EP 50: Talking Dialects
For our 50th episode, we're taking a break from the frequent talk of policy, economics and technology to tour the local dialects of the United States, the spoken identifiers of a city or region. Why do people in Chicago, or St. Louis, or the Outer Banks of North Carolina sound the way they do? What's in a voice? And what's happening that's changing those dialects or accents forever? Walt Wolfram and "Talkin' Tar Heel" - https://www.talkintarheel.com/index.php Edward McClelland and "How to Speak Midwestern" - http://edwardmcclelland.com/ Library of Congress, The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection - https://www.loc.gov/collections/american-english-dialect-recordings-from-the-center-for-applied-linguistics/about-this-collection/ Garden & Gun's Whole Hog podcast feat. Walt Wolfram - https://soundcloud.com/garden-and-gun-magazine/episode-5-a-trip-to-s-town-alabama CityLab, Edward McClelland, "Why City Accents are Fading in the Midwest" - https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/04/why-city-accents-are-fading-in-the-midwest/555152/ CityLab, "Techies Are Destroying Raleigh's Southern Accent" - https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/07/techies-have-destroyed-raleighs-southern-accent/399734/ Podcast Engineering Show, Session 91, feat. Ben Brown - https://podcastengineeringschool.com/ben-brown-pes-091/ Atlas Obscura, "How a Fake British Accent Took Hollywood by Storm" - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-fake-british-accent-took-old-hollywood-by-storm Philadelphia Story scene - https://youtu.be/nH2DKZ-2m74
Top Keywords
- accent 0.031
- chicago 0.016
- dialect 0.012
- dialects 0.011
- chicago accent 0.010
- accents 0.009
- north 0.006
- city 0.006
- north carolina 0.006
- carolina 0.006
- southern 0.005
- mhmm 0.005
Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. So that's you know, one thing I learned in doing this research is that, you know, accents are always changing and that every every generation has its own accent, just like it has its own slang and its own music.
Language is a living artifact of culture and history that often
is not recognized because people are so focused and consumed by sort of objective artifacts. I went down there kind of on a Chicago classic Chicago accent safari. At one point, the the game, it was three to nothing, and someone shouted across the bar, what are the squares for this quarter?
And the guy who was holding the money said zero and three. We take a tour of the dialects of The United States, the spoken sounds of the city. You know, why do people in Chicago or Saint Louis or the Upper East Coast Of North Carolina sound distinctly the way they do? And what's happening right now that might be changing those dialects or accents forever? My name is Ben Brown, and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns in the face of change. From the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode 50. Episode 50. That is awesome because it couldn't have happened without listeners' feedback, ideas, support, and the fact that you shared episodes with your colleagues and left reviews and on and on. Thank you. As I was brainstorming what would be appropriate for a milestone episode, I was thinking, you know, should this be a a look back or a greatest hits or nah. I mean, I I just figured the best idea is just to have a fun episode with a fascinating topic. So I pulled out one that's been on my mind for a while. We'll get right to it. Just a sec. We got some great guests. I wanna say real quick that if you're interested in podcasting as a medium, and a lot of local governments and agencies and and individuals too, have reached out over the past couple of years for advice on how to do a podcast. Well, the podcast engineering show interviews me for episode 91, and the whole focus is podcast production, specifically for this podcast. You know, the microphones and other equipment, editing techniques, and all that stuff. You can find that at podcastengineeringschool.com. The host, Chris Curran, is, he's a professional podcast producer, and he's really high energy, and it was a big privilege being on his show. Big thanks to Chris. So check out that episode if you're interested. Episode 91 at podcastengineeringschool.com. Okay. Surely somewhere along the line, you've watched, you know, an archive clip of someone being interviewed or giving a speech or reading an ad or something, maybe like in the nineteen fifties, forties, thirties, and you've noticed how they speak and pronounce or deliver their words, and you think about how, you know, you don't really ever hear anyone talk like that anymore. And I don't only mean the vocabulary, or how they're choosing to construct their sentences.
