must be somebody on side as this news story that we found from rest of the world.com they also point out that microsoft recently um launched something called paza which has benchmarking tools for 39 african languages so they're both sort of doing research work on smaller languages and yeah it's interesting i think it's really important and i

15:20always feel a bit uneasy about issues of language tech and language ownership companies aren't always good about this i just read a story we'll have this in our show notes that anthropic has been scanning millions of books but destroying them in the process so that they could make clod god um there's a memo that that uh came out where they say project panama is our effort to destructively scan that's destructively scan all the books in the world we don't want it to be known that we are working on this so what they do is they take the books they slice off the spines run the pages through high-speed

15:54scanners or just pirate them using libgen so google's books scanned a lot of things i don't know how destructive that process was i have torn the book uh the the back of a book once and scanned it um but that was after the librarians told me that a i could do it and b they would put the back on again after i was like i'd like to scan this book of yours and they were like great no one has checked that out in ages we'd love if like more people had access to it can you give us a pdf and i was like it'd be much easier

16:24if i could cut off the back and they were like sure we can glue it back together so you can actually scan books and put them back together you don't need to pulp but i think the point was they wanted to destroy this corpora so that no one could know what they'd used is that is that that was the vibe i was getting no i think it was so that it would just be really quick you just you just run the pages through a super fast scanner i've seen how google has done it with a it's got a cradle for the book that looks like this and then and then there are things that turn the pages and it's pretty fast but

16:55it's non-destructive hey we should also mention there's the african next voices project which is for 18 different african languages and that one there's a there's a link from the bbc african voices dot io i'm on it now as well supported by the gates foundation well that's interesting okay so that's uh the that's yeah look we should probably look into more of this because like it looks good and it

17:26looks good that there's resources and and stuff being built for lower resource languages unfortunately i think all the three of us just like don't always fully trust google microsoft gates to like do great things but maybe it's a baby bathwater situation that like but yeah a broken clock is right twice a day yeah this stuff is so fraught yeah oh my gosh okay well that's that's an idea for a future show we'll see what we can do well that's the news and now it's time for a game of related or not

18:01let's have our theme song this time by david oh yeah related or not some of that liquid d&b yeah no it's liquid d&b all the way love it so much thanks david our first

18:31one comes from allison who says dear hedvig et al this is gonna be yes lead author on the podcast i love it are you et and i'm al or is it the opposite ben i i'd have to imagine i'm al right with the ainsley going on that's that's my thought on it well that's okay i like to be and you you can be etu brute i've always wanted to be an ampersand yeah allison says i have a related or not triplet triplet oh triplet grim grime and crime

19:08grime and crime related a pair related an odd one out all unrelated sincerely allison interesting i mean they are kind of the same how old do you think these words are in english what kind of history we're talking about well brothers grim is at least what 250 years old and they're using their last name as a play on words for things that are grim i'm assuming so i don't think that was

19:39a play on words at all i just thought it was i thought i made that joke their names oh well but that's hold on that's like seinfeld and having a fucking librarian called mr bookman or something like what what's going on there mr librarian or do we just get grim do we just get grim from their name i bet we don't i don't think you hang on a second you mean to stare me in the fucking eye and say there were two dudes with the last name that just happened to be grim this is as lame as

20:13tolkien doing mount fucking doom i'm sorry like it's it's just it's low hanging fruit is what i'm saying okay well maybe i'll go first for this one i don't think any although i am giving grim and grime the old side eye but i don't think they're related i intuitively like i had one of those like gut moments and i also was like i reckon it's none but but now i'm gaming it right now i'm now i'm playing

20:44internal strategy i'm sun zoo art of warring it yeah no i am don't do it it's happening i am i'm doing it because no one would bring this to us with three words right three totally unrelated words so so i think that there is a connection between grime and crime okay okay outside chance i'm gonna get more water you go um i'm gonna use my cheat card of other languages so i think grim as in the

21:19adjective like a grim story is related to scandinavian grim which is cruel um and i'm gonna i think actually might be grim and crime oh we've got a spread because okay because well k and g are by the way super similar sound they're the same so it's not crazy but do we have a cut a g thing going on in germanic or guttaker we should great film not that film it's just voicing right like yeah but is that

21:59attested in any other words this is where my neighbor who's a proper historical linguist would should be here and be like hedwig you're being dumb so to me as as like not like a deep historical linguist i kind of assume that all consonant pairs that are voice d voice have a tendency to are possible yeah okay maybe that's wrong but well i'm sticking with my nothing's related okay okay here's the answer uh none they're not they're not related off allison sorry sorry sorry sorry so grim you're

22:40absolutely correct hedwig it is linked to old english grim meaning cruel or fierce goes back to a proto-germanic root reconstructed as grimma grime for its part only pops up in the 1500s um unhelpfully listed in many etymological dictionaries as of uncertain origin possibly from an alternation of middle english grim dirt or filth but it's been reconstructed in proto-germanic to a different word grim to smear because grime is something that's smeared all over you yeah and then crime didn't come to

23:16us via germanic at all it's an old french word crim meaning crime or or sin of some kind i did feel because it's criminal right and things that are all i suspect of romance origin and you wouldn't say that something dirty is criminal or something that is really like scary oh that's almost criminal nope doesn't seem to happen so none there thanks allison for that one you're the best i by the way just looked up the brothers grim and as far as i can tell it really is just like an accidental

23:49coincidence and i find that monstrously unsatisfying like on a deep visceral level i hate that they did not change their name to grim for for what it was they did that upsets me maybe it's nominal determinants um the whatever oh okay you know when you have a name and then that's associated with something and you you settle in your life that way it's like a magnet yeah but then you know what also like confirmation bias like if they'd been called story or tale or prince or any of a hundred things we

24:24would say oh look at that that's so appropriate i disagree and now we've got one from elliot hello this is elliot once more to fulfill some of your speak pipe needs i have a related or not in which it's a homonym uh with three different definitions so i'm wondering if any of those definitions are related so the word is wake w-a-k-e wake the first definition for wake is

24:56to wake up in the morning to get up to be awake to awaken the second definition for wake is a trail left by a boat or ship in the water it leaves awake behind the third definition being in regards to a funerary ceremony which is after somebody passes we attend their wake are any of them related if so how if none of them are why not

25:33why not why not why not indeed that's a related or not after my heart where if it's like if these are unrelated bloody explain a bit like with the brothers griff like just fucking what's going on here yeah there are no saying things as coincidences um interesting interesting i like this a lot elliot um thank you yeah by the way going jeff really giving us some curveballs hasn't he or they sorry true

26:04i think ben sounds like he's on the verge of an answer uh well um i have a feeling there's going to be an odd one out and my thinking is oh awaken got shortened to wake um and that's the odd one out and that the funerary funerary funerary funerary funerary funerary the the death one

26:40and the shippy toot one are related uh and this is a super fucking long bow to draw but like yeah the thing that comes after oh interesting yes yes all right good i can go next um i think that the funerary ceremony is related to waking up you would watch to make sure they were truly dead and they weren't going to awaken at least that would be part of it the boat trail

27:11is a little harder i think that might also be related you've awakened something you've dredged the water and you've slurped up this boat channel and now you've there's that's the wake there you go interesting might be an older meaning to rouse or something like that so i'm saying all related oh uh i don't think they're all related i you're going none i know i think wake up and the funeral and uh i want to ask in english can you say can you wake over something like a mother hen is waking

