Why Do Americans Speak Differently?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:01

This week, we are talking about talking. The USA is a diverse country geographically, demographically, and culturally, where every state has its own unique sense of identity.

And a big part of that identity is language. So in this episode, I want to understand why and how American accents are so different, both from each other and from the British, like me.

So why do Americans speak differently? Welcome to America, a history podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today. To discuss this, I am joined by a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno.

She is an expert on the relationship between language and society and is co author of the book Sociophonetics.

Her latest book, like Literally Arguing for the Good in Bad English, is available to buy now, and we'll link you to all of that in the show notes as well. Welcome to the podcast. Professor Valerie Fridl.

Valerie Fridland: 00:01:26

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:28

Yeah, it's a real pleasure to have you on for a really different kind of episode. We normally just do straight up history, but I think I'm gonna have a lot of fun doing this one.

Valerie Fridland: 00:01:37

Well, you know, you can't really separate history from language, so I'm glad that you let me in.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:43

Yeah. Well, hopefully we're gonna explore all of that.

So I guess, you know, to kick us off, I'm just hoping you can give us some definitions so that we're on the same page here. So what's the difference between a dialect, an accent, and a language?

Valerie Fridland: 00:01:59

Well, that's a great question, and actually one that people don't think a lot about because we all feel like, oh, I know what a language is. And dialects are sort of those other things that are, you know, bad forms of language is often the thought or various regional forms of a language.

And it seems pretty simple, but the reality is, discerning a language from a dialect is actually a very complex thing. How do you decide when languages are separate from the initial source they all started from?

So, for example, we know, and probably all of us would easily recognize that German as spoken today and English as spoken today are clearly separate languages, but they actually started as the same language, which was neither German or English at the time, you know, about 5,000 years ago. And then why are they separate languages today when they started as the same thing, but British English and American English, for example, are not.

And so I think most people would say, well, obviously, because I can't understand someone when they're speaking German. If I'm an English speaker and vice versa.

But I can usually understand someone when they're a British English speaker, if I'm an American English speaker. Although, you know, we heard claims to the contrary from time to time.

And so mutual intelligibility is often, which is a big term for we can understand each other is often used to say, okay, well, if we can understand each other, it's the same language. So we're speaking dialects if we can't understand its languages. And that's a good start.

But there are a lot of really problematic cases, you know, where we're on the edges of that, where we can't really use that definitionally.

So think about Hindi and Urdu, for example, which are actually, you know, essentially the same language that split off when we had an independent India form. And so then one language became the language of India, India, the other the language of Pakistan. And then they.

They also adopt differences in sort of where they get their words from the types of literary canon they subscribe to. Often alphabets will differ over time in those cases, so it helps evolve those dialects more and more into separate languages.

But then you have something like Cantonese and Mandarin, which are not mutually intelligible at all. But if you ask speakers of Chinese whether those are the same language, they would say yes, if.

Even though they're not actually mutually intelligible. So as you can see, it's really a hard thing to tease out that division.

But the gist is a language is something with an army and a navy, where speakers see it as having some socio political and often geographic reality for them as something separate from another language which has a separate sociopolitical and historical geographic reality, if that makes sense. And then dialects are the varieties of a language that people recognize as part of the same sociopolitical or geographic entity, if that makes sense.

When you talk about dialects, though, there are a lot of different levels. And a lot of times we say things like, oh, they have an accent. And we often don't tease out whether an accent is the same thing as a dialect.

And that's actually a very important difference in terms of what we judge and how we talk about people. So dialects are the differences within a language that create varieties that differ on a number of different linguistic levels.

So they can have different vocabulary, they can have different sentence structure or what linguists would call syntax. They might have different morphology, which is like the word endings that we put on it. And they also will have different pronunciation features.

An accent is probably the most salient part of dialect that people Notice. But it really only deals with pronunciation differences.

So, you know, dropping the R, for example, in British English in London speech versus not dropping in most American dialects, that's an accent difference. But the way that if I said, did he go see her?

And a British speaker might say he might have done, that's a syntactic difference from the way an American English speaker would say, oh, he might have or he did. And that is a dialectal difference. So does that make sense?

Dialect's kind of a broader term, and accent is a smaller term only dealing with pronunciation.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:24

Yeah, that kind of makes sense. I'm with you. Talking about this always takes me Back to about 13 years ago now when I was in the States and I was in Oklahoma, actually.

