Letter from America
California up-speak is drowning out Southern accents and Brooklynese
It is impossible for an American to open his mouth without making some other American understand him.
Almost everyone speaks rudimentary General American English, with advanced speakers striking the managerial tone of Acela English, common in the East Coast academicmedia-politics-business complex, and named after the Acela Express that links Boston, New York and DC.
But while basic American English is, unlike most of its speakers, shrinking, and a standardised accent is, like most of its speakers, spreading, not all regional accents are declining.
Regional accents are really subregional, in that they mark origin and class within geography. The Boston Brahmin and the Boston Irish extend their long vowels, but the Rp-like Brahmin accent, as spoken by Grace Kelly, once excluded the Boston Irish from paaking the caar in Haahvad Yaad. Today, however, the Brahmin accent is known as the ‘Kennedy accent’, after its Boston Irish impersonators.
You still drink cawfee in Long Island and caafee in Boston, but intra-regional differences are flattening. John Kerry originally spoke Brahmin, but smoothed his mann-ah of speech after entering politics in the Seventies, arriving at a snooty ‘Massachusetts accent’.
The same dilution has occurred in New York City. Native New Yorkers can still hear the rough music of the Five Boroughs, but the rest of us hear the generic melody of old Noo Yawk — if, that is, we hear it at all. Only the elderly still pronounce curl as coil with an ‘oi’.
Kerry’s presidential run in 2004 was the Brahmin accent’s last public stand. The dentated Judeo-brooklynese cadences that revitalised American literature in the postwar era are likely to leave the stage with Bernie Sanders. The world knows Italian Bronx from Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but modern Bronx has the Hispanic lilt of more than half its speakers. Our wiseguy president, Donny from Queens, speaks generic New York and drops his r’s after his vowels and his terminal g’s like a populist. He also has the non-new York habit, possibly contracted from his Scottish mother, of the ‘low-back merger’ typical in other Northern cities, where cot sounds like caught.
You can still tell a Northeasterner from a Midwesterner, a Californian from a Southerner, but the Northeastern, Midwestern and Southern accents have lost ground to General American English since the Fifties – thanks to increased mobility through the interstate system and cheap air travel, the promotion of a standard accent through television, and emigration from the declining cities of the Northeast to the South and West.
The various accents of Older Southern English declined after the Civil War, though traces survive in the back country. Its successor, Southern English, retains regional variations such as Appalachian hillbilly or the Low Country accent of Georgia and South Carolina, all sharing the complex of vowel sounds known as the Southern Shift, in which sit and set sound like see-it and say-it, and time and team like Tom and tame.
The current battleground is northern Virginia, now becoming Nova, a dormitory of Washington, DC, and the massive bureaucracy of what backcountry Southerners call the feral
gummint. If Northern Virginia falls, that opens the road to Richmond, Virginia, where about is still pronounced a boat and house still rhymes with gross.
The South also faces a secession problem. Southern English is much the same among black and white speakers; the intensity of the accent reflects economic status, not skin colour. But the rise of identity politics has retrospectively created a distinct dialect, AfricanAmerican English. Pressed from without by superior forces, and divided within, the South will fall again.
Somewhere west of Lubbock, Texas, the Southern accent cedes to the California Shift. California has long been the laboratory of the American future and the manufactory of the American self-image, and Silicon Valley now augments Hollywood’s ability to counter the linguistic influence of the East Coast media. The Western accent, first noticed in the 1980s, carries notes of North and South, and drawls the broad ‘a’ in bat like that in father. Judging from the global triumph of ‘up-speak’, California may be the future of American English.
Southern California begat the Valley Girl drawl, and she begat ‘up-speak’, in which all statements sound like questions. In the Nineties, the TV sitcom Friends smeared up-speak around the world. Southern California has a high number of Spanishspeaking immigrants.
Did up-speak develop so that the English-speaking majority could check that each sentence had been understood? In which case, up-speak’s technical name should be the Amicable Interrogative.
Dominic Green is Life & Arts Editor of Spectator USA