Not "feeling" like losing an accent (dialect?)

[Wilson Gray]

When I was a child in the 'Forties and 'Fifties, I made a conscious
decision never to speak BE to any who was not black. The reason was
that, during those years, BE was basically regarded as a joke by
whites and parodied and mocked at every turn. So, starting at the age
of thirteen, when I became a student at a school whose student body
was 99.44% white, I successfully trained myself to speak "proper
English," to the extent that I was often called upon to read before
the class as an example to other students. The ability to do this came
in handy at the Army Language School,  where I was
"tseremonii-meister" for the Russkii Khor.

Of course, in any human endeavor, the Law of Unexpected Consequences
holds. For instance, white desk clerks and maitres d' who had accepted
my requests for reservations over the telephone denied that I had made
any such reservations, when they saw that I was black, and they
consequently refused me entrance. But, WTF, everybody knows that life
sucks and then you die, to coin a phrase.

-Wilson

On 10/30/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Not "feeling" like losing an accent (dialect?)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Oct 30, 2006, at 3:39 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote to Beverly Flanigan:
>
> > ... My conjecture is that native USA English speakers that drop
> > the sound "awe" and replace it with "ah" are exposed enough to the
> > sound
> > "awe" through TV and radio that they can say it if they want to but
> > they
> > don't want to.  As Krashen says in his conjecture, it doesn't feel
> > right to
> > them.  This is opposed to your conjecture that they actually
> > physically
> > "cannot say it"....
>
> krashen's conjectures are largely a red herring here.  and nobody's
> conjecturing that people *physically* cannot produce certain sounds.
> what's going on is something subtler: a *mental* barrier to producing
> distinctions *in connected speech*.
>
> as far as i know, people who have leveled /a/ and /O/ in favor of /a/
> can certainly learn to produce [O] -- indeed, a great many of them
> have done so, in exclamations like "awww" or in imitations of the
> pronunciations of single words in other dialects (like the new
> yorker's "cawfee").  what is so difficult is integrating the
> distinction into connected speech.
>
> the problem is that each of us has acquired an amazingly complex,
> highly automatized, and intricately coordinated set of routines for
> producing our dialect of our native language.  almost all of this is
> not under conscious control, and it could not possibly be: even a
> short utterance requires hundreds of gestures, in sequence or
> overlapping with one another, performed on a time scale of
> milliseconds to centiseconds.  (similar things are true of speech
> perception.)
>
> that's the psychological side of things.  you can see similar effects
> in child language acquisition. parents will tell you their kid "can't
> pronounce"  r -- but the kid can imitate a dog's snarl  just fine, or
> might be able to produce r in a single over-learned "favorite" word.
> a kid who regularly devoices word-final d to t is often entirely
> capable of producing a word-final d -- but only when aiming for the
> even more difficult word-final n.  the problem isn't physical
> ability, but psychological control of a complex set of coordinated
> abilities.
>
> this is not arcane knowledge, but the stuff of introductory
> linguistics courses.
>
> but there's also a social side to things.  in principle, we could, if
> sufficiently moved, learn to shift to another dialect, including
> learning phonemic distinctions we didn't used to have.  but there has
> to be a strong motivation to do so -- a social motivation, usually
> also under the level of consciousness.
>
> we're all confronted by vast amounts of variation in language every
> day.  in the face of that, almost everybody is conservative most of
> the time, sticking pretty much to the system they've learned; there's
> just too much to choose from.  certainly, nobody can know which
> variants someone like you thinks they "ought" to be using, and if you
> try to tell them how to talk they are naturally going to be resistant
> (just as you are when people try to tell you how to talk).  yes,
> people are resistant to change their habits, especially when these
> are shared with the people closest to them.
>
> arnold
>
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>


--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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