27:47over her chicks no sounds weird okay we don't do that because but you can wake something up right is that what you mean are you using in the same sense like no like watch over oh okay that's what i thought your watch over something you don't yeah yeah no so in swedish uh um the funeral thing uh is generally when you stay up like when you are awake for a long time to do a thing so there's like a tradition of like staying up all night on the longest night to like make sure that none of the devils do

28:18anything bad and that's awake so that's clearly being awake for a long time and waking up uh the trail of the boat i think is going to be one of those weird out of left field scott's uncertain origin like we don't know what's going on poor scott's just getting thrown under the boat i'm just saying it's an underboat that's me so wake up and funeral yeah okay and ben you said that the uh the boat wake and the funerial wake are their own thing

28:53together but waking up is not and i said they were all related and we're all wrong what we're all wrong what the answer is ain't none of them related no again all these absolute rat bastard listeners so here's the story to wake up that wake comes from two different words that grew together in old english but they're two old english words that grew together by the time middle english was going

29:26around so wakan to become awake and then wakion to be or remain awake two different words that sounds i mean they sound like one word right but they're they're attested differently okay the funeral wake comes from old english waku which is yes hedwig to watch something like that related to watch okay whereas the boat wake only since the 1500s looks like a german or a dutch word just meaning

29:58hole in the ice which hedwig do you have any reflexes from that one oh shit i knew that what is it that's no it's it's just like you know when you cut a hole in the ice and you go down as like a a dip that's a valk a valk in swedish it's a valk i don't know what it is in german but there you have it it's exactly the same so oh so you're kind of making a hole into the water when you go with a boat okay i guess so yeah like like presumably when there was a little bit of ice

30:29or ice stuff in the water you would be able to see very clearly the trail of the boat as it passed through kind of thing there we go sure and now last one from wolf who is neither big nor bad okay well ben just before we hear what what our third potentially untrustworthy listener said let's just both register that allison and elliot both offered us situations where nothing was related yeah yeah so either it's the same or it's like all of them or some shit is this the start of our

31:03john wick art is this how it begins instead of like our puppy getting killed it's just three unrelateds in a row and we just like at the end of this we just get up out of the frame and just like you can see me in the background just pulling weapons out of a freaking drawer they were never okay after this i'm just watching your priors update okay here's a related knot that's been floating around in my head for a while chinese words often get loaned into other languages of the area and you can generally recognize them because their syllable structure is subtly different from that of those

31:38other languages native words tending to follow the one syllable per morphine character word thing that chinese has going for it and so my question is are lo mein in chinese a kind of noodle dish and ramen in japanese also a kind of noodle dish related if so how related are they are they the same combination of two morphemes does only half of each of those words originate from the same chinese

32:10character and if so which one or are they completely unrelated despite sounding a bit similar to our anglophone ears thanks for all the potting wolf okay so we got four choices here totally related both syllables none of them related both syllables first syllable related second syllable related you got four four picks there i guess it's my turn um we are way outside my area of expertise here but it seems like syllables are potentially really ambiguous there's only so many of them and they could mean so many

32:44different things and yet we did find that there's a lot of cultural crossover like with yen and yuan they're the same thing so i could see the men and main being related but i'm still gonna say not related that's my pick okay i'm going next i think that all four syllables are related and this is my logic when i was traveling the japanese archipelago many of our walking tour guides and stuff all kind of had the same line they they would

33:20trot out which was basically like and i want to be really clear this is japanese people saying this about their homeland right um they would say there is no real japanese culture it's all just stuff we stole from china um so i'm gonna take i'm gonna take that at face value i'm gonna i'm gonna believe i'm gonna believe all of my japanese tour guides and i'm gonna say they just ganked some route that low main also had because i can i can kind of see ra and la being similar right and i can see

33:54main and men or man and men and all that kind of thing so i'm i'm thinking shoot from the hip baby it's all of it okay all of it's the same it's all the same head big uh yeah i'm on the same train as ben i think it's all related l's and r's are quite similar acoustically you can see them shift just like daniel said earlier we have yuan and yen so like just introducing a second syllable like that doesn't necessarily mean they're not related um and the sinosphere like cultural sphere was and is very large just like there's like an endosphere that affected like thailand um and stuff there's

34:30also a sinosphere that historically has affected um all of its neighboring countries including japan which is where we mostly associate ramen with does either one of you know about me goreng because that was my follow-up question because i definitely think the goreng is not but the me am i just making things worse now goreng goreng just means fry obviously um and so like you've got nasty goreng and other gorengs that you can avail oneself of and isn't me going fried noodles yeah

35:05so you're thinking me ra and la are no i'm thinking me seems like a stretch men and low main is me now you're making it worse okay okay so we have two votes for everything related i'm saying none of us are related and we're all wrong one of the syllables but only one is related which one it's must be the first one then you think low and ra or is it oh i would have said

35:38yeah la and ra like sorry low and ra i would have said man and me are the ones that are related so wolf says half related the main part of low main and the men part of ramen are the same chinese morpheme character word mian in mandarin but low main comes from leo man in mandarin sorry about the pronunciation mixed noodles whereas ramen comes from la mian in mandarin pulled noodles oh that feels like a cheat feels bad doesn't it feels so close but it feels close to our dirty

36:17anglophone ears i think right like there's there's a tonal thing probably at work here and and to it to a to a person from the sinusphere they'd be like oh utterly different words and we're just like what but at least this time it wasn't none of them related so we we can put the weapons down thanks to allison elliott and wolf for those and thanks to david for the theme song if you'd like to contribute a related or not or a jingle we would love it just send it to hello because language.com or hit us up on the discord we're here with dr valerie friedland professor of linguistics at university of nevada reno

37:00writes about language for psychology today author of like literally dude arguing for the good and bad english and most recently the author of why we talk funny the real story behind our accents valerie thanks for coming on the show today absolutely i'm thrilled to be here it's a fun read let's just go around let's go around the table what accent are you using right now in this interview and what others do you have access to uh shall i start maybe i'll start do it yeah do it i was born uh in

37:33spokane washington so i began life speaking with the u.s pacific northwest accent but now i live in perth where i'm i'm getting a lot of contact with people who speak western australian english and so what that means is that i've lost my caught caught merger and i no longer have my mary mary mary merger well i kind of do but that's just me i was going to say they'll sound very similar but uh losing a merger is pretty impressive that's a pretty impressive feat thank you thank you people say

38:07not everybody can do that i know it was completely automatic that's the thing it was completely automatic i did not have any sort of i noticed it pop up in my conversation all right hedvig let's bring you in hello i'm hedvig i'm a co-host of the show and people who listen to this show have heard me speak a lot with a lot of different people and might have noticed that i do tend to chameleon so english is not my first language and i believe that that gives me a right to do whatever i want

38:38um because people seem to understand me some very astute linguists will sometimes because random people will will be like oh vaguely american but some astute linguists will be like she doesn't conjugate her verbs correctly and actually before we talked valerie was commenting on my thus and being like that doesn't something's a little bit up so it takes an astute person to notice that this is actually second language english heavily influenced by american but i'll be whatever you want me to be baby that's the way that's human i'm also a little bit of a linguistic

39:14complexity although aren't we all i think uh but i was born actually in madison wisconsin but lived there for you know just a couple months so i don't think had a lot of input from the wisconsin accent and then my parents who were both native french speakers moved to memphis tennessee for work so i grew up my formative young years were in memphis surrounded by a southern accent and i did sound more southern when i was younger um i never was one of the sort of more stereotypical very very southern sounding