I'm talking about the accent or the dialect. Mrs. Roosevelt has a message so important, we shall take time to say only these few words from our sponsors.
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And you've maybe put it down to, you know, things change. Various influences shape the way we dress, the way we work, the way we talk. Kids are born into changed circumstances, and they grow up walking and talking differently than their predecessors, and so on. But it gets really interesting once you dig in. For instance, I always thought that the Transatlantic or Mid Atlantic accent was just some holdover from the British days of America. Spirit though. There's something engaging about it, this godless business.
Something more challenging to the male than the, more obvious charms. Really? Really. We're very vain, you know. This citadel can and shall be taken, and I'm the boy to do it.
You seem quite contemptuous of me all of a sudden.
Now, Red, none of you.
Never of you. Red, you could be the finest woman on this earth.
I'm contemptuous of something inside That was Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the film Philadelphia Story. So I didn't know until I looked up the Mid Atlantic or Trans Atlantic accent that it was indeed a fake accent, a fake dialect, sort of. It was popular, it was ubiquitous in films, but it was basically taught as the way actors and radio announcers and so on were supposed to talk, you know, for its proper quality. But it was just kind of a fad or a phase of that, that that fell out of fashion sometime in the nineteen sixties. Just an example, but what we're getting into today is the importance or significance of regional dialects. You know, can you tie an accent to a city? And of course you can, but, you know, what does that mean? What's the story? Midwestern, Southern, Northeastern, on and on, in the million little local variants,
and what story these dialects tell, and and how they're changing. Okay. Well, let's get to it right now. My name is Edward McClelland, and I'm the author of the book How to Speak Midwestern.
I found Edward McClelland by way of a piece featured in CityLab that was adapted from his book, How to Speak Midwestern. And this adaptation article was about how accents in cities, the classic ones we know, are dissolving in the Midwest. He sets the scene in a bar in Chicago.
Yeah. Well, I kind of, I went down there kind of on a Chicago classic Chicago accent safari because I knew that Mhmm. If there was one place that you could still hear the classic Chicago accent, it would be at a at a bar, in Beverly, which is an Irish neighborhood on the Southwest Side Of Chicago, and it's one of the few places where the accent is still really prevalent. And, you know, I certainly wasn't disappointed. You know, they do the squares for each quarter in the game. And at one point, the the game, it was three to nothing, and someone shouted across the bar. What are the squares for this quarter? And the guy who was holding the money said zero and three. So that's how the that's how you count on the South Side Of Chicago. One, two, three.
So, I mean, there there's one quote in here that seems to count for a lot, but I'm not sure. The quote is from Mike, Royko, the the Chicago newspaper columnist, where he says, you know, Chicago is not an articulate town. Saul Bellow notwithstanding. Maybe it's because so many of us aren't that far removed from parents and grandparents who knew only bits and pieces of the language. Could you evaluate that? And, you know, where does the classic Chicago accent or any other Midwestern accent you know, how was that shaped?
Well, you know, he wrote that in 1976, which, you know, Chicago was a very different city then Mhmm. Than it is now. It was a a much more industrial city, a much more blue collar city. It had fewer immigrants, fewer people, having migrated there from other parts of the country. You know, the Chicago accent really, it's part of, it's part of a dialect zone called the the Inland North dialect region, which goes all the way from Rochester, New York on the East to Milwaukee on the West. So you could really say the Chicago accent came from from Western New York and from Buffalo, and then it just crossed the Great Lakes and settled in Chicago. The Chicago accent and the Buffalo accent are actually very similar. And, you know, and it it had a lot of, immigrant influences, the the whole, and tree truant tanks Mhmm. Which you hear in in a lot of northern cities. Right. That comes from the you know, English is one of the very few languages that has the the t h sound, and it's a it's a big player in English. You know, these, those, them, them, that, and, you know, immigrants weren't used to saying that, and so they would just stop at duh or ta. And it kinda got passed on to the generations. But that's something that you really hear a lot less of among younger people. And some people say it's because it was kinda stigmatized by that that Bears superfan sketch. Sure. Yeah. The Bills first came in the early nineteen nineties, and, you know, people became self conscious about it. But, you know, I still, I was at that same bar just on Tuesday, and, you know, I, you know, heard some guy saying, you know, like, he ain't there no more. Yeah. They still so they're still, you know, city workers they say city workers will still do it, you know, tradesmen, firefighters, police officers who I guess are city workers. But you really only hear it in kind of certain neighborhoods now, that are sort of insular and peep where people have families of same families have lived there for generations on the on the Far Northwest Side and the Far Southwest Side.