So this is the Midwest. They don't get a lot of British people going through Tulsa. And I went to a Taco Bell, and it was like I was speaking another language.

The person who I was staying with had to translate for me to cashier because they had no idea what I was saying. Which just, I guess, kind of proves, you know, just how diverse, just different accents, even within the same language can be. Right?

Valerie Fridland: 00:07:09

Absolutely. I'm laughing because the way you even said that. Taco Bell. Right. Which is a very British way to say Taco Bell.

Liam Heffernan: 00:07:17

I never like to say Taco problems. Yeah. It just sounds like I'm imitating if I say taco.

Valerie Fridland: 00:07:22

Exactly. I mean, it's true that we take a while to adjust.

And so if you're not used to hearing a lot of different accents, even of the same language, there is a period of speaker normalization, which is the fancy word for getting used to someone else's accent. So I remember the first time I went to Scotland, I had that same experience. I'm sure they were probably thinking, I don't understand you either.

But I went to buy something, and I just was like, what? Sorry. I could not understand what they were asking me because I hadn't normalized it yet. But I have.

One of my best friends is Australian, and so she obviously speaks an Australian variety of English. And we laugh because we go out to eat quite a bit together. And I'm the one that's always translating for the waitstaff.

So every single time it's become a joke, she'll order and they'll say something that's completely wrong because they didn't understand her and all translates for them what she said. And to me, it sounds exactly like what she said, but they just. They have that processing difficulty. And we can get into that a little later.

But there are some really interesting studies that suggest the way that our brains work make processing accents feel really difficult and uncomfortable for us, which then makes us feel like we don't understand people, even when we actually might understand them better than we think.

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:44

Yeah, that's really interesting because I think we've all had that moment where someone's talking to us and they're talking to us, in our case in English. But it's just, it's almost like there's a block on the brain and you just can't process the words that they're saying to you.

Valerie Fridland: 00:09:01

It's almost like your brain is surprised and for that reason it can't quite catch up. And so it takes a little while to get used to it.

And the more familiar we are with a variety of accents, the less our brain seems to do that, I guess.

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:16

On that note, do you think the countries like the US and you mentioned Australia as well, that are very geographically vast, is there more likely to be a more diverse range of accents? Is it purely a geographic thing?

Valerie Fridland: 00:09:33

You know, it's funny because I think a lot of people would think that the bigger the expanse of territory, the more diverse the accents or the languages even that are in that place. But it's actually not necessarily true. In fact, I'd say America is the exception to that.

American speech is comparatively uniform in terms of the varieties that we find compared to other places. For example, Britain is quite diverse, smaller than America, but quite diverse. Not just in having different accents.

Like you have Scottish, English, Irish, English, Welsh, you have a lot of different varieties and languages in one sort of aisles. But you also have a lot of regional differentiation. You have a lot extreme amount of class based differentiation compared to the United States.

So there you have an example of a smaller area with more diversity. But also look at a place like Papua New guinea, where I think there's 800 languages and varieties spoken in a really small territory.

So compared to those examples or someplace like Germany where there's actually quite a substantial difference even with intelligibility across different parts of Germany. You have Bavarian, you have standard German, Low German, Middle German. America is actually not that diverse.

So no, it doesn't really do that much with geography. The reality is the social, political and historical facts are often more important to the diversity you find in a country than the geography itself.

That's because geography is really not itself. What causes dialect variation or language variation? Mountains don't move language. What moves language? What makes it change over time?

And where people get more different from Each other is the social fractures that are caused by geography, or the social fractures that are caused by differences in nation, or the social fractures that are caused by difference in politics or race or age, even anything that creates social space and geography is just one thing that does that will create linguistic variation. It has more to do with the type of diversity that we find in a particular place than the geographic expanses itself.

Liam Heffernan: 00:11:53

Yeah, and I've always assumed that accents are a learned thing. So I just, I wonder, is there any element of nature there, or is it all just nurture?

Valerie Fridland: 00:12:04

There's a lot of nature and mixed with nurture. So our propensity to change the inherent variability of language itself is part of our nature.

So it has to do with the way our brains are wired and our mouths work. That determines the way that language change over time. Change is not arbitrary and random.

It's driven by cognitive and physiological pressures or forces that act on the systems of language itself. But the trick is, it's social fissures that give rise to differences in the way that those inherent pressures come out or are realized in language.

