Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents (上)
来源:http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-america-where-people-speak-without-accents
[1]If you want to anger a linguist/'lɪŋgwɪst/, try bringing up a speech pattern called General American. “General American is a concept for which I’ve struggled to find a satisfying definition,” writes Ben Trawick-Smith of Dialect/'daɪə'lɛkt/Blog. Dennis Preston, a dialectologist/ˌdaiəlek'tɔlədʒist/and sociolinguist at Oklahoma State University, goes even further. “General American doesn’t exist,” Preston says, “He was demoted/ˌdi'mot/to private or sergeant/'sɑrdʒənt/a long, long time ago.”
linguist/‘lɪŋgwɪst/n. 语言学家
Dialect/‘daɪə’lɛkt/n. 方言，土话；同源语；行话；个人用语特征
dialectologist/ˌdaiəlek’tɔlədʒist方言学家
sociolinguist 社会语言学家
demoted/ˌdi’mot/vt. 使降级；使降职
privaten. 列兵；二等兵
sergeant/‘sɑrdʒənt/n. 军士；警察小队长；海军陆战队中士；高等律师
[2]But the concept persists/pɚ'sɪst/: we believe that, for example, newscasters/'nuzkæstɚ/, maybe some actors, and certainly some people, somewhere, speak an unaccented/ʌn'æksɛntɪd/variety/və'raɪəti/of American English. For instance, when Stephen Colbert explained his vocal'vokl/patterns to 60 Minutes, he said:
persists/pɚ’sɪst/vi. 存留，坚持；持续，固执
newscasters/‘nuzkæstɚ/. 新闻广播员；新闻评论广播员
unaccented/ʌn'æksɛntɪd/adj. 无重音的；无抑扬的；非重音的
vocal’vokl/adj. 歌唱的；声音的，有声的
[3]“At a very young age, I decided I was not gonna have a Southern accent. Because people, when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand/'ʃɔrthænd/that someone was stupid, you gave the character a Southern accent. And that’s not true. Southern people are not stupid. But I didn’t wanna seem stupid. I wanted to seem smart. And so I thought, ‘Well, you can’t tell where newsmen are from.’”
shorthand/‘ʃɔrthænd/n. 速记；速记法
[4]The name of this accentless accent varies; sometimes it’s called Standard American, or Broadcast English, or Network English, or, as it was created by two independent linguists in the 1920s and 1930s, General American. It is a neutral accent, one without distinguishing features.
[5]But where does General American come from? Is there a place where people, young and old, speak like newscasters?
[6]George Philip Krapp was the first major scholar/'skɑlɚ/to use the term “General American.” In his 1925 book, The English Language in America, he roughly described the concept as the variant of English spoken by the majority of the country. Essentially, he said that New England has a regional dialect, the South has a regional dialect, and then everybody else, and sometimes people in New England and the South, spoke General American.
scholar/‘skɑlɚ/n. 学者；奖学金获得者
[7]John Kenyon quickly followed up on this theory, writing in 1930 that 90 million Americans spoke General American in another book, American Pronunciation. Kenyon actually laid out some linguistic and geographical guidelines for General American. The concept caught on outside the linguistic community. Accent coaches and acting coaches still to this day train in General American, which is sometimes phrased as “losing an accent,” as Colbert says he did, rather than adopting General American. “Some irresponsible speech pathologists actually engage in this, for money,” Preston said (practically yelled). “Us linguists, of course, hold them in nothing but contempt/kən'tɛmpt/.”
contempt/kən'tɛmpt/
n. 轻视，蔑视；耻辱
[8]Kenyon grew up in Northeastern Ohio and stayed in the region to teach; his specific linguistic maps of sounds for General American was heavily influenced by the way he spoke, which is to say, how upper-middle-class non-recent-immigrant white people from Northeastern Ohio spoke. I’m using the past tense here for a reason, which is that by the early 1960s, linguists began noticing something very different in that region. The entire vowel system of the parts of the country along the Great Lakes, stretching from New York cities like Rochester and Buffalo straight through to Chicago and Detroit, began to dramatically change.
[9]This change was dubbed by Bill Labov, the godfather of American linguistics, as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. The classic Midwestern accent is exclusively a result of that shift. Some examples: the vowel sound in the word “bag,” before the Shift, was pronounced with the tongue fairly low in the mouth. After the Shift, that vowel sound was, as linguists say, raised: the tongue begins much higher in the mouth. And that’s not all the tongue is doing for Midwesterners: it’s also forming what’s called a “centering diphthong.”
[10]A diphthong is a compound vowel, made up of two simpler vowels, which are called monophthongs. The vowel in the word “coin” is a diphthong: it starts as “oh” and moves to “ee.” For Midwesterners before the Shift, and basically everyone else (besides Canadians) both before and after, the vowel in the word “bag” is a monophthong. But Midwesterners, in addition to raising that initial sound, also move their tongues toward the center of their mouths. So “bag” becomes something closer to “byeg.”
[11]“Byeg” is not part of General American by any definition, not Kenyon’s (because it happened after his time) and not in any modern accent coach’s (because it’s so instantly identifiable with the Great Lakes area). So right away, if we wanted to simply peg General American to the place where the guy who basically created it was born and raised, we’re already out of luck: people in Northeastern Ohio do not speak that way anymore, if they ever did.
[12]Within the linguistic community, the idea that General American had any relation to any actual geographical place was quickly destroyed. The field of American linguistics advanced very quickly in the mid-20th century, and by 1950 numerous studies were released that found that even within Northeastern Ohio, there were multiple distinctive accents and dialects, and that certainly Kenyon’s rules for General American did not apply to the vast part of the country he claimed. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift work further combusted any idea that General American described the way people talk in the Midwest.
[13]But the vaguely Midwestern basis for General American has stuck around in surprising ways. Most Americans do not really believe they have an accent; this is a reasonable, if inaccurate, thought, as most people are surrounded by others who speak the same way they do. But the Midwest is a particularly bizarre place, and Preston knows that better than anyone.
[14]Preston is a pioneer in the study of perceptual dialectology, the study of how normal people think about dialects: where they come from, where they are, what they consist of. A 1996 study of Michiganders’ beliefs about their own accents asked them to rank states based on how “correct” their accents are, and found that by far, Michiganders ranked the English of Michigan as the “most correct.” The “least correct,” according to Michiganders, was Alabama, and the only states that sounded near to as correct as Michigan? The states immediately nearby—except for Illinois. The study is a good indication that, generally, Americans tend to believe that the accent they’re most familiar with is the most correct.
[15]But Preston also gave this test to Southerners, specifically to respondents at Auburn University in Alabama. Here’s where things get weird: the Alabamans did not rank their own speech as particularly correct. In fact, the only states the Alabamans considered worse than Alabama were nearby states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The Alabamans ranked highest the Mid-Atlantic area: Maryland, Delaware, Virginia. The pride that Midwesterners have in their own accent, and their contention that Midwestern English is very correct, is nationally unusual.
[16]Even crazier: Midwesterners tend to not actually hear the very things that distinguish them to the rest of the country. Another study told Michigan speakers to listen to a Detroit speaker say the word “last,” which a Midwesterner will often pronounce with a notable Shift-influenced diphthong as “lee-est.” Then the respondents were given three synthesized other recordings: these had been altered so that that accent was dialed up or down. The respondents were told to match up the original pronunciation with the most similar synthesized one. Not a single one could do so; instead, every correspondent picked an accent that was lessened, closer to the way the word is pronounced outside the Midwest. Michiganders, apparently, have trouble hearing their own accents—which begs the question, how can you know your accent is correct, when you can’t even really identify it?
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