Why We Talk Funny

Carrie and Megan talk with Dr Valerie Fridland about her newest book, Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.

• Maine Monitor interview with Platner
• Platner's apology

Transcript

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Megan Figueroa: Hi, welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: And I'm Megan Figueroa. Hey, we're back quick. 

Carrie: We're back quick. Yeah, we get to this month because our guest this week, her book just came out. So we got to get this one out, too.

Megan: Yep. Another interesting conversation. I love talking with people about language.

Carrie: Yeah, me too.

Megan: What a treat.

Carrie: It is a treat, yes. But today, before we get into that very fun conversation, let's talk about something a little bit of a downer.

Megan: What is our second tagline? It's a little bit of a downer. Hey, this stuff is real. 

Carrie: No, this stuff is real. And I do think we need to push back on it and it really upsets me that this word has made a bit of a resurgence. The R word. There are two R words, but the intellectual disability related one. Not only has it made a comeback, but one of the people running in the Democratic Senate race for Maine, Graham Platner, used it in an interview.

Megan: Like in a recent interview?

Carrie: Relatively recent. I think it was maybe the beginning of this month. 

Megan: Oh my God.

Carrie: It was an article published by the Maine Monitor.

Megan: Oh, okay. Local joint.

Carrie: Yeah, and he used it while talking about the controversy about his Nazi tattoo. Like, "What? This guy is walking red flags. Just all the flags. 

Megan: Also, there is not an insignificant thread line between Nazism and eugenics. 

Carrie: Right. Yes. There was a significant number of people with disabilities, including intellectual disabilities, who were murdered by the Nazi regime.

Megan: Yep. Did I say thread line? I meant through line. 

Carrie: Fair enough. It kind of makes sense. Thread line actually kind of makes sense. 

Megan: Yeah. There's a thread, and it goes through.

Carrie: Yeah. And it took him 18 years to cover that goddamn tattoo up, too.

Megan: I know and only because he's running for Senate. Like, What do you have?"

Carrie: Not only that, only because a bunch of people on his campaign quit over it. And then people were like, "What are you doing?" And then he was like, "Oh, okay, I better cover it up." And then he also used this slur in a Reddit post from several years ago, which has since been deleted. 

Megan: Oh, yeah. He's the Redditor. There's a lot of Reddit stuff from him. 

Carrie: Yeah. And so this is his apology, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I said it. I'm endeavoring to improve every single day. I'm not a perfect person, and I continue to try to be better. I will say that my politics is one of inclusivity and one of showing up for everyone. And I will continue every day to represent that in our policies and in our campaign."

Megan: If that's your ideology, and you're not a child, I feel like you would have known to not use that word already.

Carrie: Yeah. I just feel like we decided a while ago that this was not an okay word to use.

Megan: I feel like I was maybe going into high school around that time. it's been a while.

Carrie: Yeah. I feel like it was still being used in media, like in regular TV shows, until just before the 2010s, but that's still a long time ago. 

Megan: Yeah, it is.

Carrie: I don't know, and especially if you're running for the Democratic race, you probably do not want to be signaling this. 

Megan: No. I'm so annoyed because I've been seeing so many damn think pieces where Democrats need to stop using this politically woke language because you're alienating people.
The R word, I just don't even feel like it's at that level where we can even say that's too woke to not use it. 

Carrie: Yeah. I know, and it's so bizarre that it's made this resurgence because I just don't get it. It doesn't feel good.

Megan: No, it doesn't feel good. I don't know. He's a grown ass man. He's been around. He knows not to use it. That just tells me that he uses it in his private life if it comes out during an interview.

Carrie: Yeah. I feel like this guy should have been cooked a long time ago. The fact that he is, I think, still leading in the polls is scary to me.

Megan: Well, I don't know if he rescinded it, but I think Bernie endorsed him. 

Carrie: Yeah, and Elizabeth Warren.

Megan: Yeah, it's like winning at all costs kind of thing. 

Carrie: No, he looks like what they think a working-class dude looks like. 

Megan: Okay. Listen. I hate it because, yes, both of them are like champions of the working class, but it's an insult to assume that a working-class person would just use the R word or these liberties that people are like, "Oh." 

Carrie: Yeah, I don't think that's the claim I'm trying to make. I just think that he's physically working class coded to them. 

Megan: Well, like John Fetterman.

Carrie: Yeah. And saying some of the right things. 

Megan: Right. No, I'm just saying. No, I didn't say from what you said. I'm just thinking overall, like, this kind of working-class hero thing of people running for office. We shouldn't have a lower standard for them because it's just respecting human dignity, right? To not use that word.

Carrie: True. But also, you have to actually be working class. He's not.

Megan: Exactly.

Carrie: He's not. Do you know his history? 

Megan: No. I know he's in the military.

Carrie: His grandfather is a very famous designer. 

Megan: Fashion designer? 

Carrie: No, chairs and stuff. You buy these chairs that he designed for thousands of dollars. I can't even remember. He's from a super-wealthy family.

Megan: I hate it. We don't really get true working-class people in these positions like we should because it's really hard to make a living running for office and doing that kind of stuff. Don't have the safety nets that other people do. 

Carrie: Yeah, he's a piece of work, and even if he had all the right politics otherwise and just made this one slip-up, I feel like we people should take a step back and think carefully. But this is not the only thing. There's also the Nazi tattoo, and he pretends to be something he is not. Oh, and he sells oyster to his mom's company. 

Megan: No.

Carrie: Yeah. He's a nepo baby.

Megan: He's a nepo baby, yeah. Just another nepo baby that would be in Senate. 

Carrie: Yeah, well, Maine can do better. I don't know how many people listening to us are in Maine.

Megan: You can do better.

Carrie: There are other people in that race. 

Megan: Yeah, man. Just don't say it. God, I hate it. I hate hearing it. 

Carrie: Me too, and it used to be very normal. I grew up with it. 

Megan: It was very normal. 

Carrie: It was very, very normal, but then at some point it was like, "Oh no, that is bad," and it did go away. It didn't.

Megan: I changed as a kid. I was like, "Oh yeah. Okay, I'm not going to say it anymore."

Carrie: Yeah. I was an adult, but I did cut it out, and I don't like that it's come back. Makes me upset.

Megan: It doesn't hurt that the president of the United States is very ableist, to put it lightly. 

Carrie: You want to be vice signaling towards him, which why it makes sense when the Republicans do it, even though I hate it and I wish they wouldn't. But when a Democrat, suppose the Democrat does it, I'm like, "What is even going on?" To me, it's like a sign that his politics are not what you think they are

Megan: Right. Like I said, I think he probably uses this language in his private life. I think that would [crosstalk].

