The Twisted Mother Tongue

“Why We Talk Funny

 

By Valerie Fridland

 

Viking, 320 pages, $32

 

I was 11 years old when I learned that I talk funny. A new teacher who didn't share my Boston accent was surprised by the way I said "kindergarten." She mockingly repeated my pronunciation back to me: "kenndagaaten." It was the first of many verbal brushbacks I would receive well into adulthood -- the most public of which came from "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek when, as a contestant on the show, I buzzed in to answer a clue about the film "Cars."

 

"Caaahhhs," Trebek echoed back, eliciting laughter from the audience.

 

Like the biblical Ephraimites, who suffered at the hands of their enemies for their distinctive pronunciation of the word "shibboleth," I have often been marked out by my accent and occasionally made painfully aware that the way we speak has, in the words of Valerie Fridland, the power to "make us feel connected to those sounding like we do and isolated from those who don't."

 

In "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents," Ms. Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, explores both the physiological and social origins of human speech in an effort to understand why accents develop, how they change over time, and how they influence our perception of a person's origins, intelligence and social class. It's an entertaining, well-researched survey.

 

According to Ms. Fridland, human speech is largely shaped by two principles: ease of perception, which compels us to speak intelligibly for the benefit of others, and ease of articulation, which drives us to find the least effortful way of pronouncing a word. Our accents emerge from the tension between these two forces -- though how those accents are perceived depends on who is doing the hearing. In a formal context, economical speech may come off as crude and sloppy; among friends, it might seem authentic and endearing. Greater clarity can help a speaker seem more refined but can also strike the ear as cold or pretentious. "Accents," Ms. Fridland suggests "lead people to form opinions about you, mostly without you having much say in the matter."

 

The author notes that regional accents were largely absent from the U.S. until the late 18th century. Because the American colonies drew together speakers of so many different English dialects and European languages, the colonists found themselves drawn to an amalgamated tongue, one which would make collaboration in their new environment possible. "The increased contact among those from all walks of life dampened any strong regional accents that created barriers to communication while increasing the use of shared features -- something linguists refer to as linguistic leveling," Ms. Fridland writes.

 

Not long after the Revolutionary War, however, distinctions emerged that magnified the differences between coastal city folk and their inland countrymen, beginning with the deletion of "r" sounds that is still so prevalent among natives in Boston and New York -- a habit known to linguists as nonrhoticity. "Non-rhotic speakers essentially say the 'r' sound only when it occurs before a vowel sound, but not when it occurs after a vowel," Ms. Fridland says. In such accents, words like "father" and "farther" sound identical.

 

Nonrhoticity in the northeastern U.S. seems to have its roots in southern England. "The extreme amongst the vulgar in London doubtlessly is, to omit the r altogether -- to convert far into fah, hard into hahd, cord into cawd," wrote Benjamin Smart, an articulation expert, in 1836. But soon, nonrhoticity's prevalence in London made it fashionable. From there, it traveled by ship to ports such as Boston, where local grandees adopted it as a marker of cosmopolitanism. This new style, however, didn't penetrate far beyond the ports of the East Coast. As Ms. Fridland explains, "most other settlers, whose 'r' arrived with them, kept their 'r's and passed them down to their descendants."

 

A century on, people's perception of nonrhoticity changed again, as Irish and Italian immigrants in the American Northeast began to adopt local speech patterns, giving it a less genteel association. Ms. Fridland calls out Matt Damon's portrayal of the title character in the 1997 film "Good Will Hunting" as an example of how the nonrhotic accent can be seen as signal of a working-class identity.

 

Southerners are believed to have developed their nonrhotic accent separately. Ms. Fridland cites scholars who suggest its origins can be found in the nonrhotic West African dialects brought to the U.S. by enslaved people. Ms. Fridland's most surprising revelation may be that the hallmarks of Southern speech, such as the merging and shortening of vowels that make "pen" and "pin" sound identical, are relatively recent phenomena, emerging only in the decades following the Civil War. Evidence shows that the Southern drawl and "the laid-back y'all" didn't take hold until at least 1875. "Postwar animosity toward the North fostered greater Southern social and cultural unity," says Ms. Fridland, while the rapid urbanization of the South during Reconstruction brought more of its rural communities together in small towns, where local speech norms were strengthened.

 

Increased mobility after World War II, along with the rise of television and the advent of the suburbs, pushed Americans toward a more homogenous way of speaking. Ms. Fridland points to recent research showing that nonrhoticity, pin-pen merging and the Chicagoan tendency to substitute "th" with "d" (as in "da Bears") all became less prevalent over the past half-century. They are increasingly uncommon among younger American speakers. My 10-year-old daughter now regularly scolds me for my nonrhotic habits.

 

But Ms. Fridland cautions against assuming that we are destined to coalesce around a common manner of speech. "Geographic boundary-bending" media such as TikTok and Twitch have introduced a potent new dynamic, exposing young people to diverse linguistic influences faster than ever. Will the results be appealing? That, she writes, will be decided "in the ear and mind" of those who hear them.

 

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Mr. Brady's book reviews appear in the Journal and various other publications.” [1]

 

1. The Twisted Mother Tongue. Brady, Michael Patrick.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Apr 2026: A15.