What is your accent?
It can be surprisingly hard to pin down.
I remember when I was younger and people would ask me that question, I would say that I didn’t
have an accent.
I spoke “normal” and it was everyone else who spoke with an accent.
Younger me was very very wrong.
There’s no such thing as “normal” English, and everybody has an accent.
In fact, everybody has a dialect, which is their accent combined with other linguistic
features like their vocabulary and their grammar.
And I think it’s really really important that we recognize that we have a dialect -- because
once you can accept that, it’s really hard to make an argument that your dialect is inherently
superior to other dialects.
Because what I see far too often is people making fun of other people for the way they
talk -- for the dialect they’re using or the accent that they have.
There’s just no good justification for that.
Language is messy and it changes constantly and no form of it is better than any other.
Unfortunately, humans are really really good at creating stereotypes and being prejudiced,
and that extends deep into our language in a way that I don’t think most people fully understand.
Because we all grow up with these ingrained ideas about different dialects, and it can
be really hard to challenge those ideas -- but we have to.
Language is tied into so many different aspects of our lives, and if we don’t examine how
and why we have certain preconceived notions of different dialects, we’ll continue to
perpetuate harmful ideas about people who supposedly have the “wrong” dialect.
There’s actually a phrase for this: linguistic discrimination, or linguicism.
No, this isn’t just another way for people to get offended -- this is a real observable thing.
In fact, there’s an entire field of study called sociolinguistics that looks at the
way that language shapes our society, and how our society shapes our language.
It’s a thing that happens across the globe in different languages and countries and time periods.
Wherever there is language, there are differences in dialects, and stereotypes to go along with
those differences.
This was true thousands of years ago, and it will probably continue to be true for a long time.
Language has never been and never will be static.
And unfortunately, I don’t think humans are ever gonna stop stereotyping -- but we
gotta try at least.
In this video, I’ll mainly be talking about English, and within that, mainly American English.
But don’t forget that there are accents and dialects in every language.
In France, there are stereotypes for the way that people from Paris speak, and an even
stronger stereotype for the way that people from Quebec speak.
I mean, in American English, most people say Kwuh-bec -- because even the names of places
differ depending on your dialect.
In Japan, the dialect of Japanese that you hear in Tokyo will be a lot different from
the kinds of dialects you’ll hear out in the more rural parts of Japan.
This is a universal thing with language, but because my first language is English and because
this video is in English, we’re mostly gonna be talking about English.
I would be interested, though, if English isn’t your first language, tell me in the
comments what stereotypes you have for people with certain dialects of your language.
Anyway, let’s start with the first question you probably have, which is, “What do you
mean there’s no superior dialect?
Isn’t there a ‘right’ form of English?
Don’t we all aspire to use correct grammar and pronounce things correctly and all of that?
How can we have correct grammar if there’s no ‘wrong’ grammar?”
So the thing that I think a lot of people get tripped up over is the fact that formal
American English is not ‘perfect’ English -- it’s just an arbitrary standard that
we’ve all agreed on.
Now I think it can be useful to have a standard for a language -- it makes communicating between
different dialects a lot easier -- but it’s not actually correct or better than other dialects.
It’s just different.
For instance, Americans spell color without a “u” while most other dialects of English,
including British and Australian, spell colour with a “u”.
Is one of those right?
No, they’re just different.
Of course, as an American, my gut instinct is to say that color does not have a “u”,
but that’s just because I grew up being told that color did not have a “u”, and
so when I see colour with a “u”, my knee-jerk reaction is, “That must be wrong.”
It’s not, though.
Lots of people spell colour with a “u” every day, and it’s just fine.
It doesn’t destroy the language and it doesn’t hurt anybody, and with a little bit of clarification,
I can understand it just fine.
So I have to fight my knee-jerk reaction to say that colour with a “u” is wrong, and
you’re gonna find that to combat linguistic discrimination, you’re gonna have to do
this a lot -- with things that are much more deeply ingrained than the spelling of color.
You’re gonna feel an intense pressure that what you do is right, and what someone else
does is wrong -- and you have to challenge that.
Because you’ll pretty quickly see that your gut reaction doesn’t make a whole lot of
sense if you take a step back and try to look at it more objectively.
Of course, I wanna point out that I still joke about British and Australian English
being “wrong” all the time -- but I’m not being serious.
It can be fun to tease my friends about how they spell color or whatever, but I think
it’s important to recognize the difference between joking with your friends if they’re
comfortable with that, and legitimately believing that your dialect is superior.
