Is There Really a Neutral Accent?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Galen calling from White River, Arizona. How are you?

Hey, Galen, I’m doing fine. What’s going on?

I’m curious about a question about accents.

I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and probably like a lot of people in high school, my friends, and I thought we didn’t have an accent.

I realized that’s probably not true.

And I realized that our accent maybe in Southern Arizona is similar to a Los Angeles or an LA accent, maybe from California. I was wondering if there’s a general TV accent that news anchors have or kind of this general accent and where it comes from. It seems like a dominant accent, but I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that and if it’s an LA thing from Hollywood spreading it around or what you guys think about that.

That’s a fantastic question. You’re right about where your accent kind of fits into things. People in the west generally, and I say generally, boy the linguists are going to be hopping up and down, generally have one accent with a lot of caveats and a lot of little pockets of different things. But the west is is less divided dialect wise or accent wise than the east because it’s had less time to develop geographic linguistic features.

But so Arizona is more like California than it would be say like Texas or like New York.

Okay, there’s a larger picture here when we talk about accent. Maybe a better word to talk about is dialect because accent is just a part of dialect. And the thing you need to know is everyone has an accent. It’s just by comparison is what you’re talking about. Do I have an accent when compared to somebody else? So do you have an accent compared to me, Grant Barrett? Maybe not. You and I kind of sound alike. Or do you have an accent compared to, what’s somebody else, King Charles? Yes, you have an accent because you and King Charles sound very different, right?

Sure. And so maybe I’m hearing a similar dialect.

Yeah. So it’s because you speak a similar dialect or the same dialect. That’s when you can say, oh, I don’t have an accent. And the unspoken part of that sentence is by comparison with this person.

So what we’re talking about here is sometimes called standard American and sometimes, yeah, called the newscaster’s accent. The reason it exists isn’t really about Hollywood or the media, but it has more to do with notions of power, more to do with who’s in charge of wealth and education and government and money and who’s seen as authoritative and respectable. And all of these are loaded topics in the United States. As I’m sure you know, this is a mess. A lot of things come into play here. Racism and sexism and socioeconomic imbalances and indigenous suppression, Eurocentric favoritism, Anglo-centric politics, and tons of things.

And so for a long time in the United States, a lot of textbooks, and we’re talking back in the 1800s and 1700s and the 1900s even, the standard reference works were written mostly by white men from New England and the mid-Atlantic states. And those men wrote those books according to their own habits and their own education. And so they wrote them according to how they thought words should be said and how language should be spoken. They didn’t give any attention really to divergent dialects that appeared in the rest of the country, even though they were already present.

They didn’t have a lot of success because obviously those dialects, other dialects, didn’t disappear. But that’s the way that they said that you should speak. You should speak like me. I’m from these wealthy white places. This is how you should talk.

I think about growing up and listening to people like Tom Brokaw, you know, or Walter Cronkite.

Those were the accents that you were supposed to emulate.

Yeah, it’s funny that you should mention them.

Really, I think the classic example of this accent, which kind of covers all the bases, is Ronald Reagan, who was born in Illinois, worked in radio in Iowa, then went on to be an actor in California, and then went on to work in politics.

And his accent served him in all of these arenas because he had almost none of the dialect features that you could call him out and say, well, he’s not one of my people, because obviously when you listen to him, he sounds like he belongs to another region and I can’t identify with him.

So he was a really good example of the kind of neutral American accent.

There’s a subfield, though, of sociolinguistics, which I love. It’s called perceptual dialectology.

And how it works is that a linguist will give people a map and say things like, circle the area where people speak without an accent. Or write on this map words good, bad, or neutral, where you think people’s accents sound like that.

And it’s kind of unsubtle, but you get amazing results because it reveals people’s biases. It will show you that even people from the south of the United States who have a southern accent will write that they think that the people around them don’t speak English properly. Even people who have a regional accent will mark their own region as not being proper English, which is amazing because they’re taught that from the outside. They’re taught that by outsiders and by the systems around them.

So your question, I mean, I could go on about this, but generally, again, what is considered a standard American accent has nothing to do with linguistics. And it’s all about power and what we see as authority.

Wow. Thank you so much for the concrete example of Reagan to focus on as kind of this thing. And then also that field of sociolinguistics to look into.

I really, really appreciate your response.

And sorry about the background noise. I’m on lunch duty as a teacher, so you might have heard students in the background, but we’re going to listen into this episode and others later.

Oh, wonderful.

Educators are our people, so applause to you. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for giving me so many good things to chew on and bring into the classroom.

Thanks a lot for that.

Yeah, no problem, Galen. Take care now and be well.

Give our best to your students.

You too.

Thanks.

We will.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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