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gisellelx · 3 years

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Consider this ask a general prompt for any nerding you would like to do for us re: linguistic thoughts about various Cullens. Also: any particular headcanons of how they've influenced each other's speech in general? (I was going to say re: Edward emulating Carlisle but that might not be the most interesting example)

Okay commence much belated nerding out. Relevant post.

Under a cut because sorry, I went to town here. tl;dr--the Cullens sound different to each other, and their backgrounds and relationships have affected the way they sound over time. But they all can sound exactly how they need to any time they need to.

Here are two useful things we know about why people do or do not change the way they talk.

Communities of practice: this is a concept which comes from education but which has gotten adopted in several adjacent fields, including sociology and linguistics. Basically, the idea is, the way you talk will reflect the kinds of relationships you want to have with people around you, and how you want to draw lines separating your group from other groups. My easiest-to-understand example of this is that my friends from college athletic bands had some terms and inside practices which arose because of our shared experience of playing in those bands. We were in band twenty years ago, but if you're having drinks with a few other bandos and leave the bar, someone will go "ohhhhh see ya!" like the cheer we yell when someone gets put in the penalty box at a hockey game.

Convergence and accommodation: Speakers often try to sound like people they want to connect with in more than just practices and inside jokes. The more you want to connect with someone (combined with your personality), the more likely you are to adopt their style of speaking. This is in the short term, which is accommodation (you start to speak more slowly because the person you're speaking with speaks more slowly) or dialect convergence (over time your whole way of sounding starts to shift toward other people's.) Some evidence that extroverts do this faster, but it also depends on how desirable the connection is.

Convergence is probably more influential for the Cullens than CoP, although I imagine there are some CoP kinds of things that happen to vampires more broadly and the Cullens specifically. In particular, I suspect (and write) that the Cullens have lots of euphemisms for things: they talk about "mistakes" to avoid talking about murder, about "Royce" and "Charles" to avoid uttering the word rape, Edward's rebellion is called The Time or Edward's Sojourn (that's Carlisle).

The bigger question is, how would they sound and how would they naturally converge (or not!) based on their personalities and relationship.

So. You have the Cullens. Kind of a rough-and-tumble rundown of their varieties:

Carlisle: I headcanon Boston Brahmin . In the 1700s, the London accent was /r/-full, so Carlisle would've arrived to the US sounding more like a current-day American speaker than we associate now with British English (received pronunciation usually being the exported one). He would've hobknobbed with the educated elite on the eastern seaboard and picked up what they sounded like at the time. He loves being American--this is where he found his purpose and his family. So shifting toward that accent makes sense for him.

Esme: Lower middle class US midlands. The central Ohio accent is often perceived to be extremely neutral. It's not--there are some truly funky features--but people think it is, so there's not much reason to move away from it. She might have tried her hand at a transatlantic accent, but she slides back into her middle Ohioan often, because it's easy and it's not usually considered "bad" anywhere. She makes fun of the way Carlisle says rather. He teases her about how bag and egg are the same sound for her.

Edward: Northern Cities Shifted Chicago. If you've ever heard a Chicagoan pronounce the word Chicago, well, there you go. I realize this probably fucks with the gentle, sexy attempt-at-American accent delivered by Robert Pattinson. Edward was born too late to have transatlantic imposed on him, and so his accent was probably left to be.

Rosalie: Another reason they hate each other--they sound alike. Rosalie is on the other side of the Great Lakes, was born not that much later, and Rochester is another major source of Northern Cities Shift. So she and Edward sound...pretty much the same. They're both upper middle class/upper class and are picking up the prestige version of the NCVS.

Emmett: Appalachian. Pretty much enough said. The post I linked at the outset lays out a few things from Appalachian speech.

Jasper: East Texan. Texas is not general southern--there are a handful of features which make it notably different than say, Louisiana.

Alice: Upper class Mississippian. Now, this is somewhat indistinguishable to a northern American or non-American ear--maaaaybe you notice sort of "high class southern" but it's subtle. She's got a bunch of features of southern English, though, but the more prestigious versions of them. Not quite To Kill a Mockingbird--that's Alabama-- but that's not a bad place to start to hear it.

So that's where they're starting. Where do they end up?

Carlisle: sticks with Brahmin. The moment he arrived in the US means a lot to him, and so he defaults back to that first major change, when he adopted an American identity.

Edward: Probably goes without saying, but he sounds exactly like Carlisle. He shifted his default as soon as he was able, and his intense adoration of Carlisle means he converged on Carlisle's variety. He also picks up Carlisle's idiolect--particular phrases and verbal tics--again, because he wants to be like Carlisle in any way he can. "Oh my God will you quit; you're not Carlisle" is a phrase that gets uttered in annoyance often.

Esme: Keeps her central Ohio accent. She loves Carlisle more than anything, but there's nothing particularly stigmatized about her variety. So she keeps it. She's happy to be her own person.

Rosalie: Does not wish to be a part of this family and regrets her change. She certainly does not converge toward Carlisle's style, but the pressure of sounding anything like Edward, even if his dialect has shifted, is also grating. She brings her NCVS a little more toward Esme's Ohio variety over time.

Emmett: This man killed a bear* with his bare hands in the Smoky Mountains. He's real proud of being a mountain man and he sounds like one. He also has a healthy disdain for the upper-crustness of Carlisle and Rosalie and Edward and is determined to bring them back down to earth. Over time the most obvious parts of his dialect do fade--he doesn't use "a huntin'" very often, for instance. But he can shift into full on Appalachian on a dime and often does. It's fun for him.

Jasper: Stays East Texas. He's very proud of his cowboy identity, and is the least connected to the Cullen family as a community of practice. He can sound like whatever his paperwork says he does, but in default, he's still got the same Houston variety he's had for two centuries. I don't love darlin' darlin' Jasper in fic but I chalk that more up to writers learning how to have a light hand with dialect rather than it being something he fundamentally wouldn't say--he absolutely does say it. Also says bless your heart.

Alice: Biloxi is not that far from Houston, and she and Jasper, who are wound around each other, pick up each other's verbal mannerisms and reinforce subtle aspects of each other's gulf of Mexico accents. She both mellows Jasper's Texas English while also moving her own English toward his.

So in "default" mode, the Cullens sound a little different to each other. But there's no way a Twipire would somehow be unable to move perfectly and seamlessly between multiple English accents as they needed to. There's no reason to think that any of them showed up at Forks High School sounding like anything but exactly what their paperwork said their dialectal background ought to be.

*by the way this would've been a black bear, not a grizzly. I'm sure he loves grizzlies, but he wasn't fighting a grizzly in the Smokies. He probably got tangled up with a really mad mama bear. This is a pet peeve of mine, I admit.

#linguistics #twilight #accents #cullen family #carlisle cullen #esme cullen #edward cullen #rosalie hale #alice cullen #jasper hale #long post #giselle gets too srs bsns #tw: rape mention

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possessivesuffix · 4 years

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Limits of Uniformity

The notion of a “uniform proto-language” does need some sanity checks regardless. Namely, how uniform can any language variety be even in principle? What is the actual uniformitarian fall-back point on this? (Reminder: the uniformitarian principle is a key guideline of all investigation of prehistory, which states that we can only assume “kinds of” prehistorical states whose existence is known to us today too.)

Areal uniformity is the one type that we can write in by definition, once we recognize “a proto-language” to be quite possibly just one among several areal variants (as discussed in the previous post).

Some languages, usually small ones with some hundreds of speakers in just a handful of towns or clans can be also areally uniform altogether, but this is probably not the sociological setup to assume for proto-languages that have later expanded into families of hundreds of thousands of speakers. Latin is again the one notable exception, not the rule. Maybe a few more could be assumed for families that have expanded “far but not wide”, e.g. Proto-Oceanic or some of its daughter proto-languages; Proto-Inuit perhaps.

Sociolectal uniformity is not an especially tough nut either. This can exist in languages, but does not at all have to, and only seems to come about in various hierarchically stratified societies. Latin very likely had variation of this kind, and e.g. Proto-Indo-Aryan almost certainly did, too. “Genderlectal” differences could be another axis, but this is again not at all required to assume and I’m not aware of any cases where this would be clearly reconstructible. (I would have a hypothesis to pitch on this re: the fairly odd relative terminology of Proto-Uralic, but more on that at some later time.) So this is, while perhaps an underappreciated possibility, probably not a major problem in proposing a uniform proto-language.

