This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  Until Labov’s revelations, this large expanse of the Midwest had always been understood to typify a style of speech that linguists call General American, or GA, an accent devoid of any overt regional features (like Ratso’s New Yawk patois or the r-less sound of Mark Wahlberg’s tough-guy South Boston voice, or the twang of a Texan’s vowels). GA’s neutrality goes back to the settlers who originally pushed west into the American interior. They were mostly from Scotland and Ireland, both of which chose not to adopt Thomas Sheridan’s “fashionable” London-based speech and kept the r after vowels and eschewed the lip pout that turns words like “dance” into “dawnce.” Which is why, when a Midwesterner today says “car,” she shows no inclination to extend the vowel into a louche upper-class drawl and she wraps her tongue firmly around the terminal r.29

  GA is (phoneticians are fond of pointing out) the closest America has to a “standard” accent like Britain’s RP: that is, one that doesn’t divulge where you came from (beyond the vast expanse of what the coastal elites call “fly-over country”). But unlike RP (a “prestige” voice of Britain’s educated upper middle class), GA is sonic democracy: the ideal of “class-free” America made audible; the speech style of the country’s Great Middle, both geographically and economically. Little surprise, then, that when radio and television came along, GA was made the default accent (or nonaccent) of national broadcasting—and remains so for all American-born on-air network television personalities. Don Lemon on CNN, Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Stephen Colbert on CBS—all were born or raised where strong regional accents resounded (Baton Rouge, the Bronx, and South Carolina, respectively) but all today are careful to speak in generic GA (both Lemon and Colbert have talked about the training they underwent to lose their regional accents).

  It’s maybe worth remarking, though, that the tacit imposition of the GA accent by the American radio and TV networks stems from a very different impulse than the one that compelled Lord Reith to mandate the RP accent at the BBC. It’s impossible to imagine any American TV executive concerned about “leveling” accents across the United States. Instead, the motivation for universal GA over the airwaves is purely capitalistic. By broadcasting voices with the fewest “sectional peculiarities” (as one American elocution manual from the 1920s described regional accent markers),30 the network bosses are simply trying to avoid the instinctive fear and disgust response to out-group vocal sounds that might compel a viewer to change the channel.

  That people in the huge expanse of the Great Lakes region do not speak in GA (as previously believed) was a fact upon which Labov stumbled in the late 1960s while listening to a tape of a Chicago teenager named Tony.31 Puzzled at Tony’s nonsensical claim that his friend Marty nearly died “in the lax,” Labov eventually realized that Tony was saying his friend almost drowned while swimming “in the locks”—the narrow canals leading into Lake Michigan. Further investigation revealed that Tony said all his short o’s as if they were short a’s and that, amazingly, so did people in all the major cities of the Great Lakes region—including Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and Milwaukee. In all these cities, people said “I gat the jab,” instead of “I got the job,” and “a pair of sax” instead of “a pair of socks.”

  Labov discovered that this displacement of the low-back short o vowel into the high-front short a space in the mouth had initiated a domino-like effect through the oral cavity, pushing each vowel sound one unit forward, such that city-dwellers across the entire 350-mile-long section of the country (known as the Inland North) had begun saying words like “fat” and “Anne” like “fiat” and “Ian,” and words like “boss” and “caught” like “bus” and “cut.” Saturday Night Live writer Robert Smigel (a native New Yorker) was struck by the unusual accent when he moved to Chicago in the early 1980s, and later satirized it in a series of sketches from the early 1990s about Chicago Bears football fans. Seated around a table heaped with meats, they talk about “pork chaps,” proclaim themselves Bears “fee-yans,” and eagerly await the big “kick aff.”

  Labov labeled the phenomenon the Northern Cities Shift—and it’s a bigger deal than it might seem. As Edward McClelland puts it in his book How to Speak Midwestern (2016), “Vowels whose pronunciations had been stable for a thousand years, since the days of feudal England, began taking on new inflections in the mouths of Upper Midwesterners.”32 When Labov brought in a linguistic team from outside the vowel shift region to investigate the phenomenon, the transplanted linguists found that they often could not understand what the locals were saying. One heard a radio announcer in Chicago warn that an expressway was “jammed salad”; another that a local plant could not maintain “abberations” (that is, operations). A hotel concierge in Detroit announced that coffee would be served each morning next to the “padded plant.” Still more remarkable, however, was Labov’s discovery that the vowel shift was rendering the speakers incomprehensible to themselves. When he played a tape of the isolated word “block,” as spoken by a Chicagoan, to other Chicagoans, they identified it as the word “black”—until they heard the full sentence (“Senior citizens living on one block”), and realized their error. “Most spectacular,” Labov wrote, was the locals’ mishearing of the word “buses.” All of them heard the word “bosses.”

  Given the extremity of the pronunciation changes occurring in the Great Lakes region, Labov was further startled to learn that it was extremely new. Consulting earlier phonetic descriptions of how people in the region spoke (conducted in the 1930s), Labov realized that the Northern Cities Shift had come to full fruition in only the last fifty years, around the mid-1960s. Why it happened tells a remarkable story of how even the most fine-grained adjustments to the movements of the tongue and lips in speech are driven by political, ideological, and cultural forces.