39:49partially because by the time i was born um that had started to atrophy which i think we'll talk a little bit about but also i think you know because my parents were not from the area so our social network tended to be other transplants and that had an influence but then i moved to michigan for graduate school and you know got to be indoctrinated into the northern city's vowel shift where bags sound like bags and so i picked up a few traits there and lost my tendency to say honey to everybody because

40:22that got me in trouble a lot of times you know in the south you can say honey to everybody no one takes it the wrong way but in the north i was getting a lot of um dates and i would call people honey and then i ended up on the west coast uh i'm out west now and so they have a nice thing going on that used to be called the california vowel shift is now the elsewhere shift or the low back vowel merger shift of which you have lost daniel and so i'm surrounded by westernites who instead of saying

40:52bag say bog so it's i'm kind of a mutt i think i'm a linguistic mutt i'm not sure what i sound like anymore but it's a compilation of all that yeah i think you sound um if i may be so bold you sound like it would be hard for me to place exactly where i would not put you at any of the extremes i would be like she's definitely american i would not put you in canada but then i would be like very hard pressed like i don't know put you in illinois i don't know i also we'll discover this episode

41:27i don't fully i don't know that much about american dialects except for the very obvious and what i've learned from this book well that's all gonna change in the next hour there we go well that is an interesting sort of way of phrasing it because we have a lot of attitudes about accent we sometimes say oh i don't have an accent which we know is bs everybody's got an accent but also we sometimes pride ourselves if we don't feel like we're from a place we feel i i'm a voice from nowhere you know

41:59i'm ideology free which is also impossible isn't that right you know i think we see it both ways some people are really proud to have an accent you know accent is identity and so a lot of people want to lay claim to an identity that's important to them and accents help them do that i actually was on a show the other day where everybody was from new york and they were all so happy to say mary mary and mary for me uh differently because you know in long island that's an area you find that and it was

42:30part of you know their their whole shtick was you know we are new yorkers and we can show that by the way we talk and so there are certainly places and people that really really want to have those local accents because that's powerful and meaningful to them and then i think a lot of people also want it be accent free you know we see that in you know when you look at second language learners trying to learn english the whole you know a lot of them have this goal of being accent free which is also a sad thing because accents are identity and why would you not want to keep that part of your identity so i

43:03think our drive to have no accent is also is you know a fallacy because you will always have an accent the difference is between a noticeable one that people can place and a non-noticeable one meaning that the features are not easy to place that doesn't mean you don't have an accent and anytime you travel outside your country of origin people notice your accent and therefore you have one right but yes i do think that a lot of us have this you know kind of ideology of no accent and actually kara becker at university who's at a university in oregon for a collected volume on

43:40research that i did a few years ago she and her students did a study where they did a test with with their students where they were trying to measure people that thought there was no accent in oregon so they would actually ask them you know what what do you think the oregon accent is and so then they grouped people by those that said there was an accent there was a distinct oregon pacific northwest sound and then those that were like oh oregon doesn't have an accent we sound like everybody else this is where we don't have an accent and she actually found the people that had the idea

44:13ideology of no accent actually participated less in the local vowel changes that were affecting oregon speech so their belief in what people sounded like actually affected their participation in local networks versus non-local networks so it affected the choices they made in the accent they had not that they didn't have an accent but they chose an accent maybe more oriented on that uh sort of outside the local community than inside of it so there's a lot of really fascinating

44:46stuff that happens with just our beliefs about what we sound like well if we think about language communities as a big interconnected network right and and you you talk about this as well in your book like innovation spread and people get separated and if you if an innovation spread and you don't have a a tight connection to that part of the network that innovation might not come to you so if you grow up in oregon and you just like are not engaging with those part of the community or engaging more with

45:17the ones that are conforming more to the national norm you might not hear what is particular about oregon because no one around you really is talking like that and even if you live in geographically the same place you could not interact with people right so do these people have a point in that the way they particularly were speaking was less oregon you know they had a point in the sense that they adhered to their own ideology and the way that they spoke right so they did not get attracted to local

45:50features i think it's highly unlikely that people living in the same community especially young speakers at a university would not have exposure to each other's speech so it's very very doubtful that they didn't have exposure to uh oregon vowels to the low back vowel merger um very unlikely in the same way that you know in the south where i grew up the there was a big mixing where you had african american southern english and then some more you know standard southern english and a non-standard

46:21southern english that was more predominant among white speakers there it wasn't that you didn't have exposure it's that where your orientation affiliation and your social meaning and identity were kind of drove your use of variance so i think what's more likely in oregon is that the social meaning attached to those innovations was not relevant to the people that had an ideology of no accent and that's what kept them from picking it up because we're all surrounded by innovation all the time what keeps us from picking it up is that we don't get the meaning of it we don't feel uh empathy with what it's expressing

46:59and it doesn't mean it's the same thing for everybody so there can be a feature that has a certain meaning and it's in the originating group and then as that feature moves out of that originating group it's not the same meaning as the people that used it in the originating group but it has taken on another valuable social meaning that drives its use in a new group and that's really how we see innovation spread is that they morph in social importance in ways that different people with different identity structures make find them useful so i actually think that's really it what what they

47:32believed drove what was important to them and what was important to them drove the attraction to local variants or not um so i think it's a little more complex than just not hearing it i think that's true like if you live in one country and maybe there are innovations in another country yes you're not exposed to it but when you're in the same community especially going to school you've had exposure to that kind of variant maybe i'm just i've been living outside of my country for a long time and a lot of people i know are like highly educated immigrants and tend to actually like there is separation right

48:07so like for me i'm also a socially anxious person i could be like i could go to university university and not talk to a lot of people that but not everyone is like me but we're talking about what kind of the things you pick up in in young life so most in innovative variants are things that come to us when we're younger but absolutely i think as adults we get siloed a lot more and there is a a good chance we're not exposed um to things although you know social media and your your use of it might mediate that but the formative years for accent are your youthful ones and then it's really

48:43hard not to be exposed to the local environment although i i do think you know we're seeing more and more interactions on social media on the internet on twitch or whatever these you know kind of internet driven interactions are and that can have an effect in making people less available for local innovation because they're spending so much time in a social network that's not in their local community yeah and you know what i as a person who i'm living in a country that i didn't grow up in

49:15i would happily sort of take on more of the accent if i were able to and i think maybe you know because of age i'm not able to but also i feel like some people are just really good at accents some people no matter what age they are could just slip in have you noticed anything like that or am i barking up the wrong tree no no i mean you're right there are a few people that are really good at accents that but they are few and far between so the majority of us are not great at adult acquisition of another accent that doesn't mean we're not great at adult acquisition of a language and being fluent in that

49:49language i think there's two different things at work here but this idea that that you know a goal is accent free speech for any adult learning a second language it's a really um unachievable goal for most people because we simply are not designed really to to acquire the accent of an a different language as adults it's our brains our mouths we're all we're wired differently are also our lives are a little more complicated in terms of what we need to do um versus being a baby who just needs to be fed

50:21this is mine and ben's and maybe also daniel's language acquisition theory which is that babies don't have mortgages full-time jobs and you know grocery shopping yeah annoying children that want things from them at all times i you know it does there is absolutely okay so just stepping back to sort of address daniel's issue because i think it or question because i think it ties in with yours there there have been a few studies on people that are really really good at sounding native-like at