Phonologically uniform varieties certainly exist. Phonology is fully structural: anyone’s idiolect either has or does not have any particular phonemic contrast. Variation across a language can be also usually described by some smallish enough number of these that it’s just about mathematically guaranteed that there will be multiple people who share the exact same phonological system. E.g. 10 binary phonological isoglosses only allow for a maximum of 1024 different phonological systems (in practice variants also are not distributed entirely randomly). Hence it’s always valid to aim for reconstructing an unvariable proto-state from variable daughter systems. In practice this is the strongest method of linguistic reconstruction also due to the additional fact that regular sound changes at least exist (while no such thing does in morphology, semantics etc.)

Morphological and syntactic (”grammatical”) uniformity seems similarly existent at first, but beyond “core grammar” these actually start leaving a lot of corner cases. Irregular formations and idiomatic constructions exist, and rarer ones probably aren’t known across an entire speaker community. Worse, it’s possible for different speakers to analyze the exact same construction as either fossilized or incipiently or residually productive, or indeed productive in different ways. Are e.g. happy and hapless two separate words, or two derivatives of a common root lexeme √hap-? Is /wʊdəv/ a single word, a word with a clitic would’ve, two words would have — or even would of? We do not have single unique answers to these even today. Some reconstruction of (some sub-variety of) Modern English by future linguists would not need to be able to do so either.

So we have to allow for some grammatical variation in any language variety. All variation is only finitely old here as well, but the point where all attested grammatical variation converges to a single form could be far deeper back in history than phonological uniformity. Trying to strive for uniformity would be somewhat analogous to trying to reconstruct a last common ancestor form of hands and feet (some undifferentiated sea worm body segments, 500M+ years ago) instead of a common ancestor population of modern humans (300K years ago, with hands certainly distinct from feet). In a more explicitly linguistic example, I have in a recent paper argued that variation in modern Finnish in the morphology of the verb ‘to stand’ (two competing stems seis- versus seis-o-) is in part inherited all the way from Proto-Uralic already.

Lexical uniformity is a simple case again, but now in the other direction. This simply does not exist as soon as we look at more than one person’s idiolect. Every adult speaker knows tens of thousands of lexemes, and some of these are used so rarely that there is pretty much no chance that any two speakers end up having the exact same lexicon, let alone the exact same semantics for each word.

Some weaker sense of “core lexical uniformity” could exist, but this depends on how exactly we define “core lexicon”, and is probably not a good idea anyway. Synonymy could be again stable for thousands of years and cannot be usefully reconstructed away; while if we look at divergences only, in some small list of words, we will probably end up at a point when “a” proto-language has already split into dialects that already clearly differ in their distribution, phonology, grammar and overall lexicon. Even core lexicon innovations will happily spread between lineages. The French loanwords animal, fruit, mountain and person are now universally known across English but arrived into the language in the Middle English period, clearly into multiple dialects in parallel. (This has already been taken into account in current lexicostatistic methodology in the form of a rule that all known loanwords should be discarded from analysis, though I am afraid this is probably too weak of a corrective move.)

Lastly lexical phonology might be the most challenging issue. By this I mean what phonological form do individual words have, even if they’re identical etymologically, morphologically etc. Examples from historically recorded languages show that these follow the exact same principles as grammatical or lexical variation. Forms like aks versus ask can coexist for millennia, and hence it’s not a good idea to try to reconstruct them all away. They probably do go back to some more or less regular sound change ultimately… but the way they end up in variation is mainly due to dialect mixing or analogical levelling. If some variants like these later on separate off into different varieties (ok, ask / aks have been at least partly sociolectally separate in English all along — maybe a better example would be something like dreamed / dreamt) they might give off the impression that there has been some phonological change to reconstruct as happening after the proto-language. Really this phenomenon seems to allow taking off quite a bit of load from the bin of “irregular sound change”.

There is also one telling sign for these: these never involve variation in the makeup of the overall phonology. People who use the form ask will still call the tool an axe, while people who use the form aks will still wear a mask (or at least will not turn this into ˣmaks). But this is only a hint, and it would be still hard to really rule out other hypotheses like a Proto-English **aksk that ends up being simplified in two different ways in different dialects / sociolects. And if we were to indeed assume the existence of a variety that had an early but regular metathesis rule — how far back would we put it, how many words would we assume to be later innovations or loans from a non-metathesis variety, and for that matter, could we even work out the direction of the metathesis without English-external evidence?

(I don’t even know what the real answer is. Sure enough it’s from West Germanic *aiskōn- and so ask initially appears to be more archaic, but e.g. the similar wasp ~ waps is instead from PG *wapsō. Do we require two metatheses in different directions, or one metathesis plus some hypercorrections against it, or one metathesis followed by one back-metathesis…?)

This should primarily serve as a warning against going into too small details when reconstructing the general scaffolding of historical phonology. My own rule of thumb remains that one example is no example, two examples are a pattern, three examples are required to call something an actual sound law.

---

In any case we can see there will be still quite a bit of variation that should be allowed to perhaps have occurred in a “uniform proto-language”. The target is some realistic amount of grammatical and lexical coherence plus a uniform phonological system; and it may not even be too much of a problem if we still end up with multiple variant forms of some individual words. Hypotheses for explaining any remaining variation are always worth exploring, but we don’t need to nail all of them down in one specific way.

#historical linguistics #linguistic reconstruction #uniformitarian principle #variation #linguistics #methodology

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oh-boy-me · 4 years

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Idk if you’ve ever talked about it before, but how does Mammon speak in Japanese? In the translation, he speaks kinda rough and casual (maybe a bit of a southern USA flair? he uses y’all once or twice iirc) Does he have a particular accent or dialect in the OG text?

Oh, Mammon might be hard to break down, but I’ll see what I can do!

So I don’t think Mammon has any particular accent, per se? I think he’s just very informal.

From what I’ve noticed, Mammon’s speech is characterized by informal phrasing and some phonetic changes. I don’t think it goes into any actual ヤンキー (”delinquent youth”) territory, but I might be wrong as I don’t have any experience with that subculture. Regardless, it’s pretty rough, and very informal.

The following example sentences all come from the phone call where he cancels your plans (I think it’s intimacy 25?), his home screen dialogue, and the current Halloween event.

And this time more than any before, Japanese is not my first language and I have never lived in Japan, so if you find anything incorrect about the content below, please let me know so I can fix it.

---Informal Phrasing---

Japanese has lot of different ways to say the same thing with varying levels of politeness. Mammon tends to use (one of) the most direct ways of saying things.

It’s important to remember though that a lot of these “direct” things are characteristic of male speech in general, and I won’t go over those. Mammon says やつ (guy, basically) to refer to others sometimes, but so does Lucifer. Likewise, it’d be weirder if he didn’t use the dictionary verb form most of the time. There might be some that I describe even though they aren’t particularly unique to Mammon, because I’m not an expert on masc-coded Japanese.

悪い！！ (warui)

(Phone call) This literally means “bad,” but in this context it’s “my bad” or “sorry.” It’s a rough way to say it, rougher than ごめん (gomen), which I know Levi says off the top of my head, and すまない (sumanai), which I know Lucifer says.

If you need to apologize in Japanese, I think it’s best to stick to すみません (sumimasen) or ごめなさい (gomenasai) to avoid accidentally coming off as too rude or too stiff.

許せ！！ (yuruse)

(Phone call) This means “forgive me,” but like. As a command. A pretty demanding one at that. An example you’ve probably heard is when a man yells やめろ (yamero) to make someone stop what they’re doing.

その時は何があっても予定を空��ろよ！ (sono ji wa nani ga attemo yotei wo akero yo)

(Phone call) Here’s the imperative again. 空けろ (akero) is the command form of 空ける (akeru), which here means to clear your schedule (予定 is schedule). The よ (yo) at the end softens the command a little. The sentence means “At that time, no matter what you’ve got going on, clear your schedule!”

A softer way to say it would be 空けて (akete), and even softer would be 空けてください (akete kudasai). I’m pretty sure Mammon isn’t the only character to use the imperative like this, but he’s certainly uses it a lot.

館中の掃除を言いつけてきやがって…… (yakatachuu no souji wo ii tsuketeki yagatte)

(Phone call) You can tag やがる (yagaru) onto a verb to show your contempt for someone’s actions. You hate that they did something. Like most of these, it’s pretty harsh. The sentence means “He had the nerve to order me to clean the house,” but with the strength of やがって, “He fucking ordered me to” might be closer in attitude.