  In research done in the early 2000s, Labov traced the origins of the Northern Cities Shift to 1817, with the construction of the Erie Canal, which opened a waterway from New York into the American interior.33 By far the biggest migration west along the canal’s route were those RP-eschewing Scottish and Irish settlers, many of whom had been living for several generations in upper New York state and had forged an identity that today we call Puritan Yankee, a devoutly religious population strongly opposed to the death penalty and slavery. Which meant that when they arrived in huge numbers in the Great Lakes region they experienced a considerable culture clash with another group of settlers who had started moving to the area: transplanted Appalachians from the pro-slavery, pro-capital-punishment states of Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Kentucky. Contemporary historians noted the violence of the cultural and ideological collision: the Puritan Yankees “thought of the Southerner as a lean, lank, lazy creature, burrowing in a hut, and rioting in whiskey, dirt and ignorance.”34 The Southerner thought of the Yankee (who agitated not only for the end of slavery and capital punishment, but also espoused health foods, prison reform, women’s rights, new standards of dress, the closing of businesses on Sundays, and the shuttering of saloons) as a kind of proto-parody of today’s self-righteously “woke,” progressive, PC-policing millennial.

  Like the fishing families on Martha’s Vineyard, whose loathing of the summer interlopers prompted an unconscious change in vowels to mark an in-group/out-group divide, the Northerners began to use their way of shaping the short a to broadcast the greatest possible ideological and cultural distance from the upland Southerners, who showed zero inclination to adopt the accent change (and, indeed, began to unconsciously push the a vowel farther back in the mouth, stretching it out into a nice molasses drawl). As the ideological schism deepened over the next one hundred years, both sides exaggerated the speech features that marked them as distinct from the hated other. The two accents, as Labov put it, did not “drift” apart. They were actively “pushed apart,” the Northerners rotating the vowels forward through the mouth as the Southerners dropped them back. This dynamic continued with the violent upheaval of the Civil War, and was accelerate
d through the twentieth century, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—to which Republican politicians, including Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, cynically responded with the “Southern strategy,” a shameless appeal to racism against African Americans that ultimately won the Republicans the political allegiance of Southern states that, for over one hundred years, had been a Democratic stronghold. (Meanwhile, the Inland North states, formerly rock-ribbed Republican, flipped Democratic.)

  Various forms of race-based fear-mongering, and culture-war wedge issues, have kept the Southern states Republican since then and reinforced the unusually sharp boundary line between the two accents. Remarkably, people in cities of the Midland states just to the south of the Great Lakes region—including Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska—show no sign of the vowel shift, and for this reason speak in an accent that can safely be described as classic General American. These GA speakers also mark a political boundary line that (at least up until the presidential election of 2016) clearly demarcates the Northern (Democratic-voting), and the Southern (Republican-voting) states as clearly as the pronunciation of “socks” and “sacks.”

  * * *

  Not everyone in the Inland North adopted the vowel shift, however. Conspicuously missing were those people over whose fate the Civil War was fought: African Americans. To this day, despite having lived among the vowel-shifting whites of the Inland North for generations, Black residents of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee show no tendency toward saying “fat” like “fiat” or “chopsticks” like “chapsticks.” Instead, they sound a lot like the Black populations in the rural South from which they, or their ancestors, migrated. They also sound surprisingly like the Black populations of places many miles away: in New York, Boston, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.35

  The accent they share includes the Southern pronunciation of long i as ah (which white people in the South do), but also the uniquely African American tendency to give the l sound a vowel-like quality at the end of words (“coo’ ” instead of “cool”), and dropping the r after vowels not only at the ends of words (like white, working-class New Yorkers and all Bostonians and Carolinians) but in the middle, as in “Flo’ida” for “Florida.”36 Along with these, and other, accent details come an array of grammatical features that are distinct to inner-city African American speech, including deletion of the copula verb in certain constructions (as in “We happy”—but not in the first person singular “I am happy”), and a use of the verb “to be” in statements such as “She be working,” which indicates an ongoing state of employment stretching over years (as opposed to the observation that she happens to be at work right now: “She working”).

  Not all African Americans speak this dialect, of course, but every African American who grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood has myelinated the necessary speech-motor circuitry for slipping into it should they choose—code-switching like Mick Jagger when shuttling between his prep-school RP and his rock ’n’ roll Cockney. Linguistics professor John Baugh grew up in inner-city Los Angeles and for the most part speaks in the Standard English he heard at home (his mom was a college-educated elementary school teacher). But when greeting fellow African Americans, Baugh will often briefly drop this “formal” speech and execute a kind of verbal fist-bump, a quick smattering of the African American dialect that he grew up hearing on the playground and in the street. “So if several Black professors get together,” Baugh told me recently, “it’s very common to say, ‘Hey, bro, what’s happenin’?’ ‘Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on’—we style shift for a second. It provides a lot of valuable ethnic, linguistic, and racial solidarity when people engage in that.”37