Carrie: Oh, he probably uses worse language in his private life.

Megan: Oh, totally. Yeah, absolutely. 

Carrie:  Anyways, this episode, we talk about more fun things. 

Megan: Yes, with a repeat offender, with a guest we've had before.

Carrie: Yes, that's true. 

[upbeat music]

Carrie: Well, this month we would like to thank our newest patron, Beth Clark. 

Megan: Thank you, Beth. My heart warms when people are able to send a few bucks our way. I know it's hard. 

Carrie: Yeah, I know. It's hard times for everybody, but yes, it's very appreciated, and it does help us pay for everything, all the things on the backend, including our editor. So thank you very much. 

Megan: Thank you.

Carrie: And you can support us at www.patreon.com/vocal fries pod, where we have bonuses, stickers, mugs, and a good sense of supporting an indie podcast. 

[upbeat music]

Megan: We are so excited today to have a repeat offender back. 

Dr. Valerie Fridland: I love being a repeat offender.

Megan: Right? That's, that's what we call them here on this show. Today, we have Dr. Valerie Fridland, who is a professor of linguistics in the English department at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You might remember our episode on that and why she's here today. Her new book "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." Dr. Fridland is a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and the recipient of Linguistics Society of America's Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award. Valerie's work explores how social changes, linguistic forces, and psychological tendencies reshape our language over time, impacting the way we think about and talk to one another. She writes a monthly blog on language-related topics for "Psychology Today," is a regular guest writer for the popular "Grammar Girl podcast," and has a lecture series, "Language and Society," available with the Great Courses. She has appeared as a language expert in a variety of media outlets such as NPR, Armchair Expert, NBC, The Washington Post, New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Thank you so much for being back.

Carrie: Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Valerie: Of course. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. And Dami made me sound good. Thank you. 

Megan: Well, I'm reading it, and I'm like, "I love it." It's like a, what was it? Shine theory? I just love seeing other women excelling in life. 

Dr. Valerie: Well, same back at you. This is like a power group. I love it. 

Megan: Yeah, I love it. So we're here to talk about why we talk funny. Can you tell us why you wanted to write this book and why now? And I know it takes a long time to write books, but is this time in history a good [crosstalk]?

Dr. Valerie: The general now-ness. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: The general now-ness.

Dr. Valerie: Yeah. Well, okay. So many parts to that. This is sort of the bread and butter of what I've done for a living. So, my last book, "Like, Literally, Dude," was a lot of fun to write, and it was really based on what people asked me the most. So what were the things that people came to me and said, "I want to know more about this," or often it was in the form of, "Can you tell people to stop saying this?" So this sort of idea that these were bad features, and I wanted to kind of clear the air on those. That was why I wrote that book at that time, but really in terms of my career and my own personal interests and personal life story, accents have always loomed large in my experience from the time I was a small child with foreign-speaking parents to living in the South, which also has its own accent identity. That's really strong to moving out of the South, where those things became more real to me in terms of how they set me apart or brought me together with people. And so, when I went away to college, that's really what drove me towards linguistics: my experience with languages and accents. My whole career has been based on academic research on accents. Those were the things I studied. So I particularly studied Southern English, and now that I live in the West, I've done a lot on Western English. So accents have always been big in my life. In terms of why now, one is that it felt like the natural progression of where I wanted to go in my own work because I wanted my next book to reflect really things that were important to me and that I wanted to spend a year and a half writing about, and since accents have always been important to me, that was an obvious choice. 

In terms of why now in this world that we live in, I think this is actually the most important time to be writing a book about how things that feel different to us, that feel divisive to us, are actually, if we learn how to look at them from the perspective of history, of commonality, of basic human principles, are actually things that unite us, not divide us. And accents have become particularly salient in our current political and social climate, where we spend a lot of time focusing on what divides us. So I wanted to write a book that addressed those topics and how listening to the way we sound tells us a lot more than that we're different. It actually tells us how much we have in common, even when we don't hear that on the surface. And that was really the motivation for writing this book.

Megan: Did you have any idea how relevant it would be? I'm thinking about just what's happening in the world. The Supreme Court has basically made it okay to racially profile, and we've actually seen this come out in linguistic profiling. So we are seeing these videos of ICE agents saying, "Your accent makes me think you're not American." This is really playing out. 

Dr. Valerie: Right. One thing I talk about in the book is the use of linguistic shibboleths throughout history to identify people that are different than ourselves and how the consequences have been often fatal. If you go back to biblical times when the Gileadites and the Ephraimites were warring, and they used the way the Ephraimites pronounced the word shibboleth to separate them and then kill them. Or, we had something similar in the Dominican Republic, where a dictator basically had people pronounce the word for parsley, and if they didn't have the right R that identified them as a Haitian, they were also slaughtered. So, throughout history, we've seen this repeat itself. 

[cat meows]

Dr. Valerie: Oh, hi, little kitty. I hear a kitty cat in the background saying, "Yes, I agree." There goes a tail. Anyway, I think it's important for us to understand the historical nature of accents. Both how they evolved and how they are these incredible gifts we have that we look upon as somehow negative. Everybody else has an accent. Not me is the first myth. But also how accents mean we're different. And that notice that we need to then assign negative traits to versus, can we understand why accents developed from an evolutionary standpoint? Why might have they been favored by natural selection because they helped with survival in some cases? But also how they bring us together and unite us and serve an incredibly intensive identity function in ways that I think can be used for good as well as evil. And that's the idea of this book: let's look at historical examples of how accents developed, how they've been used, the history behind them to see what we can learn about this situation that we're in uniquely today. 

Carrie: So one of the blurbs on the back of your book says something like that linguistic science, psychology, and history tell us about the evolution of human speech. So what can they tell us about evolution of human speech? 

Dr. Valerie: The really fascinating thing I think that we don't think of when we think about accents is we kind of think of accents as accidental. People think of accents as examples of either people not learning a language well enough or not learning their own language well enough. That feeds to this idea that everybody else has an accent when we're a standard English speaker. It's we don't have an accent, but everybody else does. Of course, the minute you travel outside your home nation, that is clearly a fallacy because you're the one with the accent. And when I lived in Istanbul directly out of graduate school, that was my first job as a visiting professor at Boğaziçi University there. I would walk through the Grand Bazaar, which is this incredible market in Istanbul. It's absolutely fascinating, beautiful. And just from hearing me say, "No, thank you," or "hello," the vendors would say, "Ah, she's American." They would know exactly. They could hear exactly where you're from. My mother came to visit, and she's French Canadian, had a French Canadian accent. We were walking together, and within seconds, they identified her as French Canadian. It was remarkable how good they were at recognizing these accents. It's really clear that accents serve this purpose of identity for us. And so when we look back at why we have them, how they developed, I don't think people tend to think about the fact that ancient humans also had accents that served a really important function. It was the inherent nature of language to be flexible that allowed us to have accents in the first place. From an evolutionary perspective, we've developed things that are useful to us, that are good, that are positive. Having these thumbs that can be opposable, that's been really handy to us as humans. So, usually, natural selection favors things that help us. 