近いうちにまた誘ってやるから (chikaiuchi ni mata sasotte yaru kara)

(Phone call) If you read the Levi post, you might remember that やる (yaru) is a more colloquial way to say “to do” than する (suru). It’s also a more colloquial way to say あげる (ageru), “to give.” It used to imply that the recipient was on equal or lower standing with you, but I don’t think that’s really the case anymore except for how it’s not really a polite phrasing. Attached to a verb, both あげる and やる imply a favor is being done. This means “I’ll invite you out again soon before long, so”

---Phonetic Shift---

In general, the most common phoneme shifts in Mammon’s lines are cutting the middle and monophthongization. Cutting the middle is a term I’m making up for the sake of this post and is exactly what it sounds like: lengthening the first syllable in place of the next ones. Monophthongization is when a vowel made of two sounds (diphthong) is pronounced as one sound (monophthong). In the case of rough Japanese that we’re working with, that usually means <ai> and <oi> turning into <ee>.

そのなんつーか…… (Sono nan tsuuka......)

(Phone call) つーか (tsuuka) is short for というか (to iu ka). You can see how “to iu” assimilates to “tsuu,” especially if you say というか a few times fast. なんつーか/何というか means “How should I put it?”

だぁっ！わーったよ！！ (Da-! waatta yo)

(A Devildom Halloween, 1-3) わーった (waatta) is from わかった (wakatta), which means “I get it.”

そりゃ傑作だぜ！ (sorya kessaku daze)

(A Devildom Halloween, 2-16) そりゃ (sorya) is a shortened それは (sore wa), “that is.” Also, I’m not sure where else to put this, but ぜ (ze) is a very strong assertive particle that I don’t think many people actually use anymore irl. The line is “That’s a great joke!”

すっげースピードで鞭とんでくるんだけど！ (suggee supiido de muchi tondekurun dakedo)

(Phone call) Here we start the examples of monophthongization, which is probably the worst word you’ve had to read in a while but I promise is the easiest phonetic concept to understand here.

すっげー (suggee) comes from すっごい (suggoi), which means either amazing or terrible, depending on the context. Like I said before, <oi> often simplifies to <ee> (the second “e” is written either ー or え). The line means “The whip’s gonna come down real fast.” すっげー is emphasizing the speed.

By the way, やばい (yabai) also means amazing or terrible, based on context, and can be changed to やべー (yabee) in the same way. Mammon’s said that before too, but I don’t think it’s in my example pool.

あー…金降ってこねえかなー (Aa... kane futte konee kanaa)

(Home screen) This time, the negative こない (konai) turns into こねえ (konee), with the same <ai> --> <ee> shift. This time, it got written as ねえ instead of ねー. This is his “wish it’d rain money” line, and the translation is basically the same.

うるせぇ…… (urusee)

(A Devildom Halloween, 2-13) うるせぇ is from うるさい (urusai), which means “shut up.” This time the second え is the smaller ぇ!

おっせえよ。俺を待たすんじゃねえ (ossee yo. ore wo matasunjanee)

(Home screen) We’ve got two here, with 遅い (osoi), late, turning into おっせえ (ossee), and 待たすな (matasu na) becoming 待たすんじゃねえ (matasunjanee). Putting んじゃない where a な would normally be makes it a rough-sounding command. And then the ない turned into ねえ like tends to happen with Mammon.

The line is “You’re late. Don’t keep me waiting.”

気安くさわんな！ (kiyasuku sawanna)

(Home screen, UR+ animation) This could possibly be in the first section too, idk, but. The general way to say “don’t touch me” is 触らないで (sawaranaide), and a more casual way to say it is 触るな (sawaru na). Mammon takes it a step further, and drops the る to say さわんな (sawanna). Levi uses the 触るな style, so I assume Mammon’s style is pretty noticeably informal.

他人の為に何か買ってヤンなきゃならねぇんだ！ (tanin no tame ni nanka katte yannakya naraneenda)

(A Devildom Halloween, 2-13) やらなきゃならない (yaranakya naranai), is already a pretty casual way to say “have to.” Mammon’s version uses the same んな as the last line, turning やらなきゃ into ヤンなきゃ (yannakya). Also notice the switch from hiragana to katakana, which is often used to convey the conversational tone. And then ない once again becomes ねぇ! The line is “Why do I have to buy something for someone else?!”

And last but not least... そうだ、殿下。　言い忘れてた (souda, denka. ii wasureteta)

(A Devildom Halloween, 2-23) This line means, “that’s right, your highness. We forgot to say.” Why is this one last? Mammon says this line to Diavolo. From what I’ve seen it’s about the same level of politeness that Lucifer uses when talking to Diavolo.

It’s worth noting though that Lucifer and Mammon both speak casually to Diavolo.

So this isn’t organized at all, but I hope this gave you an idea of how Mammon’s idiolect ended up giving him a distinct one in the localization!

This is always a hot topic with Mammon’s portrayal as a POC character, so I need to say that I don’t know enough about Japanese subculture and language codes to say anything for sure about whether this makes him sound “uneducated.” Impolite, definitely, but “uneducated,” I don’t know. Regardless, the connotation definitely exists in how he’s written in English. And with that I’d like to remind everyone that your idiolect says nothing about your intelligence. Don’t judge a person’s worth by how many big words they use.

#obey me #obey me translation #obey me mammon

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urmomsstuntdouble · 4 years

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ok not sure how comprehensible this post is gonna be but! regarding the languages discussion, here are my thoughts about the anglo americans. be warned this post is long as fuck, but thank you so much if you do read all of it, and i’d love to hear your thoughts about it as well!

so i just wanna start with alfred’s name- alfred. i think he may be named after alfred the great of wessex, who may or may not have been the first king of england. he wasn’t technically the king of a unified england that we’d think of it as today- he was the king of wessex, as his title implies, but there was a point at which he was “in charge” or however you want to put it of most of present day southern england. anyway this presents the first of his issues with his identity. he’s permanently tied to britain beyond just his culture and most common language- his name is a reminder of who he “belongs to.” of course most people don’t know that and they just think it’s a little odd that this 19yo miles morales type is called alfred but eh, what are you gonna do.

then you have the fact that there’s no official language in the US, which makes things a little harder for him. he’s never sure what language he’s supposed to be speaking in, as the human representative of america. he thinks it should be english, seeing as that is the lingua franca, but there’s times when he just doesn’t vibe with english as a language. i mentioned before that he struggles with keeping his (spanish) dialects straight (which @cupofkey summed up as immigrant-kid-syndrome and that’s exactly it), although its not limited to just spanish. he also has a hard time keeping other shit in line, to the extent where his thoughts are a messy jumble of languages, concepts, images, and feelings. this is most evident when he’s nervous, because his accent will get super thick and he’ll start just saying the words that pop into his mind, even if they’re in another language or straight up not words at all. the only peson who can understand him when he’s doing this is canada. both of them are countries of immigrants, although they are different in who immigrated and when, so they dont have the exact same nervous tick language, but it’s close enough that they can communicate well. it’s sort of like a more global version of europanto? might sound something like this to an outside observer, but again, more global (also for the video they dont start talking until 1:17).

america and canada also have a sort of inextricable bond because of the first nations people. the first tribe that comes to mind are the members of the okanagan national alliance, which straddles the present day border of british columbia and washington state (this is also something america shares with mexico). it’s caused a lot of pain between them personally, and with the okanagan nation. just as the border itself is vague- though the us-canada border is more respected than the okanagan borders- the parts of their identities are also vague. they feel bits and pieces of themselves ebbing and flowing, and matt and fred have gotten into arguments about it because they struggle to define their identities and they just want to be able to explain themselves to themselves. but you know that often winds up causing friction with the okanagan nations, because whatever issues with identity regarding their indigenous people fred and matt are having. they’ve got it worse, only in a sort of..negative image. like whereas fred and matt feel it on the fringes of themselves, making it so they cant tell where they end and other nations begin, the okanagan nations feel themselves being slowly eroded. none of them want each other to suffer, though, because the okanagan people can be americans and canadians and okanagans all at the same time.