Put more simply, we have a lot of nature in terms of how we're structured for language. We have predispositions in the way that we like to say things and we like to think about things and just in the way our mouth is shaped.

And those will all have an impact on how language changes over time.

And it's the natural state of language change over time, which is why we have 7,000 languages from presumably one initial language, maybe two or three, if you want to go with a less than monogenetic theory of language origin, but at most a few, it's because it's the natural state.

But nurture, the way that we interact, the way that we see ourselves as part of a group and not as part of others, the way we flock together and talk together, that's what determines the specific shape of that variability. So it's almost a perfect combination between nature and nurture.

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:43

And on that note, actually, when we think about the fact that the early settlers in the US Came from Britain and it was the British Empire that first colonized the east coast, why is it that Americans speak American? Because if it was just passed down from generation to generation, why isn't everyone just speaking with a British accent?

Valerie Fridland: 00:14:08

Well, there are a lot. Okay, this is a big question.

In fact, I have a new book that's coming out called why we Talk, the real story behind your accent, which is about this topic, the whole book. Right.

So it starts from the very beginning of, you know, proto humans and traces it all the way through Britain and into America and into the modern diversity.

So this is a huge question, and so I want to just sort of take a snippet of that, but let people know there's a lot more to it than what I'm going to say. The second thing is it is true that the. The early colonial accent was absolutely British, but the Britons weren't the first settlers.

Actually, you know, there were other settlers. They were just there for.

In smaller numbers and with less propensity to stay there, whereas the British colonizers came with the intention of setting up a permanent homeland. So, you know, we had.

You had the Dutch, for example, in New Netherlands, you had New Sweden, you had New Finland, you had actually quite a bit of diversity. You had the Mexican territories and the Spanish territories, and you had some French territory. So there was actually already some diversity there.

The reason that English was the language that stuck around is because the British settlers were actually the first that came with the intention of making it a home rather than a trading center.

And when you go in with that kind of desire, a desire for permanence, a desire to make it a new place and develop its unique personality and a sense of community, and that really is a big impact on the way that language is shaped over time and also the fact that you're having children, which is also a huge impact on the force of language over time. So just that in the background. Let's keep that in mind.

h was settled in Jamestown in: 1607

So actually, the first British, you know, settlers were southern, both because they were mostly from southern Britain, and also because they landed in what is now the south of the US which is Virginia. And then we also had the New England colonies.

And it's true that they were speaking with English accents, and they were similar in some ways across those colonies in terms of where they were from.

The majority of early settlers to the first colonies were from southern Britain, but in New England, it was mainly sort of East Anglia was a very prominent settlement area that people came from. And in the Virginia colonies, it tended to center more around London and sort of the southern. I think western. No, eastern. Is it southeastern?

Yes, southeastern area. Sorry, I had a blip of geography in my head there. So you did have slight differences there.

But there were another couple of factors that played a big role in the development of the American accent. One was these very sort of small seeds of differences in terms of the origin of these early settlers.

And it would seem subtle, but they were significant different dialect areas of Britain. It was also the fact that a different kind of class group was settling the US or settling the New World at that time. It wasn't.

The US obviously, then tended to be important in London or in England at the time. So we. You didn't have a lot of royal courtly types come over.

Instead you had a lot of middle class and a lot of indentured servants that were working class or lower class. And so you didn't have this sort of pressure from the top in the same way that you do in England. And classes.

Variety in England is obviously very, very intensely important.

d that rank difference, which: 1600

And you had a certain way of speaking if you were one versus versus the other. But you would talk to each other in ways that was more democratic in America.

And that had a huge impact on the way that speech would become more uniform in the U.S. not the U.S. at the time, but what would be the U.S. than back in Britain? So that was one big impact.

Then you also have the middle colonies settled a bit later, which would be Pennsylvania, essentially, where William Penn came over with the Quakers.

Well, then you have another sea of difference, which is British settlers, because that was predominantly northern Britain, that was represented by the Quakers.

But the other difference with the Quakers from the New England settlers and the Virginia settlers were accepting the enslaved workers that were brought from West Africa into Virginia. That also contributed a language difference. The Quakers were extremely open in who they let settle in Pennsylvania.

And so you had a huge number of groups that found more acceptance in that area, so that you got a lot more language diversity in the Midland colonies than you did in either New England or Virginia.