So if it favored accents, that's probably a good thing about accents. The natural tendency of the system is that our mouths and our minds have certain patterns that they follow universally, no matter what language we speak, that lead us to vary in very predictable ways. So that means that the exact realization of how we'll vary is different, but the thing that motivates it or drives it's the same. That's built on what sounds come before or after other sounds when we're creating words, how words fit together in a sentence, how our brain better processes certain things. So it's intrinsic to the nature of language to be variable. That's an asset for us. The only reason those get heard as accents is because when groups migrate and then settle on their own in isolated circumstances, the way that those variations come out, born by these psychological tendencies we have as speakers and articulatory tendencies, will simply be different as a factor of that distance because we're not talking to the same people. We're going to copy the changes that happen in our own group and not in groups that we don't talk to very often. And so that's simply how accents develop. There's nothing social about them in that sense. They're just variations born of the inherent, intrinsic tendency of language to be flexible and follow these natural routes. But the advantage it gives us then is that we have a group identity function served by those accents. That way, in early human history, when people were going out to hunt, and they ran into someone else, at a distance, they could determine whether that person was someone who would be more likely to help them or maybe possibly hurt them or not help them at all. So, this group identifying function then became something that was useful and helped with survival. Again, it would be favored by natural selection. 

So accents are really positive in the sense that they've served us well and they're evolutionarily advantageous to us. But where we go wrong is then noticing difference becomes equated with noticing things that are different between us that we either like or don't like. And so something that was simply like, "Oh, there's group A on the highlands, and they sound like this, and group B in the lowlands, and they sound like that," becomes, "Oh, group A, don't have as good of pelts as we do, and their crops aren't as good, and so they must be doing something wrong. So they're lazy and slovenly." And then if they sound like they're from group A on the highlands, because we think of them as lazy and slovenly, we're going to think of their speech that way. So it gets rolled into these stereotypes that are negative, but that's not intrinsic to the nature of accent itself. So part of the book is really just uncovering the history of how particular accents develop by looking back in time, because then it helps us realize that these ideas and stereotypes we put on them is really a factor of our own kind of biases and not anything to do with the accents themselves, if that makes sense. 

Carrie: It does, yes.

Megan: I was thinking of cognitive biases when you were talking about this. So then it taps into how psychology is related too. So there's our brains trying to be efficient, trying to look for patterns. So is that kind of playing into this, too? When we start to have these social conceptions of accents?

Dr. Valerie: Right. I think it's natural. Social categorization is a natural human tendency. We find a huge amount of evidence of this in psychological experiments and in the way that we seem to categorize, even as babies. You see babies, for example, preferring people with the same accent over those that have different accents in terms of who they'll take toys from and turn toward. So clearly, this is something that we're naturally programmed. We also see experiments that suggest that people categorize on the basis of accent into social categories in terms of how it impacts their memory. So they're better at remembering people within accent groups rather than across them, the way they distinguish them. So clearly it's playing a role in the way that we're processing things. So in that way, yes, it's part of our cognitive bias to categorize by accent. The other aspect of cognitive bias that plays a role here is just familiarity.
One thing that's really redundantly found in experiments is that linguistic familiarity breeds friendliness and positivity in our ratings. So whether it's that we tend to find languages that are familiar or accents that we think are familiar as more attractive, we find that pretty resoundingly in research. Even if we're mistaken. So if I think I recognize an accent or a language, even though I was wrong in what I categorized it from, I will tend to like that language more than if I didn't recognize it, right? So, familiarity just in terms of what I find attractive helps, but also familiarity in terms of brain processing effort helps. So there's a lot of research that suggests the more we are familiar or recognize an accent or a language, the better our brain is at decoding that. And that's like anything. If you practice at anything, you're better at it. But we misread cognitive effort as being a negative thing. 

So when I have to work hard at something, a lot of times I don't really like that thing as much. So, if I'm struggling with calculus, I'm probably going to be like, "Calculus sucks!" But if I'm doing addition, I'm like, "Woo-hoo. So easy, I love it." You're going to like it better. Calculus is probably more useful in physics, for example, but it hurts to do. And so we misread this extra effort as something negatively associated with whatever we're doing that effort for, rather than simply as a byproduct of our brain just doing more work, even though it's actually really good for our brain. It expands our cognitive abilities. It makes us much more capable as speakers, as listeners, as interactants in society when we are working a little harder to be cognitively open and listening, but we don't like it. And so that factors into this cognitive bias because what we find is when people have to use more processing effort, they tend to be more negatively aligned towards the person they're listening to. So if someone that comes to you with an accent you don't recognize makes your brain work a little harder, you read that as, "Ugh, there's something wrong with them," rather than, "I'm just making more effort." So it's kind of two-pronged that we like things that are more familiar because they're more familiar. We also work harder at things that are less familiar because they're less familiar and that itself makes us like them less, if that makes sense.

Carrie: Yeah, it does. It also makes me very sad, and also explains why so many people are turning to AI because it's easier. It feels easier anyway. 

Dr. Valerie: I think. What we don't realize when we push off effort, we get cognitive fluency. The feeling of ease or discomfort we get when we're doing extra cognitive labor is called cognitive fluency. What we don't realize is that cognitive fluency actually, when we work harder at something, we're actually expanding things. We're actually creating neural networks that help us in the long run. So the more we don't want to do hard work, the more we're actually cheating our brain out of things that have been shown to contribute to longevity, to reduce risk of dementia, to greater use of your brain in general. So these are all positive traits, but sometimes it just takes a little effort to do them, and we love to do the simple thing. 

Carrie: We sure do.

Megan: Yeah, we do,

Dr. Valerie: Who doesn't, right? 

Carrie: Right.

Megan: We do. Thinking about this, going back to these cognitive biases and bringing in our early years. So we have infants that are preferring speakers that sound familiar to them. But we also know that in the first year of life, between 8 and 12 months is when infants really hone in on what their vowels and consonants are for the relevant languages that they're hearing. So there are these global learners at the very beginning.

