Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles to w Chuck Bryant, and there's Noel
Speaker 1: on the Wheels of Steel, So that makes this stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know the podcast. So Chuck, Yeah, how you feeling?
Speaker 1: I before your answer, I am so excited about this
Speaker 1: one because there's just no way it's not going to
Speaker 1: be a Chuck accent Bananza. Well, I am super excited
Speaker 1: about this because I love accents almost more than anything
Speaker 1: in the world. I know it. Man not doing accents
Speaker 1: because sometimes I'm okay, sometimes I'm terrible, but I'd like
Speaker 1: to try, right, I just mean hearing. There's nothing in
Speaker 1: the world I love more than talking with someone who
Speaker 1: has a really heavy accent of some kind. I love it.
Speaker 1: I love it, I love it. I love it. So
Speaker 1: if you encounter somebody with a heavy accent that you're
Speaker 1: having trouble understanding, how do you feel, oh, like in
Speaker 1: say Scotland, Sure, well, what do you mean, Like, are
Speaker 1: you just like, gosh, this is fascinating, or are you
Speaker 1: like do you start to sweat and get nervous because
Speaker 1: the communication is breaking down? No, I'm delighted beyond words,
Speaker 1: and I will like laugh and say, man or a lady,
Speaker 1: I like, I can barely understand you, and I love
Speaker 1: it so much. I can hardly stand it. That's great,
Speaker 1: that's a great way to handle it. It's just the best. Man.
Speaker 1: I love it all accents, I mean there are very
Speaker 1: I can't think of one accent I don't like hearing.
Speaker 1: Uh what about Uh? No, I got nothing like. I mean, sure,
Speaker 1: there might be some accents that might be a little
Speaker 1: grating to your ear on a personal level, but I
Speaker 1: even like hearing those just because it's just it's so
Speaker 1: that person in that region, and especially when we travel
Speaker 1: and for these shows and get to speak with fans
Speaker 1: from you know, from Boston or from the Midwest or Canada. Yeah,
Speaker 1: god's the best. I love it. Or on the UK
Speaker 1: towards I was just like flipping out, you were I
Speaker 1: had to calm you down, like every few minutes. It's
Speaker 1: just amazing, and it makes me like, it makes you
Speaker 1: feel a little self conscious that I have such a
Speaker 1: non accent, but you do have an accent, you just
Speaker 1: can't hear it. That's one of the hilarious parts of accents.
Speaker 1: Is that person with the accent can't hear their own accent.
Speaker 1: It just sounds normal than them sort of. But it's
Speaker 1: like everyone has an accent, they even say in this article.
Speaker 1: But unmarked speech technically is what we're talking about, which
Speaker 1: is it doesn't have a hallmark sign of geographic area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's, if anything, what an accent is. It's a
Speaker 1: telltale giveaway of where you where, where you live, where
Speaker 1: you're from, where you were raised. Usually, Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: have I mean again, it's you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: But you don't have an accent either. Now we have
Speaker 1: those things are pretty unmarked. We have non regional accents,
Speaker 1: non regional American accents, I think, yeah, or jen am,
Speaker 1: I've heard it called general American. That makes sense. That's
Speaker 1: that's good. It's lovely. I mean, listen to us right now.
Speaker 1: I love this accent. But and I may have told
Speaker 1: the story before. I heard a cassette tape of myself
Speaker 1: as a like a twelve year old a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago, and it was heavily southern. Oh really yeah.
Speaker 1: And I didn't try to lose it. I didn't work
Speaker 1: on it. I never thought about it. Um, where did
Speaker 1: go Chuck, I have no idea what you do. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I really it just I was shocked. I
Speaker 1: was like, that's not me. Wow, that's really surprising because
Speaker 1: I mean from from and we'll talk about it a
Speaker 1: little bit, but accents they tend to develop in childhood
Speaker 1: and they tend to stick. I don't know, man, I
Speaker 1: can't explain it. That's pretty interesting. The only thing I
Speaker 1: can say is that at the time, I was friends
Speaker 1: with a lot of rednecks. Oh, I guess, and I'm
Speaker 1: not now, even though I love the right kind of redneck.
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong, Um, I love the right kind
Speaker 1: of redneck, the salts of the earth. Good to each
Speaker 1: his own kind of redneck. Yah. Sure, that's a good
Speaker 1: redneck good the best. Plenty of other kinds too, plenty
Speaker 1: of other kinds. Um, boy, do you know what? This
Speaker 1: is kind of off topic, but you don't hate More
Speaker 1: than anything is when a fellow like I'll just go
Speaker 1: ahead and say it, when a fellow white dude thinks
Speaker 1: you think like them just because you're a white dude.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and they you don't know them, and they'll
Speaker 1: just start saying stuff right, And I'm just like, dude,
Speaker 1: that's awful. I'm not like that, and please don't presume
Speaker 1: them like that. You just throw your hands to your
Speaker 1: ears and stomp up and down and go no, no,
Speaker 1: no until they run off. That's the worst. I hate it.
Speaker 1: It's pretty bad. We're all that way. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: let's get into this. Oh we're not into it already. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess the first thing technically we should say, uh,
Speaker 1: is that dialect and accents are two different things. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Accent is how something sounds when you talk. And again,
Speaker 1: it's usually related to where you're from and usually where
Speaker 1: you're raised, right, yeah, and in your family too, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and a dialect you're probably going to pick up from
Speaker 1: where you're from, from your family, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But dialect more has to do with the vocabulary you use,
Speaker 1: the like, the words you use, the slang, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Um, there's grammar rules that that can be
Speaker 1: different than you know, the standard grammar of the language.
Speaker 1: So it's it's more like, what you're saying is dialect
Speaker 1: how your how you sound when you're saying it. That's
Speaker 1: the accent. That's the big difference. Yeah, have you ever
Speaker 1: taken one of those dialect tests online? No, it's pretty neat.
Speaker 1: And the New York Times has one where you basically
Speaker 1: go through like twenty questions that say things like, um,
Speaker 1: what do you call the the strip of land between
Speaker 1: two streets? Or what do you call a house on
Speaker 1: the opposite corner of your own? Um? And stuff like that.
Speaker 1: It's not just like soda pop um. I gotta okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be interesting. Like I say median, I say
Speaker 1: kitty corner. Oh, I say catty corner. No, see, that
Speaker 1: was one of the choices, but I would say median
Speaker 1: as well. Right, some people say devil stra. One of
Speaker 1: them was interesting was what do you call it when
Speaker 1: it's No, that's a thing. That's not a thing it is.