German settlement In the late: 1700

Similarly, not a lot of wealthy people. So it wasn't the high class that were moving in, it was the middle and lower class also. Hugely impactful.

The very first phase of American history, or pre American history, but early colonial history would have had a British accent. So the earliest settlers obviously were from Britain. Sounded British.

But when you have children, what happens is children don't learn from their parents. I think anybody who has teenagers are absolutely convinced of that. Right. Teenagers have no interest in you as a person.

In fact, they want to be the opposite of you. And this sort of has happened for time eternal.

Now, we didn't have teenagerhood like, like we do now, but we did have children learning from peers and not from parents. And that's called vernacular reorganization that happens with every generation.

So children then take the seeds of their parents languages and varieties and they build from that sort of a community language that works in their peer group.

And so what you have is the changes between older speakers and younger speakers is the difference between older speakers that have these established fossilized dialects that aren't going to change and younger speakers whose dialects are in formation that are now drawing from a huge set of different variants to use. Right. So they're not using the accent of their parents, they're hearing the accents of their peers.

And a lot of times what you find in these, these kind of dialect settlement areas, you find it in New Zealand, you find it in Australia, you find it in the New world when you have this massive influx of a lot of different varieties all coming together in a more sort of equivalent kind of sense. I mean, there was no basic dialect already there to compete with.

Then those children take from the seeds and the ashes of those accents and they form a new one that communicates where, where the same group. We're in this together. And usually that draws from the predominant features of the accents they hear around.

So you get something called leveling, which means that, you know, idiosyncratic changes that some accents do that others don't, will probably get filtered out and everybody will converge on a set of shared norms and those set norms will sound different than everybody whose older accent.

So within one generation, and especially two or three, you already have something that's drastically different from very different routes than those that were brought over to America. And that is really where we start getting the true American accent.

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:31

Yeah, and that's, that's fascinating because I, I just assumed that the only reason you guys turned the S's into Zeds and dropped the U out of everything was just stubbornness. So it's nice to know, well, we were pretty stubborn.

Valerie Fridland: 00:22:43

I think that that was how we survived. You know, I say we. I actually, my parents were immigrants in the last generation, so I can't claim colonial ancestry.

But the reality is it's an incredibly fascinating story. I mean, it is.

It is so unique and exceptionally fascinating how we go from, you know, point A to point Z or Z, depending on your background, in a generation or two.

You know, by: 1700

It was that there was a uniform American accent that no matter where you traveled in the New World, you couldn't tell where someone was from. And it was often commented on how starkly different that was from the motherland, where you could constantly tell where people were from.

And also on its. Its correctness and its sort of eloquence.

ars to hear, but in the early: 1700

Part of this sort of beauty of coming together in this sort of new nation or to be nation for a common goal of a new homeland. And that has an incredible power on speech.

Liam Heffernan: 00:24:20

You know, you mentioned as well about people and children especially sort of learning from their peers.

But when we skip forwards to today, and really, you know, for the past hundred years, where we've seen this explosion of, you know, mass communication and where Hollywood has really become sort of the Western epicenter for the film and entertainment industry, how much has mass media played a part in shaping those accents and those languages?

Valerie Fridland: 00:24:52

You know, it's a really interesting question because there are two answers. The first answer is a lot, and the second answer is not as much as you might think.

And so it's a fascinating sort of evolution of an undercurrent of the same pressures that always affect our speech.

But I think you have to keep in mind that, you know, mass media, and certainly the Internet, social media, but even before that, when you get to television and movies and things like that, that's really only been about a century, but the.

The massive difference in our varieties between British speech and American speech, and even within American speech, the different varieties there were sort of preceded any of that, right?

h changed drastically between: 1600

And as much as American accents evolved into their own thing, the British accent in all its varieties evolved just as much but in a different direction because of those social fissures I talked about earlier. So this inherent propensity to change meets massive social distance.

And think about the Revolutionary War, you can't get much more of a social fissures than that. And that really inspires changes in both varieties. So that also was foundational.

But getting back to the entertainment mass media, when we look at studies on how much television affects accent, it's kind of a mixed bag, but almost always in the direction of not that much. So can television help you learn a new word or two? Yes, absolutely.

You can learn a certain type of vocabulary from listening to certain types of shows.

