It’s easy to see why such voices evolved in our species: because same-sex attraction is not manifest in physical terms (you can’t tell if someone is gay by body type, hair or skin color, facial features, and so on), the voice became a highly useful means for alerting others who share your orientation. But a voice that strongly announces same-sex attraction can also be a major trigger of discrimination. Many gay men report having been teased as small children for their “sissy” way of talking, and threatened or attacked for their voices as adults. Some internalize this homophobia and come to hate the sound of the gay voice—their own and others’. In the documentary Do I Sound Gay?, the filmmaker David Thorpe describes his gay friends as sounding like “a bunch of braying ninnies,” and he feels his own voice stigmatizes him as a particular kind of person: a frivolous party animal, not the message he wishes to send as a thirtysomething, newly single man in search of a lasting relationship.56 Thorpe visits a speech pathologist who counsels him to speak with less of a “singsong” prosody; to shape his vowels with his tongue more to the front of his mouth; to limit “nasality”; to reduce the hiss in his sibilants, and to stop mimicking the “upspeak” affectation typical of teenaged girls who end every statement on a rising pitch as if it’s a question?
Thorpe tries hard: he monitors his tongue and lip moves in a mirror; reads aloud tongue-twisters to change his s’s; consults a dialogue coach to unlearn his habit of ending sentences with upspeak. But he fails; he has clearly grooved his “gay” articulations and prosody so deeply into his basal ganglia that he cannot deprogram them. Mystified at his inability to change something in himself that he dislikes, and unable to pinpoint when he even began talking in this manner, he asks family members and childhood friends when they noticed that he was speaking “differently.” They tell him that his gay voice did not emerge until college (when he came out). By the end of the documentary, Thorpe, aware that he cannot change it, says that he has come to terms with his voice, but it is clearly an uneasy peace. Stand-up comedian Guy Branum, who, as an act of personal liberation, refuses to modify his stereotypically gay speech patterns, nevertheless understands the fear and revulsion that men like Thorpe feel for what Branum calls the “bright plumage” of their gay voice. “We are prey,” Branum writes in his 2018 memoir, My Life as a Goddess, “and bright plumage can get you killed.”57
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Whether you’re straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans, certain acoustic changes to the voice are universal during erotic arousal. This is because the vocal tract behaves much like the sex organs—which is to say that, in the early stages of the sexual response cycle, the mucus membranes in the larynx (like those in the vagina) secrete lubricant, coating the vocal cords in sticky mucus that limits their efficiency in chopping the airstream and lends the voice a husky, breathy quality in both men and women. It also makes pitch control difficult, which is why your voice veers weirdly when you’re trying to talk to someone who is making your heart race with romantic and erotic excitement. Meanwhile, swelling in the tissues of the throat and tongue (much like that of the penis and vulva) softens the walls of the vocal tract’s resonance chambers, so that they absorb and muffle higher overtones, lending the voice a velvety texture. Our ears can detect, and interpret, these acoustic signals of desire—which is why, on a first date, you might be communicating more than you intend when you innocently ask for the salt.58
SIX THE VOICE IN SOCIETY
The most famous literary work about how the human voice shapes identity, and thus destiny, is George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion, later adapted into the stage musical My Fair Lady (starring Julie Andrews) and movie (starring Audrey Hepburn). The plot concerns a speech scientist, Henry Higgins, who transforms a penniless Cockney flower girl into “a duchess” by altering how she talks. At first, Eliza Doolittle is almost unintelligible to anyone but her fellow Cockneys. “Wal,” she says in the opening scene (as rendered in Shaw’s phonetic spelling), “fewd dan y’d-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin.” (Translation: “Well, if you’d done your duty by him as a mother should, he’d know better than to spoil a poor girl’s flowers then run away without paying.”) After eight weeks of phonetic training (and some adjustments to her dress and grooming), Professor Higgins has made a new woman of Eliza. She speaks in an impeccable upper-class accent, attends society garden parties, is preparing to launch her own phonetics practice—and is about to marry into the aristocracy.