Dr. Valerie: Right, they're universal talkers.

Megan: Yes, exactly. But there's still this tendency to like the familiarity in voices and in people like very young.

Dr. Valerie: Oh, hi puppy! I have my little great Dan coming to join us. Everybody, say hi to Juno! 

Carrie: Hi Juno! 

Megan: Hi Juno!

Dr. Valerie: One of the reasons I put a chapter in the book on baby talk and how babies contribute to accents, and this really cool universal learning that babies do, is because I think what we sometimes don't think about is how we are giving babies input well before they're born. So they hear the mother's voice. So part of this attraction to voices that sound more like the language spoken at home or the accent spoken at home is probably this fixation on the mother or on the caregivers that babies have to begin with. This is just a survival instinct. So if you know that this lady is going to help you survive and give you nourishment, you're probably going to turn to her versus someone that doesn't sound like her. So, in the womb we do think babies actually pick up on some of the rhythmic aspects of the mother's language because that's obviously what they hear best through the filtering of the amniotic fluid. There's a lot of stuff to get through, so the mother's voice is what they hear the most unless a dad has a megaphone at the stomach, which I'm sure has happened.

Carrie: Please don't do that dads. 

Dr. Valerie: I should never say that. Dads do not try this at home. So, I think part of it's just when they're attracted more to the language at home, it's really this idea that nurturer, the caregiver, the giver of milk, sounds like that, and it's survival instincts. The same way that I think the animal baby kingdom, they smell their mother. Their mother has a certain scent. So clearly, things that smell like their mother are going to be more attractive to them. So I think there's a little bit of just sort of that innate survival instinct that's at work there, but the fascinating thing is that babies are universal talkers. They're also universal learners. So if you have two parents that speak two different languages, what you'll find is the child will be able to tease out the sound system of each of those languages separately within the first year of life. It's amazing. If you think about it, we never give babies credit enough. We want them to be able to talk and able to walk and use a potty, but man, they're doing so much work just figuring out the system of language. Let's give them a break and let them wear that diaper a few more years because that is a lot of work. It's a lot of work. You never thought of it that way.

Carrie: I've never thought about it how we're being about the diaper thing. 

Dr. Valerie: We're so pushy, and we don't [inaudible] to use utensils. My God, let's give them a break. We don't recognize the amount of work they're doing. So I think there's two things conflated there. There's this idea that the reason they're more drawn to people that sound like they do at home is probably related to this survival instinct. That makes anything that's related to the parent language, the parent body, the parent smell, anything like that, is going to be just recognized as something nurturing and safe. But then we have this incredible fluid plastic brain that is able to absorb so much input, that's actually the very time that having multiple unfamiliar accents would be best for them. And so if you make an accent familiar to them, then they'll turn to it as much. It's just their initial response when we run experiments is that, okay, it's a familiar accent versus an unfamiliar one. They turn to the familiar one. 

Megan: Absolutely. And you write in the book, "These amazing abilities end up becoming the accent albatrosses around our wrinkled and waddled necks." What do you mean by that? 

Dr. Valerie: I think if anybody has ever tried to learn a language as an adult, you know what I mean, because amazing abilities we have in this first year of life to be little linguistic sponges. We can learn any language equally well without effort. Babies are probably feeling like they're working really hard, but when you think about it, they get to lie there and be taken care of, and all they're doing is absorbing this stuff, and boom, by age two, they're chatting away in both language systems. If they had two or five language systems, if they have five, it's pretty remarkable. But you walk into a room in a language learning context at 20, and it's a whole different ball game, and it's effortful, and it's hard, and you struggle. As my son, who's a college student and in his second year of Spanish, keeps telling me, "This sucks. It's so hard." It's so hard because you learn it in a very different way. Children are primed for the language acquisition process in a way that adults aren't for a number of reasons. One is the brain is different. We actually do see that children have greater resources as cognitive resources devoted to the effort and less lateralized than they are as adults. So there's probably a processing difference in the brain, but even beyond that, there's no competing system. So a baby is born, I hate to say a blank slate because of course there's some theories about what's already in their pre-program, but essentially you don't have any prior knowledge that you have to compete with. As an adult, you have a ton of prior knowledge, an entire language system, maybe two or three. So you have to unlearn while you're learning, whereas a baby just has to learn. So that's another aspect where it's an albatross around our neck is that we actually have a system that competes. Then also you have a number of other concerns as an adult language learner, which is the social side of it, the motivational side of it, the professional side of it.

As a baby, you don't have any of that crap that is also loaded onto having to learn a language. So for all those reasons, it's incredibly hard feet to learn a second language. We sometimes don't give credit where credit is due that you don't need to learn it perfectly. In fact, the cards are stacked against you to learn it perfectly. You need to learn it in a way that makes you intelligible, confident, and happy with what your skillset is, and stop beating yourself up that you need to be completely sounding like a native speaker. In fact, that's the wrong attitude. We shouldn't sound like native speakers because that's not the goal. And so much of who you are is tied up into that identity of what you were as a child and the language you learned at that point. Why would you want to give that up? And to expect people to do that is also atrocious. So, there's so much about being an adult that's wound up in language learning and what your native language is, what the goals you have for your new language. But one goal that should never be is that you have to sound like a native speaker, because it's also almost impossible for most speakers. There's a lot of evidence that the majority of speakers cannot become native-like in their pronunciation as adults. But when you're a child, as long as you're learning before age about 12 or 13, you'll probably sound like a native speaker. It's a fundamentally different process, and we shouldn't use the same goalposts in those two different categories. 

Carrie: Yeah, the frustrating thing about being an adult second language learner is that you're cognitively so much more well-developed. And so you have all these adult thoughts, like you could have philosophical thoughts, you absolutely cannot express in the second language. I think for me, that's the thing that bugs me more than the pronunciation. Obviously, I want to sound intelligible, but I can't get my ideas across, and it's frustrating.

Dr. Valerie:  It can be frustrating. I think there's different goals that you have. I think one thing in that regard is simply as a child learning language, you're exposed constantly every day to that language, to the words of that language, to the structuring of that language. So you're just thinking about, you have 18 years of experience going towards expressing thoughts in that language, expressing the vocabulary needed for those thoughts in that language. When you're an adult language learner, you have to learn all this on the fly while you're bringing home the bacon, making dinner, taking care of kids, holding down a job, trying to fit in. You don't have to worry about that as a baby. And so it's natural to struggle more with that because it's also vocabulary. You think about just how much vocabulary the average child learns on a day. It's like 10 to 50 words a day they're exposed to of new words. You can't possibly put that as a bar for an adult speaker. How many of us, even in our own language, would say, "I'm going to make a goal. I'm going to learn 50 new words a day." Well, if that's all you're doing, maybe, but that's not all you're doing. So absolutely, I think that's a different issue. That's just part of managing time, and it's just hard to have the time to learn all those things. 

