The regulars over on the Men’s Rights Subreddit are currently getting amused and/or outraged by the existence of a book titled “Girl, Get That Child Support,” a guide to help single mothers track down deadbeat dads and get the child support they are owed. A few of them were apparently so overstimulated by the book’s title, and a reference to “Baby Mamas” in the subtitle, that this little conversation ensued:
Note the upvotes and the (scarcity of) downvotes. And the complete lack of anyone saying “hey, you’re being racist assholes.”
The Men’s Rights Movement, the “most significant civil rights movement of the 3rd millennium.”
Yeah well, I speak Standard Canadian English! Whatcha gonna do aboot it, eh?
(Also, random aside – as a Midwesterner who went to college in Massachusetts, I was endlessly amused/annoyed by people’s surprise that I “talked normally.” It got even funnier/more annoying when I would imitate an Ozark accent and people told me that that’s what they always thought all Midwesterners sounded like. Oh, privileged New England kids, I both do and don’t miss you. :-p )
Since no one has mentioned it Dialect Map!
@chibigodzilla Although, I would argue that the data for the Colorado (my home state) is incomplete, they don’t have enough samples from the various regions to imply a trend. Still, it’s a neat map that tries to demonstrate the intricacies of American English, but mainly shows that it’s really, really complicated.
Pecunium and Shaenon, another Pittsburgher here! Well, former Pittsburgher, but I feel like I’ve met more former Pittsburghers than current.
I’m Canadian, but have been told that those who live in my city, including myself, have a Michigan accent. Ts and ds that appear at the end of words get swallowed. Apparently that’s a Michigan thing. Then again, I’ve had a few people tell me I sound either Irish English or from out East because of the way I pronounce certain words, which I supposed I could’ve picked up from my Irish English grandmother. Hey, we all have our quirks, eh?
You know, I used to know a Jamaican guy who spoke Jamaican patois at home and standard English at school and he switched between them. He was bilingual or at least bi-dialectitual and now I’m making up words. The idea that ‘they’re just talking like that because they can’t speak English like educated people’ is ridiculous.
Oh… and I’m from Northeast England so I have a Geordie accent, definitely experienced my share of snobbery and people pretending they couldn’t understand me when I was down south 😀 And it goes a little something like this:
@chibigodzilla
Thanks. I hadn’t seen the dialect map before. It’s neat, but the “pin = pen” thing threw me. Do these words sound different when other people say them? How so?
This is one of those things it’s crazy hard to explain solely in written form, especially when I’m typing and too lazy to find out how to insert IPA symbols in html. :-p
Basically, yes, they do sound entirely different in many accents, somewhat different in many others, and totally the same in some more. Almost everyone seems to pronounce “pin” roughly the same way – the distinction is generally in how you make the short-e sound in “pen.” In your accent, it is fairly likely that the words “bet” and “bit” sound different. Try saying “pen” with the same vowel sound you used in “bet,” and see if that sounds different than “pin” now.
There’s lots more like this, and it’s darn weird when you first start learning it. In my accent, the vowel sounds that drive me nuts are “aw” and “ah,” which everyone around here says indistinguishably and everyone in New Jersey (where I happened to be when I was learning the IPA) thought I was crazy for not immediately being able to hear as two totally distinct sounds.
Comet: Your Jamaican friend is code-switching. (Linguistics is fascinating but I should probably leave it up to the linguists!)
@ Polliwog,
Thank you. That does make sense. It took a couple of tries before I could hear the difference, and it sounds very weird to me. I think I’ll stick to my Southern accent. 🙂
@Alex
What city are you in, is it near the great lakes?
@Jean-Renee
I’m not sure if the map makes it clear, but some regions have more vowel sounds, out in “The West” we have very few, so pin and pen are often lumped together and I think that the whole pin/pen thing might be one of those. Personally, I’ve lived pretty much my entire life on that “Pin-pen merger” so it’s hard for me to explain.
Do you pronounce Ben and bin differently? If so Ben sounds like pen and bin sounds like pin.
Comet: what you are calling, “bi-dialectical” is code-switching. We all do it (think about how teens talk to their friends, vs. how they talk to their parents).
It’s simple, in that everyone does it, and complex, in that it involves knowing your audience, and that some words have more than one meaning, depending on context, and some of the shades of meaning are subtle.
