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Accents and Attitudes
Gillian Gane, Department of English
I'm going to talk about the '"accents'" part of the title of this exciting series. Anyone interested in language will anticipate the series with particular eagerness. Among the performers are several who work within an oral tradition, a tradition of song and story far older than writing and almost as old as language itself. The medium of these oral performers, the material substance out of which they construct their art, is the spoken language - and it is of course a particular, local, and distinctive version of that language: they speak (and sing) with Southern accents.
Just in case a couple of definitions would be helpful, an accent is one component of a dialect. A dialect is a complete version of a language, with its own grammar, vocabulary, and idiom as well as its own sound system, or accent. Accent in itself has to do partly with the system of vowel and consonant sounds and their combinations, partly with rhythm and intonation - the "tune" of speech-and partly with characteristic voice qualities, as when we characterize certain accents as "nasal" or "guttural."
Now, there are two ways of looking at the relationship between a language and its dialects. Some believe that there's one true, pure, proper, standard English - set against a number of deviant or defective versions of the language called "dialects." Usually those who believe this think that they themselves speak the good, proper, correct English; "I don't have an accent," they say, "but those other people do." But saying "I don't have an accent" is comparable to saying, "I don't have a race." It's saying, "I'm normal, and Those Others are weird. My language is the Standard, and theirs is the deviation."
The other way of looking at language variety accepts that everyone speaks a dialect, everyone has an accent; a language can only be realized in particular forms, each socially conditioned and specific: there is no true, pure, originary form standing at the center and above all others. What is true is that certain dialects - those we label standard English - have more social prestige than others and are supported by a number of forces, including the writing system, the media, the pronouncements of a range of authorities, and the social standing of those who use these standard forms. Standard English is not inherently more pure or more proper or more beautiful than any other dialect. It's convenient in many contexts; as a writing teacher I certainly promote the conventions of standard written English. But this does not mean that we must disparage dialects other than the standard; in the spoken language in particular there is every reason to celebrate the rich variety of English dialects.
How we decide where to draw lines between those who speak "good," "standard" English - typically the same kind of English that we speak - and those who speak an alien dialect is itself revealing. One of the areas I've investigated is how writers represent speech on the printed page - specifically, how they represent the accents of particular speakers. A writer must choose whether to represent any given character's speech by smoothly assimilating it to the standard or by accentuating its distinctiveness (usually by respelling words in an attempt to convey how they sound). Clearly there is a tacit calculus of belonging and relation at work here: is this character one of us? Faulkner used conventionally spelled standard English for the speech of upper-class white Southerners like the Compson family-as opposed most strongly to the speech of black characters, which he marks as sharply deviant from standard English. But, interestingly, he reveals that to nonSoutherners Quentin Compson's accent sounds alien; Quentin "talks like they do in minstrel shows," says a boy in Massachusetts (The Sound and the Fury 76). To Faulkner himself, that is, Quentin spoke unremarkable English, represented by conventional spellings just as the speech of northerners is, while black southerners spoke a dialect marked as different. The boys from Massachusetts, however, perceive things differently: to their ears, Quentin sounds like a black man. The same linguistic data - the sounds of Quentin's speech - are perceived and categorized in two different ways, revealing that our perceptions are far from objective but frequently contaminated by considerations that have nothing to do with language as such.
All too often, moreover, dialects other than our own elicit strong and irrational reactions in us; it's been claimed that a person's speech influences others' perceptions more than the visual cues of racial identity. The sound of speech - accent - affects us particularly powerfully. I asked the students in my Making of English course to write about what they considered good or bad English and what varieties of the language they admired. Several expressed their admiration for British English. One wrote:
. . . the best-sounding English ever spoken is by far any take on the British accent. Whenever I hear a person speak with British, Australian, or South African accents, I automatically assume that they are very intelligent. . . . British accents just sound so "proper."
The Founding Fathers thought they declared independence in 1776, and then Noah Webster struck a blow for linguistic independence, but evidently British Imperialism has longlasting effects on this side of the Atlantic.
It's more common for people to get worked up about the accents or dialects of which they disapprove. Often reactions to certain dialects are hostile or contemptuous - and this is true even among those whose views are otherwise liberal-minded and egalitaian. There's a tendency to associate regional vernacular dialects with illiteracy and stupidity. '"I have always been told," wrote one student, "that English with an accent and especially English that mutilates verbs . . . wasn't legitimate, nor did it sound intelligent." Among the repertoire of negative labels for nonstandard accents are some that purport to identify features of the speech itself, though it is in fact difficult to specify exactly what it means in linguistic terms when an accent is said to be broad, thick, flat, rough, harsh, or heavy. When accents are described with terms like low, substandard, countrified, hick, or barbarous it seems clear that what's being condemned is not really speech but its speakers: as the linguist M. A. K. Halliday has put it, saying you dislike someone's vowels often really means that you dislike that person's values.
Southern accents are among those most easily recognizable, and they arouse strong and complex responses. "White" southern accents can be negatively perceived for diametrically opposed reasons; some associate them with white racism; others, like Faulkner's kids in Massachusetts, think that white southerners "sound black." So if you're a white southerner, you just can't win: both the racists and the anti-racists hate you. If you're black and you "speak black," no matter where in the country you come from you confront a whole structure of negative perceptions. One of my students generally articulates a tolerant attitude toward language variety: "I do not really categorize English into 'good' and 'bad' qualities," he says, "except when referring to someone from a foreign country." But in his next paragraph, he moves on to consider what he calls "Ebonics," the dialect most linguists now call African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE: of this my student says, apparently unaware that he's contradicting the claim he's just made that he doesn't categorize English into good and bad varieties, "If forced to make a judgment, . . . I do consider it bad English." Foreigners and African-Americans, then, are similarly exceptions to this student's tolerant attitude: their English alone can be categorized as "bad."
As if our reactions to Southern accents in themselves weren't complicated enough, another factor that enters into play is the ways in which those accents have been represented. Faulkner's Massachusetts kids actually think Quentin Compson speaks like a minstrel - that is, a white man in blackface presenting a crude caricature of black speech in a minstrel show. There has been a long tradition of distorted representations of African-American speech, both on stage and in written texts, from Uncle Remus to Gone with the Wind. If we are aware of the offensive elements in such representations, we may be thrown for a loop when we encounter African-Americans who seem to be replicating some of the same features: isn't all this rude and politically incorrect? The fact of the matter is that African-Americans have a strong tradition of distinctive speech patterns, which many proudly claim, and there's a real difference between outsiders' parodies of African-American Vernacular English and African-Americans' own renditions of the language they grew up with.
Listen with an open mind and an attentive ear to the accents we will be hearing; I'm thinking in particular of Sharon Bridgforth's 'Affrilachian' speech and Sheila Kay Adams's mountain dialect, since these two specialize in the spoken word, but there will be other southern accents as well. Listen well, and you'll find new pleasure in the rich variety of the English language and in the skills of oral performance.
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