Carrie: Yeah, so let's go back a little bit. Another part of your book is sociophonetic. So what is sociophonetics? 

Dr. Valerie: I love sociophonetics. Sociophonetics is the social life of sounds. We don't tend to think of sounds as being variable based on social categories. We think of sounds as just existing. So you just say sounds, but really, if you think about what an accent is, let's just start with this. When we talk about accents, we're talking about pronunciation differences, which is different than a dialect, which can also include accent differences, pronunciation differences, but that's a bigger, broader category that can have vocabulary differences, sentence structure differences, morphemic differences. So how you make words, that's dialect. That's a level of dialect. But when we're talking about accents, it's just pronunciation alone. And so sociophonetics is really, what are the social factors that affect the way we pronounce sounds essentially? And what can variations in sounds tell us about social factors? So it's really things like just looking at how, for example, we say T sounds, that's so fascinating. People don't realize that they have a lot more than T in their language in any language, but in English, we have a lot of different T's. We think of them all as T because in our language, it tells us we just have T. But think about the T in a word like W-A-T-E-R. I'm spelling it because I want everybody who's listening to say that word and think about how they would say it. Well, how you're going to say that word will depend on sociophonetic aspects of where you're from and what kinds of social class you belong to, and even perhaps things like your gender. So if I say water with a T and no R, that says something social about me. If I say "wah-der," that says something else social about me. If I say "waw-tuh," that says something else social about me. All of those are born out of natural variations that happen to as T called weakening when it becomes between a stressed and unstressed syllable.

So that's the phonetic part where it's like, "Why is it making that change?" But the sociophonetic part is what social facts about me drive this phonetic variation in the way I say a T. So that's an example of a sociophonetic question. Why do I pronounce a T differently? It's not just because of the phonetics. It is partially because of phonetics. It's also because of the social marking and signaling I'm doing by using sound in different ways. That's a long answer to what is sociophonetics. 

Megan: No, it's very helpful. I think, is it Philly where the water or how do they say water [inaudible]? 

Dr. Valerie: "Wah-der." Philly is "wah-der." 

Megan: Yeah. I was thinking about that when I was reading the book. Also, I was thinking about this this morning before coming on to record. I didn't grow up speaking Spanish, but my dad spoke Spanish. I was always to refer to my aunts and uncles on his side as Tio and Tia. I was thinking about how I have that dental T at the beginning unaspirated naturally because of that. But English speakers will not; they'll have trouble with that distinction of T at the beginning. They'll probably say it aspirated. They'll probably use the alveolar T. So they'll say, "Teh-ah" and "Teh-oh."

Dr. Valerie: Right, exactly, because that's how you hear it. Because again, it's been filtered by your experience. We think of accents as things that affect the way we sound, but actually, accents affect the way we hear. We filter speech through accents the same way that we say speech with an accent. We often don't realize that our accents are not just in our speech, they're also in our ears too. We hear things with an accent, and that creates us saying them wrong in the way that we mean by not native-like. So, for example, the example you said, saying them different than a native speaker would, because we're hearing them differently than native speaker would because of the filtering of our own accent. And that's an example of something we talk about in the book called the substrate influence, where you're not yourself a speaker of Spanish, but your father's background as a Spanish speaker is sort of some aspects of his phonetics are carried over into your system. One of the things we find in the book is that many of the accents that we notice, the things we notice about them are actually due to substrate influence that go back centuries. And my own speech, I tell the story of how I didn't pronounce my Hs when I was a little girl because my parents are French speakers and H isn't pronounced in French. It wasn't until some kid told me I sounded funny that I realized I didn't pronounce my Hs, and so then I started really aspirating them. So I sounded like I had spitting problem all through elementary school. 

Carrie: Hypercorrection.

Dr. Valerie: Exactly.

Megan: Yeah. I have to say, though, you still kind of have that when you say "human."

Dr. Valerie: I do, and that's where you go from having this thing that is maybe super noticeable to a very subtle substrate influence, and where people don't identify it anymore as where it came from.
That's when we start hearing it as mistakes rather than the evolution of some earlier history of our language and groups of speakers. We can track history through language, like accents are the fossils of speech. When we dismiss them, when we want to get rid of them, we're actually getting rid of our history. People don't realize that because if we eradicated the differences between us and the way we talk, we would have no way to track the evolutionary progress of humans, the migratory progress of humans. When we look at linguistic diversity measures, and compare that to genetic diversity measures, we find a lot of the same things that we left Africa 50,000 years ago, just like genetic diversity decreases, well, we find linguistic diversity decreasing. And so we're losing, we end up with languages that are dominant, that have very little linguistic diversity. Then we have no way ever to track what the origin of language was, what the sounds of early languages were, what human capacity for language would be. We don't understand that. We actually lose history because language is often the only way we have to track it in prehistory.

Megan: Yeah, because there's not very much written record, or there's nothing in the rocks or whatever.

Dr. Valerie: A lot of what we put in encode in graphemes that are letters, can't tell us the subtleties of the phonetics of how language varies. Sort of when I was talking about tea, we write all these different teas we say as "tea." So if we lost English, we would no longer know how those things were actually pronounced. We would no longer know the full variety that English had, and why, and understand the principles of the human brain, because we'd only have the letter, and the letter T tells us nothing about the phonetics.

Carrie: It's so funny. When I was in high school, I remember we were talking about Latin for some reason, and I asked the question, "How do we know that that's actually how this was pronounced?" And we didn't really. We knew on the macro level, but not in this sense. We had absolutely no idea how the Latin was being pronounced. 

Dr. Valerie: No, Latin, we're a little lucky because there are written records. Latin is a language that there was a lot written about oration and rhetorical style. That was something very important to the Romans. So there was actually a lot written about elocution, and they even wrote about sounds and certain sounds that people made, and what were good sounds and what were bad sounds. So we have some hints based on that. Also poetry, we get a lot of poetry written in Latin. We get a lot of poetry written in Greek. Rhyming schemes that we expect that poetry had can help us with how things probably were pronounced. But many languages don't have that history, and so we don't have that to fall back on. And even then, you're right. Latin still doesn't tell us really how things were pronounced. We just make guesses.

Carrie: Yeah, we have really good educated guesses, but we still don't know 100%. 

