The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  But without doubt the most remarkable example of pronunciation change arising purely as a whim of fashion was the sudden tendency in eighteenth-century upper-class southern England to pronounce words like dance, bath, and castle with a broad a, as if they were spelled dahnce, bahth, and cahstle. In the normal course of things, we might have expected the pronunciations to drift back. But for some reason they stuck (at least they have so far), helping to underscore the social, cultural, and orthoepic differences between not only Britons and Americans but even between Britons and Britons. The change was so consequential and far-reaching that it is not so much a matter of pronunciation as of dialect. And that rather neatly takes us to the topic of our next chapter.

  7.

  Varieties of English

  Whether you call a long cylindrical sandwich a hero, a submarine, a hoagie, a torpedo, a garibaldi, a poor boy, or any of at least half a dozen other names tells us something about where you come from. Whether you call it cottage cheese, Dutch cheese, pot cheese, smearcase, clabber cheese, or curd cheese tells us something more. If you call the playground toy in which a long plank balances on a fulcrum a dandle you almost certainly come from Rhode Island. If you call a soft drink tonic, you come from Boston. If you call a small naturally occurring object a stone rather than a rock you mark yourself as a New Englander. If you have a catch rather than play catch or stand on line rather than in line clearly you are a New Yorker. Whether you call it pop or soda, bucket or pail, baby carriage or baby buggy, scat or gesundheit, the beach or the shore—all these and countless others tell us a little something about where you come from. Taken together they add up to what grammarians call your idiolect, the linguistic quirks and conventions that distinguish one group of language users from another.

  A paradox of accents is that in England where people from a common heritage have been living together in a small area for thousands of years, there is still a huge variety of accents, whereas in America, where people from a great mix of backgrounds have been living together in a vast area for a relatively short period, people speak with just a few voices. As Simeon Potter puts it: “It would be no exaggeration to say that greater differences in pronunciation are discernible in the north of England between Trent and Tweed [a distance of about 100 miles] than in the whole of North America” [Our Language, page 168]. Surely we should expect it to be the other way around. In England, the prolonged proximity of people ought to militate against differences in accent, while in America the relative isolation of many people ought to encourage regional accents. And yet people as far apart as New York State and Oregon speak with largely identical voices. According to some estimates almost two-thirds of the American population, living on some 80 percent of the land area, speak with the same accent—a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.

  Some authorities have suggested that once there was much greater diversity in American speech than now. As evidence, they point out that in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain needed seven separate dialects to reflect the speech of various characters, even though they all came from much the same area. Clearly that would not be necessary, or even possible, today. On the other hand, it may be that thousands of regional accents exist out there and that we’re simply not as alert to them as we might be.

  The study of dialects is a relatively recent thing. The American Dialect Society was founded as long ago as 1889, and the topic has been discussed by authorities throughout this century. Even so, systematic scientific investigation did not begin until well into this century. Much of the most important initial work was done by Professor Hans Kurath of the University of Michigan, who produced the seminal A Word Geography of the Eastern United States in 1949. Kurath carefully studied the minute variations in speech to be found along the Eastern seaboard—differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and the like—and drew lines called isoglosses that divided the country into four main speech groups: Northern, Midland, Southern, and New England. Later work by others enabled these lines to be extended as far west as Texas and the prairie states. Most authorities since then have accepted these four broad divisions.

  If you followed Kurath’s isoglosses carefully enough, you could go to a field in, say, northern Iowa and stand with one foot in the Northern dialect region and the other foot in the Midland region. But if you expected to find that people on one side of the line spoke a variety of American English distinctively different from people on the other side, you would be disappointed. It is not as simple as that. Isoglosses are notional conveniences for the benefit of geographical linguists. There is no place where one speech region begins and another ends. You could as easily move the line in that Iowa field 200 yards to the north or 14 miles or perhaps even 100 miles and be no less accurate. It is true that people on the Northern side of the line tend to have characteristics of speech that distinguish them from people on the Midland side, but that’s about as far as you can take it. Even within a single region speech patterns blur and blur again into an infinitude of tiny variations. A person in Joliet sounds quite different from a person in Texarkana, yet they are both said to live in the Midland speech area. Partly to get around this problem, Midland is now usually subdivided into North Midland and South Midland, but we are still dealing with huge generalities.

