This Is the Voice
Page 18
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The BBC made its debut radio broadcast on November 14, 1922, a decade after Pygmalion’s premiere. That broadcast marked the first time that a single voice addressed an entire nation. It did so in flawless RP. This was no coincidence. The network’s administrators and announcers (all drawn from Britain’s ruling elite) had mandated that RP be the BBC’s exclusive accent, arguing that it was the clearest, most intelligible style of speech (which is, of course, what speakers of any accent say about their own way of talking), but also the most inherently “beautiful.”16 By broadcasting exclusively RP voices, the BBC also hoped that it could succeed where Sheridan and Shaw had failed: transforming the speech habits of the nation by leveling the accent to a single standard—a hope openly stated by the corporation’s first director-general, Lord Reith. “One hears the most appalling travesties of vowel production,” he wrote soon after the BBC’s maiden broadcast. “This is a matter in which broadcasting may be of immense assistance.”17
To that end, Reith, in 1926, created the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English, whose mission was to police on-air accents and to settle disputes about tricky pronunciations (should the Latinate word “canine” be kah-nine, or kay-nine?). George Bernard Shaw became a committee member and served for ten years, eventually rising to chairman—despite a distinct Irish accent acquired during his childhood and youth in Dublin. Shaw, however, was well versed in RP—and may, indeed, have submitted to an Eliza Doolittle–like course of phonetic instruction in his early twenties18 upon arriving in London as a penniless, tongue-tied, high school dropout; recordings made of him in the 1920s, when Shaw was in his seventies, reveal a hybrid accent that mixes his Irish lilt with some curiously RP-sounding vowels. Whatever the case, the majority of Shaw’s fellow committee members all spoke in the toniest, Oxford- and Cambridge-honed RP, including art historian Kenneth Clarke (who later hosted PBS’s Civilization) and journalist Alistair Cooke (later host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre).19 Evidence suggests that their pronunciations tended to prevail in internal debates of the Advisory Committee. (For instance, Shaw’s argument for “kay-nine” was rejected as an uncouth “Americanism.”)20
The BBC, of course, failed utterly to “level” accents across Great Britain. And with good reason. As noted earlier, there is a critical childhood period for learning accents, so for all adult listeners to the BBC, the announcers’ RP accents were powerless to change how they spoke. Like the light bulb in the joke about psychiatrists,I people who change their accent after puberty really have to want to change—by submitting to the kind of intensive training and practice that Eliza (and possibly Shaw) underwent. But babies and small children also proved entirely immune to the accent-leveling influence of the BBC. Disembodied electronic voices are powerless to inculcate babies with language or accents: speech can only be acquired as part of the back-and-forth feedback loop of a caregiver speaking Motherese and a baby babbling in reply.
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The BBC’s Advisory Committee was shut down in 1939, as an unnecessary expense in wartime. It was not resumed after the war—but not for budgetary reasons. In 1945, the country took a hard-left turn, politically, electing its first majority Labour government. With a newly empowered working class in charge, attitudes toward RP, and the 3 percent of people who spoke it, shifted dramatically. It was suddenly no longer so fashionable or desirable to sound like a member of Britain’s posh ruling class, and the dream (shared by Sheridan, Shaw, and the BBC) of leveling all speech to a single (upper-class) accent was perceived, not as a benevolent way to erase class differences, but as a patronizing imposition, by a privileged minority, on the culture and identity of the majority working class. Daniel Jones, the phonetician who had coined the term Received Pronunciation, hastened to distance himself from the whole concept. In the 1944 edition of his English Pronouncing Dictionary, he insisted that he did “not regard RP as intrinsically ‘better’ or more ‘beautiful’ than any other form of pronunciation.… I take the view that people should be allowed to speak as they like.”21
The BBC apparently now agreed because it soon hired some on-air talent with regionally tinged accents. By 1962, the widespread acceptance of non-RP speech over the British airwaves was such that, when the Beatles arrived in London on the first wave of Beatlemania, they were able to ignore the practice of earlier Liverpudlian entertainers who, upon making it in the capital, were required to jettison their Liverpool “Scouse” for a plummy RP. Indeed, daring to speak in their natural voices was an act as revolutionary as the Beatles’ eyebrow-brushing bangs, narrow suits, melodic innovations, and Cuban-heeled boots—and it helped (at least for a while) to make the Liverpool accent, and indeed all working-class voices, downright fashionable in 1960s Britain. RP speakers of long standing quickly learned to “code-switch” (that is, to alter their accent for purposes of social advancement—to join the in-group), as when the Rolling Stones’ front man, Mick Jagger, a product of solidly middle-class Dartford, in Kent, and a former student at the London School of Economics, began speaking in a caricatured Cockney. Except when he happened to find himself, in May 1966, on a talk show defending himself against criminal charges of marijuana possession after a drug bust. Jagger reverted to his best boarding-school RP. The members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus deployed their upper-crust Cambridge accents to satiric effect through preposterous exaggeration of its vowels and consonants (to say nothing of their absurdist utterances), and the comic bestselling books Fraffly Well Spoken (1968) and Fraffly Suite (1969) parodied, through clever phonetic spelling, the ridiculous, lockjawed sound of Refined RP. “Bar chorleh a smol gront from the yacht skonsul snommotch twosk for” (Translation: “But surely a small grant from the arts council is not much to ask for”).22 The Fraffly (or “frightfully”) Well Spoken series was by Australian author Alastair Ardoch Morrison writing under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder (Refined RP for “Alphabetical Order”). No professional linguist has ever demonstrated so potently how even the most supposedly “refined” accent is intelligible only to those who happen to share it.