Speaker 1: What do you call it when the when it's raining
Speaker 1: with the sun shining? Apparently that's highly regional raining with
Speaker 1: the sun shining. I didn't even know there was a
Speaker 1: name for that. Yeah, people call it different things. We
Speaker 1: grew up calling it the devil's beating his wife. But
Speaker 1: what's up with all this devil's stuff? Don't know, it's
Speaker 1: all the devil's beating his wife? Is what you call that?
Speaker 1: When rain it's coming down while sun was shining. That
Speaker 1: crazy yeah, anyway, it's got It has an interactive map
Speaker 1: that as you answer the question, it turns different colors,
Speaker 1: like from red to blue. How heavy You're like, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's like that went back, well not politically, um. And
Speaker 1: then eventually after the last question, the reddest hot zones
Speaker 1: will be where you are from. And mine was like
Speaker 1: Atlanta or not Decator specifically, but Atlanta Decatur or Atlanta, Birmingham, Alabama,
Speaker 1: and I think like Nashville. Huh, so I was in
Speaker 1: the zone. So cosmopolitan southern is your dialect? Basically it
Speaker 1: sounds cosmo southern. Yeah, southern Mo. Anyway, I highly recommend
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a fun test. Yeah, it sounds pretty fun.
Speaker 1: But nothing to do with accents. What what I mean?
Speaker 1: Can you put like not applicable for the one about
Speaker 1: the rain when the sun shining? Yeah? Most of them
Speaker 1: have an option that says I know what this is,
Speaker 1: but I don't have a name for it. Gotcha, Okay? Cool,
Speaker 1: Well then yeah, i'll take it. I'll take it right now.
Speaker 1: All right, So we've established what dialect is, we've established
Speaker 1: what accents are, and apparently now that we're diving into
Speaker 1: that world of accents. If you are a linguist, there
Speaker 1: are basically two categories that you would put accents into.
Speaker 1: If you want to start talking accents with linguists, they're
Speaker 1: gonna be like, wait, wait, wait, are we talking about
Speaker 1: the accent that a person has when they're speaking their
Speaker 1: native language or are you talking about the accent of
Speaker 1: person has when they're speaking what is not their native language.
Speaker 1: Explain yourself, says the linguist. Right, and when you go
Speaker 1: to learn a second language as a a non you know,
Speaker 1: developing infant, like let's say high school, middle school, or
Speaker 1: beyond um, you have to I mean, you took language
Speaker 1: class in high school, right, sure, French? But was this
Speaker 1: in Georgia or yes? And there are plenty, plenty of
Speaker 1: thick Southern accents speaking French and it is about as
Speaker 1: grading as it gets. Well, it's funny because that's a German.
Speaker 1: It was the same thing. And I always had a
Speaker 1: knack for Um speak and a Deutch. Yeah that's how
Speaker 1: it sounded. And it was always funny to me because
Speaker 1: our teacher would you know, dictating or say something in
Speaker 1: perfect German and we would repeat it back individually. And
Speaker 1: I always had a pretty good knack for not accents,
Speaker 1: but just sort of parenting. I'm much better if I
Speaker 1: hear someone say something, I can kind of say it
Speaker 1: back like they say it. And I just figured, like,
Speaker 1: just do that and then you're speaking correct German. And
Speaker 1: some of these dudes would, you know, prekin ze Deutsche
Speaker 1: And I would just be like, how can you just like,
Speaker 1: can you not pretend to speak German, like with a
Speaker 1: German accent? And they couldn't, And it's just fascinating. I
Speaker 1: just thought everyone could pare it something back, and that's
Speaker 1: when I realized, no, not at all. Well they have
Speaker 1: those people have very well formed, non plastic synapses, is
Speaker 1: really what it comes down in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Do you, uh, you want to take a break before
Speaker 1: we get into the development of accents? I guess, so, well,
Speaker 1: let's do that, m all right, Chuck. So, there's been
Speaker 1: a lot of study about accents about when we developed language.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of debate about whether we're born with
Speaker 1: a language instinct or if it's just something we we
Speaker 1: naturally develop as a result of being social animals. Who knows,
Speaker 1: but one of the studies on accents specifically has found
Speaker 1: that apparently babies they recognize accents in the womb. They've
Speaker 1: tested newborn kids. I don't know what parents let this happen,
Speaker 1: but apparently in the delivery room or shortly after um delivery,
Speaker 1: the baby was born. It's another way to put it.
Speaker 1: They've had people speak with different accents to the baby,
Speaker 1: and the baby just based on their gaze, tend to
Speaker 1: prefer the accent that they heard while they were in
Speaker 1: the womb. It is pretty interesting, right, And apparently from
Speaker 1: that moment on, even from the time their brains developed
Speaker 1: enough to to start hearing and soaking this in, and
Speaker 1: then after they're born, they're they're taking all of these
Speaker 1: these little things we take for granted when we speak,
Speaker 1: when we use dialect, when we when we um form
Speaker 1: an accent. All of the stuff is sinking in their
Speaker 1: little baby brains and it's helping them develop UM what
Speaker 1: is called basically a map, a language map, a dialect map,
Speaker 1: and accent map, and they're hearing how to talk, learning
Speaker 1: how to talk just by listening to the people around them,
Speaker 1: even before they're six months old. Yeah, this UM researcher
Speaker 1: UH speech professor named Patricia cool k u h L
Speaker 1: you dub go Huskies um. She said that she was
Speaker 1: describing the map, and she said, you know, the sounds
Speaker 1: they don't hear, their synapses aren't firing when they don't
Speaker 1: hear those sounds, so they just sort of fall away.
Speaker 1: And you can think of it as like pruning of
Speaker 1: that network of the brain, which I thought was really interesting.