@Pecunium, I might argue that using different registers — how you’d talk to your peers, or your parents, or your children,etc — is not quite the same as code-switching, which usually requires different dialects or languages. I don’t think there’s enough systematic differences between registers to really qualify. But I’m just a nerdy undergraduate so, grain of salt >.>
My grandparents used to code-switch between English and French all the time, as a sort of social marker of their Franco-albertain history, and to maintain their connection to one another. It was really cute. We called it “grandma’n’grandpa speak”.
A lot of broadcasting classes stress learning “Upper Midwest” as the best neutral accent to have for working in news. Mind you, they don’t work off actual dialect mapping, more “sound like you’re from the northern midwest, but stop short of Canada, eh?”
(Apologies to any Canadians I just offended. I grew up 60 miles from the border and my Canadian friends say I sound like them. 🙂
Viscaria: Grey area. Depends on how different the registers are. I’m told that watching me speak to police is “scary” because my entire way of presenting changes.
I know that “speaking army” is code switching, even though almost all the words are standard english. The difference is, often, connotational meaning. It’s not as dramatic as flipping from English to Russian, or even from San Francisco English to Eastern Tennessee English, but it’s more than moving from LA to SF.
Drst – Hrm. My partner is from the northern midwest and he has a distinctive “oh ya doncha know, I was up nort in da yoopie” accent that doesn’t sound much like a broadcaster. I think the broadcast voice is closer to Seattle.
Personally, I’m not getting comet’s friend as actually code-switching. It doesn’t seem (to me) like they were switching between “Proper English” & “Jamacian patois” within the same conversation, which seems (again, to me) like the key difference between code-switching and poly-lingualism.
@chibigodzilla- that code map is awesomesauce. I’m from Philadelphia, and it frustrates me to no end that I don’t have a lot of the standard dialect markers (I think it has something to do with theater training and having grandparents from Central Pennsylvania). That being said, a Philadelpha native recently picked my best friend and I out in the line into Mt. Vernon and Philly natives, so who knows?
Heh, I love how we’ve now attributed the “newscaster” accent to pretty much every region of the Midwest.
I don’t want to claim too much authority, since most of my study of dialect and pronunciation comes from the realm of classical music, not journalism or linguistics, but everything I’ve learned IDs the basis of the Standard American accent as being what I’d call the “central Midwest” accent – located around southern Iowa, northern Missouri, western Illinois, and therabouts. Or, in other words, “around the origin points for the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Trails,” which is generally the reason I’ve heard given as to why this accent spread enough to become seen as standard. So, if you want to talk like a journalist, talk like someone from Des Moines. (Unless Des Moines has some weird, atypical, Des Moines-specific accent I haven’t noticed – I’ve only driven through Des Moines on the way to other places, so it’s theoretically possible that Des Moines residents have a totally wacky accent and I just don’t know about it.)
Pecunium, you make good points. I will concede, sir. :- )
there’s definitely bleedover. when we were in canada last summer a lot of people told my dad (illinois raised, from minnesotan stock) that he sounded like a local
Red-neck, red-pill… A connection?
The MRM is continuing it’s Blitzkreig further into the outer reaches of the lunatic fringe.
*Outed as a hate movement by the SPLC.
*Humiliated with the “Sink Misandry” stupidity.
*Further humiliated by Tom Martin’s idiotic court case and subsequent meltdown on this very blog.
*JohnTheOther’s hilarious backtrack on Youtube and unforgettable wounded words about being picked on for getting it so wrong.
*And, of course, the constant drip of racist, sexist, ill-informed bile regularly exposed here.
All in less than three weeks. That’s not bad going for “the most significant civil rights movement of the 21st century”.
Now is not a good time to be an MRA. Looks like 2012 won’t be the year of victory for them after all.
my boyfriend made me blow a gasket 20yrs ago when he informed me that,as i was Scottish, that i had an accent unlike him, being southern English and privately educated, who has no accent. I took it upon myself to discuss with him the inherent colonialism in language and its power structures. this was the same dude who also used England interchangeably with Britain (UK compatriots will get that at least). i had fun ‘discussing’ that with him too.
and, reader, i married him.
p.s. the UK is chock full of accents to a degree that is totally bizarre and totally classist and racist along with it.
p.p.s still married to dude but luckily he is a bit better informed these days.
Viscaria: We’re both right. It’s like dialect/language. They shade.