And I don't know if you heard there was a big hoopla over Peppa Pig a few years ago, American children were watching Peppa Pig and it was claimed they were learning, you know, a British accent from that, you know, because they were calling people their mummies and things like that. But actually all they were learning were a couple of new words that made them sound British.

And, you know, I, anytime I try to say anything, you know, like bloody or blimey, I have to say it with a British accent. It doesn't work otherwise. So mummy is one of those words, but the impact is really superficial. So it's words and maybe even some phrases.

But we don't find accents being wholesale change because people are listening to a television show.

A couple exceptions we have found is where there's already an inherent tendency towards a certain type of variety in a place where a television show then it basically makes it a little more sexy and interesting even, and then makes that more likely to be picked up. So there was a show called the EastEnders that was very popular, I'm sure you've heard of it, and we found some really interesting.

It was actually Jane Stewart, I think, was the name of the researcher in Scotland that actually did some studies on how that affected speech in certain cities in Scotland and she found that that actually had people speaking more with an Eastender accent.

But it was because some aspects of the Eastender accent were already prevalent and that show became super popular and people that reported watching it more, actually had more of those features in their speech.

So yes, it probably did make them use them more, but there was already an undercurrent of some of those features in the speech there already and it just made those people do it more. So did it create the accent? No. Did it maybe make it stronger? Yes.

This is a very different influence though than what we find with social media, which is a totally different thing than television. And that has had a really big impact in the last 20 years on speech to a degree that we haven't seen with media of other types.

Liam Heffernan: 00:29:04

I've known many people over the years whose first language wasn't English, but they've since moved to the UK and other English speaking countries. And through school and also largely through television and film, they've learned how to speak English.

But because of that they've invariably had an American accent because a lot of the film and TV that they watch are created in America, in Hollywood.

So do you think that the prevalence of American content in non English speaking countries means that American English is becoming the primary English accent?

Valerie Fridland: 00:29:49

Yeah, there are a lot of different interesting aspects of the question you just asked.

One is, you know, I think it's very different to learn English as a second language and the impact of media on that is probably more substantial than when you are already speaking an English variety and you're watching an English show that has other types of. Types of English varieties, if that makes sense. It also depends on the age in which you learn.

So a lot of people that are trying to learn English, that speak different languages are watching television and learning English at a younger age, that they're also more susceptible to learning aspects of accent in those times. And because most of the.

I think it's changing, but most of the mass produced television and movies historically have been out of Hollywood, out of the US it has just packaged the American accent in a way that motivates speakers to want to have that accent. One is by pure exposure.

There's just not another sort of powerhouse in terms of media that has contributed to the international stage as much or screen. And so those models are just more American. But also it's the sort of sexiness of Hollywood. Right. It's this American imagination of what the world is.

And it's been very attractive to people outside of the U.S. it's also the economic power of America is also very attractive.

And so people are learning the accent they think will give them the greatest potential, whether that's in where they want to live or what they want to do or who they want to trade with, or the kind of lifestyle they want to emulate. And for that reason, America has been the accent that people have been aiming for.

For what will happen with the American accent as our sheen is wearing off is a good question and one that we don't know.

I think maybe American English will become a little less shiny and exciting as, you know, if we play less of a prominent role internationally and as we become a little. If we become more protectionist, as we are doing now, that could turn people off, that could make it less helpful to learn American English.

And then I think you might see other models.

But yes, it is the American accent that really has become the international model, not just for people that are learning a second language, but also as the language of business, as the language of science, because of the powerhouse that America has been in the last century. It has been the natural dialect that people have kind of been attracted to.

Liam Heffernan: 00:32:26

And thinking a bit more kind of domestically in the US as well. How much of an impact do you think immigration has on blurring the lines between accents?

Because, you know, children raised in bilingual households or, you know, multiethnic households, the accents that they have aren't going to be as clearly defined as their parents and grandparents. Right.

Valerie Fridland: 00:32:52

When you talk about the accents that they have, do you mean the accents in their home language or their accent in their new language?

Liam Heffernan: 00:32:59

Language in their. In their new language.

Valerie Fridland: 00:33:01

In their new language.

Liam Heffernan: 00:33:02

Assuming they were born and raised in the usa, but they had, you know, different ethnicities and accents within their household, you know, whether.

Valerie Fridland: 00:33:13

I'm not sure you could say that wouldn't be as clearly defined, but they'll be different.