this also applies with the american border with mexico, seeing as there’s some areas in the southwestern us where spanish is spoken more than english. when he’s down there, freddie finds it easier to communicate than when he’s speaking english. chicano is his language just as much as english is- he just sort of became able to speak it when the west was colonized, and he already knew spanish for business purposes, so there ya go. there are some issues with that though because the spanish in the west is primarily from mexico and central america, whereas the east is more from the caribbean- like how miami has a large cuban minority. so he’s got a weird sort of chicano english too, because it’s no longer “pure” chicano. pure is a very loose term there because there is of course variation within southwestern chicano speakers. angelinos don’t have the same chicano as nuevomexicanos. anyway i think he’d get it mixed up with spanish proper or spanglish a lot because of the similar phonetic rules. i’m not sure about any indigenous tribes who have land that straddles the us-mexico border, but that’s probably not alfred’s biggest worry with That Border. actually no i think he might purposefully talk in an aggressively chicano dialect whenever someone in the government wants to talk to him about the ice concentration camps. like he usually doesn’t try that hard to keep the wrong language out of his mouth but he will go Full Chicano, just to make them uncomfortable and to try to get the point across that he can literally feel the physical pain of the people trapped at the border in those camps. but this also causes some tension with the countries of origins of those people, seeing as they can also feel that pain. there’s quite a lot of discourse between america, mexico, guatemala, honduras, and el salvador about that, because none of them quite know what to do. they argue again about whose pain it is and how they should, as nation personifications, deal with it.

another thing that he struggles with where matt is concerned is with his indigenous languages. the languages of his northernmost people are the most at risk and endangered, and some are actually in the process of dying. he hates that, because as much as he wants to act like he speaks just SCE and quebecois, he doesn’t. he knows all of his people’s languages, and it makes him feel like he’s losing his identity a little bit when his indigenous languages start fading away. the worst part about this is that he doesn’t even always know it’s happening until the fading feeling kicks in, so sometimes he’ll just make a point of going up to the northwestern territories and try to hang out with the oldest inuit people he can find to try and have a chat. and it’s ROUGH communicating at first but when he can get back into it he feels more solid and defined. i think this isn’t unique to him, and that the other countries in the americas do this too, but bc of the way civil rights work in canada, it’s a little different for him. because indigenous canadians are recognized as a certain class of citizen, indigenous canadian governments have a collective legal bargaining power and could theoretically ask for legal protections from the ottowa government for their languages. however, this doesn’t apply to the northwest territories, so that’s why matt goes there specifically to talk to old ass indigenous people. their languages aren’t protected legally in the same way that french and quebecois are, so he sort of takes it upon himself as mr canada to do preserve the languages and history. it’s especially sad when a language dies out forever, because then he’s one of very few people who still speak it and if he wants anyone else to know about it he’d have to teach them. but since the language is dead, there’s no one for him to get help from. the people who once spoke it are gone or use other languages now, and it’s all very weight of the world on his shoulders. i think this makes him very sad, because of the weirdly smug left wing anti-american nature of canadian nationalism. like he understands exactly the sort of pressure freddie is under but also has a cultural pressure to not say anything about it or even offer to help.

this is also why he has the most boring and basic idiolect out of perhaps the entire anglosphere- even arthur has a distinct posh dialect that he uses most of the time. matthew talks like a textbook. a very polite and anxious textbook, but a textbook all the same. and matthew williams actually kind of likes what alfred jones has going on, but canada doesn’t. canada fell into british hands after the end of the 7yr war, which happened to be the war that sparked the american revolution (speaking of which the ages for america and canada make no goddamn sense, ask me about it if you want more detailed thoughts). loyalists fled to canada, and developed a superiority complex around the idea that they weren’t ungrateful. then it was about how they weren’t slave owners- which isn’t entirely true- and in the present day, even in hetalia canon, canadians often define themselves in relation to america. that is, they are better than americans because of xyz political thing. right now, to quote the anime, it’s “our free healthcare and lack of gun crime, eh.” this also poses some difficulties for canada in terms of culture, though, because if that much of their national pride comes from being better than america, what do they have to make a name for themselves? for anglo canadians, that’s a more complicated question. for quebeckers, it’s that the’re not anglo canadians. but quebec is also annoying as fuck and canada actually has nightmares about there being a successful secession movement there, so. i don’t know what the average anglo canadian thinks of quebec seeing as im not an average anglo canadian, but i do know that i hate their accents so now matt does too, although he will respect their right to have their language protected by the ottowa government (because quebec, that’s why).

anyway i do have one last thought and that’s that nobody will ever really know america or canada like they know each other. they struggle with a lot of the same issues regarding language, but america has just sort of given up. in some ways, matt’s jealous of him, and in others he’s so glad he’s not the united states. but they do understand each other a lot as the anglo americans, and as some of the number one destinations for immigration out of the entire world. so yeah, i dont have any specific strong conclusion ot this post, but would absolutely love to hear your thoughts about languages in the americas! shit’s wack in this neck of the woods my dudes.

oh actually one last thing. i think america and canada struggle a bit with their identities because they dont fit into any one specific group, linguistically or otherwise. they feel a bit isolated from the rest of the world specifically due to the intensity of the melting pot effect, and even within their own countries sometimes. people will be like oh you’re too white or you’re too black or you’re too dine or too much whatever other culture, so they often feel isolated from that stuff because they are all of those things, and have a deep connection with all of it. anyway they’ll always be there for each other

#hhh this is Long #good job if you read all that its just pure unfiltered thoughts about the anglo americans #anyway sorry if the stuff about indigenous languages was weird or wrong #i have family who are dine so i tried to echo what they've told me about their relationships with that aspect of their heritage #as white passing dine latinos #but also just thinking about how fucking painful it must be to be a country #like my heart really goes out to them #specifically these lads #just because of the treatment of minorities within their borders..like how in the us you have so called patriots who are violently racist #im not sure how exactly i think stuff like domestic genocide or ethnic cleansing works in hetalia #but i think it might be analogous to self harm #idk #anyway enjoy this #hetalia #hws #hws america #hws canada #hws mexico #sort of #hws languages #this took..way too long to write but eh i enjoyed it #ceros posting

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concerningwolves · 5 years

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hi! I'm planning on writing a profoundly deaf girl around 8 years old and I haven't seen much about how to write a deaf child, specifically who's primary language is asl. Would there be a difference in how a kid signs vs an adult, and would their signing be influenced by the fact that their parents are hearing?

ahh deaf children! This is something I enjoy talking about but (surprisingly) have had little chance to yet on this blog. Nice question, Nonny!

“Would there be a difference in how a kid signs Vs an adult?”

A sign-speaking child might use Makaton at first (it’s where I started). Makaton is a sign system designed to support speech – I like to think of it as the middle ground between verbal speech and sign language. The signs come from the national sign language but used in the same way as verbal speech. The first ever word I remember learning is “drink” followed by “more” and then, once I had more of an understanding of full sentences, “please”. When I was very young, I would just sign a single word for what I wanted in the same way as a verbal-speaking child would. “please” and “thank you” came later, and full sentences after that.

It’s also worth noting that Makaton doesn’t incorporate regional dialects like BSL, ISL, ILS, ASL etc, and varies from country to country. As the child gets older and transitions to their national sign language, they may pick up the dialect and drop the more basic Makaton signs. (The average signing 8 y/o would do this, btw. Children pick up language from adults in their life and then form their personal idiolect as they get older).

As with all talk of representation: people are people. Or in this case: children are children. This means that some basic features of children’s speech still translate into how a child uses signs. You might have noticed from that children between the ages of (roughly) 2-4 years over-generalise. All insect-like animals are “fly!” or all four-legged animals are “doggy”. So a sign-speaking child might, instead of “tea”, “coffee”, “juice” or “water”, just use the “drink” sign for everything. As the child ages, they would get a wider understanding of different signs and gather the words much like any other child would (barring a speech-related disability, that is). I highly recommend this post about child speech with additions from an actual expert, but keep in mind that some of these are unique to verbal speech/ wouldn’t work in sign!

HOWEVER, the answer to

“would their signing be influenced by the fact that their parents are hearing?”

can render some above advice useless. Here’s why:

As much as I would love to see more supportive parents, many parents of Deaf children ruthlessly mainstream their children. For the unaware, mainstreaming refers to the practise of pushing Deaf children into Hearing society without nuance, sensitivity or regard for what the child wants. It can include (but isn’t limited to): speech therapy, punishment for removing hearing aids/implants, sending a child to a mainstream Hearing school, cutting ties to Deaf culture, encouraging a Deaf child to actively shun Deaf culture, and having a child fitted with implants at a young age without their consent.

It’s also important to remember that although mainstreaming is an abuse, it doesn’t always mean that the child’s parents are abusive. Most of the time, the parents are simply… Hearing, (and raised in an inherently ableist society). They don’t know any better, and health professionals do nothing to educate them. These parents often believe that they’re doing the best by their child. Even “supportive” parents can might not understand the nuance of the Deaf community; they will take some very basic sign language courses, watch a few videos and then try to “compromise” between verbal and signed speech with their child. (which is confusing and upsetting)

If any of this is true for your character, then their development of signed speech may suffer.

