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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and now for something completely different than we've been talking about today, listeners, have you ever intentionally changed your accent and why? 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692. I once did it, my first job in radio up in Albany, they told me I had too much of a Queen's accent, and I had to lose it to keep the job permanently. What about you? Have you ever changed your accent and why? 212-433 WNYC.

The US is full of different regional accents, influenced by waves of migration and immigration and mixing, ethnicity, socioeconomic factors, everything. Maybe you grew up with a southern accent and they're not all the same. I lived in Virginia for a couple of years and the accents in southeastern Virginia where I was were not the same as the accents from Western Virginia, certainly not the same as the southern accent from Texas, or maybe you have what might be called the New York Latino accent. How about the Minnesotan accent? Made famous in the movie Fargo if you have no other contact with that.

Of course, there are so many different what linguists call African American English varieties. Did you grow up with one? Do we have any listeners with Hawaiian accents? The question is, did you ever seek to change your accent and why? 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692. There were some articles about this recently, which is why we bring it up but what about changing your accent? Do you feel like you've betrayed somebody, if you've done that, betrayed your heritage in any kind of sense, or even just your geography if you changed it for personal gain?

According to the 2020 census, New York has lost over 300,000 residents just during the pandemic, so New Yorkers who might be listening to the show in other parts of the country, hello out there. Did you take your New York accent with you? If you had one or did you leave it behind or are you trying right now to move it behind? Joining me now to take some of your calls and to talk about history and characteristics of some regional accents is Erik Singer, a dialect coach for film and television. His recent work includes Terminator: Dark Fate, Disney's live-action, Mulan, and others. Maybe you've seen his Webby award-winning videos for Wired, where he talks about language and accent variety more generally, they've been viewed over 70 million times. Eric, welcome to WNYC.

Erik Singer: Hi, Brian. Thank you. Great to be here.

Brain Lehrer: Does this happen a lot judging by the way our phones have exploded right away when I asked that question?

Erik Singer: I wish I could see. I bet it's lighting up.

Brain Lehrer: You'll hear some of the stories, but do you deal with this as a voice coach? Do people come to you and say, ''I want to lose my, fill in the blank, accent?''

Erik Singer: Yes, non-actors. What we might refer to as civilians coming to make a change, it does happen. The first thing that I will always do in a situation like that is have a conversation with them about why they want to do that. Giving them a lot of socio-linguistic context and hopefully discourage them from pursuing such a radical path, because there's a lot of social facts and linguistic facts that underlie this that I think aren't as widely understood as they should be. Among other things, all accents or dialects spoken by native speakers linguistically speaking are equal. We have judgments, we have high prestige, we have low prestige, but these things are purely social in nature and not remotely linguistic. We got to start from that first of all.

Brain Lehrer: Let's take one random example before we go to calls. That Fargo accent, the one from parts of Minnesota, of course, Fargo is not in Minnesota, it's in, I forget, is it South Dakota or North Dakota?

Erik Singer: North Dakota.

Brain Lehrer: North Dakota. Linguists say it was formed because of immigrants from Germany, Sweden, and Norway concentrating there. Can you break that down further and why it came out sounding like what we now think as Minnesota?

Erik Singer: Not a ton further because I don't think we really know for sure. That is a reasonable speculation based on just the sheer numbers of immigrants over the time and during the critical period of time when these things were being developed. One of the main things that characterizes that Fargo accent right is O's and A's. You're O, hope only, and you're A, day, train. Those sounds being what we call like a monophthong, a single long held to a vowel sound as opposed to a diphthong when I say O or A. For me, there's a little movement in those vowel sounds so that's a diphthong. Those are monophthong I's and those are vowel sounds we can find in all of those languages. It's absolutely a reasonable speculation, but it's a little bit of connecting the dots when we attribute it to that.

Brain Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Vinnie in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Vinnie.

Vinnie: Good morning. How are you?

Erik Singer: Morning, Vinnie.

Brain Lehrer: How are you?