Dr. Valerie: Not exactly, but again, here's a great thing. We have the fossils of Latin. Romance languages are the fossils of Latin. And so, because that still exists, we actually can get more information, but what if those didn't exist? What if it was Hittite? We have no idea how that's pronounced because we don't have that. So I just think when we don't often think about the deep tie of accents to history and how, without them, we have no way of reconstructing that history. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. When I was reading the book, here's some time for some praise, Valerie, I was just thinking, you clearly know your audience. You know what you're doing, what you set out to do. You want to educate people and move them forward in their thinking. And I think that's what we're doing here with the Vocal Fries Pod, and I'm a trained linguist, but I also have this very deep urge to just be like, "Don't judge people, that's all you need to know." Don't judge people based on their accent. It's just this urge to be like, "It's obvious, just don't do it because it's being decent to our fellow humans." But you really bring in the reason why with having that historical perspective. I was really struck by that. I was like, "Oh, this is how to convince other people, is to give them this kind of history."

Dr. Valerie: Right. I'm with you. So I think linguists by nature, just especially social linguists, we tend to have this view of, "Well, duh, don't judge people." And it's just because we know these things so well. We understand the structure of language. We understand why change happens. We understand when we see a sound like T-H in English becoming a T or a D or F or a V, or someone says "mow-th" instead of "maw-th," we understand that that's actually guided by a very systematic process that has affected human speech through millennia and is found in all languages, including standard English. So we understand the principles that drive it. That makes us more empathetic, but we sometimes forget that we may not have started with the same knowledge base. And while we might've been empathetic people to begin with, I think it's not fair sometimes the way that we get angry at non-linguists for the belief systems they have when we haven't given them the tools and the understanding of why we say what we say. And so my goal in this book is not to judge anybody, because it's not my place to judge what you think, but to give you the tools to make informed decision based on having at your command the understanding that a linguist does written in terms that maybe aren't as fancy. I don't need to give you vocabulary like a linguist use. You don't need to sound like a linguist to think like a linguist. And really my goal here isn't to berate anybody for their belief system or even tell them what to think because my view is once you understand the principles that drive human speech, it's an obvious choice what you'll think. So that's my goal here. And I do really actually enjoy speaking to audiences that aren't necessarily linguists, because I think there's a lot of fun you can have with the examples you can come up with and the way that it's these aha moments that they can have, that we sometimes get jaded and forget when we're theoretical linguists that work in academics all the time. [crosstalk] So thank you, Megan.

Megan: Absolutely. I hope you feel that. I appreciate what you're doing and what you do in psychology today. It's very important. Let's talk a little bit about how this shows up in discriminatory ways. This book has something for everyone because there's that historical bit.
You talk about how babies learn, and then you talk about the historical bit, and then you get into how this is like playing out in real life. Not that those things aren't real life.

Dr. Valerie: Right. [inaudible] bit.

Megan: Yeah, exactly. So I'm wondering, why is the idea of "good and bad English," or "good and bad speech," classist? 

Dr. Valerie: I think, first of all, just to get to this question about the social bit. One thing, the book does do the history and the science, but what's really important is the psychology of accent. And that's what you're talking about. What we don't understand about the views that we have about what's good speech and bad speech is the historical perspective, as well as the psychological. And so when you ask a question like this idea is classist to have good and bad speech; it's because if you look at the history of how our notions of what's good came into existence, it's deeply based on class mobility. It is actually really the heart of what makes standard English standard really rests in the industrial revolution and how that radically reshaped the class system in England and London, particularly. So up to the 16, 1700s, there was no such thing as class, really, the way that we think of it. When we think about someone sounding like they're upper class or lower class, it's on a continuum. Someone could adjust their speech in a way, and then that continuum would slide for us a little bit, and we all do this in our speech. When we're hanging out with our friends, we're not speaking to a room full of colleagues, our speech is going to sound different and probably we're going to lean on more working class features if we have access to them, because that's solidarity building versus when we're giving a presentation to a bunch of CEOs, we're going to be at the other side of our repertoire and that will sound more upper crust. Well, that's a continuum of class that we have access to, some of us more than others in modern times, but go back to 1600, and you were who you were based on your birthright. So you were either a commoner and you would speak like a commoner, or you were a royal, or an aristocrat. That was because you were landed gentry and it was by birthright. You couldn't just come into that. You couldn't marry into it because you had to also be someone in the same class or the same rank to get into that world. 

So here we have this really sharp division between the people born to wealth, to land, to ownership, and those in Marxist terms, between the owners and the workers. And the workers were commoners. So there were fundamental differences in the way they spoke. There's no doubt about that, and people recognized it. So you would probably have in the 1600s easily recognized someone of rank and someone without, but there weren't strong comments about sort of these archetype characteristics of people with those qualities in speech, because it was just a natural given, and there was no social mobility that helped people rise in rank and change their speech. But with the industrial revolution, what we found is now the ways you can make money were very different, and the services that commoners provided became incredibly useful. And many, many commoners rose drastically in wealth to the point where they were wealthier than the landed gentry, but the one thing that stood between them was an accent. So you couldn't tell apart old money or new money anymore because people could buy the mansion right next to you. So it wasn't ownership of property that was going to do it. You could buy titles now. So it wasn't having a title that could do it. But what did remain? Well, that division in speech between the commoners and the aristocrats. And so what happened as you were a rising middle class and you were becoming super wealthy and you wanted in that world because that had always been the world associated with success, professional, economic, political success, then what would you do? You would try to learn the speech features that would then help you pass for that kind of existence. So what that did is it spawned this incredible elocution industry, this incredible grammar book industry, dictionaries, all sorts of usage guides, all sorts of training lessons where people learned these new norms. And what that did is it required people write the norms, people create the norms. And who were the norms based on? 

Well, the speech of the people that had wealth, success, land, and title. That is essentially what became standard English today. So the fundamental property of standard English is class-based just from the get-go. And then what happens is when we start to equate certain styles of speech with those that happen to have economic, political, and institutional success, we often then see, instead of realizing it's social luck. Those are things that happen with social luck and those are speech features of those that happen to have social luck. We see it as somehow intrinsically better. People that are successful somehow must have something intrinsic to them that make them better. Therefore, their speech has to be intrinsically better. So instead of just seeing them as socially lucky, we see them as somehow socially inherently better. That's where we get this really classist view of then people that don't sound like that, that speak so-called bad English, are lazy, they're ignorant, they're uneducated, they're incapable, they're less good professionally, we shouldn't hire them, and we can't probably trust them. And that's how it all rolls from this really weird situation, where many of the features that ended up becoming part of the standard in standard English were usage norms that the upper class had only because they had actually gotten them from the lower classes before all that became a thing. So, the fact that you drop Rs in high-class British English, that actually was a lower-class feature, saying things like "/ɑːnt/" instead of "/ænt/," that was actually started as a lower-class feature, but those had already entered higher-class speech by the time this elocution effort and usage guides and the norms that became standard English got set. So it's not really upper-class speech in many ways, but it is based on the model of what was upper-class speech in the 19th century.