Accents are, however, like hemlines: fashionable pronunciations rise or fall in popularity and prestige according to the whims of social and political change. With the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government in 1979, RP was back in (soon giving rise to a mania, in the early to mid-1980s, for the Sloane Ranger accent popularized by Lady Diana Spencer, then-fiancée to Britain’s Fraffly-speaking Prince Chulz). Today, in studies designed to rank the most desirable British accents, RP is once again the sought-after voice, while the Liverpool accent, after its brief, Beatles-inspired moment of desirability, has been thrust back to the bottom of the social ladder. Along with Cockney (polls show), Scouse is the accent most likely to ruin your chances for landing the big job, to be accepted in your proposal of marriage, or to win an election.
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George Bernard Shaw (or maybe Oscar Wilde—no one seems to know for sure) once quipped that America and Great Britain are “two countries separated by a common language.” There are indeed enough vocabulary and pronunciation differences to make the two tongues seem, at times, distinct. But even so, they operate identically on the level of voice—which is to say that Americans are as quick as the most accent-conscious Briton to form snap judgments about their fellow countrymen and -women according to how they move their lips and tongue when speaking English. There are fewer accents across the United States than across the United Kingdom (about one-fifth, in fact), but that’s only because England had a thousand-year head start in shaping its various dialects. There are, in any case, more than enough different accents across the United States over which to discriminate—such that you might almost say that an American can’t open his mouth without making some other American hate or despise him.
Thus, to many Americans dwelling above the Mason-Dixon line today, something as arbitrary as a Southern speaker’s pronouncing the i vowel as ah (“Ah lahk pah” for “I like pie”) can instantly stigmatize the s
peaker as backward, undereducated, slow-witted, prejudiced, or intolerant; while to Southerners, a Northerner’s habit of pronouncing i as two vowels (the dipthong uhh-ee) establishes the speaker as an elitist, PC-liberal snob. Midwesterners, with their hard r’s, nasality, and singsong prosody, are, to East Coasters and Southerners alike, bumpkins (like Marge Gunderson in the Coen brothers’ Fargo), while Californians, with their surfer-dude drawls and Valley Girl upspeak, are, to the rest of the country, hopeless flakes.
Americans also make vocal judgments about a speaker’s economic status as readily and automatically as do the British. No American who reads The Great Gatsby wonders what the title character could possibly be referring to when he says of Daisy Buchanan: “Her voice is full of money.”23 The “money” Gatsby hears is partly a feature of what she says (a blend of weightless gossip and empty flirtation possible only in someone with plenty of leisure time), but mostly how she says it—not only her accent, but her prosody, pace, and timbre. “She began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice,” the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, rhapsodizes: “It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again… there was an excitement in her voice… a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since…”24
Fitzgerald filled The Great Gatsby with his abiding obsessions over money and class, and their manifestations in the voice, in part because he wrote the book in the early 1920s, alongside the birth of radio. Alive to every thrilling new innovation of the Jazz Age, he seemed determined to catch the vividness of his characters’ voices with all the immediacy of a radio play, and the novel is (to my knowledge) unique in American literature for its focus on how people sound. It is virtually a book about voices. Daisy’s, for instance, proves to be a “dishonest signal.” For all the warmth and intimacy her voice projects, the fun, she turns out to be as cold and opportunistically self-dealing as her odious husband, Tom, upon whose voice Fitzgerald lavishes remarkable attention, capturing not only the dominance and imperiousness typical of his class, but its forced masculinity:
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it… “Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m more of a man than you are.”25
Meanwhile, poor Gatsby, the social-climbing arriviste, has a voice whose pretentions to high-born status are captured in his clumsy, would-be “British” expression: “Old sport.” Only at the end of the book, when Gatsby’s father (a farmer from rural Minnesota) arrives in Long Island for his son’s funeral do we learn how the young “James Gatz” would have sounded before the self-improvement program he subjected himself to as a boy, an Eliza Doolittle–like regimen that included an hour a day (5:00 to 6:00 p.m., his childhood planner reveals) to “Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.”