Because, okay, believing that one spelling of color is superior to another isn’t a
huge deal, but a lot of linguistic discrimination is much more sinister.
A lot of it is really racist.
In English, people regularly make fun of those who have English dialects that are influenced
by a second language.
But that rule isn’t universally applied.
French and German and Swedish accents for example tend to have rather positive stereotypes
attached to them, while Mexican Spanish and Japanese and Indian accents tend to have more
negative stereotypes attached to them.
Can you guess why?
Because racists will use any excuse to insult people of color -- especially including the
way they speak.
Now, I don’t think learning English or immigrating to the US is super easy for white people -- that’s
not an easy thing to go through for anyone -- but I do think it’s substantially easier
than it is for people of color.
For a quick example, I lived in France for a year teaching English.
While I was there, obviously I had trouble communicating sometimes.
My French wasn’t perfect and I didn’t always understand what people were saying to me.
I have a very American accent in French.
However, because I’m white and American, I had certain stereotypes attached to me that
people of color from other countries learning French didn’t have.
French people would make fun of Arabic-accented French while in the same breath saying that
my American accent was cute.
Arabic-accented French and American English-accented French are both dialects of French with influence
from a different language -- the difference is mainly race and nationality.
That same thing happens in the US quite a lot.
People think that French accents are romantic, but then turn around and mock Japanese accents
-- which makes no sense.
Accents from people learning a second language are predictable and have their own rules and
reasons that they exist.
For instance, in French, there’s no “th” sound, so words that have a “th” are really
hard for them to pronounce.
That’s why you hear a lot of French people say “zis” and “zat” instead of “this” and “that”.
And there’s nothing really they can do about that.
While humans are capable of making and understanding a wide range of sounds when they’re young,
that capacity shrinks quickly once we grow up -- because most languages only use a small
subset of all the possible sounds.
Like, for an English speaker to learn French, the “r” noise is often really hard to replicate.
That’s why I struggle to say, “Roi” or “Ecureuil” or “Cru”.
Likewise, when Japanese speakers learn English, it can be really hard for them to distinguish
between Rs and Ls.
Phonetically, these sounds are very similar, and in Japanese, they’re the same.
So when a person moves from one language to another, especially if they learn the other
language once they’re older, they take certain aspects of their first language with them.
And that says nothing about their intelligence or skill or effort -- it’s just often a
byproduct of learning a language.
And lots of people learn English as a second language.
125 million people in India speak English -- compare that to only 59 million people
in the UK.
Technically, going on sheer numbers, Indian English is more common than British English.
Pakistan, the Philippines, and Nigeria all have more English speakers than the UK, and
they all have their own unique dialects of English.
Obviously people from these countries will speak with different dialects, and some will
inevitably have a more American or British dialect, but if they learn English as a second
language, many of them will speak with a dialect that has linguistic traits from their first
language -- and that’s okay.
All dialects are valid regardless of how many people speak them, but I don’t think people
are aware of how many people speak English with a dialect that isn’t American or British or Australian.
Pakistani English and Nigerian English are both completely valid forms of the language,
and they’re spoken by a lot of people.
I think if you can really grasp the scope of how many people speak those dialects, it’s
a lot harder to dismiss them as irrelevant or wrong.
But, because stereotypes about language are so deeply connected with race, you can’t
talk about linguistic discrimination without talking about racism.
They’re intertwined, and understanding one requires you to understand the other.
In the US specifically, language has been used to oppress people of color for a long time.
Despite the fact that we have no Federal official language, people rally behind English -- and
specifically “formal, proper” English.
Do you wanna know how we got “formal, proper” English?
You could probably guess, if you wanted, but a bunch of old rich white dudes randomly decided
that their version of English was correct, and all the other versions of English spoken
by people of color and poor people were wrong.
The group that’s in power gets to decide what is “correct”, and for most of history
that has been rich white men.
They’ve then used their power to impose that on everyone else.
This way of thinking about language is called “prescriptive linguistics”.
It means that there is a right way to speak, and a wrong way to speak.
On the other hand, “descriptive linguistics” doesn’t seek to denote a right or a wrong
way to say something -- it simply observes, records, and analyzes all the ways that language
can be used.
Historically, prescriptivism was very popular.
Dictionaries got their start being prescriptive, but every major dictionary today is descriptive.
Unfortunately, lots of prescriptive ideas have stuck around.
