Week 14 Post: The "Non-Accent"

English with an Accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States
Rosina Lippi-Green, chapters 2-4

I find this aspect of social-linguistics extremely interesting. It is one of my favorite subjects with linguistics and possible within the English studies. For some reason I am fascinated with accents. Something that has completely changed the way I think about accents is a section within this reading, “The Non-Accent,” when the author describes the two different types of accents that are present, these being an L1 accent and an L2 accent. I had never before thought or even considered the idea of separating these two. How unfair is it for us to dub a specific regional way of phonetically producing words as separate from “English?” I find this relevant in my life because being from Chicago, anytime my family and I travel people can guess right away where we are from. I hear no difference at all in how they speak and how we speak most of the time, but somehow it sounds so different to them. I always wondered how it was possible for only one side of the “accent” to notice any difference. Now, I am dating a guy from central-southern Illinois. When I first met him I had a hard time understanding him! I asked him if it seemed like I had an accent and he said no, I just sound like how people on TV sound. Now, of course, I have gotten used to his and his family’s different phonetical pronunciations.

As for an L2 accent, I find it incredibly interesting to think to separate these two. It completely makes it. L1 accents are just different American (in our case) regional ways of phonetically speaking. L2 accents are accents that are produced due to the speakers’ way of having learned their L1 and how their hard pallet has been shaped because of it. I always thought that it was so interesting that if a child starts speaking an L2 before the age of 12, there is a lower opportunity for the child to develop an L2 accent because their pallets have not yet finished forming. I know a family that moved here from Italy. The son was 14, one daughter was 12 and the other daughter was 7. Now adults, the only sibling to have an L2 accents is the oldest son who was 14 when they moved. The other two have (to my ears) absolutely no accent once so ever.

The author states, “…dialect is perhaps nothing more than a language that gets no respect” (43). How the author then goes on to explain her technical definition of dialects and accents. Accent is when differences are restricted primarily on phonology, like my boyfriend’s and my way of speaking. If the two varieties of a single language also differ in morphological structures, syntax, lexicon, and semantics, then they are different varieties or “dialects” of the same language.

I can almost see this with my boyfriend and me. He has phrases that I have never heard of and I find it very interesting that he and his family use the word “seen” for I think past progressive tense. For example they say, “I seen that movie last week,” or “I seen him running earlier today.” Obviously, these could be changed into one of two ways, “I saw the movie last week” or “I had seen that movie last week.” It depends on the context for when you would use each. So whenever they use the word “seen” I always try to figure out which tense it would take place in, because sometimes they do use the word “saw,” maybe they just take out the lexical verb “have.” It is interesting to take note on these differences.