Shaw, an avid socialist, saw Pygmalion as a critique of England’s rigid class system and a commentary on how accents trap people in the social stratum into which they happen to have been born. He put it bluntly in the play’s preface: “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”1 For this reason, Shaw formed the unusual belief that phoneticians, like Higgins, were the most important social reformers in England. They alone could rid society of the vocal differences that so stubbornly divide the classes, and that deny people like Eliza any social mobility.
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Everyone has an accent—a fact about which you can remain ignorant only if you never encounter someone who speaks your shared language differently than you do. Just as every human speaker emits vocal signals whose shape, rhythm, and tune offer strong clues about their geographic origins, socioeconomic background, and education level, all of us, as listeners, parse other people’s pronunciation for such clues and draw instant inferences, often quite inaccurate, about the speaker. Accordingly, some linguists call voice and accent the last socially acceptable form of prejudice.
It is also a “prejudice” over which we, as listeners, have little or no control. All stimuli—visual, tactile, auditory—are first processed in our emotional limbic system, which parses them for threats. Only then is the signal passed up to our higher brain for more rational analysis. So even before we have considered what someone is saying, we experience certain instinctual, limbic reactions to how they’re saying it, including reactions to accent. In 2015, psychologist Patricia Bestelmeyer of Bangor University used fMRI to show that activity in our limbic system, including the hot-button amygdala, determines whether a speaker is, according to his or her accent, a member of our “in-group,” or an outsider, an “other.”2 Bestelmeyer theorized that such reactions date to when speech first evolved, as a way for early humans to assess whether someone belonged to the same tribe as the listener, and was friend or foe—which suggests that there was more neuroscience in Shaw’s comment about accents triggering hatred than is immediately obvious. But even if violent emotional reactions to accent are, to a degree, hardwired, we are also rational, evolved creatures capable of overriding atavistic responses (otherwise, we would still be behaving like our less civilized cousins, the apes)—and Shaw rightly condemned the injustices that vocal prejudices give rise to. In Pygmalion, he took pains to show that Eliza, before her vocal transformation, possesses an innate decency, appetite for hard work, and determination to better herself that make her at least the moral equal of the aristocratic Londoners who turn their noses up at the sight, and perhaps especially the sound, of her.
Recent studies show that, more than a hundred years after Shaw wrote Pygmalion, little has changed: people in the United Kingdom still associate the educated upper-middle-class accent that Higgins teaches Eliza with honesty, intelligence, ambition, and even physical attractiveness,3 while her Cockney accent is associated with lack of professionalism, low prestige, unintelligibility, and lack of success.4 That some ways of talking speed professional advancement, while others relegate entire segments of the population to menial labor, the welfare rolls, or worse, is a remarkable aspect of our vocal signaling. The voice, in other words, drives our social evolution as a species, helping to structure human civilizations. English is ideal for studying the phenomenon not only because it has become the global language of business and diplomacy, but because the place where it first emerged also happe
ns to be the place where you can still find the greatest variety of accents and the greatest class snobbery associated with them. But speakers of every language make snap judgments about others according to voice and accent, and English speakers in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and the United States are (as we will see) no exception.
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English, as it developed in the British Isles over the last 1,500 years, was spoken by people from Wales to London, Birmingham to Dublin, Manchester to Edinburgh, from remote rural redoubts, to large urban centers, and by people of widely differing levels of education, occupation, and wealth. Accents emerge in groups of people who are isolated or “islanded”—geographically, financially, socially, professionally—so that a particular way of pronouncing speech sounds becomes, in effect, “inbred” by being passed down from caregivers to children by Motherese, over generations. Inevitably, many different ways of sculpting an a or an e, or tapping out a t, emerged across England.
By Shakespeare’s time (in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), the accent associated with educated Londoners had already taken on a certain prestige, since the city was the center of finance, art, and politics, and the way people did things there tended to have an outsized influence on how they did them everywhere else.5 But a remarkable number of other accents flourished across England and still do. In his book The Mother Tongue (1990), Bill Bryson notes that in “six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations of the word house.”6 All told, there are some one hundred distinct accents across Great Britain—a remarkable total for so small a geographic landmass.