Vinnie Good. Yes, I heard the question and I do this all the time, especially with people that are immigrants to the country, I happen to be an immigrant myself and I have a friend that she hates that I do this but I've always asked the people, when I put on an accent that they can't even have, does that help them understand because they don't speak English as well as I do? They always say yes because when I speak normal, my everyday English, I tend to speak fast so they say, "Oh, we don't understand." I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Brain Lehrer: Well, I'm going to try to answer your question, or have our guests do it but, Eric, how would you describe Vinnie linguistically first of all? People are hearing Vinnie, and in New York anyway, probably saying, "Oh, I know that one."

Erik Singer: Well, Vinnie sounds pretty New York, I think he's probably been here a while.

Vinnie: What you're talking about, I'm not from New York?

[laughs]

Vinnie: I've been here for 31 years, I'm actually from Kosovo, Albanian from Kosovo. I came here in the early '90s.

Erik Singer: Got you.

Brain Lehrer: Eric, when Vinnie does something like he described he does to make others feel more comfortable and I think he just gave us an example of it when he lapsed into something else, do you think people receive that as a way of reaching out, a sign of respect, or more like they're being mocked?

Erik Singer: Well, it really could go either way, couldn't it? I think the devil is probably in the details. It sounds like Vinnie probably has a good sense of that and a good touch with describing what he's doing or making sure that that context is understood. We actually all do at least a little bit of that most of the time. It's been really, really, really well studied and it's just been duplicated over and over and over again in research. We all do, linguists call it conversational convergence, or just accommodation more simply, which is that we moderate our accents a little bit at least, unconsciously in the direction of people that we're talking to.

It goes along with affinity so we tend to do it more with people that we like, or who we want to like us, and a little bit less if that is not present, but everybody knows people who are aware that they do it, feel like they do it a lot where their kids tell them they do it and say stop that, but we all do it at least a little bit.

Brain Lehrer: Mary in-- I'm sorry, you want to finish your thought?

Erik Singer: Go ahead.

Brain Lehrer: We'll go next to Mary in Manhattan who I think has an interesting story. Hi, Mary, you're on WNYC.

Mary: Hi, good morning. I grew up in the South. I was born in Greenville, Mississippi and I grew up in Arkansas, I went to college in Tennessee and I was lucky enough to go to law school here in New York. In the first year, they have a moot court competition and I was in the moot court competition. One of the judges who was a graduate of law school, he told me that I did an excellent job, but that my southern accent would be a hindrance to my legal career in New York, and that no one would take me seriously in court, and that any judge would knock 30 Points off my IQ if they heard me speak, and that he recommended that I go straight to Broadway and take allocution lessons so that I can lose the southern accent.

I was deeply offended, as was the person I was debating against and like many people who've tried to put me down. I didn't listen to him and I went and I talked to the law school about it and they apologized. I'm now a courtroom lawyer, a partner in a law firm. I've been a federal prosecutor, and I am who I am. My father, he grew up in the deep, deep south and he said things like vehicle and vegetable and all these words. I now say vehicle and vegetable. I grew up in the south in a small town and I think I've done pretty well for myself in New York.

Brain Lehrer: Do you code switch sometimes, Mary? Put on one more or take one off more depending on your circumstances?

Mary: Well, what I try to do sometimes if I'm in court, I try to maybe have a lower voice which I'm trying to do right now in a slower voice because I think a lower voice is sometimes more effective and I'm talking a little bit now in my court voice. Of course, if I've just spoken to my mother, she's 89, people have told me when I speak to my mother on the phone I sound more like I'm in Arkansas. Anyway, it's very interesting. I just appreciate sharing my story.

Brain Lehrer: Thank you. We appreciate you doing it. Thank you very much. Bill in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Hi. How do you do? I am from the Misbegotten State of Texas. Been here in New York 25 years, and I did what I could to scrub most of the Southern accent for my voice when I was an adolescent. I sounded more liberal [unintelligible 00:11:18] and was there for a while, which complicated my backstory of course. There are a couple of things I cannot bring myself to say because they sound too effete. I cannot say the word pecan because pecan is a pretty word, but pecan is just, and it's not, and I still say cement instead of cement.

Brain Lehrer: There you go. Do people judge you for any of this?

Bill: A lot of people say I can't place where you are, but you don't quite sound New York but that's that. By the way, I'm from a little town of Texas where Janis Joplin and Robert Rauschenberg are from. Port Arthur, Texas.

Brain Lehrer: Bill, thank you very much. David in Newberg, you're on WNYC. Hi, David.

