Why Americans Have Different Accents and How it Can Affect Your Life

I was born in Chicago, but grew up in Milwaukee, and while both cities are in the Midwest, they can have different accents and different slang, which is true of many states, or even in different sections of individual cities. A much more glaring difference is when you compare a Southern accent with a Northern accent. I had no idea how different these things were until I married a Southerner and started to wonder, "How did it get this way? The country isn't that old." So I did some research.

What first intrigued me was words my in-laws used that I had never heard. "Cattywampus," "pertooky (or just tookie)", "cattycorner" and others made me wonder what bizarre planet these people were from. The oddest word you get in Milwaukee is "bubbler" which means "drinking fountain", and it's rooted in the brand of fountain that was popular around the city for many years. Easy. But where did "cattywampus" come from? It means "crooked" or "askew," or perhaps "disheveled," as in, "Fix that, it's all cattywampused."

Scotch-Irish roots

It turns out that a lot of Southern words and Southern slang have their start in Scotland, because of the high percentage of Scotch-Irish people who migrated to America early on. The Scottish already had their own slang and variants in English. They moved to mostly the Northern part of Ireland, then emigrated to the US, settling in many places, but particularly the South. The Scottish slang word "perticky" is short for "particular", which means "fussy" or "picky." After a few centuries, Southern Americans started pronouncing it differently and the word changed.

Slang in other parts of the country has similar roots. Things vary based on who settled where. If you've seen the movie "Fargo," you certainly noticed the accent, which is common in areas such as North Dakota, Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where many settlers were of Norweigian or other Scandinavian descent.

But what about the Southern drawl? That also has its roots in history. In England in the 1600s, the upper class British started to not pronounce the R at the end of words. "air" became "aiah", "here" became "heah" and so on. This was a way to distinguish themselves from other classes, or more accurately to distinguish other classes from them.

As people sailed over to America, many British upper class people settled in the warm farming regions of the South, where they started cotton and tobacco plantations, while others settled in the North, where they may have farmed, or worked in other trades. This started the difference in how Americans pronounced things - use of Rs in the North, dropping them in the South.

As noted earlier, there are still more variants in the accents. South Carolina has been noted as being vary different, and New Yorkers and New Englanders typically sound different than other Northerners, but historic class and ancestry are the most basic reasons for the most basic differences in the way Americans speak.

Affects on bias

Accent bias isn't just an American thing, and regional accents also aren't American. The best example of accent bias is in the film, "My Fair Lady," when a linguist is challenged to take a working class woman with a Cockney accent and perfectly transform her into an upper class woman, from the way she spoke to the way she walked, dressed, and ate.

If you pay attention to American media, if someone is meant to be portrayed as stupid, uncultured, backward, or ridiculous, they will most often be depicted as having a Southern accent. At the same time, according to a 2012 study, someone with that accent will typically be thought of as more friendly. This bias is deeply ingrained, affecting even children, and goes across regions. But realistically, the bias is formed by more than speaking more quickly or more slowly, or saying, "That ol' cat is kind of perticky today, bless her heart." The biggest source of bias is grammar.

Grammar matters

You can be from Milwaukee and pronounce "bag" as "baig" and it just sounds funny, but if you say, "Yeah dere, I went to that place oncest, it useta be over dere trew da stop and go light acrost from da Tyme machine there. Yah," people are going to think you're crazy, or not too bright. Similarly, saying, "Hi y'all," instead of "Hello" is more likely to make people think you're charming. What will most likely make people question your intelligence and sophistication is if you see your child get stagger because he's dizzy from being on the merry-go-round and you say, "What's the matter doll-baby are you drunk? Cain't walk no good no how, bless your heart." An even better example might be if you said, "Huh uh, I ain't hungry. Me and Mama had a bite at the S&S little while ago. If I had my druthers I'd a had barbecue at the Rooster Cafe but you know how Mama loves the S&S. Won't never go nowhere else. But darlin' if you're hungry I can fix you a sandwich or heat you up some black eyed peas and corn bread right quick. I reckon I had about enough of those black eyed peas. I don't never need to see them again."

That example might sound perfectly pleasant, but when you read it, think of how that person might look. What job do you think they have? The image in your mind is your own response to the grammar of that sentence. Double negatives, slang, mispronunciations, and misuse of words all contribute to the impression we have in our minds of the intelligence and character of the person saying them, even if we don't actually see or hear them. And these impressions can have very negative long-lasting effects, from how you would be graded for a speech at school, to whether you were hired for a job, or how you are judged to be performing at your job.

Take recent presidents for an example. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, from Georgia and Arkansas respectively, both had very pronounced Southern accents. George W. Bush had a much milder Texas accent, so he doesn't really fit the comparison. Comedians, talk show hosts, and people across America would do their own version of the accents of both these Presidents, just as some might do their own impressions of the stylistic speech of presidents Reagan and Obama, but what was not mocked was their use of the language. How they pronounced things was different, but what they said was typically flawless. In contrast, George W. Bush was mocked for his use of the language, such as questioning "How many is a Brazilian?" That's the difference of the impact of accent versus grammar.