Some things you need to know about the parents:

how do the parents feel about deafness/Deaf culture?

have the parents learned sign language?

how to the parents feel about sign language?

do the parents use signed or verbal speech with their child?

and some things to know about the child/their environment:

do they have access to the Deaf community?

are there any Deaf friends, family members or other trusted adults who use sign language in their life?

do they attend any clubs or groups with other sign speakers?

If your character has other sign-speakers that they trust and interact with, then their development of ASL (or any other sign language) will be healthy. But if not, or if their parents are awkward about sign language, then it would be harder for your character to sign freely.

Here in the UK we have the National Deaf Children’s Society where deaf children do fun things like drive cars blindfolded, go grass-sledging, venture out on sailing boats and go to see sign-supported pantomimes. (I’ve done all of those. And when I say fun, I mean,, chaotic and fear-inducing and also brilliant). The NDCS also provides resources for parents, encouraging them to embrace sign language and Deaf culture, partakes in activism and more. Do some research to see if there would be anything similar that your character could access.

Good luck!

#Anonymous #deaf characters #deaf children #mainstreaming

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utilitycaster · 5 years

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theorphanmaker replied to your post “Accents of Exandria”

ah yes the plentiful langues of "eastern European" and "Russian" love those categories

I’m not sure if this was meant jokingly or sarcastically but it’s a good opportunity either way to talk a little bit about the challenges of describing and figuring out accents that I ran into here. They’re in part due to the limits to my knowledge and experience, in part due to the incredible diversity of accents in the real world even within the same language, region, or city, in part due to the limitations of even a talented voice actor, and in part due to the fact that Exandria doesn’t have a Britain, or Russia, or Europe so we’re using accents that exist in our world to describe accents in a completely different and fictional universe.

(obligatory disclaimer that I’m a hobbyist, not an accent actor nor a linguist, and if you have specific and actionable constructive advice I welcome it).

Before I start, those specific, verbatim categories of “eastern European” and “Russian” were picked in part because of the notes Matt tweeted out here. Also Russian is a language? So to address what might be going on here...

Eastern European isn’t a language - this is true. The words we use to describe accents are not always a perfect one-to-one match with languages. If you asked most people to tell you what accent Percy had, for example, they’d probably say “British”, which is true. British isn’t a language. Neither is Texan (Fjord’s put-upon accent).

Eastern Europe is indeed a tricky definition and the exact makeup of eastern Europe is itself a subject of debate but it’s also an accent actors would see on call sheets; people from that region of the world have different accents but on the whole there are some shared traits among said accents. I've seen a lot of discussion on where exactly Jester’s accent is from and honestly, I couldn’t tell you (nor could most people, because it is probably something of a compound accent that doesn’t match up exactly with any specific country or language) - but it sounds eastern European in its traits (the ‘ih’ sound when stressed becomes more of an ‘ee’ sound, her ‘r’ sounds tend to be fronted, the ‘a’ in Traveler sounds closer to an ‘eh’ sound, and so on). These are qualities her accent shares with Kree, who Matt noted had an eastern European accent, even though they don’t have identical accents. For the most part, everyone has a few individual accent quirks anyway (referred to as idiolect).

(sidebar - while I don’t think it’s a perfect match the accent I’ve heard that sounds closest to Jester’s is Romanian. Jester doesn’t have final obstruent devoicing - listen to how the ‘d’ in “Fjord” is pronounced as a ‘d’ when she says it, vs how Caleb says it almost as a ‘t’ - and neither does Romanian, but many languages spoken in that region do devoice final obstruents. I also think the coastal nature of Nicodranas evokes southeastern Europe - I remember someone drawing comparisons between Nicodranas and Dubrovnik (I don’t have enough familiarity with Croatian speakers; I did a quick search and some dialects have this feature and some don’t so if anyone reading this can speak to Jester’s accent being Croatian with some level of knowledge, let me know!)

Anyhow: using a regional descriptor of accents even when many different languages are spoken therein (eg: an Indian accent)- or using regional descriptors of accents even when they’re within the same country and people with that native accent speak the same native langage (eg: a Texas accent and a Boston accent) is pretty normal. People from the same geographic area can have different native accents based on socioeconomic/cultural factors: to use the TV show The Wire as an example, most of the characters are supposed to be natives of Baltimore, but the working class white accent is not the same as the African-American accent.

Another possible point here was that Russia is (at least partially) in Eastern Europe: this is also true. We can refer to accents very specifically (eg, “Percy has a Moderate Received Pronunciation English accent”) or very generally (eg, “Percy has a British accent”). If I had to speculate re: Matt’s notes, it might be that he wanted to clearly distinguish Kree’s accent (eastern European) from Oremid Hass’s accent (Russian). As mentioned above each language has some distinct features within the accent. Because Russian was specifically used as a descriptor I broke it out from the larger Eastern European accent group.

I’m not sure if an implied point here was that Russia is a language spoken across a huge country with a multitude of regional accents in which case this falls under the same case of, for example, Texan accents not being the same in every single part of Texas. Houston isn’t going to sound like El Paso.

Next: actors have limitations! We’ve seen this with Taliesin specifically trying to develop his Irish accent work. Sometimes it’s a learning process, but also sometimes people pick a collection of traits often seen in a broad accent category but that are unlikely to be seen within the same accent of an individual: for example, using non-Rhotic (not pronouncing all the ‘r’ sounds after vowels) pronunciation found in many London accents with the vowel sounds of a West Country British accent, which is Rhotic. It’s not a realistic accent you’d be likely to find in the real world, but it is a consistent speech pattern with internal logic. This is why a lot of dialogue coaches recommend that people listen to a single speaker and imitate them if they’re trying to get familiar with a specific accent. However, because this is Exandria, not Earth, if you mix and match your accent patterns and come up with something new, that’s okay! Jester’s accent might not fit an Earth category other than “kind of eastern European sounding” because again, Jester isn’t from the Ukraine or Romania or Belarus, she’s from Nicodranas.

Exandria is further complicated because in D&D, every player character is at least bilingual, many are multilingual, and while everyone’s speaking in Common most of the time it’s up to the player whether they learned Common or their racial/regional language first. Matt usually plays it so that most dwarves, for example, speak with a Scottish accent whether they’re in Trostenwald, Uthodurn, or Kraghammer - it’s at least heavily implied this is the dwarvish accent, rather than a regional accent (though if you were to think about it, in Uthodurn and Kraghammer, cities with large dwarvish populations, this might become part of the native regional accent). Jester’s accent might be because she’s from Nicodranas (or it’s the accent of wherever Marion’s from originally) but it could also be how they’re depicting infernal, and she spoke that as a first language but Zahra and Molly didn’t - or maybe Zahra lost her infernal accent later on in life, or who knows? I’m a fan of embracing the vagueness here since Exandrian accents will never be a one-to-one match with the real world, but at the same time I had a lot of fun looking for patterns among those accents as they’re a cool part of world-building and tropes.

#theorphanmaker #critical role #accents

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mszegedy · 5 years

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Speaking a non-lectal idiolect for fun and profit: an essay

This is an essay on what’s in it for you if you make the way you talk unique. It’s very long, because first you need to understand the social implications, which requires a lot of background knowledge. Think of this as a technical introduction to something that’s hard to do right, but written without assuming you already know anything about sociolinguistics. In my opinion, it’s worth it to know all of this, because then you can think about the way you speak on a new level, where you’re aware of what it’s doing for you socially.

What is an idiolect?

It’s the way a single person talks in a single language. Most people’s idiolects belong to a dialect or regiolect (a regional variety), a sociolect (a variety associated with a social group), and some amount of registers (varieties used in different social contexts). Some examples of dialects of English, with varying scope, include General American, North San Francisco Bay English, Older Southern American English, and Scottish English. Some examples of sociolects of English include African American English, surfer slang, the “gay lisp”, and Received Pronunciation. (All sociolects are somewhat regional in nature, too.) Some examples of registers of English are the way you’re asked to write in essays in grade school, the way you talk with your family, the way you talk with your friends, and the way you talk on the internet. (Prescribed registers like Grade-School Essay English are usually plagiarized off of old high-prestige sociolects, so they can feel sociolectal. But the way you write grade-school essays is your grade-school essay register, and that’s a register, not a sociolect.)

These categories can collectively be called “language varieties” or “lects”. The boundaries between lects are fuzzy. The way you tell whether an idiolect belongs to a lect is whether it has some features that are part of that lect: pronouncing a vowel a certain way, using certain words instead of other ones, that sort of thing. But these features never cluster together cleanly into lects where everybody has all the features of that lect. Each feature has a slightly different geographic and social distribution. Here’s a bit of Rick Aschmann’s wonderful map of American English phonological features:

This isn’t even all of them. You can see him picking out dialects, but it’s hard to do with so many intersecting features.