  In the 1990s, Baugh used his talent for code-switching to conduct an eye-opening, and now classic, study of voice profiling by landlords around Stanford University. By phoning in responses to advertised apartments in expensive neighborhoods of Palo Alto, and variously using his impeccable African American “inner-city” voice, his flawless Chicano voice, and his perfectly modulated Standard English “professor” voice, Baugh revealed that landlords were claiming no vacancy to everyone except those who sounded white.38

  Today, the African American dialect that Baugh code-switches into when greeting fellow Black professors, and that he used in his study of linguistic profiling, is known, variously, as “Black English,” “African American Vernacular English,” “Spoken Soul,” or “Ebonics” (from ebony plus phonics—literally “black sounds”). William Labov was, in 1969, the first linguist to conduct a formal analysis of the dialect’s grammar, showing that, contrary to claims that it is “slang” or “lazy” or “sloppy” speech, Black English (as I will call it) is as complex, consistent, rule-based, and richly expressive as any other dialect (if not more so).39 Labov offered this analysis in the face of “expert” opinion from school psychologists of the early 1960s that Black English is a “non-logical mode of expression”—that is, not a language—and evidence of a genetic deficiency, a cognitive deficit, the supposed proof for which were the low reading scores of school kids in the inner city.40

  Labov showed that this was grotesque racist nonsense, and that the struggles of elementary school African Americans, reared in the Black English typically spoken in the intimacy of the home, reflected nothing more mysterious than the children’s lack of familiarity with the Standard English spoken by their teachers. This might suggest a degree of racial segregation bordering on South African apartheid—and, sure enough, Labov showed that the majority of inner-city Black children reached fourth grade without ever having had a face-to-face conversation with a white person, and thus never having conversed in Standard English. That they had been bombarded, since birth, by the electronic sounds of Standard English blaring from TVs and radios was irrelevant: as we noted earlier, people cannot passively acquire languages, accents, or dialects from an electronic, disembodied voice. Voices are shaped in active interplay with other voices during a critical window in childhood development.

  * * *

  In 1996, the Oakland, California, school board took up a suggestion by Labov and others that teachers speak to children in Black English (or, as it was now being called, Ebonics) as a way to ease the kids into proficiency with Standard English. This was met by a cyclone of outrage from both white and Black commentators who misapprehended it as a proposal to teach kids a nonstandard dialect, in place of Standard English. Stanford University sociolinguist John Russell Rickford documented in his book Spoken Soul (2000) the widespread ridicule and contempt aimed at the Oakland proposal—and at Black English itself, a mode of speech that for a huge number of African Americans is vital to their sense of personal and group identity, culture, family, and history. Nevertheless, media outlets derided it as “mumbo jumbo,” “mutant English,” “broken English,” “fractured English,” “slanguage,” and “ghettoese.”41 The right-wing political TV personality Tucker Carlson, then of CNN, now of Fox News, dismissed it as “a language where nobody knows how to conjugate the verbs.”42

  There is debate over the origins of Black English. The “Africanists” insist that it derives from the West African languages spoken by the original slaves wrested from their homeland, a diverse group of speakers who, plunged into the unfamiliar world and language of their new circumstance, were obliged to improvise a pidgin (a simplified form of a language) that bridged the gap between their respective African tongues and English; this then became a creole (a more systematic, grammatically governed speech) spoken by their children, and then a full vernacular within a generation or two. Certain grammatical features (like using “be” for permanent situations, as in “She be working”) do seem to be unique to African tongues. But the “Anglicists” argue that every feature of grammar and accent can be traced to the seventeenth-century English spoken by the white indentured servants (imported from Britain’s non-RP-speaking underclass) whom the slaves worked alongside on plantations. Still others sug
gest that the dialect derives from a merging of the two strains43 (for which there seems to be compelling evidence).

  Regardless of its origins, Black English’s continued existence, a century and a half after the emancipation of the slaves, and its growing divergence from Standard English, is testimony, Labov says, to the institutional racism that has characterized the Black experience. And not only in the South. In search of better jobs and better treatment, some six million African Americans fled north in the Great Migration (1916–1970)—only to face discrimination almost as revolting as that which they experienced on the plantations: obliged to live in outlying, decrepit, or otherwise substandard neighborhoods, isolated by white flight to the suburbs, pushed into underperforming schools, denied well-paid (or any) jobs, stopped and frisked, gunned down by police, linguistically profiled, and imprisoned en masse (in 2020, despite a sharp decline in incarceration rates for African Americans, they are still locked up at a rate more than five times that of whites).44 According to Labov, Black English’s continued divergence from the English spoken by the majority white population is a result of the same dynamic that he first documented in the fishermen on Martha’s Vineyard—an unconscious rejection of an oppressive, exploiting “other.” Or perhaps not so unconscious. Urban anthropologists in the 1980s discovered among Black teens in Washington, D.C., a clear hostility to “acting white”—with speaking Standard English (including “white pronunciation patterns or accents”) topping the list of behaviors to be avoided at all costs.45 And who could blame them?