Speaker 1: It just makes sense. You know, the sounds they hear
Speaker 1: most often will be reinforced over and over, and that's
Speaker 1: how a dumb little baby gets an accent. And there
Speaker 1: there's a really good example, if not a super stereotypical one,
Speaker 1: but um speakers of Japanese have a very hard time
Speaker 1: saying L making the L sound right. So rather than lake,
Speaker 1: they may say rake, they tend to they tend to
Speaker 1: replace the L with an R sound. And it's simply
Speaker 1: because that's what they were exposed to growing up up
Speaker 1: and there they didn't learn to make the L sound
Speaker 1: just in the same way that you and I might
Speaker 1: have a lot of trouble rolling our rs, where if
Speaker 1: we had been raised in a society or a group
Speaker 1: or a family even that rolled there ares we could
Speaker 1: probably roll our rs perfectly. But all of for all
Speaker 1: of this research is starting to show that accents are
Speaker 1: just acquired and developed, and they're reinforced through through exposure
Speaker 1: by hearing other people around you and then speaking that
Speaker 1: way yourself. And that map that that's formed starting before
Speaker 1: even six months old. Um, it's what you it's what
Speaker 1: you use to navigate through through spoken communication with the world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: She found out this is cool still in studying babies
Speaker 1: in Sweden, Japan, US and other places that at six
Speaker 1: months old, Japanese babies could distinguish between the elm are
Speaker 1: just American babies, but by the time they were one,
Speaker 1: they had lost that ability again because that was just
Speaker 1: sort of pruned away. Yeah, and I looked into this,
Speaker 1: I'm like, how how would you set that up? And
Speaker 1: this is actually pretty clever. Right, So they would put
Speaker 1: these babies in a room and let them all hang out,
Speaker 1: and then they'd be like a loud speaker and then
Speaker 1: over the loud speaker, hopefully it a normal normal, right,
Speaker 1: they would say they would just have a voice, a nice,
Speaker 1: pleasant voice saying like la la la la la la
Speaker 1: la la la la la la, right, and then every
Speaker 1: once in a while the voice would say la la
Speaker 1: ra la la, right, And when that r would come
Speaker 1: out instead of a la a like a bear would
Speaker 1: light up and start dancing and playing like a drum,
Speaker 1: like something that babies would love would happen, right, So
Speaker 1: they came to associate rather the like the what would
Speaker 1: be construed as an error in the act center the
Speaker 1: dialect um with something going on with the bear. So
Speaker 1: the babies that were Japanese by the time they were
Speaker 1: a year when there was an error, they wouldn't look
Speaker 1: over at the bear any longer because they stopped hearing
Speaker 1: that that la la la and just heard it as
Speaker 1: la la la. Interesting, isn't it. Yeah, And apparently they
Speaker 1: found that babies crying can even sort of mimic the
Speaker 1: intonation of their nationality. So like French babies, apparently French
Speaker 1: speakers go up an intonation toward the end of the sentence,
Speaker 1: and so French babies would when they cried, I guess,
Speaker 1: would go why wawa and go up at the end,
Speaker 1: whereas German babies would go down just like Germans. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 1: all right, they wouldn't say law no. Uh. Super interesting though, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so all of this forms of the basis of
Speaker 1: a lot of people already know but you might not
Speaker 1: know why. But it is way, way easier to learn
Speaker 1: multiple languages when you're younger than it is, say when
Speaker 1: you're in high school. And there's a big push among
Speaker 1: American educators to start language development second language, third language, uh,
Speaker 1: when you're much younger, like even as young as nursery school,
Speaker 1: rather than waiting until high school, which is little baby
Speaker 1: is being raised bilingual from birth. Yeah, and that's a
Speaker 1: really good way to raise a smart kid like you.
Speaker 1: May speaks Japanese in English. She was raised in a
Speaker 1: household that spoke Japanese in English, right, And I mean
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. There's I read another article about
Speaker 1: a woman who was raised in the Philippines and her
Speaker 1: father was raised I think her father spoke Tagalog, which
Speaker 1: is the national language, and then her mother spoke a
Speaker 1: regional language. And um, so she spoke two forms two
Speaker 1: languages from birth and then learned English as an older person. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the whole idea that you should wait until high
Speaker 1: school to learn language because then you're old enough to
Speaker 1: understand is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
Speaker 1: Like you're supposed to be teaching kids multiple languages from
Speaker 1: a very young age because that's when their brains are
Speaker 1: plastic enough, and they wanted to know how that's possible.
Speaker 1: It turns out that you your brain creates multiple language maps.
Speaker 1: So you have a language map for your native language,
Speaker 1: you have another language map for this other one you
Speaker 1: learned in school, than another one that you're for the
Speaker 1: language your grandmother speaks, and you can just switch between
Speaker 1: them depending. Amazing and that So when you do learn
Speaker 1: another language, though, Um, and I guess it's probably true
Speaker 1: for any age, but as an adult for sure, or
Speaker 1: a teenager for sure, when you already have your your
Speaker 1: own home language solidified, there's something called language transfer that
Speaker 1: can happen, or that always happens, uh, And it can
Speaker 1: be either good or bad. So, depending on what your
Speaker 1: language is and what language you're learning, it might be
Speaker 1: a little bit easier to learn that language and say
Speaker 1: certain words, or it might be a little harder can
Speaker 1: depending on how close it is to your native tongue
Speaker 1: and accent. So Um, like a German learning to speak English,
Speaker 1: UH may have a tougher time with the th h sound,
Speaker 1: and they may say like a like a t z
Speaker 1: or or harder s in place of it, like instead
Speaker 1: of the German z Germans right or if you're Italian
Speaker 1: and you're learning Spanish, you might have an easier time
Speaker 1: because those are a little more similar, uh, like with
Speaker 1: especially with the ps in Spanish, right, because in Spanish
Speaker 1: the P is a non aspirated, short onset time sound right. Um.
Speaker 1: In English we would have a hard time with the
Speaker 1: P because we say P. We aspirate it, right, P
Speaker 1: like your breathe when you say it he um, and
Speaker 1: it's it's a It has a long on set time right.