  So only in the very baldest sense can we divide American speech into distinct speech areas. Nonetheless these speech areas do have certain broad characteristics that set them apart from one another. People from the Northern states call it frosting. To Southerners it’s icing. Northerners say “greesy.” Others say “greezy.” In the East groceries are put in a bag, in the South in a poke, and everywhere else in a sack—except in one small part of Oregon where they rather mysteriously also say poke. Northerners tend to prefer the “oo” sound to the “ew” sound in words like duty, Tuesday, and newspaper, saying “dooty” instead of “dewty” and so on. The Northern and Northern Midland accents are further distinguished by a more clipped pattern, as evidenced by a pronounced tendency to drop words at the beginning of sentences, as in “This your house?” and “You coming?” People from the same area have less ability to distinguish between rounded vowel sounds like “ö” and “ah” such as exist between cot and caught. In the South, on the other hand, there is a general reluctance or inability to distinguish clearly between fall and foal, oil and all, poet and pour it, morning and moaning, peony and penny, fire and far, sawer and sour, courier and Korea, ahs and eyes, are and hour, and many others.

  Sometimes these speech preferences can pinpoint speakers to a fairly precise area. People in South Carolina, for instance, say “vegetubbles,” but in North Carolina it’s “vegetibbles.” North Carolinians also give themselves away when they say, “She’s still in the bed” and “Let’s do this one at the time.” People in Philadelphia don’t say attitude, they say “attytude,” and they don’t have a downtown, they have a center city, which is divided not into blocks but squares. In one small area of eastern Virginia people tend to say about and house as Canadians do, saying (roughly) “aboot” and “hoose.” These linguistic pockets are surprisingly numerous. In southern Utah, around St. George, there’s a pocket where people speak a peculiar dialect called—no one seems quite sure why—Dixie, whose principal characteristics are the reversal of “ar” and “or” sounds, so that a person from St. George doesn’t park his car in a carport, but rather porks his core in a corepart. The bright objects in the night sky are stores, while the heroine of The Wizard of Oz is Darthy. When someone leaves a door open, Dixie speakers don’t say, “Were you born in a barn?” They say, “Were you barn in a born?”

  Add all these regional peculiarities together and it might be possible to trace any one person with considerable precision. A sufficiently sophisticated computer could probably place with reasonable accuracy, sometimes to within a few miles, almost any English-speaking person depending on how he pronounced the following ten words: cot, caught, cart, bomb, balm, oil, house, horse, good, and water. Just four of these words—bomb, balm, co
t, and caught—could serve as regional shibboleths for almost every American, according to the dialectologist W. Nelson Francis. When an American airline received anonymous telephone threats, the linguistics authority William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania was able to identify the caller as coming from within a seventy-five-mile radius of Boston. His testimony helped to clear a man from greater New York accused of the crime [cited in American Talk, page 2].

  Although the main dialect boundaries run from east to west, dividing America into a kind of linguistic layer cake, some important speech differences in fact run from north to south. People along the East Coast tend to pronounce words such as foreign and horrible as “fahrun” and “harruble,” whereas people farther west, whether from the North or South, tend to say “forun” (or “forn”) and “horruble.” People along much of the Eastern seaboard can distinguish between words that are elsewhere in America strictly homonyms: horse and hoarse, morning and mourning, for and four [all cited by Pyles, page 270].

  Kurath was aware that his four main speech divisions were not adequate. He subdivided the four regions into eighteen further speech areas, and we should remember that he was only dealing with the eastern states as far south as South Carolina. If we were to project those divisions onto the rest of the country (and bearing in mind that regional differences tend to diminish as we move west), we could expect to find perhaps fifty or sixty subareas. But it may be that a really thorough study would show that there are hundreds, even thousands, of regional speech divisions.