50:52acquiring languages and there do seem to be some differences so people that are really good at vocal mimicry so that they can kind of exactly imitate something um with their voices and we've all seen comedians that can do this right where they're really good at doing other people's voices or sounds i'm not like you asked me to you know bark like a dog i will never actually sound like that dog or make the kookaburra sound and i you know i sound like a fool uh but some people are really good at that

51:23and some people are also really good at imitating accents well so the people that seem to have that ear and that ability to to mimic also seem to be very very good at languages um also those with a lot of sort of inherent musical aptitude also seem to do better at acquiring languages more in a more native like fashion and finally when we look at like fmri studies of brains of people that are particularly good at languages they have found that they seem to process language in a slightly different spot

51:55than those that are fluent but not native-like but there is also a study that looked at 24 speakers english native speakers who had learned german were fluent in german and were living in germany going to graduate school there and then they had judges listen to them to see how many could determine that they were native or non-native of the 24 only one was mistaken for native german speaker so we're talking about out of 24 people who lived there work there were fluent in the language obviously had a lot of

52:28motivation to learn the language and be fluent only one actually didn't sound like they were american so i think we have to keep it in perspective that we're talking about if four out of every 100 right that's not a very big percentage of people that can actually be native like um so i i think that now we're shifting towards uh hedvig's observation that you know when you're a baby you don't have a lot else to do i mean when you're a baby people are feeding you and cleaning your diaper and all you're doing is paying attention to the world around you now that doesn't mean there's a lot of stuff you're

53:01not doing right because you have to get your visual field all set put your foot in your mouth you gotta chew on some stuff right there's dog food out there you gotta drool you know all that stuff all that you gotta barf a lot spit up on people's shoulder and cry so there's a lot going on but you are really able to attend to certain tasks and and you do see babies particularly interested in attending to certain tasks over others right so they're not working on feeding themselves they're really working on uh figuring out the sounds of their language and so i do think that

53:34there is a lot at play in the difference between the way children acquire language and adults do and some of it is cognitive plasticity um our brains are different when we're children and there does seem to be a little bit more neuroplasticity that children are able to apply to various things but also i think focus is a big one there too you know they can put all their energy towards this one thing and so they are acquiring it much more rapidly and and then here's the other trick they have nothing else to interfere so i'm not talking about mortgages and kids that too but they don't have a

54:07system that's competing with this system and i think that is the biggest thing is that they have their blank slate and okay that's debatable in linguistic circuits how blank but i'm using it sort of to just mean that they don't have another language there's no transfer in play yeah so there's no fighting between systems there's no confusion their mouths are also not programmed into doing certain sounds so for all these reasons it is super unlikely as an adult to not have traces of

54:39your native language no matter what you do but i really like what you were saying earlier um that like and also because because you could hear that and say well i should give up learning hungarian i'm never gonna fit in which if if what you wanted to do was pass entirely as a data speaker maybe that is not going to be achievable if you start learning at 27 that you know mileage might vary and you might be special um but as someone like my husband is learning swedish and he has an english

55:09accent and he did it will probably be there for at least a very very long time and i don't think he should give up i think it's still worthwhile and i also hear people on swedish news speaking with american or british or like turkish or other accents in swedish and you know more swedish people are getting used to this and i don't know i i think i think it's easy to take that message and think well it's not i should just give up and i just don't think it's yeah i don't know we should be kinder i think i mean the trick

55:43is not giving up the trick is accepting that if you do have remnants of who you were before that that's a really positive and wonderful thing and it shouldn't be a negative one and i think we kind of have this idea especially in the second language acquisition circles that you have to sound native like to have cultural fit and i think that's absolutely not true that to be to culturally fit in doesn't mean you have to sound like everybody else um because none none of us even when we're from that place sound like anybody else that doesn't mean we're not culturally adept and um aren't able

56:18to fit into that culture and i think that's what we need to let go of this idea that your accent will keep you from fitting in that culture um there are you know there are things like prosody and intonation that really are probably more impactful on giving an impression of cultural fit than the accent itself um and so you know if people really want to work on things that make them sort of seem culturally savvy they can work on their intonation patterns and their stress patterns and prosody which are things that are sort of over and above the sounds of a language and the grammar

56:51of a language because that actually does seem to really impact how native speakers think people you know kind of get what the gist of things are or get what the conversational flow is like and those things are accessible if you work if you do some shadowing and work on those so i i think there are two things that work here this sort of ideology of what it is to be a you know native speaker that that means you're really in that you fit in that culture which i actually think is a the wrong ideology

57:23i think what we really need to do is this ideology that you can absolutely fit in and function as a non-native speaker and and giving up your identity isn't the answer to getting a new one right you can have both you don't need to choose and that's sort of the message part of the book where i talk about non-native speech i mean the book's a lot about american accents but i also talk about second language accents and i i think you know we stress the wrong thing when we are trying to acquire another language

57:53well that makes me feel a little bit better i mean i've been very aware of how we use language and especially accent to perform identity but the way that i talk is sort of a look at where i've been and that's that's a great thing you know going back to babies for a second you mentioned in the book that parents use different accents at different ages and i i just found that really surprising could you tell us about that sure i'm not necessarily different accents but different aspects of their

58:25dominant accent is sort of what i'm talking about there have been a number of studies on infant directed speech and child directed speech which is sort of the fancy linguist way of talking about how we talk to babies and how we talk to children and you know anybody who's had a child or met one probably has changed their voice when they're talking to it so you know we we see this with parents particularly where you know they do the goobily goobily goobily kind of stuff to their children you know they have a baby and they're like hi baby and they get this really high pitch kind of

58:58exaggerated intonation sing-songy kind of drivel that they speak to babies um and we also talk to toddlers differently than we talk to adults so there are people that have studied well how are we talking differently to babies uh just from adult speech but there's also some researchers that have looked at well how do we talk differently depending on the age of the child and why might we be changing it up and so what we find is when when people when adults talk to infants particularly mothers most of the

59:28research has been done on mothers because that is just historically uh who spends the most time with with children and infants so most of the research has been done on mothers and what they find is that mothers do definitely change their voices when they're talking in their accents and the types of features they use when they're talking to infants compared to when they're talking to other adults and that can be sometimes the adults would be the interviewer that had the baby and the mom in the same room and she would record the whole interaction and she would notice features in terms of how the mom

59:58was talking to her and then notice how she talked to the baby it also is the case sometimes where people had recorders in their homes and the recorders would pick up different types of conversations where the parents were having conversations with other adults in their community so they were using a lot of local features that were important there um this was a lot of this research was done in parts of britain that had more local really well-known local accents like the geordie accent and tineside and then they would

1:00:29also get them saying things directly to their child or their infant and they would say oh my goodness look at that they really radically redo their speech when they're talking to their child versus when they're talking to these adults and in all cases what they found were mothers tended to specifically mothers mothers really tended to change up their speech to infants to use sort of hyper articulate and more standard forms so what mothers seem to model very very early on to young young children infant level

1:00:59children was sort of the sort of prominent models of speech so that they were using more standard forms than they did to an adult speech and also extending their articulation of those things and kind of intensifying them which sort of makes sense if you're thinking you're modeling you know sounds for your infant so here's a baby laying there looking at the world and the first thing they have to figure out is not you know how i'm going to ask my mom for the bottle but what sounds am i going to use right i have