Chicago ends up being an interesting one to study in the way of dialects. For one, historically, it was one of the more segregated cities. For instance, the African American population didn't have what we're calling the Bill Swerski superfans accent. By way of the segregation and from where a lot of that community migrated, there were Southern identifiers preserved in the way they spoke. I mean, you they they still say y'all. Mhmm.
And nobody else says y'all. Some some people in Beverly are will say yiz. At the same time, where you mentioned the Bill Swarovski accent accent kind
of fading. Yeah. So is so when you said where that accent kinda lives in sort of like the tradesman context, what's the glue there? What's the common denominator? Why would that be? Well, I guess, you know,
some people say that TV is what's leveling out accents, but, you know, I say nobody watch more TV than the baby boomers, and they have stronger accents than their children. So, I mean, I would say it's been more, education and deindustrialization and geographic, mobility than anything else. Because, you know, the accents tend to be anywhere you go. I would say the accents are strongest among white people who, didn't go to college and have, you know, still live roughly where they grew up and, have jobs that don't require Mhmm. Contact with, you know, people outside the neighborhood or people outside their their home city. You know, like like, you know, tradesmen or waitresses or hairdressers or factory workers or anybody who fits that demographic.
So, I mean so if you're able to document change, I mean, that's kinda like a barometer for the city and and what's happening with it.
Yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. I mean, because, you know, I I now I have to wonder, you know, is is what we think of as a Chicago accent. Is it the Chicago accent, or is it just a Chicago accent? Because most people who live in Chicago don't use it. Maybe 10%, 15%.
And was that exaggerated when we saw it on SNL?
Not not really. That was pretty accurate.
If you're a steady podcast listener, you probably maybe spent some time with s town, an investigative journalism podcast from the same people who produced Serial. It was hugely popular. It takes place in Woodstock, Alabama, and a lot of people were struck or charmed or interested in the accent of the central subject, a guy named John b Macklemore. So was it just a deep native Alabama accent different from, say, a mountains of North Carolina kind of accent? Well, you may be familiar with the magazine Garden and Gun. They have a podcast that a little while ago interviewed a linguist from the town I work in about that S Town accent. Okay. I'm Walt Wolfram,
a linguist at North Carolina State University and basically, I'm a dialectologist. Yeah. I I did an analysis of S Town, which was a very popular series, of course, that a lot of people were listening to, and it's set in Alabama. And I was struck by the fact that the dialects most of the dialects there of the characters, which were very southern but didn't appear to be traditional sort of lowland Alabama southern. And so I I said, it's just curious because they actually sound like they have a lot of features from Appalachia. We have ways in which we can identify. And so I made this curious prediction that it was laced more with Appalachian kinds of features than traditional coastal or or lowland southern features. And then so after I made that, prognosis, I then went and read the history and lo and behold, found out that the people in this town were loggers who came from Appalachia, and so they brought their dialects. So we were deal actually dealing with Yeah. The southernmost part of Appalachia. But it it was nice to confirm that my linguistic analysis actually predicted the historical analysis, and then I could go back and and and that affirmed my position. Yeah. I mean, there there's kinda like forensics involved in kind of an inverse way. Oh, yeah. There there's there's a lot of forensic linguistics, you know. So sometimes, sometimes as a matter of fact, there's a whole field of linguistics called forensic linguistics. So, for example, the Unabomber was basically was basically nabbed by some dialect forms that traced his lineage to Chicago. You know, certain forms for median strips and so forth that were uniquely Chicagoan. And and so linguists were prominent in terms of identifying the profile and then also seeing what his Chicago connections might have. And and we're instrumental in actually finding him and, giving a profile that could be followed up.