And so, you know, when you are from a multilingual household, especially in the United States over the last century, what we have found is something called the three generation pattern. And what that is is language loss within three generations.

So the traditional trajectory of immigrant languages, once they come to the United States is not that they're retained, but they're actually lost by the grandkid generation of the original immigrant, which is, of course, a very sad thing for the immigration, the immigrant language itself, for the vitality of that language, but also for speakers that don't speak these beautiful, wonderful languages that actually have cognitive benefits if you're multilingual. So there are a lot of reasons why that's a sad pattern.

with German, you know, in the: 1800

And what accent is gained, though, is often something that is more defined as an ethnic variety than the English they might have been exposed to. So often what we lose is the language, but we gain is an accent.

And that's how we get ethnic varieties of English, is that the identity stays, even if the language doesn't. So I wouldn't say that the dialects are less clearly defined.

In fact, often they become really emergent, but they're different than the accent maybe of the mainstream group. And this can often cause a lot of problems for its speakers. But it's because identity doesn't disappear just because a language does.

And that's a really important thing to keep in mind.

Liam Heffernan: 00:35:02

Yeah, no, that's, that's a really valid point. And I guess from, from what you've just said, I have a sort of two part question here.

Firstly, when you think about that three generation shift, how do we really know what someone or a group of people spoke like 200 years ago before there was any audio record of how people spoke? And secondly, depending on what the answer is to that first part, what can we actually discern about America and American history from language?

Valerie Fridland: 00:35:38

Well, you know, that's a really fun question because I think, you know, a lot of times linguists like me get up and tell people, oh, well, you know, 300 years ago they didn't say that. And people are like, how do you know we had no iPhones back then.

You know, no one will ever wonder what speech in the 21st century sounded like because we record it amply for future generations. But, you know, 400 years ago, we don't have a lot of records.

That's where we have diaries, letters, Shakespeare, right, that tell us a lot about what, what speech was like at that time. So, you know, we have literary records. A lot of times we have rhymes, you know, like.

So, for example, you know, in Shakespeare's day, reasons and raisins rhymed.

There's actually a big sort of spoof that Shakespeare makes a pun that he makes with those rhyming words where he says if raisins, you know, reasons were like raisins, because reasons and raisins were pronounced the same way at that time. So we know that those words had to be pronounced the same way.

and: 1700

We also have rhymes, and so we know, you know, which direction those Words were pronounced in, in terms of which vowel they had that was merged. So a lot of times it's from rhyming schemes.

You know, a really great example is Jonathan Swift rhymed ruin and doing, which, of course, you know, we don't. Well, we could you say doing and ruin.

But that suggests to us, and as do other written documents, that actually the correct or the more mainstream pronunciation of the ing ending in Jonathan Swift's time was actually in, not ing. And it's only in the 19th century that we start seeing the G more prominent in writing.

pronunciation starting in the: 1700

That was sort of when people started to notice differences in accents as being related to sociocultural identities before that. But it was just normal. People sounded differently. We didn't make a big deal about it.

I mean, people certainly thought there's an educated and an uneducated way of speaking, or there's a, you know, land owner way of speaking and a commoner way of speaking.

But because that was just part of what you did as a rank, as a member of your rank, no one commented on much in terms of, like those dumbass peasants. Right. You know, maybe they thought it, but that wasn't really what we heard.

But in the same: 1700

So then we also have it written for us. Another source of information are things like trial transcripts. So in Britain in the.

I think it Starting in about: 1700

which took place in the late: 1600

And that miss misspelling, when it's consistent, tells us, okay, things were pronounced differently.

So one Misspelling we often see in the Salem witch trial transcripts is ask a S K written as axe, A X, E, which of course in America now is a really a shibboleth of African American English, right? And it's often said to be, you know, really wrong and uneducated.

But the reality is, the reason that's in African American English is not because African American English speakers can't pronounce ask. It's because what they have done is retain an older form of ask, right?

is language. But they came in: 1600

So the axe we hear in African American English is not a novel. In fact, it came from colonial accents way back then. We know this because we see Salem witch trial transcripts.

Another misspelling that we see a lot is the word serve or servant. Sarve was often written as sarve, and we know that.

ech. So that happened between: 1600

e, that tells us, oh, between: 1400

ve been weakening as early as: 1600

So we can, as linguists, reconstruct the clues in written records to help us understand the sounds of 400, 500 years ago, which I think is a really cool part of linguistics.

