- Hi, I'm Erik Singer, I'm a dialect coach.
So in the Technique Critique videos, where we talk about
accent performances in movies--
- Margot Robbie is really a fantastic accent performer.
- I don't often have time to go into depth
about this or that aspect of language,
and today I wanna talk about some mindblowing facts
about language and linguistics.
[contrasting audio clips]
So let's just talk about the inventory of speech sounds
in a language.
English has about 42, 44, distinct speech sounds
depending on the accent, the variety of English,
[quick vowel sounds]
and we're talking about sounds that can make the difference
between one word and another.
[quick consonant sounds]
English has an "ee: sound and an "ih" sound,
which can change the meaning of a word.
"Beat" is different from "bit".
Other languages may not have both of those sounds.
What is the largest number of speech sounds
that a language can have?
Turns out it's somewhere between 90 and 110.
Depending on how you count them.
A lot of the languages with the largest sound inventories
turn out to be click languages.
Because there are lots of ways that you can combine
those clicks.
Let's have a look.
- The three clicks are [click]
are in a "C" which is pronounced [click],
and the "Q" which is pronounced [click].
- On the flip side, what is the smallest number of sounds
that a language can function with?
Turns out it's about 10 or 11.
Piraha language in the Amazonian basin
is one of those languages.
[quick phonetic sounds]
So, there's a huge variety there in the ways
different languages work and that doesn't mean anything
about a particular language or its people
or the way they think or what they're able to express,
languages just work differently.
There's a huge variety.
Next up, the great vowel shift.
So, one of the fundamental facts about language,
kind of the fundamental fact about language,
that we know from linguistics,
which is the scientific study of language,
is that it changes.
One period of really interesting fast sound change
in the history of English is something called
The Great Vowel Shift.
Started around 1400, the word that we know as "name"
around 1400, used to be "naw-meh".
And then that "aw" vowel in the middle changed to "ah",
so we had "nahme",
then it was an "eh", so we had "nehme".
Then it was a long a, so we had "nayme".
And then finally, it came to the diphthong
that most varieties of English have now,
something like "name".
That was a long distance to travel.
Another example would be a vowel sound
in a word like "house".
Started off as "hoo" so it was "hoose".
Vowel sound in a word like "time" started off as an "ee",
so it was "team".
And then over time, it came to be "time".
That was a period of really rapid and complete change.
It's an example of the kind of thing that's happening
all the time.
[laughs]
So why does this happen?
We don't know.
Really for no reason at all.
Again, if there's something we know from the
scientific study of language, the field of linguistics,
it's that language change is essentially arbitrary.
Moving on, the American "r" sound.
We've talked about that in some performances in some of
the Technique Critique videos, as being a really hard "r".
- American English has a really weird "r" sound.
This "er" thing that you do when you bunch up your tongue.
This is a really weird sound.
It barely exists in any other language on Earth.
- Really mastering this kind of "r" sound
and being able to slot it fluidly into a flow of speech
is one of the hardest things for an actor to learn
when they're learning American English.
In fact, native speakers of American English
find it really hard too.
It's one of the very last sounds that a child learns,
and kind of masters.
[child babbles, repeated "r" sound]
So why is it so hard?
It turns out it's really complicated.
It's a weird set of things we're doing with our tongue
when we make that sound.
Mostly, the weirdest thing, is that the sides of the tongue
are sort of coming up.
Imagine, kind of, if I'm a tongue, and raising my shoulders.
The sides of the tongue'll come up
and they'll make contact with the upper teeth,
the molars and the bicuspids on either side,
and you can have a really strong version of that
where they come all the way up inside
and even press out against the sides of the upper teeth.
Let's have a look.
- Real. [slowed down] Real.
- In addition to that, the root of the tongue is
often pulling back in, and you can even get a little groove
in the back of the tongue.
To have all of those things going on,
it's a really complex articulation,
hard to get right if you're a kid,
hard to get right if it's not your native language.
Moving on.
There's this accent that often gets called
Trans-Atlantic or Mid-Atlantic,
as though somebody were maybe born on an island
halfway between the US and England.
You can hear a great example of this accent here.
- Build these forms out of the desk over there
and bring them to me.
- There's another great one here.
- Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?
- Why, yes, of course!
- One of the things that's really interesting about it is
it's essentially a made-up accent.
It's synthetic.
It's not a way that anybody talks natively.
- I think you must be a sort of irresponsible type.
- So this is a sort of an accent that was essentially
invented in its earliest form by one guy,
an Australian named William Tilly,
who at the end of the 19th century,
thought that there might be something to be gained by
everybody who spoke English speaking exactly the same way.
So, he devised this accent that was sort of,
the best accent of English.
It was "correct" speech.
He wanted everybody everywhere to speak this.
It became a thing in the United States
where he was teaching.
It was taught in the New York City public schools,
and it became the accent of the stage and screen.
So actors were taught to speak this way,
that this was "correct" speech.
So the early version of a dialect coach,
it was usually called an elocution teacher,
was really different essentially because they were
teaching actors to speak correctly, not teaching actors
how to speak like the character that they were playing.
So this Mid-Atlantic accent, this perfect, "correct" speech,
that's this synthetic created accent.
- I wouldn't have lost it for the world,
they were all a memento!
- So that's why we hear that in old movies all the time.
So this has been a few kind of cool things about language.
Things I think are cool.
Thanks for listening.