1:01:31to figure out the sounds of my language before i can ask for anything in that language so they're working on sounds and so a mother then is kind of without even being conscious of it working on helping that child understand individual sounds and in order to do that because when we speak in connected sentences we're really rapidly transitioning from one sound to the other and a lot of times that changes each individual sound because it's smooshed between these other ones but if you elongate it and you

1:02:01are hyper articulate it it kind of makes it more obvious for that child what sound is being said so they saw elongated vowels for one thing but they also saw that voicing contrast so the difference between like a t and a d or a k and a g is just the vocal fold vibration that they were also overdoing the vocal the vocalization the voicing contrast also probably just to sort of model to their kids this is a sound and this is a sound and look wow this is another sound but then as those kids aged up from

1:02:35like two to four they switched it up to use a more local variant so what they seem to do is go okay now you have the system now let's learn the social system and so we find this really interesting dynamic shift in the way that moms particularly modeled speech to their young children versus their toddler children versus adult friends so it's a really cool area of study that's very interesting i hadn't heard of that before i mean i am familiar sort of what you were talking about something like like this is an

1:03:05apple or like when you like you that was an extreme version but something like that um i don't know i've heard some parents that that do sound just like that i was interested what you said about local variety um because one another besides um me and ben's theory about kids don't have anything better to do um we also have another long-running theme throughout many of our episodes and and shows now let's see if daniel can guess it no i'm not i'm not right there with you okay about access to

1:03:38standard and prestige varieties so you talk about this in the book as well like you know um thinking of someone as stupid because of the way their accent or dialect or in general how they articulate themselves is not a very accurate or kind thing to do um however we know that when people are out on the labor market or when they are talking to people they are likely to be judged by the way they're speaking um so some people make an argument that um schools have a responsibility to not say

1:04:10that certain dialects or certain accents are worse but to give everyone a chance to learn the variety that is considered the least troublesome and it sounds almost like these mothers are sort of modeling that kind of ideology by by avoiding the more regional varieties early on um to give and i'm wondering because that sounds i'm wondering how generalized that is because that's very it doesn't sound like a thing everyone would be doing well we found it i mean it's interesting it's been found in not in

1:04:41very in sort of disparate locations now it's been found in studies mostly with english um although there were there's a study in with chinese children that they showed hyper articulation also to those children that decreases those children aged so i i actually think it's fairly general but i i don't i think what they're modeling is actually the opposite of what you're saying they're using the more standard forms or the more fully sort of uh you know modeled forms fully articulated forms because a lot of times

1:05:15when we speak colloquially you might shorten things you make say them quicker okay so right that's what they're doing in very young children and then they actually go the opposite where they use more local forms when those kids are a little older so it's they're actually de-standardizing their speech rather than uh ramping up on the standards when those kids age up so i i really think the first stage and this does seem to be the general consensus in the literature that in that first year mothers are hyper articulating not because they're trying to teach their children standard language

1:05:47um and it may not even be standard in the way that you know we're thinking of standards because when you're unpacking it like this it doesn't sound like it's standard yeah it sounds like it's just articulating more of the phonemes distinctly exactly whatever model speaking right and that but even but we do see it towards the standards so there was another study done in memphis tennessee not by me but a different researcher named julie roberts and she studied moms and their children interacting with the researcher which was herself and she was looking at eye monopathyzation which is

1:06:20something that's very prominent in southern speech so that's like ta ba ha far there's a far there's a far down there that's called eye monopathyzation and it's a very very prominent feature of southern speech and it's something that also is kind of stereotyped as being a southern feature like bye now bye bye now you you know people are imitating southerners they often will imitate eye monopathyzation without knowing the fancy name for it so it's i wouldn't it's not a standard feature but it's very prevalent in southern speech um and what she found is that mothers used more of

1:06:56the canonical eye forms which means the more traditional standard fully articulated eye when they were talking to their babies than when they were talking to the interviewer so they actually were shifting from what would be considered more canonical or standard when they were talking to their young infants but i think that just happens to be where it's lining up with the hyper articulate form does that make sense so what we find is is mothers actually vary in how when when people do

1:07:28eye monopathyzation it's not that they don't ever have the full i it's that depending on the the voicing of the consonant that follows it's a very complex it's kind of complex rule they either shorten the glide off the vowel or they leave it on so they do have it it's just depending on what the voicing of the following vowel is so if it's a voiceless consonant they tend to have more of the glide if it's voiced they don't so they're they're doing the alternation in their own speech so they have access to it

1:07:59so they kind of know what the pattern of the full vowel is and they're just hyper articulating the full vowel to a child and it just happens that it actually lines up with what tends to often be in the case in standard english which is more hyper articulate vowels i so you know how what you want to make of that in terms of whether they're aiming actually for the standard which i think is unlikely or just the fuller form uh whatever it is what they're doing is modeling the sound for that infant but then and all these studies they found that between ages two and four what moms say to their

1:08:32children varies more away from that hyper articulation to use more local variants and also to be different depending on whether the child is male or female and they tend to use more standard forms with girls and less standard forms with boys which that is modeling the social meaning of those forms and the final really fascinating part of this puzzle is on the few times that men wandered into the picture in these recordings which it was mainly mothers but they did have some dads that would you

1:09:03know come in here and there and talk when they talked to their children they didn't change their speech that's what i thought and so what's interesting is what does that model well that also models social meaning it models that men do different things that boys do different things than girls and that boys use less standard variants because they didn't go more towards the standard than as the mothers did and that sort of between mothers using more standard forms with their young children and fathers not changing up their speech but staying at the less standard usage levels with all children what that

1:09:37models is that there's a gendered meaning behind these variants at a very young age to children which sort of sets us up to understand well why why do women and men sometimes use language differently in the sort of general finding that women tend to speak more standardly than men well it's because it's been modeled to us since we're very little children so it i mean there's a lot of fascinating work there's so much fascinating work with kids um you know and then of course you know it's funny when you have kids as a linguist how you are super hyper aware of how you're talking to

1:10:12them every linguist becomes a parent don't have children if you're a linguist that's all i want to say having children as a linguist is great it's fascinating yeah vernacular norms have connotations of masculinity and toughness and that's been and that's all being modeled rather unconsciously or at least some of that's going below the surface of awareness i absolutely i don't think parents are thinking oh this is a boy i'm going to talk differently to him i mean i didn't think that way and i probably you know you you realize it'd be interesting to have measured your own speech

1:10:43because you don't know what you're doing right maybe that's what we should do is have a bunch of it's too late for me my kids are are not babies anymore but maybe future linguist record yourself yeah i was modeling their speech don't record the baby record yourself yeah exactly hedwig and i did a bit on the southern accent the u.s southern accent a while ago and it was is the u.s southern accent disappearing it was one of those episodes with just you and me hedwig it wasn't ben wasn't in this one but uh what's your take valerie are we losing accents or is it just

1:11:18that what we consider to be the u.s southern accent is changing and always has been yes and no i mean there's there's two sides to the answer to that question the southern accent is absolutely in urban areas becoming less salient as a distinct regional accent but that's been happening for a long time and you know i one of my big um fights in graduate school was i went i'm i grew up in the south and i knew that even though i had an unusual background and that kind of explained why i had less southern

1:11:53features perhaps but my southern friends that were from memphis didn't sound really really southern right most of them didn't really sound that southern and they sound i mean there were things they said certainly like i'm on optimization absolutely you could hear in a subtle way in their speech but you know this sort of sing-songy drawl that people talked about and even the vowel changes like saying said as fade those things were just not prominent in my friend's speech and so when i went to graduate