Okay. So in North Carolina, how many different I mean, have you cataloged different dialects and, quirks and and all that and, you know, what what goes into that? Yeah. We we've spent twenty five years
doing, over 3,000 interviews with residents of North Carolina, urban, rural, literally from Murphy to Manio, which is what people use in North Carolina to for a fact that you cover the whole state. Mhmm. And and so that's given us lots and lots of data. We we have done work in 26 different linguistic sites here where we've done, lots of interviews. And and it's led us to the conclusion that there's probably no state that has a richer dialect heritage because it ranges from the Outer Banks, the most the the only dialect in The United States that people misidentify
as being Australian or British and not American. So now we're looking for that. We haven't found it yet, but we know it's there. And we just went to this place. It was a thicket and high ground, so we knew there had to be a house or something there. You know? Because Portsmouth is real marshy. And everywhere there was a high piece of land, there was a house. So we started cutting our way in there and came right up on this big fireplace and she and me still standing in there. Wow. Completely covered with flames and tears, so we cleared that off then. Oh my god. So that's how I do honors.
Wolfram has written more than 20 books, including one he coauthored called Talkin' Tar Heel, how Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina. And the cool thing about it is the pages of the book include QR codes that you can scan, you know, with your smartphone. And they'll bring you to an audio sample of the dialect being discussed, including the one you just heard from Ocracoke, North Carolina, a thin barrier island just a bit southwest of the famous Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
To the Appalachian, you know, which is distinct because of its Scots Irish influence, and you can sort of trace things that are, from Ulster and so forth, to sort of the to sort of the tidewater areas in the Northeast where you get oat n a boat, which is like tidewater, also Canadian, which is kind of a curious, affinity. And then you have you have the, you have the Coastal Plain, which is sort of that area, that area between the coast and the Piedmont. And then we have the Piedmont. The the Coastal Plain, you know, people don't always identify, but there are a few things that are peculiar to it. One of the things that's always curious to me is it's the only place in The United States where they use boot of the car for the trunk of the car, which is what, of course, the British do. And
So on the outer banks, when there there's sort of the the British flavor to it, what what are the factors? Like, why is that? Well, it has certain vowel sounds
that are not really American. So for example, the way it pronounces it's all vowel. One of the easiest factors to identify general region of The United States is to look at the word in word that between Caught, C A U G H T, and Caught, C 0 T. And so so do people pronounce them the same? You know, there are distinct pronunciations. I'm from Philadelphia. We're like New York. We say Caught. Alright? And so I say coffee, and people always make fun of me when I when I order a cup of coffee, and that's a lot. But, but on the outer banks, they produce in a way where there is no guide. So they say, which is exactly how the British pronounce it. And so people hear that, and they say that's not American. And then there are other sorts of features. So for example, there's this saying that they have hoi toid on the sound soid. You might actually
Oh, no. Steady speech. I said, hoi toid on the sound soid. Last night, the waterfall. No fish. No fish. Please put a matter of a word. Soid
often strikes people as a sound that is associated with Australian English Mhmm. Or some areas of Southwestern England. And so people, even in England, misidentify speakers. So I've had some speakers from the Outer Banks who took trips to England, and even the British misidentify them and ask them if they're from the Southwest of, of England.
Obviously, isolation can preserve something. I mean, what was that kind of a factor with this area? Yeah. That area,
you know, what we're talking about is is islands where people were isolated and lived you know, came there in the '17 early seventeen hundreds, lived in isolation before the before they became a tourist high spot hot spot. So, so people basically stayed on the island, and that isolation, while their language continued to change, it also retained features that they brought with them.
Moving into the urban areas, for example, so we're in Raleigh right now, and I feel like I don't know what the statistic is, but I feel like more often than not when I stop somebody on the street and I'm using a hypothetical, but ask where you're from, it's not gonna be from Raleigh. There's a lot of, influx. This area is growing like crazy, the job market, the tech sector, and all that. I mean, what kind of change would a city like that see as far as its personality and accents or dialects or whatever? There is dramatic change.