Carrie: Interesting.

Dr. Valerie: It's so fascinating.

Megan: It is really fascinating.

Dr. Valerie: Can you tell I like it? 

Carrie: Yeah.

Dr. Valerie: I'm like, "Oh my God, yes, let's talk about that."

Carrie: I didn't realize, so I say "/ænt/" and "/ɑːnt/" sounds very weird to me.

Dr. Valerie: I know, me too. I grew up with an "/ɑːnt/" speaker. It's so funny because if you hear "/ɑːnt/", that's one of those cases when we're talking about sociophonetic. So the difference between "/ænt/" and "/ɑːnt/" is the difference of a vowel. It's a phonetic difference in terms of how that vowel is pronounced. But in terms of the social connotations, if I said, "Oh, who's your "/ɑːnt/"?" You're going to have a totally different view of me than if I'm like, "Who's your "/ænt/"?" Like you're thinking, Martha's Vineyard versus my patio in Memphis. It has a whole different ambiance in it in terms of the type of speaker we think you are based on the pronunciation of that one vowel alone. So this is what I mean by sociophonetics, is we put a lot of meaning socially into the way these small little pronunciation differences characterize us. 

Megan: Yeah, we absolutely do.

Carrie: I have a really random question. Do you know why Americans have started saying "verse" instead of "versus?"

Dr. Valerie: Oh, that is a very random question. You mean in terms of why we got rid of that S?

Carrie: Yeah.

Dr. Valerie: I really don't know. That's a good question. I'm sure it has something to do with the economy of effort, which drives almost everything that we do over time, and Americans particularly. This is where we get into another aspect where history is really interesting and predicting the way that things happen. It's not an exact answer to your question, but it might help us understand that after the American Revolution, the founding fathers, John Adams particularly, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin was incredibly interested in speech and also sounds themselves, but also they worked with Noah Webster and they all really strongly believed that American identity was really tied partially to keeping this sense of the difference of independence of speech as well. And so a lot of spelling conventions that Noah Webster introduced were not just like, "Hey, this seems simpler." We don't actually pronounce the U in color, but it was also because of American identity. And so I don't know if that had something, if Noah Webster was the one who did that, altered that in written form, and then it became part of speech, but it's very possible that that was part of the drive to do that. But also, Americans have often been accused of abbreviations in ways that the British find kind of annoying. That would also be another case where Americans were kind of like, "Let's do this in efficient fashion," and this is our reputation. So I think a lot of the changes that happened in between the British versions and the American versions were about more economic speech as well. So I don't know the exact answer to that, but I would think it probably has some relationship. Although I'm sure someone out there has researched it as I'm talking, and they can probably tell us how I'm wrong. 

Carrie: Well, that sounds reasonable to me. It's just that the only thing I would say is that I think it's a newer phenomenon. 

Dr. Valerie: It might be, yeah. 

Carrie: I remember people saying "versus" not that long ago. And then in the past year or so, suddenly I hear everyone say "verse." 

Dr. Valerie: Instead of "versus." Well, I can see that for the same reasons of all other aspects of economy of effort. When you speak it, that S kind of gets in the way of other things. So if you don't need it, there's no other competing "verse" that we're going to be like, "Oh, wait, which verse do they mean?" Well, except poetic verse. 

Carrie: Yeah, that's where my brain goes.

Dr. Valerie: But it wouldn't be used in the same context, right?

Carrie: True. 

Dr. Valerie: Or the same part of speech. So I don't think it would be hard to disambiguate it. So a lot of times we get rid of things and S's in particular. Now, one fun story that was similar, although it's S before an R, is the reason we have words like "ass" and "cuss" and "bust" are actually because the British version, which were "arse" and "burst" and "curse," R-lessness started in the 15th century, particularly before S sounds. And so, at the time of the early colonists in the early 1600s, that R deletion had already happened. And so that would have been something brought over. So actually, "cuss" is the R-deleted version of curse. "Bust" is the R-deleted version of burst. And "ass" is the R-deleted version of arse. And the reason we have those words in American English is because that was the earliest stage of R-dropping, which we did bring over verse the ones that the British had later. So, I think we're just really great at chopping some stuff off. 

Carrie: Okay, yeah, fair enough.

Dr. Valerie:  But I do know that example. I'm going to have to look that up afterwards. 

Carrie: I've just been hearing it everywhere in the past year, I guess. 

Dr. Valerie: That's interesting. You wonder how much of that, too, is this more informal language that we are using a lot, where people, kids particularly, are not reading quite as much. Not that they're not literate. They're highly literate. I have two children, and they're quite literate, but they don't read like we did in books when I was that age. They read things on social media posts and things like that. I think the language that we use on social media will be a lot more abbreviated. And so I could easily see how that would feed into the phenomenon you're talking about.  I don't know. Those are all my theories. I'm throwing them out there. Pick one that you like.

Carrie: I like them all. 

Megan: So we were just talking a little bit about how the idea of good and bad speech can be classist. How can it be racist? 

Dr. Valerie: It's the same idea of where we get from a historical perspective our sense of what's good and what's bad, and that's where racism enters the picture. So, one thing we tend to separate out is we think of certain things as being racist and certain things as being classist, but many, many times what actually happens is things are classist and racist at the same time, and it's the classist part that then drives the racist part, and in many cases with African American English, that's what happened. And if we look at the development of African American English, which is something I do in the book because it's an overlooked part of American history, the journey of white English is often discussed. The journey of black English is rarely discussed because it's often just accused of being deterioration or decay, and there's no historicity behind that, but the reality is actually African American English has its roots in colonial English. And a lot of the features that typify African American English today, things like saying "ax" for "ask," multiple negation, that S on like "I goes," not just "he goes," those are actually things that were more likely class-based variants in colonial English. Of course American English got rid of a lot of the class-based structure of Britain. In fact, one of the things that a lot of early writers claimed about American speech was you couldn't tell someone's class or someone's region on the basis of their speech. By 1700, we find writings in this saying basically there is just beautiful equanimity in American English that's lacking in British speech, where class was really noticeable in terms of dialects.