1:12:24school my dissertation was on the changing shape of southern vowels because my dissertation director was like nah they still speak that way um of course they do right they all sound like that southern stereotype and i was like yeah i really don't think so not in urban areas in rural areas perhaps where there's a different ideology at work but not in the urban areas and so part of my dissertation was what is happening in the south and my generation actually which is generation x was really the first generation in which we see a movement away from traditional

1:13:02regional accent features and that's not just in the south that's actually everywhere where we start to see it's at the level of generation x where social demographic and economic changes come into play that started orienting people away from their local communities and more sort of pan regionally and then of course you get the internet and social media with gen z and gen alpha and even the millennials and that really sort of speeds up that process but i would argue it's not that accents are dying

1:13:35it's that regional american accents are dying and that's a little different and and they're not dying they're changing shape in terms of what they mean the social meaning and remember at the beginning we talked about how it just depends on what that social meaning is well i think what it is is the social meaning of regional accents as being the local is changing but what we find is some really interesting recent research is that um for the southern variety particularly a lot of it has to do with conservative versus liberal ideology so within the south the people that sound most southern are ones

1:14:11that tend to be very conservative leaning politically and ideologically and if we ask them what they you know would vote for um and the kinds of issues that are important to them what we see is they tend to be conservative leaning ideologies those that have sort of retrenched and are not doing the southern vowel features even though they are southern tend to be ones that are urban young and liberal so here you have the same city with you know some people sounding southern some people not that doesn't mean the

1:14:44non-sounding southern people aren't southern but what it means is that the southern accent means isn't i'm from here now it's here's what i believe um and we find actually a similar thing with northern vowels too that um people that tend to use more northern cities shifted vowels or sort of the bag the big kind of vowel that i was talking about before like michigan vowels you know there if you listen to any kind of spoofs on saturday night live or anything a lot of times like or you know the da bears that kind of accent that they had i think they had a skin on saturday night live called like

1:15:20the super friends oh yeah or super super fans not super fans that's right and that right those features those are actually associated now if you play that for people and ask them to say what they think the ideology politically of the speaker is they tend to hear them as more liberal leaning so we see this really interesting shift in kind of what accent features associated with regional accents at one time actually mean now and it's less region and more ideology more sort of whether you're rural or urban

1:15:53whether you're conservative or liberal so there's i think what we want to say instead is not accents are dying but they're being repurposed um so that some of their traditional associations of only being about region are now really about belief systems in those regions um so i'm not saying that northerners are going to start sounding southern because they're conservative but in the south what a regional accent means has changed and then we're finding it decreasing um in urban areas particularly which tend to have more

1:16:25liberal ideologies for one thing but also because of the impact substantial impact of the way social media has reshaped the way we interact with each other and the way we interact with locals versus non-locals it has continued the atrophy of these highly regionalized forms okay okay i thought it was interesting what you said earlier you said that um sometimes um a way of speaking or word choice or something can carry a social meaning that changes over time and that changes in and outside the group

1:16:58um so something that could have a certain signifier within the group or or sort of have a mild signifier could from outside of the group so an extreme case would be like a stronger southern accent being associated with like rural and more conservative ideology there might be like a sort of tendency within the community but the perception outside of it is like oh they're a monolith and everyone is exactly like this that's absolutely so that that can make it really hard because i this is a very america-centered

1:17:29episode but but that's okay because that's what we're talking about but like i imagine that there is diversity within communities as well right so like i don't think everyone in the south who lives in rural community votes for the republicans um though maybe many of them do um and it must be it could be kind of challenging if that gets tied to your identity and at some point maybe i could see someone being like well i don't i don't want to be perceived that way so like maybe i'll figure out a different way of presenting myself which is you know not very nice for that person well i think a lot

1:18:05of times that happens even in you know teenager years which is when sort of this sort of social identity and social meaning about language really gets formed and i you know when i was saying that you our accents are maybe more about rural and urban that's not necessarily the same thing as conservative or liberal but there is a very big difference a lot of times in the type of orientation that people have when they are are rural and planning to stay in that community they're much more vested in the local community than we find people in urban areas where there's a lot of more migration a lot of people don't have deep roots people are less oriented so that's kind of the probably more important

1:18:39division between rural and urban it is also true that in the united states at this moment rural areas do tend to have a different political ideology a lot of that's because of the economic circumstances farming or you know different types of activities that happen to populate rural versus urban areas but there's also just a bigger sense of rootedness in rural areas and there has historically always been and rootedness is what drives accent and so i think the bigger argument here is where where there's

1:19:11more rootedness there's 10 tends to be more accent shared features and in urban areas what we're seeing is less and less rootedness and part of it is the economic and demographic changes that have happened over the last 50 years but also part of it is this rise in this new way of interacting that has also made us orient away from our local communities to this screen that we're interacting with in intimate and colloquial ways that television just didn't do for us before so that it's a new way of

1:19:43interacting so you know i i think there's a lot at work there it's a fascinating again fascinating different tangents to pull out on that yeah and we've sometimes said oh you know television doesn't have that much impact on someone's accent people have asked me is television straining out other accents so that we're all uniform and i'm like well no what i've seen is sociolinguists say we don't want to talk like the people on tv we want to talk like the people next door but gosh online varieties online accents even ludolects the games that we play like the fortnite accent or the tiktok

1:20:21accent you know this is a level of interactivity that really could shift things that media really could be having an influence that television really didn't it has changed who's living next door i think that's really the thing right we're we're not knocking on doors we're knocking on on computer screens and the people opening those doors are a totally different accent variety than maybe we get from our neighbors and so that's sort of i think what has really shifted is the communities that we're deeply embedded in are no longer the local communities they're local to us in a different

1:20:56kind of locality so they're localized by the activities that we're bonded through so gaming is a perfect example um we're localized by sort of the um the voice that we want to hear so a lot of times people curate their social media based on their own belief system and so they're going to have these you know uh echo chambers kind of that they create of that and then that exacerbates sort of language use uh to be similar because they're listening to each other over and over again um so yes i think

1:21:30i think what we're hearing is just whose next door is changing in this new world television has never been a door you could knock on i mean you don't have conversations with your television well unless you're my husband yelling at his sports team so you know um go seahawks that's all i'm gonna say so very nice very nice i mean you all say that like tv like i don't think that i would have spoken this way if um the simpsons wasn't on twice in the afternoon every day during my high school years i'm serious like i think because my in in europe generally a lot of schools um want you to speak

1:22:06with a british uh variety right and most of us don't come out sounding like that well input is input so naturally that's going to that's going to be something that that happens but if that is then countered by loads of other input in that language then i'm not going to sound like the simpsons it's just that you picked up on what was available there's also a difference between the conscious shadowing that you're talking about so i've heard from a lot of speakers of english as a second language that they learn their accent from tv this is something i have heard many times that non-native

1:22:40speakers have told me that this is a different kind of language learning process than what we're talking about which is sort of the naturally evolving accents that come out of our mouths as as teenagers right as we're sort of learning the local system and so i think that's what's really fundamentally shifted but i do agree with you that we can i mean if you ask sort of how non-native speakers a lot of times can improve their fluency by actually shadowing tasks by taking things on tv

1:23:10and like modeling that intonation pattern or modeling that speech so it's not that you can't learn things that way but it's not interactive and in a way that actually tends to be very conducive to shared social meaning which is really important to accents i don't think you're wrong i just no i'm not saying you're wrong either i just suspect that like no no but i just suspect that you as native english speakers maybe are underestimating it you're saying like oh there's no effect of the tv and i'm just like i don't think i would be that affected and you guys not at all affected that