  We have really only just begun to look at the matter seriously. The most famous large-scale study of American dialects, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), began work only in 1963, under the direction of Frederic Cassidy. A hundred fieldworkers, armed with stacks of questionnaires, were sent to 1,000 carefully selected communities to interview 2,777 informants. Each questionnaire contained 1,847 questions divided into forty-one categories designed to tease out local or regional names for practically everything, from household utensils to feelings of affection to slang words for passing gas. The researchers collected a phenomenal 2.5 million items. They found more than 100,000 variations in terminology and pronounciation throughout the country, including 79 names for dragonfly, 130 names for oak trees, and 176 names for dust balls under the bed. (We just called them dust balls under the bed.) Something of the colossal scale of the undertaking is indicated by the fact that nearly a century elapsed between the book’s being proposed and the publication of Volume 1 (A to C) in 1985, which itself takes up 1,056 pages. Five volumes altogether are planned.

  It seems churlish to say it when so many years of dedicated work have gone into DARE, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is not truly comprehensive. In Iowa not one informant was from Des Moines, the state capital, and not one was black. Yet the speech patterns and vocabulary of people raised in Des Moines are quite distinct from those of people brought up in rural areas of the state, and this division is almost certainly even more pronounced among black people. However, a more exhaustive approach would not necessarily guarantee a more accurate survey. Since 1931 diligent scholars have been collecting data for the much more thorough Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, but they are not finished yet. In 1939, the first volume, the Linguistic Atlas of New England, was produced and the work has been proceeding westward ever since. The problem is that by the time the westernmost states are dealt with more than half a century will have elapsed and the early volumes will be largely out of date.

  Why do we have all these regional variations? Why do people in Boston and New York call white coffee “regular” when everywhere else regular coffee is black? Why do people in Texas say “arn” for iron? Why do so many people in New York say “doo-awg” for dog, “oo-awf” for off, “kee-ab” for cab, “thoid” for third, “erster” for oyster? There is certainly no shortage of theories, some of which may be charitably described as being less than half-baked. Charlton Laird, generally a shrewd and reliable observer of the vagaries of English, writes in The Miracle of Language: “The New York City variant of doy for die, boy for buy, thoid for third suggests forms in Yorkshire, which are reflections of the strong influence of old York upon the New York.” That is just nonsense; people in Yorkshire simply do not speak that way and never have. Robert Hendrickson in American Talk cites the interesting theory, which he attributes to a former professor of Hofstra University, that the New York accent may come from Gaelic. The hallmark of the New York accent is of course the “oi” diphthong as in thoidy-thoid for thirty-third and moider for murder, and Hendrickson points out that oi appears in many Gaelic words, such as taoiseach (the Irish term for prime minister). However, there are one or two considerations that suggest this theory may need further work. First, oi is not pronounced “oy” in Gaelic; taoiseach is pronounced “tea-sack.” Second, there is no tradition of converting “ir” sounds to “oi” ones in Ireland, such as would result in murder becoming moider. And third, most of the Irish immigrants to New York didn’t speak Gaelic anyway.

  But there are other factors at work, such as history and geography. The colonists along the Eastern seaboard naturally had closer relationships with England than those colonists who moved inland. That explains at least partly why the English of the Eastern seaboard tends to have so much in common with British English—the tendency to put a “yew” sound into words like stew and Tuesday, the tendency to have broader and rounder “a” and “o” sounds, the tendency to suppress “r” sounds in words like car and horse. There are also similarities of vocabulary. Queer is still widely used in the South in the sense of strange or odd. Common still has a pejorative flavor (as in “She’s so common”) that it lacks elsewhere in America. Ladybugs, as they are known in the North, are still called ladybirds in the South and sidewalks in some areas are called pavements, as they are in Britain. All of these are a result of the closer links between such East Coast cities as Boston, Savannah, and Charleston and Britain.