So when you think about how many African Americans were in colonial times, we don't realize by the end of the colonial period, there were probably half a million people of West African origin that had been forced into slavery in the United States. Wasn't the United States at that time, but the New World. Their speech was colonial English varieties with a West African substrate, and a lot of the features like "ask" for "ax" that I just mentioned were actually colonial traits that were heard as by the 1800s Southern lower-class features, and this is where probably if we hop back in time to 1800, the difference between poor African American Southern English and poor white American Southern English was very little. It was very, very similar. It was a shared trait, and what happened over time is these classist ideas about speech eradicated who were using these features. We find a lot of these features in Northern speech. So in New England records, for example, the late 1600s, "axe" is everywhere, and "we was" for "we were" is everywhere, and a third person singular S as a general present tense marker on things like "I goes" is everywhere. So that wasn't a Southern feature at that time. By a century later, it's mainly a Southern feature.  A century later, it's mainly a Black Southern feature. So here's where we see class and race really tied together, and then what happens is you get the great migration of the 20th century when African Americans from the South that were living in the rural South that sounded a lot like rural Southern whites at the time with some African substrate migrated to the urban North and Los Angeles, and then that brought a lot of Southern features to be reclassed from class-based Southern features to race-based Northern features. 

So it's this really interesting relationship between class and race that we see that's really fundamental to part of the reason that African American English is so despised. One is obviously that there's been a long history of racism in the United States that has created a dislike for things associated with African Americans or generally in society. Then you take speech that is also class-based where there's this negative attitude towards it for the same class reasons we talked about when we talk about bad English as being class-based, and then it becomes sort of this incredibly salient marker of being African American identity as African Americans had this incredibly rich, flourishing culture in the inner city and urban areas of the North. Then innovations happened that made even more differences between Black speech and white speech. So then sounding Black became a true aspect of African American identity and culture, but at the same time, it fed into these racial hostilities that were really fundamental to the forging of the United States at that time, and then it became inherently racist because you're disparaging speakers on the basis of class and race and not on the basis of history or linguistics. So that's the long story short of how we are looking at language through a certain lens and not realizing that lens is inherently biased by class and by race. And if we break down the history of it, then we see how it emerged that way. So that chapter was one of the most interesting to me to write because while I knew a lot about the history of African American English, understanding the psychological consequences of these ideas we have because a lot of that chapter is partially the history, what I've just discussed, but also the psychology of what it means to sound Black. And sounding Black is an important statement of communality, of solidarity, and the irony of social media is it has made this particular variety that was group-based become not just about race because it's not about just sounding Black anymore. It's made it accessible and visible to people far outside that community who share none of those commonalities.

And so what they've done is see these other traits that have gotten put on African American English, such as it's like this hip coolness, it's tough, it's physical, it's associated with very cool music. That is what people outside of that community, young people particularly, really heavily involved in social media and hip-hop culture, have taken from it without recognizing the deep historicity, meaning, or validity culturally of that variety to the speakers for whom it originated. 

Carrie: Yes, the digital Blackface sort of. 

Dr. Valerie: Right. Well, I think the trick is there's a separation between what young people at 15 and 16 understand. I talk a lot with my students about this because  I have a lot of students that come from second language heritage backgrounds and have a lot of feelings about this idea of appropriation, and it's something we talk a lot about that they also then recognize, "Yeah, I feel this way about my own language, but then I'm actually using hip-hop terms." And this, "Oh my God," realization. I think the thing is at the age where children are really heavily into social media, which is 12, 13, 14, it's quite young, younger than that in some cases, but where they understand the social currency that it offers, I don't think that, just judging from my own children, that they have the psychological reasoning capabilities to understand the subtleties of that. And so that's why it's really important to have conversations about it that are not judgmental, because that's what I tell my students. No one is blaming you for the fact at 13, you didn't understand the complexities here, but let's have a conversation about it." And that's what I'm hoping to do in the book.

Carrie: Amazing. 

Megan: Yeah, you absolutely do.

Dr. Valerie: I love the purring. I can hear this happy purring. I'm not going to take credit for that. I think that's over there. Carrie has a happy cat. 

Carrie: Same from you. She's very purry. The one before was lambda. 

Megan: They're just like offering some ASMR for anyone who's like, [inaudible]. It really sucks how you got racism. It sucks. 

Carrie: I think it's very important. 

Megan: It's very important. We need to talk about it, but for some people it's uncomfortable. 

Dr. Valerie: So it is like just the idea of talking about sounding Black. This is something we are so afraid of having conversations about it that we don't have the conversations about it. That's how I start that chapter. This whole idea of people will say, "Oh, it's racist to even say you can sound Black." But a lot of people who feel like it's important to them to sound Black, that's completely eradicating their experience then. We can't always hear race in speech. I will say that that has nothing to do with any kind of biological predisposition we have to sound a color. There's nothing in it, but there is absolutely the same way a Southerner who is really closely tied to Southern identity will be more likely to sound Southern. I'm Southern. I don't sound Southern. So it doesn't mean that all Southerners sound that way. I do have a little [inaudible]. 

Megan: Yeah, Carrie, [inaudible].

Dr. Valerie: I do. People do call me on that, but I don't sound super Southern [crosstalk] because I don't live in the South and my parents weren't Southern, but I still have some aspects just in the same way. It's not racist to say someone sounds Black because that's recognizing there's an identity tied to a certain speech feature, but that doesn't mean they are Black. And it doesn't mean that every Black person sounds that way. But I think we've gotten afraid to have conversations about race because it's become such a hotbed of controversy, and that's unfortunate. It helps nobody.

Carrie: No, not super Southern. Is there anything that you want to leave listeners with before we let you go? 

Dr. Valerie: The only other thing that I love talking about that we didn't cover, but we don't have a lot of time, is just the idea of sound symbolism.

Carrie: I love it.

Dr. Valerie: In many of the chapters, this little throw-out to sound symbolism, because I think there's so many fun and fascinating stories about why we hate certain words or why we love certain languages. So I will just say that you will finally have your questions answered if you are a moist hater. If you hate it, [inaudible] wonder no more. 

Carrie: Okay. I like that as a teaser. Let's go find the book, everybody.

Dr. Valerie: Secrets will be revealed. 

Carrie: I love it. All right.  Well, thank you so much. And we always leave listeners with one final message. Don't be an asshole.

Megan: Don't be an asshole.

Dr. Valerie: Don't be an asshole. 

Carrie: The VocalFries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, with theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @VocalFriesPod. You can email us at VocalFriesPod at gmail.com, and our website is VocalFriesPod.com.

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