David: Hi, how's it going? I grew up here in New York in the Hasidic community and my first language is Yiddish. When I was around eight, I started to learn English and by the time I was 13 or 14, I was attending a non-Hasidic school that was still ultra-Orthodox. I immediately tried to change my accent. You can hear what I sound like now. I didn't want to sound like my old classmates from elementary school who had a little bit of a broken English, like Yiddish inflections in the way they spoke English. I thought it was pretty interesting and I still find myself changing the way I speak depending on who I'm talking to.

Brain Lehrer: How do you feel about all that today?

David: I don't know. I haven't really explored it too much. I guess it's just like when I speak to someone who grew up in that community and hasn't done this, I just note that their English sounds, I don't want to say broken, but that's what it sounds like to me. I feel like I've gotten to where I'm at in my career and with work and everything by just being able to speak on everyone else's level, I guess, and not sound like my English is broken.

Brain Lehrer: David, [coughs] thank you for your story. We really appreciate it. Erik Singer, dialect coach for film and television. His recent work includes Terminator: Dark Fate, Disney's love action, Mulan among others. Maybe you've seen his Webby award-winning videos for Wired, where he talks about language and accent variety. Generally, they've been viewed over 70 million times. Give me anything you were thinking as you heard any one of those callers.

Erik Singer: Well, the bottom line here and this is again just a super important aspect all of this is that people's accents are on a very, very deep level their reflection of their identity, their reflection of who they are in a really complex way because it's a record of choices that are made at the time when we're first forming that. We find that people are very changeable up to the age of about 12 or 13. Things start to settle in both language and accent-wise around the same time as people are making slightly more permanent choices about who they are, what groups they feel like they belong to and don't.

Of course, those can be overlapping things and we can get people who are masters of more than one mode, and so code-switch between two different modes. There are always, when we dig into the story, it's always a reflection of that. It's those choices. That's why two people who grow up in exactly the same family and exactly the same place can wind up sounding completely different because they're making different choices along those lines.

Brain Lehrer: Darren in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Darren.

Darren: Hello there. I'm really curious, I grew up in central Jersey near Trenton and this came up when Mare of Easttown aired on HBO. I grew up speaking an accent that people associate with Philadelphia, where we say things like I'm going to get a [unintelligible 00:15:16] and I'm hitting him. My dad used to talk about opening the windows on Tuesday and all that stuff. My friend who I grew up with from back home always imagined that accent, that Philly, South Jersey, East Pennsylvania, even Delaware, parts of Maryland as being almost mashed up with New York, but I'm wondering what the guest thinks about the origins of that accent.

Erik Singer: In terms of origins, it's always hard to figure out traceback when we're going back before where we have a lot of recordings or good attestations. That line that cuts through New Jersey around Trenton or a little bit higher really does carve the state into two sections so that that Northern and most of central New Jersey is in the New York City accent region sphere of influence and South Jersey is in the Philadelphia accent sphere of influence. You mentioned some of the telltale shibboleths for that. In terms of exactly where some of those sounds are coming from in that Philadelphia-influenced area, I'm not sure. I'd have to do a little research to see if there have been some people who've tried to piece that out.

Brain Lehrer: We've only got a minute left. One listener responding to the question, have you ever changed your accent on purpose Twitts, ''Yes, to save my life. Sounding more academic when speaking to people in positions of authority, police, in particular, reduces the risk of their having a negative assumption of me.'' I'm sure you've heard that one before. Let's end hyperlocal. I grew up in Queens. Eric Adams grew up in Queens. If you heard either of us without knowing us, would you say Queens and Queens?

Erik Singer: Nope. This is going to get some response, but New York City accents do not vary by borough. We know this for a fact. They vary by a lot of things and there are a whole lot of accents in New York City, but varying by borough is not a thing.

Brain Lehrer: What about varying by ethnic group within a borough?

Erik Singer: Absolutely. Well, ethnic groups but more likely across the city and even to some extent the broader area. Yes, all the factors that factor into identity in a very strong way. Socioeconomic background and ethnicity and race and all of these things tend to be what determine those variations.

Brain Lehrer: Erik Singer, dialect coach. Thank you so much for joining us today, really fascinating.

Erik Singer: It's my pleasure, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

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