The science of accents

James shackell explores some facts about the way we speak.

To the average ear, your accent is simply the way you sound when you speak. But to the ear with a little know-how, your accent is way more than that. It’s your culture and history. It’s your parents’ family tree. The way you pronounce your ‘o’s is probably due to the movement of forgotten people hundreds of years ago. Your accent can hint at your trustworthiness, and determine how well Alexa can understand your pizza order. It’s a verbal signature that, in some cases, can geotag you, right down to a particular neighbourhood in a particular town at a particular time.

“Your voice is like a fingerprint,” says Hollywood dialect coach Erik Singer. “It reveals a great deal. Speech is by far the most complex thing we do with our bodies, and everyone’s an expert. That’s the thing: it’s so automatic that we often have no idea how we speak. It’s one of the few things we’re both expert in and completely ignorant about.”

It’s important to distinguish between accents and dialects here. While an accent refers to the way words are pronounced, a dialect is a complex verbal soup made up of jargon, language, slang, grammar and pronunciation. As David Foster Wallace once pointed out, Black American English and Latino English are both dialects, but there are also dialects that have nothing to do with ethnicity, such as “Medicalschool English, People-who-follow-pro-wrestling-closely English and 12-Year-old-males-whose-worldview-is-deeply-informed-bysouth-park English.”

The point of a dialect is for group members to understand each other. Accents work in kind of the same way. They need lots of things to grow, but two big ones are isolation and time. As a general rule, the more isolated a community, the more distinctive they’re going to sound. Ocracoke Island off North Carolina, for example, sits 50-odd kilometres from the mainland and, through an unusual turn of events, was settled by ex-pirates, Native Americans and English sailors in the 1700s. It remained cut off from America for so long that, even today, Ocracoke residents sound like extras from an Elizabethan costume drama.

Younger countries also tend to have fewer accents than older ones, which is why the UK has roughly 40 recognised accents compared to America’s 20 – despite being the size of the state of Alabama. UK accents have had longer to percolate and split. “It’s all about settlement patterns,” Erik says. “In America, there are more accents east of the Mississippi, because people have been speaking English there for longer.”

Australia is younger still, which is why our accent is fairly consistent across the board – we can tell if someone grew up in the bush or the ’burbs… sort of. Even then, it’s no sure thing. The differences are subtler, like the way South Australians sometimes rhyme ‘pool’ with ‘fuel’. And of course, that's just ‘white’ Australian accents – First Nations people, Vietnamese, Senegalese, Italian and Greek Australians all have their own verbal ticks and markers. Erik says that, eventually, Melburnians and Sydneysiders might sound as different from one another as New Yorkers and Texans. “There do seem to be some regional accents emerging,” he says. “They just need more time to develop.”

Your accent gets formed early. Really early. We’re all born as verbal clean slates, but studies have shown that infants as young as six months old are beginning to soak in the accents around them. They even cry with a different twang: French babies, for example, tend to laugh condescendingly rise in pitch when they blubber, while German babies do the opposite. The first consonants uttered by English-speaking children tend to be ‘p’, ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘h’ and ‘w’, and most of those mouth-sounds are hard-coded by the time you hit puberty. Erik says the years between 10 and 19 are the most crucial – that’s when your accent settles into your body. “It’s kind of like a pair of leather shoes,” he says. “It needs to be broken in.”

But even when it does find its groove, you’re not necessarily stuck with your accent for life. Our pronunciation can change when we move overseas, though again, it’s easier for kids: research shows the longer we’ve been speaking with an accent, the harder it is to shift. (This obviously doesn’t take into account young Australians

who move to London and, within weeks, start saying stuff like “innit?” unironically.)

Accents don’t just determine how you sound, but also how people feel about how you sound. Language app Babbel surveyed users and found most people (unsurprisingly) consider French the sexiest accent – German (perhaps also unsurprisingly) was voted the least erotic. Nervous passengers on planes supposedly find Received Pronunciation, also known as Queen’s English, to be the most trustworthy accent. (Apparently, the ‘posher’ the pilot, the less likely you are to crash into a mountain.) By contrast, only one per cent of people said they felt reassured by a Scouse accent from Liverpool and its surrounds.

“Sexiness is in the ear of the beholder, obviously,” Erik says. “It’s all really subjective. If you ask non-brits what the sexiest English accent is, Birmingham comes out on top. But when you ask British people, it’s the opposite.” This kind of swings both ways. Accent perception has kept many of our worst racial and cultural stereotypes alive. (Just think of Mickey Rooney in

Breakfast at Tiffany’s and you’ll know what we’re talking about.) Depending where you’re from, your patience for certain accents might be higher than for others – but as American culture coach Regina Rodríguez-martin says, it’s probably less about them being harder to understand, and more about you not valuing them as much. Erik agrees – this sort of stuff says more about the listener than the speaker. “In the US, if you’re from the South, people assume you’re friendlier, but also dumber,” he says. The same might be said for Aussies with a more ‘ocker’ way of speaking, but “the truth is, you can’t tell stuff like intelligence from somebody’s accent.”

Accent bias is creeping into technology, too. In 2018, The Washington Post discovered Alexa and Siri were 30 per cent more likely to make mistakes with non-native English speakers. People who spoke Spanish as a first language, for example, were understood six per cent less than speakers who grew up in California.

(Two guesses where most big tech companies are based.) This is just one of the reasons why diversity in the tech world is so important – an algorithm that only hears one accent will assume all humans talk that way.

Physically speaking, your accent is the unconscious coordination of dozens of facial muscles, including the placement of your lips, throat, larynx, jaw, teeth and tongue. Here’s an example: hold your hand in front of your mouth and say the words ‘pit’ and ‘spit’. You should feel a little puff of air after ‘pit’, but not so much after ‘spit’. That’s because, in English, the ‘puh’ sound is always aspirated (in other words, breathy), except after the letter ‘s’. English speakers can’t easily hear the difference between the two ‘p’s, because English doesn’t really care how breathy your ‘p’s are. In Thai, though, an aspirated and unaspirated ‘p’ mean completely different things, and a native speaker would never confuse the two. “Australian speakers tend to have a higher jaw than people in other countries,” Erik says, “and your tongues are usually very muscular. They’re bunched laterally in the back and the middle. Tongues are either flat like pancakes or thick like hot dogs – we call this the hot dog–pancake hypothesis. Australian tongues tend to be more like hot dogs.”

There are still some things we don’t know about accents. Why coma patients, for example, sometimes wake up speaking different dialects or even languages (scientists reckon it might be the brain rewiring itself after trauma). Or whether animals have accents. Some species certainly do. Sperm whales in the Caribbean use different clicking patterns than whales in the Pacific, and dogs have been shown to mimic their owners’ accents over time. Some breeds even develop ‘posh barks’, apparently, whatever that means.

And how about all those dodgy Australian accents in American movies? What’s going on there? “The Aussie accent is easier for Brits,” Erik admits. That could be because of its Southern British origins – although Erik has another theory: “They do watch a lot of Neighbours.”