What Makes CB Radio Users Sound Alike?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s David and I had a question about accents.

Great. Where are you calling from, David?

Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Well, ask us about accents.

So I’m a software engineer, have been for 30 years, but previous career I was a truck driver.

And this was, again, several decades ago.

So I’d have the CB on sometimes and was born and raised in the Midwest.

So I sound like I do now for my whole life.

And I noticed on the CB, no matter where I went, the accent of the people there, because I was a new truck driver at the time, but the accent of those people, it was different.

But it wasn’t like from Oklahoma and it wasn’t from New Jersey.

It was sort of a mishmash, but it was the same on the radio no matter where I was in the country.

So I was wondering, instead of, or not instead of, in addition to regional accents, is there a such thing as occupational accents?

You’ve got groups of people around each other all waking hours, and their accent becomes that way?

Ooh, love this question.

Can you do your impression of the accent for us?

No, it’s been decades.

Oh, come on, David.

Breaker 1-9.

You got the one honeybee here.

What’s your 20?

See, that didn’t sound right.

The words were right, but the accent wasn’t.

Yeah, it’s been a long time since I was honeybee on the CB radio.

Do you remember the movie Smoky and the Bandit?

I do.

With Burt Reynolds and Sally Field and Jerry Reed.

I feel like people on CB who are speaking English try to sound like Jerry Reed from the 1977 movie.

It’s a kind of a generic country accent, kind of like country singers use even if they’re not from the South.

It reminds me so much of that.

Yeah, sort of.

Sort of.

Okay.

If anyone hasn’t listened to the CB radio in a while and you want to hear what we’re talking about,

There are recordings on Internet Archive.

You can look for, for example, user 187 Outlaw has posted a bunch.

But there is something happening there.

And to answer your question, you can have, I guess it’s called an in-group accent more than an occupational accent.

A group of people who are involved in the same enterprise will begin to talk like each other.

And just like in any group of people, they’re influenced by people with the most prestige or respect.

And so if you listen to some of those recordings on Internet Archive, some of them are 10 or 15 or even more years old, you will still hear people using that CB radio way of talking.

Now, some of it isn’t really an accent.

You know, a linguist defines an accent differently than a non-linguist.

So what it really is, it’s about the medium.

There are some difficulties with talking on CB radio.

There are lots of people to talk over and static to talk through.

So you have to adopt this rhythm and this pacing and this intonation that makes your speech more intelligible.

And there’s a lot of repetition, too.

If you listen, people do say the same things over and over, one right after the other.

So they will say Breaker 1-9, Breaker 1-9, which means somebody’s on Channel 19 and is looking for somebody to talk to.

But I still think there’s a little bit of an almost Southern tinge to the way English speakers talk in North America on CB.

Well, and you remember you mentioned country music, and I’m thinking about that song that was super popular in the mid-70s, Convoy, by C.W. McCall.

Oh, right.

Oh, yeah.

Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy.

Well, that’s why I mentioned Jerry Reed, because he does Eastbound and Down and Smokey and the Bannet, and that song was a huge hit for him.

Partly because it’s a great song, but partly because of the movie.

And in the movie, Jerry Reed is on the CB a lot.

All of the truck drivers are.

And all of them talk approximately like what David is referring to.

Anyway, the short version is, yes, people can adopt occupational accents.

For example, think about the way pilots all sound alike when they talk on the PA.

Right?

Right, right.

Yeah, or the air traffic control.

You know, they’re talking to these people all day long, more than they talk with their family.

So, yeah, would they all start sounding the same?

Well, David, thanks for a really interesting question.

We haven’t talked about this before.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye.

Well, we’d love to hear about how they talk in your occupation or your hobby, 877-929-9673.

Or send us audio clips.

Attach them to an email, words@waywordradio.org.