We have a big study going on. One of my colleagues has interviewed over 300 people in Raleigh representing all different age levels, and there's dramatic change in Raleigh so that the most salient features of Southern speech like the whole Southern vowel system like fish for fish and stuff like that and TAD for tide, that's vanishing and what's left is a set of features that is much more subtly indicative of southern speech. And there there are subtle features in Raleigh today. Educated people still use double modals, as in I might could do that, you know, which which mitigates an obligation. So if somebody says, you know, are you gonna be at the party Saturday night? You say, well, I might could come, which means you may or may not come as opposed to yes or no. Right. So so there are subtle things that are still highly indicative of being southern, but the most salient features have radically changed and and therefore the urban areas, which in most cases are made up of, outside people who move there. I mean, the fact of the matter is that I think Raleigh has more people from the outside than it has native Raleighites at this point and same of Charlotte. Mhmm. So these things do factor in greatly.
You know, kind of the industrial heyday of Chicago, and weren't a lot of outside influences coming into the city, would have been the the, you know, the the the World War two generation, the baby boomers. That was the that was the prime time for the classic Chicago accent. But the the stew mill's closing, I think, had a had a big influence on Sure. On, reducing its range or its its habitat. You know? Because back in the sixties, when you got out of high school, you didn't need to go to college, and you didn't even you could just walk across the street and get a job in a factory. You didn't even need to leave your your neighborhood. Right. And and actually having that accent, I think, was probably a, you know, a sign of the it was a sign of, you know, local cred. You're you know, you were a regular guy.
So other than Chicago, New York, Boston, for example, do do you know of other cities that have trademark accents that may be changing with
professional change, cultural change, so on? Yeah. Well, certainly Pittsburgh. Because in the article, I talked about Chicago and Pittsburgh. Mhmm. Because they both have similar histories of having been steel making cities and and, you know, there's no steel made within the boundaries of of either city anymore.
A Steely McBean. Okay? Well, Steely because it's a steel pan. Mc because the the Steelers are Irish. Okay? And Bing because still Bing plus my husband loves Jim Bing. So
there you go. Pittsburgh has had what you call the the Yinser accent. Yeah. Yeah. In Pittsburgh, the instead of y'all, as you'd say in North Carolina, they say Yins Mhmm. Which is a contraction of you ands. And and, somebody with a strong local accent, there is called a Yinser. Now but now it's it just sort of people just do it ironically in a lot of cases. I I met a woman at a sandwich shop, a Permani sandwich shop, and she said, well, we don't say Yinz. Our parents said Yinz. So that's you know, one thing I learned in doing this research is that, you know, accents are always changing and that every every generation has its own accent just like it has its own slang and its own music.
What what got you involved in this kind of work?
Well, my own history is that I was a child of immigrants from Germany who spoke German. And, since I didn't wanna speak German right after World War two, it wasn't cool. I had no models except the people around me because my family was not a model for me, and I grew up in working class Philadelphia in a kind of vernacular speaking area, and so I modeled my speech after the kids around me. And in doing so, it, it gave me a kind of sensitivity. You know, if I was going to sound American, these were the kinds of things that I needed to do. And that went along with dressing like an American as opposed to German and other sorts of things, and then I realized that my observation capabilities in terms of language were were probably a bit accentuated because of my background. So that's what got me into dialects.
And so the Philly accent, I mean, that's a that's a really special one that if you get to certain parts of the city, you hear it richly. Right? Oh, yeah. And and actually, if you listen to my speech, there are a couple of words. One of my closest friends is from Philadelphia, and for whatever reason, he he, you you know, he doesn't have that accent in particular, but I did become acquainted with it. I I used to, play music professionally and tour around and pick up things in different cities. Salt Lake City and parts of Utah have a really interesting accent. St. Louis too. Yeah. St. Louis does for sure. Yeah. Yeah. What what stands out about St. Louis?