Speaker 1: So which is That also explains why native English speakers
Speaker 1: often have trouble distinguishing between P and B when they're
Speaker 1: listening to Spanish being spoken. Yeah, and so depending on
Speaker 1: if it's um easier or harder, it's called negative positive
Speaker 1: transfer or negative transfer um. And I remember in German
Speaker 1: learning to roll those rs was probably the hardest thing
Speaker 1: for most of the kids in the class. Sure, right,
Speaker 1: And again it's the same thing. It's like the the
Speaker 1: with the southern accent with German. Right. So their language
Speaker 1: map is so well formed and so immovable that they
Speaker 1: are following the rules of that language map even when
Speaker 1: they're trying to speak this foreign language. Well, languages don't
Speaker 1: have the same maps, which accounts for different languages and
Speaker 1: accents and all all sorts of things like that. So
Speaker 1: on the one hand, it's cognitive, but on the other hand,
Speaker 1: there's also um differences in in motor function. Right, just
Speaker 1: like when you say L but not are as a
Speaker 1: kid and there they seem interchangeable to you. When you
Speaker 1: grow up, you have trouble actually making the the the
Speaker 1: L sound like making your tongue make the L sound instead,
Speaker 1: it wants to make the R sound right, So you
Speaker 1: have the cognitive trouble with your language map applying your
Speaker 1: language map to this new language, and you also have
Speaker 1: the physical trouble of actually making your mouth and your
Speaker 1: tongue in your airway do the things that it has
Speaker 1: to do to make those sounds like rolling in our Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it's simply unpracticed in doing so. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's it. That's what the good thing about it is
Speaker 1: that you can learn a good accent, You can learn
Speaker 1: to speak another language. It just is harder because your
Speaker 1: brain is pretty well set. You can retrain it, though,
Speaker 1: it just takes practice. And apparently, from what I saw,
Speaker 1: the best way to learn an accent and to learn
Speaker 1: a new language is lots and lots and lots of
Speaker 1: listening up front, that you shouldn't just jump in and
Speaker 1: start trying to speak. You should spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time just sitting around listening to it first. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: way out of practice now with remembering German and speaking it,
Speaker 1: but I got pretty good at one point to the
Speaker 1: um to the point where I went. When I went
Speaker 1: to Germany, I had Germans saying, you know, you speak
Speaker 1: very good German. And that's like the best best thing
Speaker 1: that can happen when you traveled to a different country
Speaker 1: and you're trying is for someone to say, wow, you
Speaker 1: speak really good uh, French or German or whatever. Here,
Speaker 1: have a schnitzel on me. It's funny. My buddy and
Speaker 1: I Brett, who did my first big Europe trip with,
Speaker 1: we went to a beer garden in Germany and um
Speaker 1: in Munich and got uh had a lot of beers,
Speaker 1: a lot of steins because this local dude who didn't
Speaker 1: speak English and I spoke very little German. And we
Speaker 1: drank with this guy for about four hours and bonded
Speaker 1: in two different languages over the music of the Beatles,
Speaker 1: and it worked somehow, and got our picture with the
Speaker 1: guy and it was just one of those travel moments
Speaker 1: that just one of the best travel moments of my life.
Speaker 1: And I always wonder if this guy remembered that at all.
Speaker 1: And that guy turned out to be christof Walls, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a feeling this guy didn't remember. It's one
Speaker 1: of those things like as a young American, I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that was a posting. Ever I could
Speaker 1: see that happening in Germany. In France, no French person
Speaker 1: has ever said, hey, your French accent is pretty good.
Speaker 1: Exactly what's gonna help you? Right? Um, Well, let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit because this, to me is one of
Speaker 1: the more fascinating parts of accents is the fact that
Speaker 1: uh British English, uh and in England, as colonizers all
Speaker 1: over the world, we still ended up with so many
Speaker 1: variations of the English accent. Yeah, which makes sense, fascinating,
Speaker 1: but it's basically like, um, Britain went around the world
Speaker 1: and said, oh, we're we're gonna have an illegitimate child here,
Speaker 1: and we'll have an illegitimate child here, and in an
Speaker 1: illegitimate child here, and they all just kind of look
Speaker 1: like us a little bit. Right, Okay, it's a little
Speaker 1: bit like that, but language wise or accent wise. So
Speaker 1: everybody um who speaks English, I should say, in India
Speaker 1: and in Australia and in Canada and in the United States, UM,
Speaker 1: they all speak English. All of us speak English. Were
Speaker 1: speaking the same language, but we um speak it with
Speaker 1: different accents. And when you start to look into why,
Speaker 1: it just becomes extremely fascinating. Like you were saying, like Australia,
Speaker 1: all right, the Australian accent. Anybody in the world can
Speaker 1: pick out an Australian accent no problem, and it's such
Speaker 1: a unique accent. But it's also a hodgepodge of English
Speaker 1: accents because you had so many people coming from England,
Speaker 1: UM in different parts of England fourth together in this
Speaker 1: you know, these small pockets over this large geography, but
Speaker 1: relatively small pockets of of um uh like cities and
Speaker 1: towns and stuff, and they're disparate regional English accents came
Speaker 1: together to form a common, unique one which is now
Speaker 1: known as Australian English. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I've always
Speaker 1: heard that UM English actors have an easier time picking
Speaker 1: up the Southern American accent because they're so similar, and
Speaker 1: there's actually a lot to that. I read this great
Speaker 1: article from PBS called Our Full Southern that's the letter
Speaker 1: R f U L Southern U from John Fought and UM.
Speaker 1: It basically kind of lays out the history of UM,
Speaker 1: the Southern American dialect, where it came from, and how
Speaker 1: it's changed over the years, and the fact there's kind
Speaker 1: of two different ones there. They call one the are
Speaker 1: less Southern accent and one the R full meaning UM
Speaker 1: with words when you have an R before a consonant
Speaker 1: um are less accents you drop that are altogether. So like, uh,
Speaker 1: there are different variations UM. Because you see this in
Speaker 1: like in New England, like in Boston, and then you
Speaker 1: actually see it in places like coastal South Carolina, in
Speaker 1: coastal Mississippi and Alabama. Uh, And so you think, well,
Speaker 1: that's weird, But when you think about it, it's true.
Speaker 1: If if you're talking about you know, poc in the
Speaker 1: CA you're dropping the R as with that hard Boston accent,
Speaker 1: but you can also pock the car in South Carolina. Joe, Sorry,
Speaker 1: I get fired up, but it's the same thing and
Speaker 1: it and it came from the same thing. So what
Speaker 1: happened was these coastal plains of uri early European settlements. Um,
Speaker 1: and we're talking not New York City and not New Orleans,
Speaker 1: but all these other places came from our less areas
Speaker 1: of southeastern England. And so as they were settled, they
Speaker 1: set up shop, uh, and farmed around the coast, and
Speaker 1: the coastline didn'tvert venture very far inland. And so then
Speaker 1: there was the second wave that started coming from our
Speaker 1: full areas and this started to change apparently. Um. And
Speaker 1: what we're talking about is rhotic R H O T
Speaker 1: I C and non rhotic dialogue or dialect. Rhotic is
Speaker 1: where the R is hard, yes, like park and non
Speaker 1: rhotic would be like poc. Yeah. And apparently in England
Speaker 1: and especially in southeastern England, when they colonized America, they spoke,
Speaker 1: or they sounded a lot more like what you would
Speaker 1: think of as an American accent today. Yeah, probably a
Speaker 1: lot more that we probably sound very much like they
Speaker 1: sounded back then, which is just knocked my socks off man.