Efforts to reduce English to a single “standard” pronunciation began in earnest in the mid-eighteenth century when Thomas Sheridan, an ex-actor and teacher, appointed himself the authority on how English should sound, and became the country’s first National Elocutionist. The subtitle of his bestselling book British Education, published in 1756,7 left no doubt about the connection Sheridan drew between speech patterns and moral character:
Being an Essay towards proving that the Immorality, Ignorance, and false Taste, which so generally prevail, are the natural and necessary Consequences of the present defective System of Education. With an attempt to shew, that a revival of the Art of Speaking, and the Study of Our Own Language, might contribute, in a great measure, to the Cure of those Evils.
Sheridan aimed “to fix and preserve [English] in its state of perfection”—which is to say, how well-educated, well-heeled, and well-connected Londoners spoke it. He denounced the Cockney habits of dropping the h in words like “Heaven” and “happy,” and pronouncing th as f or v (as in, “My bruvver finks ’e’s in ’eaven”). He derided speakers from northern cities like Liverpool for pronouncing the u in “cup” with dropped tongue and rounded lips that made the word sound like “coop”; he scorned the tendency of the Irish to “mispronounce” the vowels o and e (so that “sort” became “sart” and “person” became “pairson”), and he informed Scottish-accented speakers that they were doing almost everything wrong. The book was popular among the country’s growing middle class, whose insecurities about gaining membership in polite society Sheridan preyed upon mercilessly. His follow-up volume, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, announced that speaking like an educated Londoner (or member of the royal court) is “a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people, or members of the beau monde.”8 All other accents, he warned, “have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.”9
As snobby as Sheridan can sound, his stated aim was the opposite of accentuating class and regional divisions. He imagined (like Shaw, a century and a half later) that by erasing differences in how English was spoken, all Britons would become mutually intelligible to one another, fostering greater communication between all people. A fine aim and with fine logic behind it. If our evolutionary history predisposes us to fearful reactions to accents not our own, then eliminating differences in pronunciation could only be a good thing. On a practical level, reducing accents to a single standard would abolish all kinds of miscommunication, as when the pronunciation that, say, a Cockney speaker gives to the word “pie” might seriously confuse an upper-class Englishman who hears him state a desire to eat some “poy.” Differences in consonant pronunciation also create confusion: a Cockney fruit seller who says that he has “three apples” could be accused of dishonesty by the Oxford graduate who has clearly heard him say “free apples.”
But despite his bestselling books and a national lecture tour that packed auditoriums, Sheridan failed to convince everyone to talk as he did. Most people in Scotland and Ireland proved perfectly happy with how they sounded—proud of it, in fact—and ignored Sheridan’s rules for “fashionable” pronunciation. Others (perhaps too poor to afford Sheridan’s books, or too busy to attend his lectures, or simply lacking the articulatory prowess) were stuck with their stigmatizing Cockney brogues, Yorkshire burrs, or other regional signatures. So, ironically, Sheridan’s effort to unite the country only drove a further wedge between people, by drawing attention to the supposed “disgrace” attached to specific accents, and holding up one particular form of speech as the only correct one.10
This vocal divide took on truly toxic class dimensions in the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution brought people from all corners of the country pouring into London and other urban centers to work in the factories that were creating the greatest explosion of wealth and prosperity the world had ever seen—at least, for the factory owners. The uneducated, underpaid factory workers (many of them children under the age of eight), were consigned to dire Dickensian slums, where the dominant accent (Cockney) became associated with all the ills of poverty: prostitution, alcoholism, robbery, murder. Meanwhile, the upper middle class—some of them former “rustics,” provincials, and even Cockneys who defied the odds and clawed their way up the income ladder—scrambled to enroll their children in a new type of school: high-tuition preparatory and boarding schools, where one of the chief attainments was an accent that bore precisely no embarrassing giveaway traces of their parent’s “disgraceful” origins.11