You know, it's interesting. They have a, there's this legacy accent and, you know, people will say, instead of 40, they'll say farty. Mhmm. You know, I was born I was born in 1948.
Right. Yeah. Almost Irish sounding.
Yeah. You you and that's could could be from that. You know, I hadn't thought about that. But actually the fill the St. Louis accent has been changing to sound more like the Chicago accent because the two cities are linked by I '55 and by this this baseball rivalry. You know, the you know, I'm a big fan of Roseanne, and I've been watching the new shows. And I used to wonder why John Goodman, who was from Saint Louis, sounded so much like he was from the Chicago area. And it's because the Saint Louis accent has been changing to it's kinda becoming an inland north city.
Why is this important? What's the significance of documenting this kind of change or dialects in general? Well, language is culture and history.
And when you look at language, you're looking at the past, you're looking at the present, you're looking at the future. So so one of the things we typically do in the study is we study old people. Alright? People 60, 70, as old as we can get them. You know, we we go to many senior citizens, so we people have lots of ties because we wanna know what the language was like when they were coming up. Because once people get to puberty, they don't really change certain basic things about their language. Like, they don't change their vowel system and so forth. And then we study middle aged people to see where it's at now, and then we study young people to see where it's going. So in a sense, language is a living artifact of culture and history that often is not recognized because people are so focused and consumed by sort of objective artifacts. Mhmm.
Do you see a a thinning, in general of I'm not even sure how to ask this question, but but just a thinning of dialects across America as things are so in flux or I mean, is that too wild of a question?
No. I think so. Yeah. Because, you know, people I think people move around more than they more than they used to. And, you know, if, you know, if you move somewhere else, with a heavy accent, you're you're gonna learn how to modify it Mhmm. You know, to to fit in with everybody in your in your new surroundings. So, you know, I've it's interesting, you know, because I go to Boston sometimes, and I hear more I hear the Boston accent more being more widespread there than the the Chicago accent or the Pittsburgh accent. I don't know if that's because it's more exotic to my ear or Mhmm. You know, I also Boston's a much more provincial city than Chicago. Right. So that that could be another reason. Has fewer fewer outside influences, but, certainly, that's a big totem of of civic identity. You know, I met a guy at a Pittsburgh Sportsman and Beauty shop, and it was called Yinsers. And he was complaining that his teacher told them to stop saying yins Mhmm. And start saying you guys. And he said, well, you know, you you know, this is what makes us special as a city. Why do they want us to stop doing that? And I hope this isn't controversial, and you can you can pass on it if if not.
But, what value do you put on dialects or just the character of an area versus the push to, quote unquote, speak properly?
Yeah. There's there's a real tension between, adopting standard English and reinforcing local identity. But here's the point. You know, despite the fact that we move so much now and we're migrating all of them all over the place, people wanna be from some place. And so when you hear someone from a place that you're associated with, that's kind of an identity. And people want that identity. You know, at the same time at the same time, there's this push in the schools to sort of homogenize and make everybody speak standard English. Well, the way I look at it is you don't have to give up your local dialect to speak standard English. There are plenty of opportunities per to pronounce things in ways that are local, to use words that are local. Look, every time you go to lunch, you make a dialect decision. You what what kind of carbonated drink are you going to are you going to order a soda, a tonic, pop, cola or co cola? Or even in the western part of the of the state in Appalachia, you would order dope, you know? And are you gonna have a hero, a tornado, a hoagie, a sub, you know? So you can't even order fast food without making a dialogue commitment of some type. And that's something we just need to embrace and cherish as a part of the legacy of language diversity.
We're getting to the end here and I'm gonna play a few great examples of different dialects around North Carolina, which are discussed in-depth in Wolfram's book, Talkin' Tar Heel.
Here's a Lumbee Indian speaker. And truly come a man here. Big bro, I can see him as pretty as I'm a lookin' at you. Come all the way down that ditch bank. I says to myself, I says, kept on lookin' at the mannies and lookin' in the dish just like there's somebody in that ditching. You know how a man would walk. Could you imagine a man? Two men in a ditching ditching and a man walking down inside of that ditching looking at that man down throwing that dirt? Hey. That's just where he's looking into this ditch this man was.
