The Myth of Non-Accent
By: R. Lippi-Green (2012)
This chapter focused mainly on misconceptions and attempting to clarify those misconceptions about accents. In the opinion of linguists, accent is a difficult word to define. This is due to the fact that language has variation therefore when it comes to a person having an accent or not, there is no true technical distinction because every person has different phonological aspects to their way of speaking. However, when forced to define this word, it is described as “a way of speaking” (Lippi-Green, 2012, p.44). Although Lippi- Green identified the difficulty linguists have in distinguishing between accent, dialect, and another language entirely, they were able to construct a loose way of distinguishing. Lippi- Green states that an accent can be determined by difference in phonological features alone, dialect can be determined by difference in syntax, lexicon, and semantics alone, and when all of these aspects are different from the original language it is considered another language entirely (Lippi-Green, 2012).
Lippi-Green also di...
All accents and dialects tend to originate from where people came from. A largely known accent that is often stereotyped is the southern accent. Although there are many different kinds of southern accents, people often associate the southern accent with stupidity, or someone that is “slow”. The southern accent comes from most southern states such as Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi as well as many others. In the film American Tongues, they show an example of a woman (from the north with a northern type accent) that says that she was once dating a man that was originally from the south and had asked her to come visit his family, that was still living in the south. She decided to go, and as they got closer to his home town, the mans southern accent began to grow stronger. She then told him to stop the car and immediately got a flight back home. She then stated that she was not going to have babies that spoke like that. This is a great example of how people will strictly judge you from your accent and the way you speak. While the woman in this example believed that the man had a strong accent, people from the south would believe that she was the one that had the accent. Everyone has an accent, and everyone believes everyone else has and accent, therefore judging them on it, thinking their way of speaking is the only way. One of the most common judgements would be judging a person’s social class on their accent or dialect. For example, hearing someone talk with a southern accent (which is said to be slow) can make people think they have no money because they are thought to be a blue-collar worker, categorizing them into the lower class. Since most accents generally are concerned with the region, the south for example has more emphasis on agriculture than in the north, causing there to be less need for education. These stereotypes do not just go towards the south or
Quests do not need to be started by the most likely people, as long as they put all that they have into it they can still succeed. In the book Into The Beautiful North, Nayeli is inspired by the movie “The Magnificent Seven” to bring back men from the United States to liberate Tres Camarones. She wants to bring back the men and her father who had left for jobs, to defend their village from the banditos. There are many circumstance in which Nayeli has to face before she can even get to “Los Yunaites”. She will need assistance from what is most unlikely source. She will face trials that she was never prepared for. Before all of this she has to be called to save her village from outsiders. Nayeli’s perseverance after many trials and her desire
For this summary I watched a video called Voices of the World: The Extinction of Language and Linguistic Diversity. The video starts off with how people believe that there are about 6, 000 languages. David Crystal talks about how with all these different languages half of them are endangered of becoming extinct. Each different language offers a different point of view of the world and culture. He said that if different languages are lost then “we lose the meaning what is it to be human.”
Chicago’s accent situation is almost identical to those in other cities, you cannot expect everybody from New York to have a thick Brooklyn accent, and this lies true within the Windy City. As shown through the script experiment, a large percentage of people do have three of the characteristic vowel changes that distinguish the accent, but only a small minority speaks with all the vowel changes that make up the quintessential accent.
The article The Strange Persistence of First Languages by Julie Sedivy was an intriguing and eye-opening piece of writing to read. The concepts she brought to life through her explicit writing revealed many things I had never heard of before. The further I read, the more I wanted to know and the deeper my interest became. As a monolingual, this article was insightful, captivating and ultimately provided me with a new perspective on language.
Session #1: The speech language pathologist (SLP) modeled and role-played different types of voice tone. According to Jed Baker (2003), when demonstrat...
Defining the American character is quite difficult because American identity is vaguely founded on shared values and ideologies, more so than a particular creed, race, or culture. In order to describe the American character, we will consider the dominate and distinctive qualities of Americans as interpreted by J. Hector St. Jon De Crèvecoeur and Thomas Paine. First, we will examine how Crèvecoeur illustrates Americans as industrious, prideful, and political in “Letters from an American Farmer.” Then, we will analyze from Thomas Paine's “Common Sense” how he depicts the prevalent qualities of Americans to be driven by justice, liberty, emotions, and individualism. Also, because both authors consider the American character and culture different
Fourteen years ago, in Oakland California the Ebonics debate came to the forefront. The term Ebonics, which is a portmanteau word of ebony and phonics, has been suggested as the alternative name for this dialect. Ebonics is a language system with its own vocabulary, rules of grammar, and structure. It is also k...
The video “American Tongues” is about variety of English dialect in America, and people still carry prejudice and stereotypes in people’s accents and dialects. These accent and dialects are not limited in pronunciation. There are different words, phrases and grammars in their dialects, therefore, some people are noticed where they are from. As a premise, everyone has an accent. However, some people believe they don’t have an accent because people around them have the exact same accent and dialect in their community. Therefore, they haven’t noticed differences. In the video, there was a scene of a woman was correcting her accent for work to speak “standard dialect”. It was required for her to speak “standard dialect” for work because when she was out of her original community where
...earch? Are there theoretical linguistic conceptions which match better the significant empirical evidence we have accumulated?
Have you ever been to another country, state, or even city and realized how different your accent may be? Have you been asked to repeat a word or phrase that you may say differently? Sometimes we were asked for a good laugh, but that’s not always the case. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldúa and “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, both authors use personal narrative to demonstrate how their lives and identity are affected by their language and culture.
Another difficulty cultures deal with is language and the way people speak. In some cases, people struggle to belong by making changes in the way they speak the English language just to be assimilated. They attempt to use words and letters, as well as body language that fit in the norm; all in an attempt to denounce their original intonation and style of pronunciation. One ...
Garrett (1975) represented four characteristics of slips of the tongue. The first one is that the exchange exists between linguistic units of the same positions. For example, initial linguistic segments are replaced by another initial linguistic segment. The same generalization is applied to the middle and final linguistic segments. Additionally, slips appear in similar phonetic units. This means that that the consonants are replaced by consonants and vowels are replaced by vowels. Furthermore, the slips occur in similar stress patterns, which signifies that stressed syllables are replaced by stressed syllables and unstressed syllables are replaced by unstressed syllables. Finally, slips of the tongue follow the phonological rules of a language (cited in Carroll, 2007, p. 195).
Interest in speech errors started many decades ago. Historically in the sixteenth century, several writers used it as a source of humor. For example, Henry Peacham in his book complete gentleman (1622) refers to a melancholy gentleman who says "sir, I must go dye a beggar" instead of "I must go buy a dagger ". Speech errors have been under scope since the 8th century, when the Arab linguist Alkisai (1915) wrote his book Errors of the Populace. He was interested in such errors because he believed that such errors may provide insight into how language change. Recently, speech errors have been studied in several fields of linguistics as being a source of the history of linguistic change, a mean for understanding the speech production and to gain insight into psycholinguistics. The scope of those researches is not to find out why the speech errors happen, but how they occur and how the people arrange linguistic structures as they speak. An investigation of such speech errors has been spotted in many researches. As David Crystal (2001) has noted, studies of tongue'...
Analyzing dialects can be difficult due to the fact that is it hard to transcribe the pronunciation of an individual dialect because English is not spelled the same way it is pronounced. Furthermore, one person’s interpretation of spelling a dialect might not match up with another’s, so the reader might not “hear” the dialect properly. Regardless, written versions of dialects are essential to discussing dialectical differences.