1:23:43sounds and i do think there is an effect there have been studies there there are studies that have looked at the influence of television on accents and most of them have found not no effect but limited effect what it tends to be limited to are things that are already in the environment of whatever speaker they're reaching that then it is intensified by that television show and so there was a really interesting um study done in glasgow for people that watched the east enders i think is the name of the show which is based in london right so the east enders is london accents and um but i

1:24:20and i think it's like a i i've never actually seen the show but i think it's kind of like a oh you should watch it you should watch it i i have to now right that's sort of a working class london variety what they found is that people in glasgow that reported much higher viewing of that show had more of those sort of cockney features in their own speech um and so the argument was well look they they watch a lot more of this show sort of they are really into this show and this seems to come out not just in their speech they also sort of had more of that that sort of street style they

1:24:54tended to wear certain clothes that also represented it so they're sort of having a stylistic influence from this television show they're watching but the argument that the researcher made was that it's probably because those features are actually also found in glasgow's speech they all the features that they saw these people picking up and using more of were ones that are underlyingly already in the speech of this community and what that show did is highlighted it made it cooler and kind of intensified their use of it so that it was a pattern they were already familiar with that then

1:25:29television helped model more rather than introducing something new and i think the difference is that actually with social media you might get this sort of interactiveness the so the social meaning the social networking that really can cause some innovations in speech um that really fundamentally can reshape speech in a way that television can't so i think it's not that i'm not saying television didn't have an impact it's that it's a moderate impact compared to social media so yes i agree with you some things can come through on the tv for native speakers for native speakers if we're talking about

1:26:04people who are learners that could be that could be different right and that's a second that's a different kind of learning strategy right so i think that's a more conscious learning strategy and that's different and now it's time for lightning round and are you ready to take on some specific sounds and talk about them let's do it all right the most common question i get ever ever ever is about the word important why are people saying important with a d and i don't even you can fill in the blanks for western australians it might be a d for other people it might be a glottal stop

1:26:35important um for other people it might be something else some people just delete it all so i'm southern i you know so important would be right what i would say but yes you sometimes get important um which isn't native to me so i i don't quite say it with the flow but it really has to do with um the kind of amount of stress we put on different syllables and whenever you have connected sounds together um they influence each other so it changes subtly the the way that you pronounce a certain sound

1:27:07and then also the more consonants you have at the end of a syllable the more likely that some of them are going to drop off or weaken you know meaning they're they have sort of less articulation in your mouth because you're having to jam all these sounds together in rapid speech well so then you take away stress you like have this alternating stress pattern in a multi-syllabic word like important or important um you actually have this sort of stress pattern where you have a stressed and unstressed syllable and so you're you're alternating stress you're putting sounds together you're jamming a bunch

1:27:42of consonants in there but the tendency is to weaken one of the sounds and usually the t because of the way t is articulated and because it's the second consonant in a cluster and it's at the end of a stressed syllable at the beginning of an unstressed syllable and so it just causes it to naturally weaken which can come in various forms it can either be glottalized because t sounds are often glottalized if you remove the articulation from the mouth part of a t articulation often where you get the sort of slight indicator of a consonant is with the glottis so it's a glottal becomes a glottal stop or it can be a t

1:28:16that's pronounced a little less hard and more glottalized so it's a glottalized t or it can be flapped where the tongue just kind of slaps against that alveolar ridge and comes like a d or you can just get rid of it all together so these are your options as a speaker in those contexts when you're not using hyper articulate speech which most of us aren't when we're talking in casual conversation and so the natural tendency of that sound is to either get glottalized get flapped or get deleted in those contexts that was a long answer for a short question

1:28:49importantly and importantly um importantly are not contrasting they're not contrasting words that could they could be confused with should you choose to do these things and that's usually when it happens yeah when you don't create also as soon as you get you know you've got the i you got the m you got the you got you're pretty far into the word important once we're talking about these distinctions here people can figure it out they've already guessed they've done studies where they take out sounds

1:29:19of words and you know but they play them for listeners and listeners can often not even realize the sounds are gone right because we're so good at matching that you know in a word like important which is often um now you have me doing important um which is often a word that we might use in high frequency so you know and it has a very sort of significantly multiple syllabic clue to what it is uh we probably wouldn't even be able to say someone dropped a sound or changed the sound in most

1:29:50casual speech because it's kind of programmed into our head and we fill in the blank kind of like when you're reading if you know you're reading a text and maybe there's a word missing as if as the writer you know students do this all the time as they go back and read it they're kind of skimming it and so they don't even they just fill in those missing words that might be missing like the a that sometimes they forgot to put in their paper so i might see it because i'm not used to you know i'm like oh this is the first time i've seen that there's a name missing but they their brain is already churning that same thing and they're like oh yeah it's fine same thing with hearing a word

1:30:21like important whether you say the d or the t we don't even need that information we're really good you could cut out half that word and we still know what you're talking about no penalty for doing so okay next one uh h's they drop in they drop out uh in australia we say herbal in america it's herbal um honest hotel hour historic these have all at various times in england history had h's or not sometimes h dropping is the prestige variety sometimes h inclusion is the prestige variety what's the deal with h h is a weird and lovely sound and it's had a really interesting history

1:30:58so we we yes in america we say herbal and actually i i might it's funny because i'm always like what do we say like do we say herbal herbal um because you know you just we have so many weird h things but historically h's were something that in the 19th century were really on the mouths and minds of of many southern british speakers as being kind of uh crass if you drop them and so what happened is

1:31:29that inspired a lot of h's to be reinserted where they were sort of historically had been there at one time way way way way way way ago but had been dropped but then to sound fancy people put them back in and herbal is one of those words so we have words like our and we have words like honor and if you look at how they're spelled there's an h but if we look at how they're pronounced there's no h and that's because historically at one point there was an h there but many years ago it got yeah historically

1:31:59um that that it got dropped and so herbal is one of those that has an h you can see it in writing that's sort of a historical remnant and it really depended on what was the prestige variant at a particular time in a particular dialect and so people say it or they don't depending on how fancy they they think it needs to be americans are less tied to their h's in fact words like which and which historically also had a h that was used in one and not in the other and that actually

1:32:36distinguished them but they dropped off and in fact noah webster talked about you know how it was a bad thing that we were doing this but you know where's that h now no one no one sees it so americans are less tied to their h's but this was certainly h dropping is something that i think is really prominent in the british psyche as being a kind of vulgar or less prestigious form and that that's why i think in some places they have herbal rather than herbal because it was actually put back in after it hadn't been pronounced for a couple of centuries to be prestigious and is it just a weird little sound

1:33:11that you know it's back in the glottis you could do it you could not do it it wouldn't make much difference either way maybe sometimes is that you know h has actually come from a really fascinating old english history where a lot of them were were sound different sounds that weekend so h is like the ultimate weak sounds so remember when we were talking about the t quite weakening or becoming less articulated in the mouth well h is kind of the ultimate what's if we're not going to if we're going to weaken a sound or not articulate in the mouth the glottis can make a puff of air and that's

1:33:44kind of as weak a sound as you can possibly make so a lot of them were sort of like fricatives a lot of them were fricatives velar or glottal fricatives in old english so like german has still has some velar fricatives that english doesn't have well a lot of what was in old english a velar fricative weaken to an h depending on where it was in the word um and so h's are actually really a fascinating kind of whole genre of sounds in terms of why they tend to become h or delete over time so a lot of