You’ve probably had people tell you that “ain’t” and “ya’ll” aren’t proper
English, or that “ask” can’t be pronounced as “aks”.
That’s all prescriptivism.
Because these are words and pronunciations that people do use, and people understand.
Isn’t that the whole point of language?
That doesn’t mean that there are no rules, though.
Having a standard form of a language can be useful.
It allows us to publish articles in national newspapers and have everyone who speaks English
understand it, regardless of their dialect -- and it gives us a standard to work from
when we’re teaching English.
But it’s not better than other dialects.
Prescriptivism places a value judgement on one dialect over another, and while I think
standards can be useful, adding a value judgement to it is not.
Because not everyone is going to speak and use the standard form in their everyday life.
Every language has tons of different dialects.
Where there are groups of people, there are dialects.
These can be regional -- so people from the West coast tend to use some different words
than people from the East coast.
These can be social.
People from certain internet communities use lingo and slang that isn’t used in the standard
form of English.
These can be cultural.
Communities that have a lot of Spanish speakers often develop a Spanish-influenced dialect
of English -- even for people who don’t speak Spanish.
And within Black communities, African American Vernacular English or AAVE, is a common dialect.
And these can also be generational.
Young people tend to develop dialects that are considerably different from their parents’
dialect, and even more different from their Grandparents’ dialect.
The thing about all of these forms of English that’s important to understand is that while
they may seem lawless and confusing to you as an outsider, they actually follow very
specific rules exactly like the standard form of English does.
That’s why you can often tell when someone is trying to imitate a dialect -- because
it doesn’t sound quite right.
They don’t 100% understand the rules behind the usage of words or the structure or the
grammar in that particular dialect.
These dialects aren’t standard English with mistakes -- they’re variations of English
with their own consistent guidelines and structures.
And even if you wanted to, you’d never be able to get rid of dialects.
Even the most annoying prescriptivists don’t speak perfect formal English everyday.
We all abbreviate things and smush words together and forget certain arbitrary grammar rules.
Plus, there isn’t one perfect definition of standard English.
Different style guides make different recommendations for certain words, like login vs log-in, and
dictionaries often list multiple possible pronunciations like neither or neither.
Even though we all have an idea of what standard English is -- it’s what we were taught in
school -- it’s not really all that consistent.
Unlike some other languages that have an official academy to decide what is “correct” or
“incorrect”, English just exists in a bunch of forms.
And it should be noted that even in languages that have an official “standard” version,
people who speak those languages rarely use the standard version because it’s needlessly
complex and tries to stop the gradual and inevitable change of the language.
But, back to English and how we almost never use the standard form.
One example that’s really easy to understand is that most of us say “gonna” instead
of “going to” or “wanna” instead of “want to”.
We tend to not realize that we’re doing this because we’re just speaking quickly,
but it’s really common.
If you think that you speak perfect proper English all the time, you probably don’t.
And that’s okay!
Because holding everyone to an impossible, arbitrary, and loosely-defined standard just
doesn’t work.
Plus, language by its very nature is constantly changing.
Early Modern English, which is what Shakespeare wrote in, existed from around the late 1400s
to the late 1600s.
And if you’ve ever tried to read Shakespeare, you know that it’s pretty different from
modern English and can be hard to understand.
If you go back a little further to Middle English, which existed from the late 1100s
to the late 1400s, it’s nearly incomprehensible.
Middle English is what Chaucer wrote in, if you ever tried to read the original Canterbury Tales.
And if you go back further than that, to Old English, you definitely can’t speak that
language without studying it.
Old English existed from the 500s to the 1100s, and it’s what Beowulf was written in.
Here’s an example of some text from Beowulf.
Does that look like English to you?
Is it the most perfect and proper and pure form of English?
Of course not, but that’s why it’s ridiculous to try and keep a language static.
Languages change so much over time.
There’s no golden era of English to go back to.
It’s always been influenced by other languages and regional dialects and new slang words,
and it always will be.
Every generation complains about the next generation’s “butchering” of their language,
and yet, English continues to exist -- despite the fact that it’s constantly being “destroyed”
by improper grammar and bad spelling.
For instance, let’s take a look at how one word has evolved from Old English.
Hlāfweard was an Old English word that translated to bread-keeper.
The word “bread” was used as a stand-in for providing nourishment, kind of like how
we call people “breadwinners” today or say that they’re “bringing home the bacon”.
So a bread-keeper was the male head of household.
This meaning gradually shifted into “nobleman”, and the pronunciation shifted from hlāfweard
to hlāford to lord.