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The linguist who has provided the greatest understanding of how American voices stratify the country along socioeconomic lines is William Labov, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania. At age ninety-two, Labov enjoys a reputation among linguists equal to that of his contemporary Noam Chomsky. But whereas Chomsky focuses on everything in language that doesn’t change (the supposed “universals”), Labov’s obsession, for the last six decades, has been everything that does,26 with a special emphasis on accent—an approach that has given rise to an entire subspecialty of voice science called sociolinguistics.
Labov’s first foray into this undiscovered realm came with his 1960 Columbia University master’s thesis on a subtle sound change in the voices of the year-round residents of Martha’s Vineyard, the tiny island of six thousand inhabitants off the coast of Massachusetts.27 Through skillful interviews, Labov learned how the local fishing families’ pronunciation of certain vowels (which went back to when their ancestors settled the island in 1642) was an unconscious expression of the loathing they felt toward the summer people—the wealthy professionals from mainland cities like Boston and New York who descended on the island every July and August. The culture clash between natives and summer people was exacerbated by the recent collapse of the local fishing industry, which had made the fishing families of the north shore the poorest people in the state, with the highest unemployment. This, in turn, had allowed the summer people to buy up, at fire sale prices, all the large oceanfront houses built by the original settlers, driving their descendants from their ancestral homes into the hills and hollows of the interior. The fishermen’s reverting to an old accent (a study from thirty years earlier showed that the families used to pronounce the vowels very much like people on the mainland) was, Labov said, an unconscious attempt to keep alive the vanished glory of the Vineyard’s storied fishing and whaling past, to express their sense of themselves as the true “owners” of the Vineyard (accent as territorial marking), and to distinguish themselves from the hated mainland interlopers and their out-group big-city vowels.
Linguists had long known that language and accents are in constant flux, but Labov’s Vineyard study was the first to document a sound change in action—and to describe the social pressures driving it. The study provided a template by which Labov, over the next five decades, laid bare the socioeconomic determinants of various subtle (and not so subtle) accent changes across the country, including the sudden pronunciation, by upper-middle-class Manhattanites, in the mid-twentieth century, of the hard r sound after vowels (in words like “caR,” and New YoRk”), to distinguish themselves from city dwellers of working-class origins, who said “cah” and “New Yawk.”28 Today, Woody Allen and Bernie Sanders are the most famous bearers of this working-class New York accent feature. But seventy years ago, even rich, “aristocratic” New Yorkers, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, left off the r after vowels. (In his inaugural address of 1933, he can be heard declaiming: “We have nothing to feah but feah itself.”)
This missing r (also heard in Massachusetts, where nonnative actors trying to portray Bostonians practice it with the elocution exercise “Pak yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” and in the South where Virginians and Carolinians eat “po’ boys” and vote for “senatahs”) is a linguistic legacy of the original British settlers of the seventeenth century (and is, of course, a major feature of the RP accent of Hugh Grant and the Downton Abbey cast today). But if that r-lessness was part of the linguistic umbilical cord that still connected cities of America’s eastern seaboard with the motherland, that cord was severed in some cities after the Second World War, when the United States came of age as the world’s superpower. Wealthy New Yorkers, in particular, unconsciously began to distinguish themselves from both a declining England, and the un-moneyed Manhattan masses, by wrapping their well-bred lips and tongues around those terminal r’s. Labov documented the change, as it was occurring, in an ingenious experiment for his 1962 PhD dissertation, by plotting the statistical prevalence of r in the voices of clerks in three Manhattan department stores: high-end Saks, midrange Macy’s, and super-discount S. Klein. By requesting an item that he had previously established was on the “fourth floor,” Labov was able to show that the statistical distribution of the r sound in New York City was directly proportional to the social class to which the speakers belonged (or wanted to be perceived to belong).
Labov expanded his dissertation into a five-hundred-page book, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (1966), which examined several other class-based city accent features (including the tendency, later noted by Saturday Night Live’s Mike Myers, for outer borough speakers to pronounce “coffee talk” as “coo-awfee too-awk,” and to drop the g off the suffix –ing, as in Ratso Rizzo’s famous “I’m woo-awkin’ heah!” from Midnight Cowboy). The book instantly made Labov famous in linguistic circles. But his most startling revelations about American speech came a few years later when he began publishing papers on a prev
iously undocumented peculiarity in pronunciation in a vast, but puzzlingly self-contained, swath of the country, extending from upper New York state, across the Great Lakes region, to the western edge of Illinois.