Liam Heffernan: 00:41:44

It's really fascinating because, you know, we usually spend so much time talking about what was said and how that's changed history, rather than, you know, how it was said, how it was written, and what that can actually tell us about, you know, the history of America and any other part of the world. You know, it's. It's fascinating, right?

Valerie Fridland: 00:42:02

And it doesn't just tell us about the history. That is something, obviously, it tells us a lot about. It also tells of us as linguists about how language has worked through time.

And when we see consistent patterns in speech that we can reconstruct that way, then we can start having ideas about sound laws.

How did things happen over and over again in the same way through different languages and different dialects, that starts to tell us something about the way the brain works and the mouth works. It's like this beautiful circle of both history and science coming together.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:34

Yeah, I mean, there's. There's just. There's so much that I still want to ask here, but I think we're gonna have to wrap this up for now.

Valerie Fridland: 00:42:42

Well, you can read the book. I'll send you a copy.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:45

Thank you.

And, and for anyone listening to this as well, that does want to learn more, I mean, by all means, plug your book, but are there any other resources as well that people should be checking out?

Valerie Fridland: 00:42:54

Absolutely, you can check. I'm.

I just go to my website, which is Valeriefland.com and I talk, talk a lot about both the research that I do in modern English, but I also have links to a lot of different articles that I've written or interviews I've given that I can talk. I talk about all these topics in depth. There's also a blog I write every month for Psychology Today, and so that's called Language in the Wild.

So you can just look up Valerie Friedland, Psychology Today. And in that one, it's not as much about the evolution of American. American speech.

There are certainly things on that topic, but it's about anything you've ever wondered about language and linguistics and sort of its evolution. I try to talk about those different things in that blog.

And then finally, you can obviously pre order my new book, why We Talk Funny on anywhere you buy books. And then my last book, like Literally dude, has a really fun hit, historical kind of tracing of all the modern speech tics we love to hate.

So there are a lot of different sources that you can go to if you want to hear more from me.

There's also a lot of linguists that are doing wonderful work, like John McWhorter and Rosemarie Ostler, that have books that are also very accessible and fascinating that you can read too.

Liam Heffernan: 00:44:14

Yeah, thank you.

And yeah, I need to read your book because I realized how old I was recently when one of my younger relatives spoke almost a whole sentence of words that I completely did not understand. So, yeah, I think I'm getting way too old to take in new slang now.

Valerie Fridland: 00:44:34

So did you ask him for a translation?

Liam Heffernan: 00:44:37

Oh, no, I didn't. Want to look silly. I just sort of nodded and went with it. But I did Google it afterwards, of course.

Valerie Fridland: 00:44:44

Well, that's the beauty of having students that never age in your classes as a professor. You know, I get older. They're always the same age every year.

And so I get every fall I do something called Word of the Year, where we have a contest and they all have to bring in their competing new slang and then argue for it why it should be the word of the year. And that's where I get all my new slang from. So that's the only way I stay informed. Otherwise it's almost impossible.

And my my own kids roll their eyes when I ask them to explain things, so I have an in with the new generation, which is great.

Liam Heffernan: 00:45:19

Yeah. Handy. Yeah. Right. Well, I'd love to talk more, but I think we're going to have to wrap this up for now.

And Valerie, I can't thank you enough for joining me for this episode.

Obviously, if anyone listening to this also wants to find out more, I'll put links to everything that Valerie's mentioned in the show notes so you can go and check all of that out. But Valerie, remind us, if anyone wants to connect with you, where can they do that?

Valerie Fridland: 00:45:45

You can just go to my website, valeriefriedland.com and there is a contact tab. You can click that and just email me through that contact tab.

Or you can also always look me up at the University of Nevada, which is where I work on a yearly basis.

Liam Heffernan: 00:46:03

Wonderful. Thank you again. And if anyone cares to connect with me, I'm on Bluesky LinkedIn. Just search for my name and I'll pop up somewhere.

But if you enjoy the podcast, do make sure you leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening to this and give us a follow as well so that all future episodes appear in your feed. And if you really love what we do, there are also some links in the show notes to support the podcast from as little as $1.

It helps us keep making the show and makes everyone involved really happy. So thank you all so much for listening and goodbye.