Regardless, you don’t have to have all features of a lect to have that lect, since no feature even “belongs” to a lect in the first place. But there are some features that aren’t even on the radars of any of these lects, and would be out of place in the idiolect of one of their speakers. For example, pronouncing “new” as “nyoo” would be weird anywhere on this map. The people who do that learned English on a different continent entirely.

If the language you’re speaking is your second language, your idiolect might be pretty unique, and contain features from your parent language, with the most apparent ones being phonological ones. There isn’t a good word for this as far as I know; I just hear it discussed as “foreign pronunciation of X” or “X as a second language”, which makes it sound like a collection of speech errors instead of an idiolect. It’s not. Your idiolect is always valid. It might cause problems, though, especially if you’re a second language speaker, when people can’t understand you. It might also cause problems if people stereotype you based on it (see below). Finally, it will cause problems if your idiolect contains slurs, and I have no sympathy for you in that case. But no matter how many problems your idiolect causes, it’s not worse than anyone else’s on some universal scale. It’s just different.

What your idiolect says about you (to laypeople)

People are better at identifying lects than they give themselves credit for. They might not be able to narrow it down to a single city and social group every time, but at the very least they can tell the country you come from, and can pick out major sociolects like African American English (AAE). They use your idiolect to infer a lot of things about you, based on how they feel about the groups that use those lects. They often go so far as to say that the language features they notice in these lects inherently produce these feelings. When people say that, they are almost always terribly wrong.

A common example of this is racism towards black people. If you speak a version of AAE, people are reminded that you come from a black community. They will then apply their assumptions about black communities to you. White people will imagine you growing up in a ghetto, and not having a good education. They imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. Their assumptions are built on the AAE speakers they’ve seen in the media, and in real life. Black people have gotten to the point in mainstream media where now there are multiple black person character archetypes. But most real people don’t fit those.

(Meanwhile, a black person who speaks a white sociolect will get called “articulate”, because people have better stereotypes about black people who speak that way.)

Another common example is the image of upper-class British people that Americans have. If you are a Received Pronunciation (RP) speaker, Americans will describe you as “posh”. They will imagine you having lots of money and strong opinions. They will, again, imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. This is again because of the contexts in which they’ve been exposed to RP in. In media, its speakers are educators, acclaimed writers, royalty, and historical figures. As an RP speaker, you might not be any of those, but you will still get the credit for it.

This effect intersects with sexism as well. Valley Girl English is a heavily-stereotyped sociolect. If you have features of Valley Girl English, people might call you “superficial”, and think that you are dumb and that you sleep with many people. They will imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. (I’m repeating myself for the third time because with all of these examples, you can probably imagine what way I’m talking about without me telling you. Everybody knows Valley Girl English speakers, for example, wear revealing clothing and have expressive body language.) They will imagine sexist things about you because the Valley Girl stereotype is in general a sexist stereotype.

One interesting example I don’t see brought up very often is features associated with bigots. One such feature is using the substantive for certain groups of people. People get offended if you say “blacks” and “Jews” instead of “black people” and “Jewish people”, because they know that that’s what bigots say. If you have this feature, people will imagine that you are dismissive towards the problems that minorities face.

What (lay)people say about your idiolect

People who think they know things about language will say that their stereotypes about your lects come directly from the language features themselves. They will say that the AAE sentence fragment “did’n do nofin” sounds “lazy” and “uneducated”, and when asked why, they will say that it’s lazy to not have a “t” in “did’n”, it’s lazy to have “f” and “n” instead of “th” and “ng” in “nofin”, and most of all, it’s bad grammar to have two negatives. They will say that Valley Girls use “like” as a filler word so much because they don’t actually have anything to say. And they will say that the reason that words like “blacks” are offensive is because it is dehumanizing to not include the word “people”.

All of these things are wrong. The truth is that these features occur more or less randomly regardless of social attitudes. Sound changes occur all the time to every language and every lect; the “posh” RP is just as much of a pile of sound changes as the “lazy” AAE. There are many languages and lects where flipping all the negatives in a sentence negates it, like in AAE, instead of just flipping one negative. My first language, Hungarian, is one of them. AAE isn’t any worse for having it. It’s just a way that it’s different from most other English lects. “Like” isn’t used more than any other filler word, and filler words are in every language. There is nothing empty-headed about using filler words. Everybody does it. Saying “<adjective>s” instead of “<adjective> people” is far more common than not, over all languages. In many languages it’s the only way to do it. Even in English, it’s the preferred way to do it for nationalities, e.g. “Americans” instead of “American people”, or things that sound like nationalities, e.g. “lesbians” instead of “lesbian women” (although you do hear the two-word forms in some narrow contexts).

The best way to figure out whether your feeling about a feature is an inherent thing about it or just a bias of yours is to ask, “Does this feature also occur somewhere where I don’t feel about it this way?” The answer is almost always yes. It’s a big world out there.

Rigging the system

Getting stereotyped isn’t fun. Nobody can opt out of stereotypes. People will take every little facet of you, from your clothes to your height to your gender to your skin color and infer a whole bunch of things about you no matter what you do. But you can stop people from including your idiolect in the information they use to construct their stereotypes. Or at least, you can discourage them. Or instead of opting out of stereotypes altogether, you can try to control them instead, and use them to express things about yourself. You can do this by being aware of which language features form which lects, and which lects invoke which stereotypes. After that it’s just a matter of adopting the language features you want, which is still easier said than done.

One way to use this power is to adopt an idiolect that runs counter to the stereotypes that people might construct about you for other reasons. You can often do this just by changing register, without retraining yourself to a different lect. For example, as a child, I got stereotyped as “smart” and “gifted”. I did not feel very smart or gifted, but I did know that I wanted to erase stereotypes. So I tried to speak very informally all the time. My hope was that my actions would speak louder than my words, and people would think I’m smart for real reasons, and feel less like the register I was using was only for dumb people. It’s hard to estimate the amount of success I had, but I never stopped wanting to speak in ways that people don’t stereotype as “technical” and “too complicated for normal folk". People still think of me as “technical”, so I guess I’m a failure.

Another way to use this power is to adopt a non-lectal idiolect. This is the main point of the post. “Non-lectal” is a term I made up to refer to something that has a collection of features that make it impossible to classify into a lect. Having a non-lectal idiolect will make it difficult, but not impossible, for people to form stereotypes about you based on your idiolect. It might also give you more freedom of self-expression, because each language feature can say something different, instead of all of them together saying that you belong to a stereotype.

Non-lectal idiolects

Having a non-lectal idiolect is harder than it sounds. You can’t just make a grocery list of language features you want, because that list is endless and you will always forget something. Maybe one day, somebody will write a complete guide to all English language features, telling you who uses them, and how people feel about that. Then, in a year or two, that guide will be useless, because attitudes towards certain language features have changed, and new, interesting language features have sprung up that should really be in your guide. But then, that’s the almanac model. If people cared about that sort of thing, you could make a lot of money re-releasing an updated version of your book every year.

A good way to make a non-lectal idiolect is slowly. Think of yourself as a language feature collector, like somewhere between a postcard collector and a Pokémon trainer. Whenever you notice a cool language feature you would like, think about what groups it would associate you with. If you’re comfortable with that, add it to your idiolect. Maybe read up on how it works, if you’re lucky enough to have literature on that. If not, do your best to figure it out on your own, or come up with your own version of it.

There’s a couple of pragmatic considerations to keep in mind:

Borrowing features from lects that are closely associated with minority groups you aren’t part of is not a good idea. People will think that you are pretending to be a member of this minority. The people who will be the most offended are the minority members themselves.

A classic case of this is that it’s not a good idea to borrow distinctive features from AAE if you are white. I have personally wanted to do so many times, as a sign of respect and as a way of normalizing a sociolect that people look down on. But I’ve ended up borrowing only innocuous things where I have the plausible deniability of having taken it from somewhere else. I feel justified in using multiple negatives, for example, because my first language also does it. But really, I do it because of AAE.

Trying to use language that people consider offensive in a way where you feel like you’re removing the offensiveness is not a good idea. You will never make anything but enemies if you try to bleach or reclaim a slur, for example, especially if you’re not part of the group that the slur applies to. You have to get an army of people to do the same thing with you before you can do that and not be taken for a bigot.