The accent was a version of the one promoted by Sheridan and spoken by children at the country’s top prep schools (Eton and Harrow) and universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Known variously as “correct English,” “good English,” “pure English,” “standard English,”12 it eventually acquired the name “Received Pronunciation,” or RP, and its chief distinction was that it had no distinction at all—it deliberately erased all signs of regional accent, and thus all indications of what slum or hamlet you came from. It remains, to this day, the prestige accent of Britain’s educated upper middle class, and the target accent taught to foreign students of English abroad. Although spoken by only about 3 percent of the British population, it’s a prominent and powerful 3 percent. Anyone who has ever heard former prime minister David Cameron speak, or watched Downton Abbey, or seen a Hugh Grant movie, knows RP: its features include the elongated a that makes the word “bath” take on the posh-sounding pronunciation “baaawwth”; it removes the r sound from the ends of words and syllables so that “purple” and “learn” and “more” become “puh-ple,” “luuhn,” and “mo-ah”; it mandates that the lips be held in against the teeth when saying things like “cup” so that the word doesn’t shade toward “coop,” and it calls for the studious aspiration of h at the beginning of words. (A still more tony version of RP, called Refined RP, is reserved almost exclusively for the royal family and their “noble” retinue, and is responsible for pronunciations like “bleck hit” for “black hat” and “Ehh lewktool ayvah th’ hice,” for “I looked all over the house.”)
Thanks to the plasticity of the preadolescent linguistic brain, a year’s exposure to this approved, standardized accent was usually sufficient for Victorian public (that is, private) school children to rinse the shaming strai
ns of Yorkshire, the Midlands, or, God forbid, Cockney, from their voices. This accent leveling was imposed by schoolmasters (who, in rebuking students for saying “loike” for “like,” exhorted them to “Keep your i’s pure!”13). But the accent was also ruthlessly enforced by peers. In the 1986 book The Story of English, Robert MacNeil and his coauthors quote from a history of Victorian private schools by John Honey, who documented how, at one such school, in the Midlands of the 1800s, “local boys with a North Bedfordshire accent were so mercilessly imitated and laughed at that, if they had any intelligence, they were soon able to speak standard English.”14 Those who couldn’t were stigmatized as undereducated, ignorant, provincial, poor—the out-group.15
Thus did England, by the dawn of the twentieth century, make voice one of the primary means by which people categorized one another.
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RP, Received Pronunciation, was the accent Henry Higgins taught to Eliza Doolittle and he did so with a then new science of pronunciation, phonetics, that studies the exact movements of the larynx, tongue, velum, and lips in speech. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus (1731–1802) made the first phonetic study when he catalogued the precise tongue positions for vowels by placing cylinders of rolled tinfoil in his mouth, noting where his tongue left indentations. But the father of modern phonetics was Alexander Melville Bell, whose son, Alexander Graham Bell, would go on to create the most revolutionary invention in human voice communication, the telephone. Bell père’s work was, in its way, as lasting. In the mid-1800s, he created a unique set of hieroglyph-like symbols that represented every possible position of the articulators and thus every sound that could be generated by the human vocal tract, in any language, including the glottal clicks and tongue pops of African tongues like Xhosa. Bell tried to market his findings in a privately printed book, Visible Speech (1867), which he touted as an aid to foreign language learning. It failed to sell. But as the first accurate and exhaustive speech-transcription system, Bell’s Visible Speech would have serious legs. A streamlined version was produced by one of Bell’s students, the phonetician Henry Sweet (upon whom Shaw based the fictional Henry Higgins). Sweet replaced Bell’s weird hieroglyphs with familiar Roman letters (capitalized, italicized, turned, or raised), and with a team of other phoneticians from around the world created the International Phonetic Alphabet, a system still in wide use today and which serves as the pronunciation guide in every dictionary (or dik-shә-ner-ē) and is an indispensable tool for lexicographers, foreign language students, speech pathologists, translators, even singers and actors—and which George Bernard Shaw believed, when he was writing Pygmalion, would change the world as a tool by which class differences in human speech could be erased. That dream became moot when a (seemingly) far more effective means for influencing English pronunciation arrived on the scene.
This Is the Voice Page 17