Speaker 1: Fact of not just this podcast, maybe fact of the year. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But at some point, uh, And I think there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of debate on exactly when there became a
Speaker 1: conscious shift in England for uh kind of to draw
Speaker 1: class distinctions, to to have a more posh sounding accent,
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, there's something called so the
Speaker 1: typical British accent. When you listen to say, someone like
Speaker 1: you Grant speak what you think of as like kind
Speaker 1: of classy British, that's called Grant, right, classiest guy around
Speaker 1: at the very least, he's one of the most charming, um,
Speaker 1: which is how he gets away with so much. But uh,
Speaker 1: that that that accent is called received pronunciation, and it
Speaker 1: developed in England as kind of an aspirational accent among
Speaker 1: the middle class. The middle class was starting to grow.
Speaker 1: Um from what I saw that it was the mid
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. I know you saw something like the sometime
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century, but regardless, it came out of
Speaker 1: the middle class in England getting a little wealthier, sending
Speaker 1: more and more middle class English kids off to boarding
Speaker 1: school where they were kind of being instructed in this
Speaker 1: received pronunciation accent, and it it became the the educated
Speaker 1: southern England accepted way to speak, right, it was British
Speaker 1: and that really got cemented in the nineteen twenties when
Speaker 1: the BBC started broadcasting and they actually held a panel
Speaker 1: to try to figure out what accent or accents their
Speaker 1: broadcasters were going to speak in, and they settled on
Speaker 1: received pronunciation. It became the one accent that all BBC
Speaker 1: broadcasts were done in from nineteen twenties to the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies or eighties. It became quintessential British accents, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that something like less than ten percent, maybe even
Speaker 1: less than that, of the population actually speak with that accent.
Speaker 1: But that's what everybody else in the in the world
Speaker 1: typically thinks of when they think of a British accent.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating and it's again, this came after America was colonized.
Speaker 1: It came from what I understand, after Australia was colonized.
Speaker 1: So at the time Americans and the British um sounded
Speaker 1: very much like we do today. Yeah, So starting in
Speaker 1: about picking back up with the R lesson R full
Speaker 1: stories UH. Starting in about the middle of the eighteenth
Speaker 1: century and for the next hundred years or so, you
Speaker 1: had more people coming over from UH like northern and
Speaker 1: western England, UH and Scotland and Ireland, and they appear
Speaker 1: cly started entering the US, not along the coastline but
Speaker 1: through like the port of Philadelphia, which um that was
Speaker 1: the busiest in the nation at the time. So these
Speaker 1: folks move inland instead of hanging around the coast, and
Speaker 1: then west and southwest, and uh they had the r
Speaker 1: full accents. And so you had these inland varieties of
Speaker 1: accents that were are full, these coastal that were are
Speaker 1: less and are less was far more prominent for a
Speaker 1: long time just because of the way, um migration happened
Speaker 1: and immigration happened. And then are full has since sort
Speaker 1: of taken over. Our full Southern has taken over and
Speaker 1: our full Northern because it's you know, sort of the
Speaker 1: same version of the two different versions of the same thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: and now are full is what you kind of think
Speaker 1: more of us that sort of red nicky Southern accent
Speaker 1: um like orange glad I said orange like that? Sure? Okay,
Speaker 1: Uh what they say here in this PBS article is
Speaker 1: is the prevailing prevailing dialect of like Nascar. You think Nascar,
Speaker 1: you say that hard are instead of Nascar Nascar. I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm going to yeah, just think of Judy
Speaker 1: Davis and Barton Fink. Okay, well Boughton, you know that
Speaker 1: kind of Uh, I always think of Charleston for some reason.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because Charleston is super are less in that respect.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I think just like in say England or
Speaker 1: the UK, that um are less is associated with higher society.
Speaker 1: I think, oh yeah, for sure, the non rhotic speech,
Speaker 1: for sure. So then the sun Belt UM gets populated
Speaker 1: and people keep going inland and more inland, and our
Speaker 1: full accents, both northern and southern sort of became the
Speaker 1: dominant UH speaking style in the United States. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: you said that a lot of those UM those immigrants
Speaker 1: came to the U. S and State in the coastal
Speaker 1: areas or went inland. There's been a lot of um
Speaker 1: a speculation that there's pockets of of UM accents, say
Speaker 1: like tucked away in the Appalachians or in the Outer Banks,
Speaker 1: or just kind of in less populated or trafficked areas
Speaker 1: where those original accents were captured and kind of frozen
Speaker 1: in time. Which apparently all of that's been debunked. Um
Speaker 1: that that you can't find the original colonial slash British
Speaker 1: imperial accent in you know, the people in the Outer
Speaker 1: Banks or in the Appalachians. But it's pretty romantic to
Speaker 1: think of and I have to say, I gotta say this,
Speaker 1: speaking of the Appalachian accent. Um, I've said before, you
Speaker 1: know that that that airline pilot talk, how all airline
Speaker 1: pilots sound exactly the same, and they're all actually doing
Speaker 1: Chuck Yeager, Chuck Yeager, whose Appalachian accent was kind of
Speaker 1: famous because he broke the sound barrier. Um, all pilots
Speaker 1: kind of aspired to sound like him. So that's why
Speaker 1: all airline pilots sound exactly the same on the intercom,
Speaker 1: because they're all, whether they know it or not, trying
Speaker 1: to emulate Chuck Yeager, who actually did talk like that.
Speaker 1: And that raises like something pretty pretty significant, Chuck is
Speaker 1: you can acquire an accent just by aspiring to sound
Speaker 1: like somebody. And that's how a lot of accents have
Speaker 1: spread over time. That's how we received pronunciations spread. People
Speaker 1: listen to the broadcaster on the BBC and said, I
Speaker 1: like the cut of that guy's jib, and they started
Speaker 1: mimicking him, and that's how that accent spread. You want
Speaker 1: to take a break, Yeah, we'll take another break and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about media and the movies and um, how
Speaker 1: accidents can affect the perception of a person right after this,
Speaker 1: all right, So I got a call one day from
Speaker 1: John Hodgeman. Yeah, and he, uh, if you don't know,
Speaker 1: as a writer and actor and more and more so
Speaker 1: an actor, and he was auditioning for a part where
Speaker 1: he had to speak with a Southern accent. So he
Speaker 1: called me up and was like, dude, I need some help. Um,
Speaker 1: what what do I do? Because I think he's heard
Speaker 1: me complain a lot about bad Southern accents and movies
Speaker 1: and TV and how that's just such an immediate turn
Speaker 1: off for me, Like that's why I couldn't watch House
Speaker 1: of Cards because Kevin Spacey. Oh his accent you mean?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I just heard it off and how you
Speaker 1: meant just Kevin Spacey in general. Now he kind of
Speaker 1: bugs me in general these days. Yeah, I don't see
Speaker 1: Baby Driver then, Oh no, I love Baby Driver and
Speaker 1: I liked him in it. And that's the first thing
Speaker 1: I'm really in a long time. Yeah, I thought it
Speaker 1: was standard Kevin Spacey. Oh well it was, but I
Speaker 1: used to love Kevin Spacey and what the oh just
Speaker 1: in the early days like usual suspects and uh American beauty.