Trying to use the substantive, which, as noted above, is associated with bigotry but isn’t inherently insulting the way slurs are, is a project that maybe has more merit, but consider this. You will, eventually, use the substantive around a minority member and make them feel unsafe. This is a somewhat different dynamic than when, say, a white person feels unsafe around an AAE speaker because they associate AAE with crime. In the first scenario, the minority member is guaranteed to have already experienced bigotry, and has every right to be wary of bigots. In the second scenario, the white person is just racist, precisely because they haven’t interacted with AAE speakers enough. Is it a positive thing to give a minority member experiences where a substantive user turned out not to be a bigot? Well, sure, but in the meantime you’re making their life worse. I would err on the side of not making people’s lives worse.

Is a non-lectal idiolect right for me?

Think about what you want your idiolect to mean. It matters more what your idiolect’s features mean to you than what they mean to other people. You’re the one who has to listen to it all the time, after all.

Sometimes what a feature expresses to you can be so different from what it expresses to other people that you start to feel bad about it. And sometimes this is a feature you’ve acquired naturally, not by planning your idiolect. For example, the thing that affects the way I speak and write the most is that I have central auditory processing disorder. I absorb language and information through text far better than through speech. It about balances out; it’s like the text and speech capabilities of a neurotypical person got switched. I hardly ever remember things from lectures, but once I read something in a textbook, I’ll remember it for a long time. In my dreams, I can read text, but I can’t understand speech. And, most importantly, I naturally acquire language through text, not through speech. This means that, while most people end up writing the way they talk until they are trained to use a unique register for writing, I would end up talking the way I write if I didn’t put every ounce of my effort into not doing that.

I would love to naturally express to people through my idiolect that I have more of a connection to written things than spoken things. And in theory just letting the acquisition take its natural course would be a good way to do that. But the problem is that the most common written register of English is basically an anachronistic pastiche of formal English sociolects from the 20th century. People don’t just think that I sound like a book. People think that I sound “smart” and “educated” and “technical”. This is what I’ve wanted to avoid all of my life.

I would like to express other things than just my connection to text. There are many lovely dialects that I have respect for and a personal connection to that I would like to give a shout-out to in my idiolect. For example, in the Hungarian lect my family speaks, the word for “New York” is Nyujork instead of Nujork, because it was borrowed from British English and not American English. I think this is really cool and cute, so as a way of paying tribute to it, I pronounce words like “new” and “nude” as “nyoo” and “nyood”. I could have just changed how I pronounce “New York”, but I already have other features competing for New York-related real estate, and having the sound change be universal is easier anyway.

The biggest reason to worry about which language features to have is that you ultimately know yourself better than your language acquisition engine does. Your language acquisition engine will take features from your environment and dump them into your lap. Your job is to vet these features and see if you like what they tell people. If you just let it do its thing, your idiolect will probably tell people where you lived, and maybe what communities you’ve been part of. But probably not as well as if you’d put some thought into it.

Putting thought into your idiolect doesn’t have to mean making it non-lectal. Making it non-lectal is the nuclear option where you don’t want people to immediately associate you with certain places and cultures. If you are okay with being associated with a place and/or a culture, consider its distinctive lect something to build around. There is no hard boundary on being a non-lectal speaker. You can have a lot of features that point towards one thing and several other features that point towards other things. Experiment.

Conclusion

Language is the most versatile tool for expressing yourself. The semantics of any language are already a powerful engine of communication that you’ve been training yourself your entire life to use. Make the pragmatics, the metatext, work for you too. Don’t worry about every feature; there’s too many of them to do that. But if you single out features you care about, you can turn your idiolect into a beloved work of art that you can carry with you everywhere. Whether the art that you make will be non-lectal, I cannot say. But know that the option is there, and it’s a goldmine of untapped self-expression potential.

#linguistics #conlanging #english #self-expression #language #language art #sociolinguistics

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Dialect Coaches on Actors and the Best and Worst Accents

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Congruity is important in fiction. Trust and verisimilitude are the first casualties when breaches of the unspoken contract between creator and audience occur. Each of us has our own limits on what we’re prepared to accept before that crucial tipping point is reached and our minds unmoor from a piece of fiction. Although we understand that show-runners and directors will sometimes bend reality or sacrifice elements of the truth or historical record in the pursuit of spectacle or entertainment, some things are sacrosanct.

Arguably our ears are the fiercest arbiters of truth. These days, botched accents or dialects in entertainment vehicles are the elements most likely to trigger flash-bangs of furious incredulity, and offend cultural sensibilities (especially now that we’re past the era of casting people in serious dramatic roles out-with their own ethnicities). Though the 1995 movie Braveheart was rife with historical inaccuracies – akin to Abraham Lincoln teaming up with Grover Cleveland to fight WWII alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger – it retained a plausible and satisfying emotional core in the hearts of most Scots largely thanks to Mel Gibson putting on an eminently passable, forgivably imperfect Scottish accent. That wouldn’t have been the case had he sounded like Christopher Lambert or Pee Wee Herman.

So accents are important. They strike at the truth of who we are, where we’re from and where we’re going. It follows then that the gate-keepers of the human voice – the vocal coaches and dialect specialists that lend their expertise to the entertainment industry – perform a vital function that transcends mere entertainment. Den of Geek spoke to three of them, to get a flavor of the work they do, the professional choices they make, the role they see themselves playing, their views on the industry, and their take on the issues of the day filtered through the prism of their profession.

Nic Redman is a well-known and knowledgeable vocal coach and voice actor who hails from Northern Ireland, but now lives and works in the north of England; her coaching helps regular folks, commercial clients and famous faces alike.

Paul Meier is a voice coach, actor, professor, Shakespeare enthusiast, theatre director and archivist of dialects who made the leap from the southern UK to the mid-western US in 1978, bringing with him a wealth of expertise.

Joy Lanceta Coronel is a Kentucky-born, NY-based dialectal wunderkind, who, as well as being an eminently qualified voice and acting coach, conducts research into Asian identity and cultural representation, particularly those aspects that intersect with her profession.

Of course you can’t have three voice coaches on hand without first asking them their opinion on the worst and best examples of accents in TV and film.

Music to your ears

Let’s start with the best.

Nic singles out Jodie Comer in Killing Eve. “I’d seen her in one other thing, and she spoke in Received Pronunciation (RP) – like a standard, southern English sound – and I just assumed she spoke RP. And then I saw Killing Eve, and I was like, ‘Wow, she’s good at accents’. And then I heard her in an interview, and I’m like, ‘You are kidding me’. Because she’s a proper Scouser, like [from Liverpool, England]. And unabashedly, unashamed, wearing it proudly, as everyone with a regional accent should.”

Paul’s pick is Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. “I’ve never seen a better impersonation. She transcended impersonation and totally got the accent, but it was a brilliant impersonation as well. I did a podcast with the dialect coach on The Iron Lady, Jill McCullough, and Jill just sat in the corner twiddling her thumbs while Meryl Streep worked her magic.”

Joy is also quick to laud Meryl Streep, particularly her performance in Sophie’s Choice. She also gives special mentions to Renee Zellweger in the first Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. When it comes to picking the worst examples of the craft, Joy favours diplomacy over dirt-slinging. “Ah this question is so nuanced because I’d hate to call people out on something that might have been the result of so many different variables. There are several instances when a coach might not have as much time with the actor for them to fully inhabit the accent. You also have to factor in that an actor might not be very familiar with an accent, and oftentimes it makes it more difficult for them to take on the sounds if it is difficult for them to hear them in the first place.”

Luckily for us and our salacious appetites, Nic and Paul have no such reservations. “I really want to give shout outs to Gerard Butler in P.S. I Love You,” says Nic. “As an Irish person I found that pretty horrific. Keanu Reeves in Dracula, Don Cheadle in Ocean’s Eleven. And, then, just a couple of shout-outs for some ladies. Anne Hathaway in One Day. I know she tried really hard. I married a Yorkshireman so I think I’m a bit more sensitive to that one. And Mischa Barton in St Trinians.”

Paul goes with something of an old classic from the accent hall of horrors: Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. He follows up his choice with a salient point: “I did a podcast with my son, who is a movie critic, talking about best and worst. I found myself saying that Dick Van Dyke was so utterly charming in the role of Bert the chimney sweep, that despite his egregious cockney accent, you would say, ‘But this is how Bert speaks. This is Dick Van Dyke’s Bert’s cockney’, and it’s almost become institutional now, even though it’s a really bad cockney.”

