(imit.: dez may be slightly bent spread 5) v type, N typewriter, typist with or without suffix -|| [/BB/v,.

Fonts for Stokoe notation

You may be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the global standard for representing speech sounds, ideally independent of the way those speech sounds may be represented in a writing system. Did you know that sign languages have similar standards for representing hand and body gestures?

Unfortunately, we haven’t settled on a single notation system for sign languages the way linguists have mostly chosen the IPA for speech. There are compelling arguments that none of the existing systems are complete enough for all sign languages, and different systems have different strengths.

Another difference is that signers, by and large, do not read and write their languages. Several writing systems have been developed and promoted, but to my knowledge, there is no community that sends written messages to each other in any sign language, or that writes works of fiction or nonfiction for other signers to read.

One of the oldest and best-known notation system is the one developed by Gallaudet University professor William Stokoe (u5"tx) for his pioneering analysis of American Sign Language in the 1960s, which succeeded in convincing many people that ASL is, in ways that matter, a language like English or Japanese or Navajo. Among other things, with his co-authors Dorothy Casterline and Carl Cronenberg Stokoe used this system for the entries in their 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language (available from SignMedia).  In the dictonary entry above, the sign CbCbr~ is given the English translation of “type.”

Stokoe notation is incomplete in a number of ways. Chiefly, it is optimized for the lexical signs of American Sign Language. It does not account for the wide range of handshapes used in American fingerspelling, or the wide range of locations, orientations and movements used in ASL depicting gestures. It only describes what a signer’s hands are doing, with none of the face and body gestures that have come to be recognized as essential to the grammar of sign languages. Some researchers have produced modifications for other languages, but those are not always well-documented.

Stokoe created a number of symbols, some of which bore a general resemblance to Roman letters, and some that didn’t. This made it impossible to type with existing technology; I believe all the transcriptions in the Dictionary of ASL were written by hand. In 1993 another linguist, Mark Mandel, developed a system for encoding Stokoe notation into the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set, which by then could be used on almost all American computers.

In September 1995 I was in the middle of a year-long course in ASL at the ASL Institute in Manhattan. I used some Stokoe notation for my notes, but I wanted to be able to type it on the computer, not just using Mandel’s ASCII encoding. I also happened to be working as a trainer at Userfriendly, a small chain of computer labs with a variety of software available, including Altsys Fontographer, and as an employee I could use the workstations whenever customers weren’t paying for them.

One day I sat down in a Userfriendly lab and started modifying an existing public domain TrueType font (Tempo by David Rakowski) to make the Stokoe symbols. The symbols were not in Unicode, and still are not, despite a proposal to that effect on file. I arranged it so that the symbols used the ASCII-Stokoe mappings: if you typed something in ASCII-Stokoe and applied my font, the appropriate Stokoe symbols would appear. StokoeTempo was born. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked.

I made the font available for download from my website, where it’s been for the past 26-plus years. I wound up not using it for much, other than to create materials for the linguistics courses I taught at Saint John’s University, but others have downloaded it and put it to use. It is linked from the Wikipedia article on Stokoe notation.

A few years later I developed SignSynth, a web-based prototype sign language synthesis application. At the time web browsers did not offer much flexibility in terms of fonts, so I could not use Stokoe symbols and had to rely on ASCII-Stokoe, and later Don Newkirk’s (1986) Literal Orthography, along with custom extensions for fingerspelling and nonmanual gestures.

Recently, as part of a project to bring SignSynth (another project of mine) into the 21st Century I decided to explore using fonts on the Web. I discovered a free service, FontSquirrel, that creates Web Open Font Format (WOFF and WOFF2) wrappers for TrueType fonts. I created WOFF and WOFF2 files for StokoeTempo and posted them on my site.

I also discovered a different standard, Typeface.js, which actually uses a JSON format. This is of particular relevance to SignSynth, because it can be used with the 3D web library Three.js. There’s another free service, Facetype.js, that converts TrueType fonts to Typeface.js fonts.

(imit.: dez may be slightly bent spread 5) v type, N typewriter, typist with or without suffix -|| [/BB/v,.

To demonstrate the use of StokoeTempo web fonts, above is a scan of the definition of CbCbr~ from page 51 of the Dictionary of American Sign Language. Below I have reproduced it using HTML and StokoeTempo:

CbCbr~ (imit.: dez may be slightly bent spread 5) v type, r typewriter, typist with or without suffix _____ ?[BBv.