Speaker 1: He was okay, no no qualms here, with American beauty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just kind of just got tired of it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think Pay It Forward really killed it from You
Speaker 1: should go see it. Go see it, yeah, go to
Speaker 1: my bedroom. Yeah that wherever you have to see it.
Speaker 1: See it. Well, Baby Driver was great though. How about
Speaker 1: that movie? Yeah, no batting Southern accents, and they're really
Speaker 1: I mean they were, although the whole thing was shot
Speaker 1: and setting it Atlanta. Yeah, I mean baby and the
Speaker 1: oh yeah, the waitress had a bad Southern accent. It
Speaker 1: wasn't bad. I thought it was okay, Okay, it wasn't
Speaker 1: too bad by my standard at least. So anyway, Hodgeman
Speaker 1: calls me and I told I basically told them that
Speaker 1: even someone like me, who um doesn't have a very
Speaker 1: strong Southern accent at the very least, there's still something
Speaker 1: we do in the South, which is, um, we soften
Speaker 1: our tease generally. Um. Many times tease become d's and
Speaker 1: sometimes they become ends. Like no one from Atlanta says
Speaker 1: Atlanta Atlanta. It would be spelled A D L A
Speaker 1: N N A. You know it's funny, is it's exactly
Speaker 1: how people from Toronto's Toronto Toronto. But like we're so
Speaker 1: we live in Atlanta, but we say Toronto, right, But
Speaker 1: whenever you hear someone say Atlanta, you just think, you know,
Speaker 1: get the stick out of your butt, pal, Relax, don't
Speaker 1: be so formal. Yeah, so I went through and I
Speaker 1: took Hodgman's pages and sort of rewrote them phonetically. Well,
Speaker 1: I hope you charged for this, No, of course not
Speaker 1: um and yeah, and it kind of helped him out.
Speaker 1: I think I don't think he got the part. But um,
Speaker 1: that's because of his acting, not because of my just kidding. Uh.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's just it's an interesting lesson in that
Speaker 1: um accents. I think oftentimes regional accents of the same
Speaker 1: language often come down to such subtleties as softening certain
Speaker 1: letters or dropping certain letters ours or teas or whatever.
Speaker 1: But you also, yeah, you raised uh, you raised the
Speaker 1: point earlier where you know, people in Boston and people
Speaker 1: in Alabama both dropped their rs. There are lists, but
Speaker 1: you would never confuse um in English speaker in Alabama
Speaker 1: with an English speaker in Boston. In so there's a
Speaker 1: lot more going on there. Well, it's just like the
Speaker 1: Irish immigration in Boston that had a big impact because
Speaker 1: they weren't immigrating to uh mobile, right. But I mean, like,
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot more going on accent wise to
Speaker 1: just dropping the R. But that's the reason why that
Speaker 1: one has brought up so much is because it's such
Speaker 1: a a common and identifiable beginning point to differentiate different accents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I guess that's probably a good place to talk
Speaker 1: about perception um because whether we like it or not,
Speaker 1: if you hear a very thick like old school New
Speaker 1: York Brooklyn thing or a very southern kind of Nascar talker, like,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get stereotype like it it sucks. But you
Speaker 1: have a very hard Southern accent, people are gonna think
Speaker 1: you're dumb. That's because of the hookworm than anything. But
Speaker 1: I think any really really heavy accent can um very
Speaker 1: much affect what a person thinks initially when they talk
Speaker 1: to you. Well yeah, um, so accents are at their
Speaker 1: base and in group out group marker. Right. And we
Speaker 1: despite how long we've been living in a larger, more
Speaker 1: integrated society UM full of more and more people that
Speaker 1: we interact with from different groups every day, Uh, we
Speaker 1: still have this kind of evolutionary spark where we are
Speaker 1: aware of people who are different from us, right, and
Speaker 1: we surmise different things, whether correctly or incorrectly, based on
Speaker 1: some of these markers. And one of the big easy
Speaker 1: to identify markers that says, oh, you're from a different
Speaker 1: group than me. Let me just put a little barrier
Speaker 1: between us here is the accent. Yeah, for sure. Um,
Speaker 1: they've even done studies. Uh, I know that the is
Speaker 1: it babel or babel babel b A b b e
Speaker 1: L the the language app. They've done studies and they've
Speaker 1: um had people mark like what accents they thought were sexy,
Speaker 1: which accents they thought were annoying, which ones they trust
Speaker 1: and don't trust, And of course, like a French accent
Speaker 1: was more favorable, the German accent was the least favorable. Um.