You could say the same of Karl Urban’s accent in The Boys. Butcher is supposed to be from London, but his accent is a hotchpotch that takes in the antipodes via South Africa. Again, though, the character, and Urban’s portrayal, is such a powerhouse that you stop caring. Perhaps we make allowances for bad accents by great actors just so long as the place they’re evoking isn’t an integral part of their character’s make-up; or that the character isn’t intended as a vessel to speak for, or about, people from that place.

Do the coaches agree that many actors from the US seem to struggle with UK accents in general, and London accents in particular?

“The thing about Americans encountering British accents,” says Nic, “is they have two representations of what we sound like: Downton Abbey and anything by Guy Ritchie. English or Cockney. You’d think that would help them be specific, but I think they really struggle with it because it shares a lot with Australian as well, for very specific historical reasons, and I think they flip stuff around and get a bit confused.”

Paul believes that US actors struggle with some UK accents mainly for social reasons. “Brits and Australians are better at American accents than vice versa. And it’s not because of any innate ability. It’s just because Americans tend to be more insular. American English is the global language, very few Americans have passports, they don’t travel. It’s a big country, very self-sufficient. And so for these social, socio-linguistic reasons, Americans don’t tend to be as good at accents.”

Sometimes, says Nic, we the audience will not have been privy to the decisions made on the modelling of a character’s accent – their background, their idiolect – and thus can judge a performance unfairly. “That’s how I felt about Elizabeth Moss in Top of the Lake. She got a lot of flak for her accent, but I loved the performance so much, and she was a person from a place living in a different place, so there were going to be influences from that side, so maybe she made a conscious decision to do it that way.”

A Day in the Life

How, then, does a voice coach operate? How do they assist performers? And what’s in their toolkit? Joy clues us in:

“Sometimes I get pulled in at the last minute and I have to work with an actor who has already spent time with the script without my guidance, so those instances can be challenging,” she says. “What I do enjoy is that I get one-on-one time with the actors, so it is an intimate process. I shape my sessions based on different variables: how much time I have with them; how familiar they are with the accent or dialect, how difficult the accent or dialect is, what kind of space we are working in. It’s usually a conversation that triangulates between director, actor, and coach. If possible, I try to find an audio sample of a person who meets the criteria we discussed, and we work from those audio samples. Using a real speaker as a model is the best way to humanize the work.”

What about those rare cases where a play, movie or TV show is set in a non-English-speaking country, yet casts English-speaking actors as natives, and has them speak in English? The examples that spring to mind are the TV mini-series Chernobyl and the movie The Death of Stalin. Do voice coaches have any opinion of, or involvement with, those scenarios? Paul takes the mantle:

“If you start with the idea of a Chekhov play; all of those characters are speaking Russian to each other, and we, simply for our own convenience, are speaking a translation into English, so does it make any sense to play your Chekhov characters with a Russian accent? Not really. Because they’re not speaking a language other than their own, their first language, so why would they get it wrong? If you have a play or a film where the Russian character is speaking English, then it wouldn’t make sense not to give him a Russian accent. And then I think of exceptions, like [the movie] Chocolat. All of those characters were speaking French to each other. We, simply for our own convenience, hear them in English. And yet the director and the dialect coach very astutely gave a very slight French accent colouration to the film. And I thought it helped. It put me in that little French village.”

Authenticity and avoiding stereotypes

Authenticity clearly plays an integral role in both the coaching process and ethos. This article has so far concentrated on those dialects that predominate within the English-speaking world, but what of the importance of ensuring the authenticity of accents from other parts of the world; countries and continents whose languages and cultures may well have become an integral, though still too often marginalised, part of the shared experience of living in the US or Europe?

“I can speak from the work I’ve done in the past with accents such as Thai, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean,” says New York-based Joy. “These East Asian accents have a long history of stereotyping, mimicry, and caricature and it has hurt these communities. So, for that reason, it is all the more important to add as much authenticity and humanity to the accent and frame the accent through the lens of a real human being, and not just the stereotypes that were so often seen in TV, film, and stage. Studies show that most Americans don’t know a lot about Asian culture, much less the nuanced sounds of each language. It’s just not something Americans have paid attention to because of racist portrayals and phrases like ‘Ching chong chang.’ I feel a great deal of responsibility for showcasing these languages authentically, and it is my hope that audiences will begin to recognize these sounds and hear the drastic differences among East Asian languages, so that we can slowly veer away from our problematic past.”

The issue of representation within the entertainment industry, which dovetails with notions of authenticity, gained prominence during last year’s Black Lives Matters protests, and put a lot of hitherto accepted (sometimes only grudgingly) conventions under the spotlight. Animated shows like Big Mouth, Family Guy and The Simpsons were forced to reckon with the new paradigm by recasting, or un-casting, white actors who had been portraying POC. What do the coaches think about representation in this context, and where would they weigh in on versatility versus verisimilitude?

Paul, whose life and work have straddled seven decades, responds with intellectual honesty and a sprinkling of Devil’s Advocate: “I have two takes on that really. One is that it’s a shame if you take any work away from an actor. Actors, that’s what they do: they impersonate everybody, without politics, without judgement, and it seems a shame in the world of infinite imagination to deprive anybody of the ability to impersonate or play any role. To me, it depends upon the spirit in which the thing is done. Take the role of Godbole in A Passage to India, played by Sir Alec Guinness. If we made the film today, of course we would cast Indian actors, but was Alec Guinness derogating or mocking India when he played that? No, he did a sterling job, with total respect for the culture. And then, you look on the other side of it. There’s an employment theme: why would you want to – with so many great African American actors – why on earth would you want to cast a white person to do that – unless there is some sort of exceptional necessity in that casting?”

Nic is slightly more unequivocal. “Yes, every actor can potentially play whatever they want and whoever they want, but it’s not about whether they can at the moment, it’s about whether they should. And we all have a responsibility in many ways in life right now to open up the doors to some of the more under-represented ethnicities and cultures. I feel that the only way I can responsibly be a coach in the current climate is to – if anything comes along that I feel could be coached by somebody of a more appropriate ethnic background, then I’ll pass that along. And that’s a no-brainer.”

Nic still has to grapple with and practice even those accents she couldn’t in all good conscience tutor someone to speak. “It’s important for me to understand how those accents work because I may get someone of that ethnic background coming to me wanting a different accent. Everybody starts at an accent from a different place, because everyone’s accent articulation patterns are different. So, for me, I may say the ‘ow’ sound as in the word mouth. I know I have to drop my tongue, because the northern Irish accent has more of a high tongue position. If I was teaching that ‘ow’ vowel to someone who wasn’t northern Irish, I’d have to understand where their tongue position may be. I can’t say to everybody, ‘Oh, for this sound you need to lower your tongue,’ because they might not need to lower their tongue. They might need to raise, flatten or loosen their tongue. So it’s not one-size fits all. It’s part of my job to look into these histories and cultures, and understand how these sounds work and feel.”

Joy picks up the question of representation as it relates to The Simpsons and other animated shows, and examines it all through a wide cultural lens. “I appreciate the movement to re-cast these roles. There is no justification for characters like Apu and Doctor Hibbert being voiced by white actors, and it’s something I’ve opposed for a long time. It simply perpetuates stereotypes and caricatures. And there’s no justification because there are a multitude of actors who could have voiced these characters, and who could have embodied the racial, linguistic, and ethnic background of these characters. BIPOC actors already have limited opportunities as a result of limited stories on BIPOC, so why deprive them of the opportunity? In addition to perpetuating colonialism mentality, white characters voicing Indian, American and Black characters completely ignores the history of Blackface, Brownface, and minstrel performances, all of which were racist practices meant to mimic and inaccurately portray these communities through humor.”

In closing: with whom were the trio most proud of working; who was the actor or person who shone the brightest under or alongside them? Paul plumps for Tobey Maguire, Joy for BD Wong, actors they lavish with praise. Nic takes a different approach, declining to name anyone specific. “I’m most proud of the clients who come and commit to the work – and they come back as much as they need, as they can afford, as they want, and they make genuine improvement, and it has a genuine impact on their life and their career. That’s the amazing kind of thing about this job. With the right attitude, and enough time and money I think anybody can learn an accent… but that’s a Holy Trinity that doesn’t always come together.”

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Please tell us your picks for the best and worst accents in film and TV in the comments below. Also, there are links to our interviewees should you wish to enlist their services, or are curious about their work.

Paul Meier – Dialect Services www.paulmeier.com

Nic Redman – Voice Coach and Accent Specialist Nicredmanvoice.com

Joy Lanceta Coronel – Speech, Dialect and Communication Coach joylanceta.com

The post Dialect Coaches on Actors and the Best and Worst Accents appeared first on Den of Geek.

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