Perceptual Dialectology

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Liz Ewing from Laramie, Wyoming.

Hey, Liz.

What can we do for you?

So last year, I left home in Wyoming and I traveled out to the East Coast to hike the Appalachian Trail.

Oh, how cool are you?

Oh, it was really fun. I had a great time. I was out there for six months, which is about how long it usually takes.

Wow.

While I was out on the trail, I met a ton of new people. Just fellow hikers and also locals from the towns where you stop by. Along with that, I got a lot of questions from people I met about my accent, where my accent was from, and what country I was from. I got that one a lot. Most people I met didn’t seem to register anything unusual. But on the other hand, I had quite a lot of encounters with people who were pretty sure that I had a foreign accent. The weird part about all this, I hope it’s evident by now, I’m just a regular old American. I certainly don’t perceive myself as having a particular accent or speaking unusually. So I wonder if you have any theories or insight into what might be going on there.

And Liz, did you grow up in Laramie?

I was born in Nebraska, but I did grow up in Wyoming, yes.

Well, I’m thinking about this, and I’m thinking what a regular American is, Elizabeth. What is an irregular American to you? So you feel like you have a general American accent, I guess?

I think so. I could have an accent and be totally oblivious to it.

And they thought that you weren’t even from this country sometimes.

Yeah, that was definitely a common thread.

Interesting.

I have had this experience. I don’t remember how often it happened, but it happened enough where people would think I was from Germany. I couldn’t figure it out. And I’m tall. I’m around 6’2″, and almost as white as a sheet of paper and sandy brown hair. And I could see maybe my physique having something to do with it. And I tend not to nasalize my Gs at the end of I-N-G words. That tend to make them a hard K sound accidentally.

So my question for you, do you think your appearance had something to do with it?

Are you tall and blonde?

I am blonde. I am definitely not tall, but I did have lots of times when I told people, it’s so strange, people think I have an accent. Several people said, oh, well, you certainly look the part, which is also strange to me in its own way. But I guess something about the way I look tends to register with some people, I guess, enough to predispose them to perceive an accent when I actually do speak then.

We’re asking all these questions because there’s a field of linguistics called perceptual dialectology. And a lot of the questions we’re asking you have some bearing on this. In general, perceptual dialectology deals with how we base our opinions of how other people speak on what we think we know about them. So we think we know things based on their appearance or stereotypes, or we think we know things about where they’re from. We have prejudices built in that we picked up from family and in our environment and television.

And media, and also about the power differential, about our relationship with them as co-workers or as a, as you know, they’re older or younger, you know, things like that.

Race, of course, comes into play here, and so of course everyone has an accent, and you may have a more general American accent. The line quality here isn’t a hundred percent, so it’s not I’m listening to you talk. That’s another reason that we’re asking you questions. Martha and I are both very carefully listening to your vowels and your consonants and your cadence and looking for things.

But you speak what I would consider to be probably general American. There’s no actual standard, but general American. You could pass for somebody from any one of 20 American states easily. Then if you’re in the American South, you’re going to be clearly not from there for most people. And so they’re going to assume you’re from somewhere else.

The other thing is, you have to think about your environment. A lot of people come from around the world to walk the Appalachian Trail. And so they might have been guessing these other countries because they wanted you to be from these other countries because that would be exciting for them.

I hadn’t thought of that, but that does make a lot of sense, yeah. The culture on the trail is a little different, that people are very open and will freely ask someone they’ve just met details about where they’re from and their experiences and stuff like that. So I wonder if that was playing into it as well.

Right.

So what was your trail name?

Halfnote.

Halfnote.

Oh, I love it.

Is that a musical term?

-huh.

I play piano, and sometimes I would play piano in a hostel or something. And then the half part is because I am rather short and petite, so that seems fitting as well.

That’s great.

Liz, the only other final thing I say besides this is amazing, and congratulations on doing the hike. A lot of people dream of it. Some try it and fail, and you did it, so congratulations.

The only other final thing I should say is most of us are really poor at judging the speech of other people. We’re poor at really figuring out where they’re from. We’re poor at recognizing the signs that people are giving us.

This field of perceptual dialectology really shows us that people have a lot of biases that are completely incorrect about judging which speech is correct, how people talk in other places, and so on and so forth.

So those guesses that people made about you probably have very little to do with you and more to do with them.

I hadn’t thought of things in those terms, but that absolutely makes a lot of sense.

We appreciate your calling.

Yeah, take care.

Oh, thank you so much.

Thank you for speaking with me.

All right, be well.

Have a great day.

Bye.

All righty, bye-bye.

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