1:34:15times we start from a much harder consonant and then it weakens to an h and then eventually the ultimate weakening is not doing an h but just getting rid of it all together and so it's just how far it's just where on that path you are and you know some of us are all the way over who need them and then others are like ah we still we still have luck right where we still want the full articulation well ages are interesting from a historical linguistics perspective because across language families like you say there's a lot of things that can weaken to and hate it's like

1:34:46the last stop before disappearing as a sound in a in a word right um so it actually means that there are lots of different sounds that can quote unquote turn into a h over time so if you're a historical linguist and you see an h you can be like well there are many things that this sound could have been before and you can use different clues and stuff to figure out which one of those it could be um but yeah it is sort of the last um pit stop before disappearance i know so i don't know why poor h's

1:35:19get a lot of hate there's another h they're such fascinating linguistic creatures but one actually just really fun sort of way to think about how h is a sound usually that came from another sound is when you think of of hearts the word heart itself has a h right heart but where does it come from right but we have a cardiac arrest well cardiac is actually from the same root that heart was from when heart used to have a k sound right and then it weakened to an h sound so here are words that actually seem like

1:35:52they have nothing in common but it's because of the weakening of a harder sound early in time that has become what we inherited as an h in english that's right there was a k to h thing i'm thinking of kentum and hundred same same deal yes yes or a cannabis and hemp actually right oh really oh my gosh it was circuitous but yes essentially hedvig have we done the thing where we talk about l going missing like salmon and salmon and maybe we've done a lot of episodes daniel for a long time

1:36:27l is also strange buddy hey you know l and r and there's a bunch of them that in a lot of length are not phonemically distinct um right or they're the same sound yeah yeah there's a lot of historical linguist information that they they have in their brains i've recently not recently but i have a new friend who's historical linguist and she has this stuff in her brain and i try and extract it sometimes um but they have a lot of these rules formulated like s to h uh l to r r to l or like

1:36:58something some something there or just disappearing the voicing like uh d to t might be more common than voicing in certain contexts blah blah and some of them there's one um um linguist martin kummel who's written a book like written up a bunch of these ranger european but it would be interesting to see more sort of cross-linguistic and more samples for see which of these changes are actually more common than others which reminds me i know some people who said they were going to digitize that book and i don't know if they have and i'm going to poke him with an email there you go so what valerie

1:37:34i do this about once a year what about l why do we see calm and calm and things like that is it because it's just a very weak sound yeah because a lot of times you know i actually my parents as non-native english speakers what would always say we're gonna have salmon for dinner salmon for dinner right my friends would always be like what's salmon right instead of salmon because they they read it sort of right they had learned it as adult speakers and sort of it's we're like well there's an r there i mean an l there i'm having a consonant i really my r's just

1:38:07don't want to come out um so you know it's interesting because what we we find is his you know in in in english back in the 15th century you would have had an l right you would have pronounced the l but l's and r's are sounds that are also prone to weakening so the same process that happens to h often happens to r's and l's and especially when they're articulated in rapid speech with other sounds around them and so we find that what sounds in addition to h tend to disappear

1:38:38over time r's and l's and so what happens with salmon uh same process that happens with h eventually sometimes certain speakers uh will start to naturally kind of weaken those sounds meaning that that's sort of just a natural process that happens when we speak and then there's probably some social meaning behind the people that were doing it so in the 15th century maybe the cool kids were dropping l's and then it became what everybody did so it just sort of becomes more and more widespread and every

1:39:09generation subsequent till it becomes the the way to do it and so the other example um with is our listeners in british english and southern british english much like l you find ours we can over time well in america we still say our r's at post vocalically but in southern british english in certain prestige dialects that r has weakened and disappeared and ours and l's often do the same thing and so if we look at african-american english what do we find l's sometimes disappear so you might

1:39:41hep him instead of help him but it's exactly the same process so it is a very common tendency for l to weaken over time to the point of even being fully deleted or vocalized so often it becomes more vowel-like first so it'll be help help where it has more of an off glide where the l has actually vocalized um or call call me where it's almost it almost becomes like a w sound and then it will just be deleted altogether so it's just a weakening process that's very common in language happening in

1:40:13australia too people talk about brazil right exactly you hear it in a lot of accents and when you see something like that this tendency that a lot of sort of unrelated accents have what that tells you is not oh look those speakers are dropping their consonants aren't they dumb which unfortunately is what people sometimes think instead it's actually huh there's probably a universal process at work here that is set up to make that thing happen over time and that's really what the answer is it's actually a universal process some fundamental underlying tendency of language that if we leave

1:40:48language you know to do its thing that it'll happen it'll kind of move towards that as a matter of efficiency so it what it really means is these are very efficient accents rather than dumb ones nice hedvig you got one um no i think we've covered a lot of different things are we still in the lightning round i think we're still in the lightning round i'll do one more um since you talk about things that are happening across the english-speaking world what about s retraction like saying street

1:41:18in as street this one's a great one because you i definitely get a lot of um questions about it i think you would ask me actually at one point somehow we got distracted um which happens a lot when we talk about language about like what's one of the most common questions and i actually have had that question asked i get emails from you know random people sometimes like wanting me to just be the language guru and tell them why you know things happen in language which if only i had that power but uh as retraction i can actually handle so a lot we find is um people sometimes say street and

1:41:50string or words with an str cluster more like street and strings where you know people notice people that don't do it kind of notice that it that s has turned more show like and um we find that actually becoming more prevalent as among younger speakers particularly in some urban areas not just in american english but also we find it in british english varieties as well where it's been studied and what it seems to be is a co-articulatory tendency meaning just when you're saying sounds together they somehow influence

1:42:23each other and the r sound often has a little curling of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge when you pronounce it and when you say sounds in this cluster together you have to say them super fast to get them to come out in time to you know have connected conversations so what you're doing is kind of getting in sort of an anticipatory positioning of the tongue as you're making the s sound and you're just slightly tipping that tongue back as you're saying the s sound and a slightly backer tongue when you

1:42:56pronounce an s sound turns out as sh so it's really just being efficient in positioning our tongue that for some speakers seems to just come out a little early and make their s a little more show like and that's how it's perceived you can hear you hear it more like sh than s so string where the tongue is actually just moved back a little bit and so the thing is all of these are tendencies we tend to have operating on us at all times what happens is at some point in time someone's you know a group that's

1:43:27saying it gets some social meaning attached to it that then makes it more attractive to be picked up not as a co-articulatory tendency but as a social tendency and that's why we really notice it now is because this co-articulatory tendency that started it off has become a socially important one to some group of speakers and that's where we really see things that we notice as accents and now we're back to performing our identity just like we always do and also um you're evoking this sense that i think comes naturally to a lot of linguists but not always uh lay people which is this idea of like

1:43:59underlying distinct phonemes that get realized in speech next to other phonemes and then influence each other or get shortened or various things so a hawket has this metaphor i think it's hawket of um easter eggs on a conveyor belt do you know which one i mean i have not heard this one love me neither well it's the idea that like in our heads we have like a pure s and a pure t and whatever that has like a canonical perfect platonical form sort of so there's an s that's like you know at the

1:44:31exact right place in the mouth that everyone agrees it's like what an s is um and you that's like into the little easter egg um and then you put the easter egg on a conveyor belt which is what happens when you take that idea from your head and you try to realize it through your articular channel and oh