Y’all versus yinz: Accents may say more about who we are than where we’re from
In the United States, regional accents are much more complicated than their simplistic stereotypes. Take that reductive “Southern” tone heard so often in pop culture. Researchers regularly identify significant differences throughout the region, with variations including Appalachia, Ozark, Coastal Southern, Louisiana Cajun and many others. These geographic dialects evolve through a complex combination of cultures, demographics, ancestry, and social class, but growing evidence indicates that it goes much further. At Ohio State University, linguists suspect that your accent isn’t just a representation of where you live: It highlights WHO you see yourself as a person.
“We’re used to language patterns like regionally based accents: You speak like the people who live around you,” explained Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a linguist at OSU and co-author of a small study recently published in the journal. American speech. “But here we discovered that certain aspects of language can be linked to identity rather than just place of residence.”
Campbell-Kibler and his colleagues focused on Defiance County, Ohio. With a population of approximately 38,000, the county located in the northwest corner of the state is located in a transition zone between two accents: the Northern Inland accent (lower Great Lakes regions like Toledo, Detroit, Michigan, and Chicago, Illinois) and the Midland accent (parts of western and southern Ohio deeper in the Midwest). This result here is a mixture of distinct phonetic traditions from multiple locations, which has led researchers to wonder: do regional identity and personal travel habits also contribute to a person’s accent?
To find out, the team recorded interviews with 22 men living in Defiance County. They then evaluated five specific vowel patterns and how they aligned with the speaker’s journey and self-defined rural “country” persona. Although linguists initially hypothesized that personal travel might have a strong influence on speech, they found only one vowel instance supporting this theory. Even then, the bond wasn’t particularly strong.
However, how a study participant identified themselves seems to say a lot more. During the interviews, researchers asked volunteers about their lives based on topics such as their music preferences, favorite vehicles, and hobbies. The team then scored the responses based on their associations with rural life (like hunting, fishing, and farming) or with other hobbies like golf, video games, and cycling. Finally, participants were asked how they identified in high school and whether they thought they had more in common with people in the nearest town — Fort Wayne, Indiana — or with someone in a place like rural Idaho.
Although Defiance County is hundreds of miles from the South or Appalachia, home-minded respondents more often employed two vowel patterns associated with these remote regions. Historical records indicate at least some migration from Appalachia to Defiance County during the 20th century, but study participants cited no direct connections to the region. They identified the culture of “country” more with a person’s lifestyle than with a physical location. Although the pool of studies is relatively small, the authors believe that similar results could be detectable in many other places.
“People today are influenced not only by the people they live with, but also by everything they read and see on the Internet and on television,” Campbell-Kibler said. “The way people speak can be affected by who they want to be, not just where they live.”
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