Name That Accent (minicast)

Welcome to another summer minicast of A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

During this online-only edition of our show, I wanted to talk with you about one of the great guilty pleasures of being a true word nerd.

I’m talking about that little thrill you get each time you meet a stranger. Not because you’re excited to meet someone new. No, but because you have the chance to try to guess where those folks are from by listening to their accents.

But, you know, it’s not often that someone actually asks us to do that kind of sleuthing. Recently, though, one of you did just that. Her name is Barbara, and she lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.

Barbara grew up elsewhere, and after watching the PBS series called Do You Speak American, she called to ask us to guess her home state. Well, Grant and I couldn’t turn down a challenge like that now, could we?

All right. Well, let’s do a little experiment here. Let me ask you a couple questions, and then maybe you can read something to us. Okay.

All right. Tell me what you call your parents. Oh, I call them mother and dad. Okay. And tell me, what meal do you have in the middle of the day? In the middle of the day, we always had lunch, but on Sundays, it was called dinner.

Sunday dinner was in the middle of the day after church, and the evening meal would have been called a light supper. What comes after one, two, three? Four. All right, and the year that’s after 1943 is? 1944.

Okay, and now do you have something you can read to us there? Yes, I do. I thought I would read you part of my family’s favorite oatmeal cookie recipe. Our brown and granulated sugar, butter and egg and vanilla, flour, salt and soda, oats, cinnamon and nutmeg, and black walnuts.

Now I have a question for you. Yes. Barbara, after you cook these cookies and you’ve done all the mixing in the bowls, what do you do to the bowls in the sink? Well, I wash them. You wash them.

So I heard many people say that differently. Back home? What do your parents, would your mother, would she also wash or would she wash? No, she would wash. Okay. And you wouldn’t say they need washed? No. Or need washed. Okay. You go wash the dishes. Right.

Okay. Well, Grant, why don’t you go first? I have no idea. Not a clue, Barbara. I’m going to say Southern. Well, I was thinking that she’s like me. She’s a fellow Missourian. Oh, you’re absolutely right. That’s why I sound normal to you. I’m from Kansas City.

There we go. Kansas City. But I hear you, Barbara, but when I go back, now, I’ve been in New York since 1993, so I’ve been here 15 years, and it’s enough time for me to go back, and they sound, I’m like, who are you hillbillies? They do. They drawl and twang. Do they? I’m very surprised.

And, of course, if I listen to myself record it, if I try to record a message from my phone, I have to do it over and over because when I listen to it, I think, who is that hillbilly? Because I hear a droll and a twang. You know, I don’t hear it in my head.

But let me just talk a little bit about, you had mentioned before that, let me just see if I got this right, that on the PBS television show, Do You Speak American, which, by the way, is great. Oh, it’s fantastic. Fantastic.

You said they were talking about the Midlands accent, and they were saying that this is generally understood to be the normal American accent, right? Neutral. That exactly was that the area where people say the most unaccented speech is spoken is called the Midland.

And McNeil said for most Americans, this is the yardstick, the most normal and correct of all dialects. Right. And the segment of the show that you’re talking about featured a fellow by the name of Dennis Preston. He’s a colleague of mine. Yes, he did. That’s right.

And he was on the train with Robert McNeil. He actually comes from the South. He knows this stuff. And he would never say that those people didn’t speak with no accent. What he would say is that other Americans, non-linguists, believe that they speak with no accent.

Because the truth is, everybody who speaks English has an accent. All of us. Absolutely. There’s no such thing as not having an accent. It’s actually technically impossible to not have an accent. You have one. No matter if you speak, you have an accent.

Right, and this Midland region is sort of, it’s actually more of a horizontal swath across the United States, and it includes parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

But the thing is, these borders are approximate, and inside of this big region, because it’s a monstrously large region, there are little pockets where people speak differently. There are people, for example, there are Amish and Mennonites that might speak their particular German dialects. Those in the Ozarks of Missouri. Exactly right.

And there’s a linguistic island in St. Louis, which I’ve mentioned before, and there are a few other places there where people speak a little differently. I know there’s a pocket in Missouri in the center part of the state, in Audrain County, that’s called Little Dixie, because ages ago people migrated there from Kentucky and Tennessee, and they still carry on some of those more southern linguistic traditions, even though they’re surrounded by people who don’t really have that accent.

Well, Barbara, this was fun playing Stump the Linguistic Chumps. Grant did very well. Well, he wasn’t stumped at all. No, he wasn’t. I was like, don’t I know you, Aunt? Aunt Barbara, isn’t it you? Aunt Barbara.

Okay, well, this has been lots of fun. All right. Thank you, Barbara, for your talk. I have learned a lot of things. Okay. And be proud of your dialect. We always say that.

Yeah, well, that was the other thing that I did want to say to you. Don’t be ashamed of speaking. Like that feeling that you’re not a hillbilly. You speak perfectly normal American English. Okay.

Even newscasters have accents. Trust me. They may sound generic and bland, but they’re not. They just look generic and bland. Well, I learned that an awful lot of those newscasters are from, at least from the University of Missouri. Oh, they are. That’s right. We’re the big journalism schools.

Trust me. When you get them all to the bar after the newscast, they all sound like hillbillies just like me and me. Okay. Well, I’ll have to do that sometime. Take care of yourself. Thank you both. It was fun.

All right. Bye-bye, Barbara. Bye. Of course, as Grant pointed out later, he did have a 1 in 50 chance of being right. But I have to say, I was mightily impressed.

Well, how about you? Do you have a question about language for us? Call us and leave us a message anytime. The number is 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD, W-O-R-D.

Or email us with your thoughts about language. The address is words@waywordradio.org. Or you can drop by our discussion forum to chat with fellow word lovers. You’ll find that at waywordradio.org/discussion.

And by the way, if you want to learn more about regional expressions, drop by waywordradio.org. We’ll post links to a cool survey that you can take to see how closely your word choices and ways of speaking match up with various regional dialects.

That’s all until next time. For A Way with Words, I’m Martha Barnette.

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