Speaker 1: Just generally, they've done tests that find that people are
Speaker 1: distrusting of someone with a foreign accent period. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if that has to do with the
Speaker 1: fact that it is in group out group, or if
Speaker 1: there's a UM there's like a kind of a much
Speaker 1: lighter hearted explanation for it, which is that we tend
Speaker 1: to prefer people with our own accents or people who
Speaker 1: sound like us are close to us because that's what
Speaker 1: we're used to. So we're just physically more comfortable hearing that, right,
Speaker 1: makes sense, not in hearing something different puts on edge
Speaker 1: or guards up or we're just a little more, um,
Speaker 1: a little less comfortable physically just from hearing somebody speak
Speaker 1: with an accent. And then another study suggested that cognitively,
Speaker 1: we're having to work harder to um understand what a
Speaker 1: person with an accent that's foreign to us as saying,
Speaker 1: and uh that and one way to put is that
Speaker 1: we kind of resent them for making us work harder,
Speaker 1: so we're less trusting of what they're saying, right, which
Speaker 1: is just weird. Well, yeah, and all of this is
Speaker 1: reinforced and um borne out of and reinforced by movies
Speaker 1: and television to a large degree, because anyone who's ever
Speaker 1: seen a movie, they have these kind of go to
Speaker 1: trope accents depending on what kind of character it is, um,
Speaker 1: whether it's the dumb Southerner or in the case of crime,
Speaker 1: um like this this new arc accent for like petty criminals,
Speaker 1: whereas the criminal mastermind will usually have a British accent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I read an article on that about villains having accents
Speaker 1: and usually it's British and apparently that's just kind of
Speaker 1: lazy filmmaking in a way, like many years for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so like the the no matter if it was
Speaker 1: like on another planet or Russian villain, the villain typically
Speaker 1: has a British accent, and they the article was saying
Speaker 1: that they had to do with one. It's just an
Speaker 1: easy cheap way of saying this person's foreign, this person's other,
Speaker 1: so right there that they're the bad guy, right um,
Speaker 1: and then secondly that it was British, so that we
Speaker 1: can understand what they're saying still very easily, but on
Speaker 1: an unconscious level again there other their foreign and then um,
Speaker 1: the the In America, there's something called cultural cringe. It's
Speaker 1: in America, it's in Australia that there's this idea that
Speaker 1: the British colonized this country and they were originally like
Speaker 1: the parent country, and there's still some kind of unconscious
Speaker 1: resentment of them. So that making the villain British taps
Speaker 1: into that unconscious disdain for British people, which obviously don't
Speaker 1: have consciously. But it's called cultural cringe where you're just
Speaker 1: kind of like unconsciously comparing your culture to their culture
Speaker 1: and like irritation comes out of it. Yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 1: Even the Star Wars universe, it was uh a long
Speaker 1: time ago in a different galaxy, and yet you have
Speaker 1: like some American accents and some English accents, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of all over the map. Like uh, I mean
Speaker 1: even in the in that first Star Wars movie, Carrie
Speaker 1: Fisher sort of vacillated between English accent and regular Americans.
Speaker 1: He almost adopted a mid Atlantic accent. Yeah, so that's, um,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about Maryland. Um. In the early days
Speaker 1: of the movies, they called it mid Atlantic, which basically
Speaker 1: meant just somewhere between England and the United States. And
Speaker 1: that's how almost all of the early movie stars spoke. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, I think from what I saw, you could
Speaker 1: trace it back to a single um dialect coach who
Speaker 1: taught I think Katherine Hepburn to speak that way. And
Speaker 1: that combined with Carrie Grant becoming a star and he
Speaker 1: was born in England and raised there until he was sixteen,
Speaker 1: and then moving to America. Those two becoming big stars
Speaker 1: at the same time made this mid Atlantic accent just
Speaker 1: spread like wildfire because that's what people saw in the movies.
Speaker 1: That's what they aspired to. So some people started talking
Speaker 1: like that, Yeah, super interesting. There was um a woman
Speaker 1: named Nancy Elliott that did a sample of American actors
Speaker 1: in American movies from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and she showed a steady decline and are dropping in
Speaker 1: the artless accent, which would support that what you're talking
Speaker 1: about with the mid Atlantic from sixty percent of actors
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties to zero percent in the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies dropped their rs. And then she saw within people's
Speaker 1: individual careers that had long careers in movies, they modified
Speaker 1: their pronunciations over time. Really interesting. Yeah, so what one
Speaker 1: more thing about the British villain or the villain no
Speaker 1: matter where he's from, having a British accent. This article
Speaker 1: called out and I thought, very very rightly, so um
Speaker 1: inglorious bastards as doing it right because there's like whole
Speaker 1: scenes that are spoken in German or Italian with subtitles.
Speaker 1: So the Nazis spoke German, which they would have spoken German. Right,
Speaker 1: you you have to read along English with the British accent,
Speaker 1: right right? Yeah, exactly. That's pretty funny. I thought this
Speaker 1: was interesting. Sing with the singers um generally, and there
Speaker 1: are exceptions like the Proclaimers, an Oasis and Madness at
Speaker 1: times Phil Collins, people that would sing with a distinct
Speaker 1: British accent of some kind, but generally what you hear
Speaker 1: on the radio is what this one linguists called pop
Speaker 1: music accent, which is there are a couple of theories
Speaker 1: on why you can't tell from Mick Jagger to Adele
Speaker 1: to George Michael that they're um not American um. And
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of debate over the years, but
Speaker 1: there seemed to be a couple of accepted reasons. Um.
Speaker 1: One is is that this is just the pop music accent.
Speaker 1: This is what's popular, this is what sells, and so
Speaker 1: this is what people do when they sing, no matter
Speaker 1: where they're from. Uh. And the other is that intonation
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with vowel quality, length of
Speaker 1: your vowels, and that when you sing, you follow a
Speaker 1: melody which sort of just cancels out or negates the
Speaker 1: uniqueness of the accent. That one makes sense to mean
Speaker 1: both of them do. Actually, yeah, I think it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: I think I think you almost have to work. Well
Speaker 1: maybe not. I was gonna say these bands and singers
Speaker 1: that still sound very British are doing that on purpose,
Speaker 1: and that may be the case. I don't know. Like
Speaker 1: The Darkness, the guy from the Darkness sounds super British.
Speaker 1: They're from Suffolk. Yeah, and then have you heard any
Speaker 1: Have you heard of the genre UK grime? No, Apparently
Speaker 1: that came along in out of East London the two thousands,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of a descendant of Drummond bass and
Speaker 1: dance hall and stuff like that. But it's just this
Speaker 1: really heavily accented rap. Dizzy Rascal is the UK grime
Speaker 1: I think, So okay, Well, then I have heard it
Speaker 1: and kind of like it because I'm not hip at
Speaker 1: all to this stuff, so I had to look it
Speaker 1: all up, and I think he was on the list.
Speaker 1: I listened to a couple of tunes from some of
Speaker 1: these people and yeah, yeah, yeah, Dizzy Rascals, cool roots maneuver.
Speaker 1: Check him out too, I think he was on the list. Yeah, man, okay, yes,
Speaker 1: I like UK grime. Um speaking of Great Britain apparently,
Speaker 1: like so here in the States, if you have a
Speaker 1: different accent or whatever, especially if you have like a
Speaker 1: southern drawl and you just kind of sound slow. People
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the country think of you as slow. That's
Speaker 1: just how they take you initially, until you have you
Speaker 1: have to work a little harder to prove yourself, right. Um,
Speaker 1: that's kind of aside from maybe like valley girl or
Speaker 1: valley guy accent, that's really the only accent that's super
Speaker 1: discriminated against hearing the States, but apparently in the UK
Speaker 1: accents are taken very seriously and discrimination is quite possible. Um.