So not only did it change meaning, it also vastly changed pronunciation and spelling.
This same type of thing happens today.
A word begins to mean something that is tangentially related to it, and then that word begins to
mean something else, and eventually, it leads to the word having a whole new meaning.
Plus, pronunciations regularly get simplified as people gradually shorten the word as they
speak conversationally.
And some words just die out entirely.
In Modern English, we use “you” only for the singular.
For the plural “you”, we don’t really have a universally accepted word.
Some dialects say, “Ya’ll,” some say, “Youz,” some say, “You guys,” some
say, “You all,” and a lot of others.
But, we actually used to have a plural form of you -- it was “you”.
“Thou” was used as the singular and informal word.
“You” was more formal and could be plural.
If you’ve studied French, this is a lot like the difference between “tu” and “vous”,
with “thou” being “tu” and “you” being “vous”.
But strangely, you don’t see a lot of people, even language purists, who go around saying
“thou” all the time.
That’s because it’s fallen out of use, and that’s okay.
Other words come into our language because of contact with another language.
In 1066, the Normans invaded England and brought with them a lot of French words that we still have today.
For instance, table is table, nation is nation, and government is gouvernement.
I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that “table” isn’t an English word now,
just because it came from French a thousand years ago.
New words continue to enter English, either because new things are invented or because
other languages have a word for something we don’t, and those words then become English.
That’s just the natural progression of a language.
People who believe there’s a right form of English that we need to get back to, always
seem to believe that that form of English is whatever they grew up.
It’s nothing older, and it’s nothing newer.
It was perfect exactly as it was when they were young.
This “golden era” idea leads people to despise any changes to a language, but language
keeps changing anyway.
And strangely enough, lots of linguistic features that people are mocked for today are actually
more historically consistent than our “correct” form of the word.
For instance, remember earlier when I mentioned “ask” being pronounced as “aks”?
If you ask most people, they’d say that “ask” is correct and “aks” is incorrect.
It even carries the connotation of being uneducated with it, and it’s a word used largely in AAVE.
But, “aks” is actually the original form of the word.
Chaucer wrote “aks”, but at some point, the pronunciation changed in the standard
form, but didn’t change in AAVE.
So weirdly enough, we get language purists advocating against pronunciations that actually
have a deeper history than newer pronunciations.
It’s a mess.
And it’s also important to note that most people speak in multiple dialects, or at least
are capable of altering their language in certain situations.
For instance, you probably speak differently around your friends than you do around your parents.
And you definitely speak differently when you’re out a club with your friends versus
when you’re at an interview for a new job.
This is called code-switching.
It’s when you switch between two languages, or two forms of a language, depending on the situation.
Bilingual people code-switch a lot, mainly by speaking one language at home with their
family, and one language at school or with their friends.
But code-switching within the same language is something that people don’t often recognize
they do, because it’s just so instinctual.
Most people probably automatically speak more formally and swear less in an interview than
they otherwise would normally -- which is understandable.
But I think being aware of how you code-switch in your everyday life can help you see how
dialects are useful and natural in different situations.
At the end of the day, it’s important to recognize that a dialect says nothing about
your education level, and it shouldn’t affect how you treat people.
It’s important to be aware of the stereotypes that you have for certain dialects and to
try and remind yourself in the moment that those stereotypes are wrong.
If you hear someone say “aks” and your gut reaction is that they must be unintelligent
-- stop yourself, and remember that it’s just a different pronunciation, not a worse one.
Countering harmful stereotypes is difficult and takes time, but it’s totally possible
as long as you put in a conscious effort.
The point of all of this is just to say that you shouldn’t make fun of people’s accents or dialects.
It’s okay to use different words or pronounce things differently.
If you’ve been made fun of because of your accent, I’m sorry.
That’s not fair to you, and it sucks that you had to go through that.
Hopefully, by teaching people about linguistics and the history of the English language, we
can have a few less grammar snobs in the world, and a few more people who treat all accents
and dialects equally.
It’s also astounding to me when people who only speak one language mock other people
for speaking a second language with an accent.
Like, they speak a second language!
That’s impressive by itself.
I just don’t see why you have to be so concerned with other people’s dialects.
If you don’t understand what someone is saying, ask them to clarify -- and then put
in the effort to understand their dialect in the future.
It could take some getting used to, but it’s an important part of getting along with people
and being a compassionate person.
Anyway, that’s all I had for you today.
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Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.