English dialects and accents

Several years ago one of my colleagues pointed out to me that I was the only one he knew who pronounced the aspiration in words beginning with "wh", such as where, whether, why and the like. He suspected this was an affectation on my part, perhaps due to an effort to be hyper-correct by bringing English pronunciation closer to its somewhat eccentric spelling. As I have lived in a number of different places in North America over the decades and tend to be something of a linguistic chameleon, I couldn't say for certain whether he was correct. A little research on my part (this was in the days before the internet, so I had to look for actual books!) revealed that in some parts of our continent when is pronounced as wen and in others as when. Where I grew up people tend to pronounce it in the latter way. In fact, the only "wh" words in which I do not pronounce the aspiration are whoa and wharf. So it definitely was not an affectation on my part.

I have long been interested in languages and their regional variations. In Europe such variations tend to take the form of dialects, which are very nearly distinct languages in their own right. Prof. Henry Higgins sings about these English dialects to comic effect in the well-known song from My Fair Lady, "Why Can't the English." Indeed it is not always easy for someone from Yorkshire to understand someone from Cornwall and vice versa, if they are not consciously imitating the standard "Oxbridge" variety of English.

Similarly a speaker of Schwyzerdutsch, the German dialect spoken in Switzerland, might have difficulty comprehending a speaker of Plattdeutsch, or Low German. (Marianne Scholte will be able to correct me if I'm exaggerating the differences between the two.) Among Greek-speakers, the Cypriot dialect stands out for being somewhat more archaic than standard demotic Greek. Moreover, before the short i and e sounds the k in standard Greek is often softened to a ch or j, depending on which part of the island the speaker is from. (This is similar to what Italian and Romanian do with Latin.)

In North America, by contrast, the variations in English tend to take the form of mere accents, with some differences in vocabulary. These accents tend to be most pronounced on the east coast, whose settlement preceded the era of mass communication and transportation. Here there are slight differences in speech patterns between towns and cities. The Brooklyn accent may be the most famous, as spoken by the 1970s television character, Archie Bunker. As one moves west the variations become more broadly regional than local.

I am reasonably certain that I grew up speaking a kind of standard middle western American English, the sort disseminated by network news anchors. Yet last year I was talking with a brother-in-law of a brother-in-law, who, as it turns out, grew up not two blocks from where I did in suburban Chicago and even attended my elementary school. Much to my surprise, to my ears he had an accent. As I near the half-century mark I can no longer recall whether I ever spoke as he did. I would tend to associate his manner of speech with the urban neighbourhoods of Chicago itself, but its influence in the suburbs may have been greater than I remember.

Complicating all this is the fact that in probably most languages, a particular dialect or accent comes to be seen as proper or even prestigious, as noted, once more, in the Henry Higgins song. The English spoken by the BBC announcer has tremendous snob appeal in Great Britain, and even in North America. This is, of course, the so-called King's English. The same colleague I mentioned above has often said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. In other words, standardized languages depend on a centralized political authority capable of imposing them (I can't really think of a nicer way to put it) on everyone else in the country. If a Northumbrian ruler had succeeded in uniting England more than a thousand years ago, it is probable that something like the Yorkshire dialect would have become the prestige language, as odd as that might seem to us now.

In the United States the southern accent generally lacks snob appeal, unless it is a "cultivated" one from one of the eastern cities, such as Charleston or Atlanta. Furthermore, the distinctive black or African-American version of this often becomes a verbal handicap to those phoning for hotel reservations or to seek employment opportunities. That this is unfair does not alter the fact that one's speech, including one's accent, inevitably affects the way others perceive one. My own great-grandmother, Lucy Jane Hyder, reportedly spoke with the inflections of her Appalachian homeland all her life. In fact, my mother told me that she pronounced the neuter third-person-singular pronoun as "hit," a holdover from Middle English, and even Anglo-Saxon, with an obvious resemblance to the Dutch het.

Here in Canada our variety of English is virtually indistinguishable from that of the United States, except for a few differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, not to mention the ubiquitous "eh," which comes as an unconscious tick at the end of a sentence, with an interrogatory rise in voice at the end. There are fewer regional variations here, but I understand there are more in Atlantic Canada, and especially Newfoundland. I have probably acquired many, if not most, of these Canadian distinctives, while not altogether losing my midwestern American speech patterns. Here I am probably heard to be American, while back in Chicagoland (as everyone there calls it) people ask me where I'm from, assuming I cannot possibly be from around there. I have yet, however, to pick up the pronunciation of schedule as shedule, which I rarely hear used by Canadians outside the studios of the CBC.

If the language of the king once became the standard language of a country through the extension of a uniform administrative apparatus throughout his realm, it may be that nowadays the electronic media are effectively homogenizing our languages. The Brooklyn accent seems to be dying. Even my mother-in-law, who was born there, has lost it over the decades. Nonstandard dialects in Europe are similarly threatened, although one sees efforts here and there to protect them and even, where they have died out, to revive them. The ancient Celtic language of Cornish is an example of this.

What this means to the student of politics is that my colleague's aphorism about the army and navy may be obsolete. It might now be said that a language is a dialect with radio and television networks. In this case, perhaps our political leaders are now taking their cues, as in so many other areas, from the media and not the other way round. Whether (not wether) this is ultimately for the good remains to be seen.