  Fashion comes into it too. When the custom arose in eighteenth-century Britain of pronouncing words like bath and path with a broad a rather than a flat one, the practice was imitated along the Eastern seaboard, but not farther inland, where people were clearly less susceptible to considerations of what fashionable society thought of them. In Boston, the new fashion was embraced to such an extent that up to the middle of the last century, according to H. L. Mencken, people used the broad a in such improbable words as apple, hammer, practical, and Saturday.

  Related to all these factors is probably the most important, and certainly the least understood, factor of all, social bonding, as revealed in a study by William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania, probably America’s leading dialectologist. Labov studied the accents of New York City and found that they were more complicated and diverse than was generally assumed. In particular he studied the sound of r’s in words like more, store, and car. As recently as the 1930s such r’s were never voiced by native New Yorkers, but over the years they have come increasingly to be spoken—but only sometimes. Whether or not people voiced the r in a given instance was thought to be largely random. But Labov found that there was actually much more of a pattern to it. In a word, people were using r’s as a way of signaling their social standing, rather like the flickerings of fireflies. The higher one’s social standing, the more often the r’s were flickered, so to speak. Upper middle-class speakers pronounced the r about 20 percent of the time in casual speech, about 30 percent of the time in careful speech, and 60 percent of the time in highly careful speech (when asked to read a list of words). The comparable figures for lower-class speakers were 10 percent for the first two and 30 percent for the third. More than that, Labov found, most people used or disregarded r’s as social circumstances demanded. He found that sales assistants in department stores tended to use many more r’s when addressed by middle-class people than when speaking to lower-class customers. In short, there was very little randomness involved.

  Eve
n more interestingly, Labov found that certain vowel sounds were more specific to one ethnic group or another. For instance, the tendency to turn bag into something more like “be-agg” and bad into “be-add” was more frequent among second-generation Italians, while the tendency—and I should stress that it was no more than that—among lower-class Jewish speakers was to drawl certain “o” sounds, turning dog into “doo-awg,” coffee into “coo-awfee.” The suggestion is that this is a kind of hypercorrection. The speakers are unconsciously trying to distance themselves from their parents’ foreign accents. Yiddish speakers tended to have trouble with certain unfamiliar English vowel sounds. They tended to turn cup of coffee into “cop of coffee.” The presumption is that their children compensated for this by overpronouncing those vowels. Hence the accent.

  So while certain distinctive pronunciations like “doo-er” (or “doo-ah”) for door, “oo-off” for off, “kee-ab” for cab, “moider” for murder, and so on are all features of the New York accent, almost no native New Yorker uses more than a few of them.

  Outside New York, regional accents play an important part in binding people together—sometimes in unexpected ways. On Martha’s Vineyard the “ou” sound of house and loud was traditionally pronounced “həus” and “ləoud.” With the rise of tourism, the normal, sharper American “house” pronunciation was introduced to the island and for a while threatened to drive out the old sound. But a study reported by Professor Peter Trudgill in Sociolinguistics [page 23] found that the old pronunciation was on the increase, particularly among people who had left the island to work and later come back. They were using the old accent as a way of distinguishing themselves from off-islanders.

  Dialects are sometimes said to be used as a shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally attentive to clues as to whether a person is Catholic or Protestant, and generally assume that if he has a North Down or east Belfast accent he is Protestant, and that if he has a South Armagh or west Belfast accent he is Catholic. But the differences in accent are often very slight—west Belfast people are more likely to say “thet” for that, while people in east Belfast say “hahn” for hand—and not always reliable. In fact, almost the only consistent difference is that Protestants say “aitch” for the eighth letter of the alphabet while Catholics say “haitch,” though whether this quirk “has been used by both the IRA and the UDR to determine the fate of their captives,” as the Story of English suggests, is perhaps doubtful. It is after all difficult to imagine circumstances in which a captive could be made to enunciate the letter h without being aware of the crucial importance for his survival of how he pronounced it.