In today’s American society there are many different accents, from the good old southern draw to the New Yorker or just the plain old boring mid western accent. Why are there so many differences, what makes our accents unique and why are we so sensitive when people poke fun of us because we do not speak like they do? The film, American Tongues, tries to answer these questions.
Why do we speak differently in different parts of our own country? If we go back to the days of the settlers we can see that certain areas were originally settled by people from different regions around Europe. For instance, Londoners tended to settle in the Virginia area and the Philadelphia area was settled by people from the northern region of England. They brought over their own ways of speaking and as they started communicating with the non English speaking natives they started to form their own kind of accents. As the settlers moved westward the north and south started to overlap and that is why there is really not a big difference in the way the northerners and southerners speak out west. Another reason that accents differ between regions is physical barriers. Again, going back to the settlers, once a certain group had reached a physical barrier that they could not cross, whether it was a mountain range or a large body of water, that was where they stopped, and so did there accent. And as other groups were able to overcome those barriers they took their accents with them.
So why are we so sensitive to people poking fun at our accents but we turn right around and judge them based on the way they speak? When people are making fun of the way we speak or judging us because of our accent we become very defensive. People in general are proud of the area that they live in or proud of their heritage so when someone is making fun of the way they speak they become very defensive. But we will turn right around and look at a southerner and think,” Boy is that one dumb hillbilly” just because of the southern accent without knowing one single thing about them. Or maybe we hear a girl from Brooklyn trying to give a speech at a business meeting and think to ourselves, “What does this bimbo from the Bronx know about business, shouldn’t she be at home taking care of her kids”. We shouldn’t be so judgmental just because people speak differently. They could be the brightest person in the world and we would never know it. Just like it was referenced in the movie about how people judged Jimmy Carter because he was a southerner. Right away, people had an opinion about him and that just isn’t fair.
The Boston area seems to have the most diverse accents in the country. The people from that area can tell what neighborhood others are from just by the accent they have. The areas all around Boston were influenced by the early settlers. The north end and east side were mainly Italians that carried a version of the New York accent while the south side is more Irish and they have their own accent. The Boston ‘Brahmins’ were part of the wealthy class that were English. They stayed apart from the other immigrants and seemed to have kept a lot of the original British accent that their ancestors had.
So what factors determine how we speak? A lot of how we sound comes from our ancestors and where they settled at. Then as the different societies started to form in America our accents also started to form. And depending on your social class, the people you grew up with or the people that raised you your accents were formed. Our accents can change as we grow up and move to different areas around the world, but as it was noted in the movie, when one becomes angered or agitated our accents that we grew up with come out. We also tend to migrate back to our original accents when we are around the people we grew up with or with people that have the accents we had as children.
Just because we have a different accent doesn’t make us different. As a society we need to start accepting people for who they are, not how they sound. Just because you have a southern accent it doesn’t mean you are uneducated, or if you speak like Brahmin you are a wealthy intelligent human being. Take the time to get to know someone before you judge them, they may just surprise you!