In the broad open day time. And, honey, he come right on down that ditch. My better half, by the way, is Lumbee. So hello to all my friends in the Dial and Brooks families, two of the common Lumbee last names. Here's a different voice from Edenton
located in the inner banks of Northeast North Carolina. And the the interesting thing about about it is the plantation we say farm, really. So plantation in Virginia It is approximately the same size it was originally, 1,200 acres. And it's been in continuous cultivation ever since. And the house has been lived in all. There's never been unoccupied. And here's a minute from the mountains of North Carolina. Many of the words and expressions
in mountain speech are unfamiliar to outsiders. Scott's Irish settlers brought much of the vocabulary from Europe, but many new words and expressions were invented here by their descendants.
There's just somebody coming up with a strange word is what it means. I mean, let's say you're trying to get something done. You're building something, and you'll take a look at it like the word sycoglin. You're looking at it, and it's all out of line, and you just might come up with the word sycoglin. I do that myself. Can't think of anything right off, but, I I I come up with a lot of new words myself. And so you get somebody standing around to hear that. Okay. It's sygoglin.
Say a carpenter has done a real poor job, and then you say, that's all sigoggling. You know? It it didn't have his wall straight or Yeah. Stand back and look if something like that. I said, I think it's sigoggling.
A thought from Charlotte, the largest city in the state. The older
folks, you know, they they speak kind of the old country type, but the new people are are I mean, like, next door. He's from Albemarle, and she's from New York. So you get a bit of a mix of the speech. But, like my parents, they they speak
the old
North Carolina country. And a great grandfather, African American from Hyde County, again along the Northeast Coast Of NC.
We was young fellers and got to fighting. I hit him lick or two, and he run to the shelter to get a ax. And I knew I knew what was in there when he when he went there, and I know she struck me, you better get behind the shelter. And a final word. But if you've been down here and you've been to each one of these communities,
you pick up on it, and each little community
talks just a little bit different from the community before. There are so many more. Again, that last little run was kind of confined to North Carolina, but you can get all the context and backstory of those pieces that you just heard and the meaning about them, from Wolfram's book. I'll link to that in the show notes, as well as Edward McClellan's book, How to Speak Midwestern. Additionally, I'll link to some magazine articles that hit on this topic, including one titled Tech Workers Are Destroying Raleigh's Southern Accent. I'm only the messenger. The clip you heard early in this episode about coffee, I got that from the Library of Congress. Let me just read this from the source about the collection and how it came to be. It says the first part surveyed collectors of speech samples and resulted in a report entitled American English A Guide to Collections, which describes over 200 collections. The second part of this project was designed to select from the 200 collections a representative sample of recordings with the goal of creating a centralized source of American dialect samples, and to provide for the preservation of this valuable resource that might otherwise be lost. I hope you got something out of this. I'd love to hear your thoughts, you know, stories about your hometown dialect, how your grandparents spoke differently than people your age, and what that meant to you. What's different about communication and where you come from? You know, how does that help to define your your city or your town or county or region? This is supposed to be just more of a fun, fascinating look at our communities, our cities and towns, and and our break from policy and funding and economic development Episode 50 is now in the books. We've got plenty ahead. And thank you to those of you who've submitted ideas for episodes. Please keep them coming. Connect with me on Twitter. The handle is muniequation, m u n I equation, or you can email me at bbrownnclm dot org. NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities, which makes this podcast possible. Past episodes at nclm.org/municipalequation. All right. Talk to you soon, and thanks for listening. This is Ben
Brown.
What's the difference just to set it out, what's the difference between an accent, a dialect, and vernacular?
Okay. So so an accent, generally, linguists don't use the term accent. They refer to it as pronunciation since accents most likely refers to, pronunciation. It's sometimes used synonymously with dialect, but from a linguist perspective, dialect has different components. So it has pronunciation, it has grammar, it has vocabulary, and so forth. So so and then vernacular is simply a reference to colloquial speech that is not mainstream standard English.
