At a conference this week in New Orleans, I’ve now spent time with two different friends who had originated from these parts. Both now live in northern California. There were some striking similarities to their respective tales of emigration. Both say they left because of the weather – they could not spend the rest of their lives in a place so relentlessly hot and muggy. After spending almost a week here I completely understand this sentiment.
But the other thing they had in common was that both were the only members of their respective families who had never had the New Orleans accent. One of them, in fact, who speaks with something not that far from a generic middle American accent, told me that when he was a child growing up in a small town near New Orleans, people would ask him what sort of accent he had.
So is it possible that children know, subliminally, that they are one day going to leave a place when they grow up? And knowing this, do they subconsciously adopt the accent of the larger world to which they long to escape?
I realize that two data points do not a statistical trend make. But still, it is intriguing.
All my life I’ve been asked by people in my hometown (Ohio) where my accent comes from. They usually name somewhere in Europe. I’ve come up with a few hypotheses:
1. I am so introverted that I interact with people too rarely to pick up their way of speaking, so I get my examples from the media and immediate family. If it’s possible to pick up an accent from books, I have that accent.
2. People with Asperger’s syndrome often seem to have an accent to others. I don’t have that, but others in my family may.
3. I speak hestitatingly, carefully, enunciate, and use a slightly larger speaking vocabulary than the average American.
4. I thought that, as a Mormon, I may have a Utah accent, since a lot of my social interaction was with other Mormons, who mostly were in Utah until about the 1940s. But when I went to Utah, I got the question more than ever. So I don’t think this is true.
Most of my friends from high school stayed in Ohio for college and afterwards, and I didn’t. In fact, as of this week, every single member of my family has moved away from there. So there’s another self-selected data point for you.
As someone in the deep South, I’ve wondered why the more-central part of Birmingham shows almost no Southern drawl as compared to the outskirts. I certainly don’t think it is due only to the influence of nonregional persons and media, schooling in other regions, the ability to travel, or escapism (as Southern stylizations can be particular to small communities easily gotten away from physically though maybe not more generally). But more peculiar is the acquaintance who for years will speak with not a generic accent, but a pronounced accent from someplace far away – then drop it one day. In that case, I think it is easier to claim an escape motive.
But this bit of speech psychodynamics seems too convoluted to sharply dissect. What is the cause of the correlation: persons who do not fit in speechwise want to move, or those who may want to move adopt a nonregional speech pattern? Would we say someone who chooses as a youngster to spell words more correctly (conventionally) than do her parents is unconsciously telling the family that she will want to move?
Maybe there are some constructs of childhood behavior that could help to show causality. What variables would be involved? I’d think..
> Influences such as friends from other linguistic groups, along with geographical and social divisions.
> The biological predisposition of someone in the family to acquire different speech patterns.
> The linguistic predisposition in uttering the words used by the child. (Some accents just require less expended energy than others; some are better suited to different thought patterns.)
I think Doug pointed to some possible general biological and linguistic reasons there.
It seems as a study the best bet would be to find persons reflecting deviant patterns within their given friend and kinship groups, find out whether they felt disconnected as young children due to this reason primarily, and study their speech patterns. Then find out if there were any other factors that might have led to their adopting another speech pattern (brain, throat, singing lessons, etc). Compare this to a control group with similar characteristic factors. I don’t know what social science threads have best studied this sort of thing.