Speaker 1: I wrote a tooth. I was in thirteen article from
Speaker 1: The Guardian that was talking about a study that had
Speaker 1: just taken place, and the study found that of the
Speaker 1: employers surveyed admitted to discriminating against people based on their
Speaker 1: regional accent, and that of Brits said that they felt
Speaker 1: discriminated against based on their accents. I didn't see any
Speaker 1: any study that's found the same thing in America, but
Speaker 1: I guarantee those numbers would have been in the basement
Speaker 1: compared to that. Yeah, it's definitely a thing in the
Speaker 1: UK because I've heard even friends of mine that are
Speaker 1: English when they talk to someone and also they're like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, he's he's a you know, from this area,
Speaker 1: and not necessarily even disparaging. It's just, uh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's just a bigger deal, I think. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it is too over there. I wish they all talked
Speaker 1: like Terrance Stamp from The Liney. I like Michael Caine's accent,
Speaker 1: which apparently I had no idea, yeah that that was
Speaker 1: a Cockney accent, although once I read that, I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I could hear that. Now. Well, it's funny that I
Speaker 1: love the Terrance Stamp in The Limey. But I've read
Speaker 1: an article that where one reviewer said it was like
Speaker 1: the worst accent they'd ever heard in The Guardian. But there.
Speaker 1: Did you see that movie? No? I didn't. Man, it's
Speaker 1: so good, uh Steven Soderberg movie. This is where he
Speaker 1: and his son built a house together. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's uh he's he's plays a kind of a British
Speaker 1: tough coming over to get revenge for his daughter's murder
Speaker 1: and ends up working at a pizza place in Connecticut. Nope, man,
Speaker 1: I know I haven't seen this movie. Yeah, it's called
Speaker 1: The Limy. It's great, but there's this one scene where
Speaker 1: he goes off in front of the great Bill Duke,
Speaker 1: who I think late grade is built up no longer
Speaker 1: with us. I don't know who that is. You would
Speaker 1: recognize him, Uh, well build this plays an American. Uh,
Speaker 1: I think he's a maybe a copper detective in the movie,
Speaker 1: and Terence stamp has this great scene where he goes
Speaker 1: into his office and goes off for like a minute
Speaker 1: and a half straight in this very thick cockney not
Speaker 1: only accent but dialect um, and Bill Dick's just sitting there.
Speaker 1: At the end he goes. Bill Duke says, there's only
Speaker 1: one thing I don't understand. I don't understand every mother
Speaker 1: fan word that just came out of your mouth. So classic.
Speaker 1: I gotta see that movie. Oh dude, it's really really good.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, Wait a minute. Does Terence Stamp hire
Speaker 1: himself out as a toy for a rich kid and
Speaker 1: Jackie Gleeson is the dad? No, that's the toy the
Speaker 1: Limi Peter Fonde is in it. Okay, I'll go see it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's excellent. Um, you got anything else? No, it's weird.
Speaker 1: This is one of those where it was even kind
Speaker 1: of long, and I feel like we just didn't even
Speaker 1: cover half of what we could have. Yeah, no way,
Speaker 1: and we definitely didn't. There's a lot to it. It's
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. We'll do a part two one day. Oh yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, I would direct everybody to I think
Speaker 1: wired to look up movie accent expert breaks down thirty
Speaker 1: two actors accents and this dialect coach is just doing well.
Speaker 1: He talks about thirty two different characters and um, some
Speaker 1: are really good, like um, Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Capodi
Speaker 1: apparently is dead on, and um, Kevin Costner doing Robin
Speaker 1: Hood is supposedly the worst accent of all time and
Speaker 1: in movie history. You know who I love a lot,
Speaker 1: but he can't do an American accent. But I'll still
Speaker 1: watch him just because I love him. Is you and McGregor?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he in uh. In this season of Fargo,
Speaker 1: he was great and I loved it, but he's just
Speaker 1: he just has such a hard time that Scott that's
Speaker 1: Scottish accent just comes through. Yeah. Same with the men
Speaker 1: who stare at goats. Yeah, he had trouble in there.
Speaker 1: I mean it was fine, but you've noticed it every
Speaker 1: once in a while. He really did the wet behind
Speaker 1: the ears thing. He's so like a although I just
Speaker 1: I don't care. I just get over it, whereas some
Speaker 1: people I'm just like, no, I'm not gonna watch it
Speaker 1: with you. Well, if you want to know more about accents,
Speaker 1: get out there in the world, meet new people, listen
Speaker 1: to their accents. Maybe try someone for size who knows.
Speaker 1: Uh And since I said try someone for size, it's
Speaker 1: time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this uh switcheroo.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of funny. It was not really accent related,
Speaker 1: but voice related. Because we get a lot of comments
Speaker 1: about people that differently you know, but this this one
Speaker 1: was interesting. Hey guys, a little funny anecdote thought i'd share.
Speaker 1: I listened to the podcast for about three years. Ah.
Speaker 1: Shortly after I started listening, I pulled up a picture
Speaker 1: of you guys, just to put faces to your voices. Yesterday,
Speaker 1: for some reason, I pulled up a video he watched
Speaker 1: our Google Talk at the Google headquarters, um, and he
Speaker 1: realized that he had been picturing us backwards this whole time.
Speaker 1: That that was jarring. So that's a little switch on
Speaker 1: the usual story we get that people don't even know uh.
Speaker 1: So he said, since I only saw a picture, I
Speaker 1: guess it just assumed I knew by looking who had
Speaker 1: which voice. I've had that image for all these episodes
Speaker 1: as to who is who? Imagine how odd of an
Speaker 1: experience it was to watch a video I saw Josh
Speaker 1: speak with Chuck's voice, and Chuck and Josh's by far
Speaker 1: one of the weirdest moments I've had in recent memory.
Speaker 1: Thanks for all the great shows, Keep them coming. That
Speaker 1: is Nick from Indiana. Thanks a lot, Nick, I appreciate that. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's all I have to say about that. You just
Speaker 1: so imagine that it was probably pretty funny. He's still
Speaker 1: laughing about it. Uh. If you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us, like Nick did, tell us a funny story,
Speaker 1: We're always down to hear those. You can tweet to
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