StokoeTempo is free to download and use by individuals and educational institutions.

Angus Grieve-Smith wears a mask of his own design, featuring IPA vowel quadrilaterals on each cheek

Show your vowels and support Doctors Without Borders!

I’m very excited about a new face mask I designed.  You can order it online!

I was inspired by two tweets I saw within minutes of each other on July Fourth.  First, Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a professor at Aix-Marseille, posted a picture of  his colleague Pascal Roméas wearing a “triangle vocalique” T-shirt designed by the linguistics YouTuber Romain Filstroff, known as Linguisticae. Gasquet-Cyrus’s tweet translates to “When you eat out with a phonetician colleague, you get a chance to practice your vowel quadrilateral!”

The vowel quadrilateral is one of the great data visualizations of linguistics: a two-dimensional diagram of the tongue height and position assigned to the vowel symbols of the Interneational Phonetic Alphabet, as viewed from the left side of the face.   It is also known as the vowel triangle, depending on how much wiggle room you think people have for their tongues when their mouths are fully open.  It can even be plotted based on the formant frequencies extracted from acoustic analysis.

The second was a tweet by Emily Bender, a professor at the University of Washington, about face masks with a random grid of IPA symbols on them.  These are designed by the Lingthusiasm podcast team of author Gretchen McCulloch and professor Lauren Gawne, using the same pattern as in their popular IPA scarves.

Seeing the two pictures one after the other, I realized that rather than a random grid, I could put a vowel quadrilateral on an IPA mask.  Then I realized that if I placed the quadrilateral on one side, I could get it to line up with the wearer’s mouth.  I also had to make a corresponding chart for the right side.

I decided that I wanted the money to go to a charity that was helping with COVID-19.  Doctors Without Borders has been doing good work around the world for years, and with COVID they’ve really stepped up.  Here in New York they provided support to several local organizations and operated two shower trailers in Manhattan at the height of the outbreak.

From July 16 through 29, and then from November 27 through December 28, I ran a fundraiser through Custom Ink where we raised $430 in profits for Doctors Without Borders, and masks were sent to 32 supporters.

There’s another way to get masks!  I have made a slightly different mask design available at RedBubble.com.  You can even get a mug or a phone case.  This is the same store where I’ve been selling Existential Black Swan T-shirts for years.  You can get a mask with the swan on it, if that’s your style.  None of these part of a fundraiser, but you can still donate directly to Doctors Without Borders!

Update, February 1, 2021: There are more virulent strains of COVID spreading, so medical experts are recommending that people wear three-layer masks, or wear a single or double layer mask over a disposable surgical mask.  You should know that the white-on-black Custom Ink masks sold in the fundraisers in 2020 are single layer, and the RedBubble masks sold in 2020 are double layer.  They can both be worn over surgical masks.  Both services are now offering triple-layer masks, so I’ve updated the RedBubble links to the three-layer masks, and will use three-layer masks for any future fundraisers.  Stay safe, everyone!

Deaf scholar Ben Bahan gives a lecture about Deaf architecture

Teaching sign linguistics in introductory classes

Language is not just spoken and written, and even though I’ve been working mostly on spoken languages for the past fifteen years, my understanding of language has been tremendously deepened by my study of sign languages. At the beginning of the semester I always asked my students what languages they had studied and what aspects of language they wanted to know more about, and they were always very interested in sign language. Since they had a professor with training and experience in sign linguistics it seemed natural to spend some time on it in class.

Our primary textbook, by George Yule,contains a decent brief overview of sign languages. The Language Files integrates sign language examples throughout and has a large section on sign phonetics. I added a lecture on the history of sign languages in Europe and North America, largely based on Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan’s Journey Into the Deaf-World (1996), and other information I had learned over the years.

I also felt it was important for my students to actually observe a sign language being used to communicate and to express feeling, so I found an online video of an MIT lecture by psychologist and master storyteller (and co-author of Journey Into the Deaf-World) Ben Bahan. Bahan’s talk does not focus exclusively on language, but demonstrates the use of American Sign Language well, and the English interpretation is well done.

Studying a video lecture is a prime candidate for “flipped classroom” techniques, but I never got around to trying that. We watched the video in class, but before starting the video I assigned my students a simple observation task: could they find examples of the four phonological subsystems of American Sign Language – lexical signs, fingerspelling, depicting signs and nonmanual gestures?

Some of the students were completely overwhelmed by the task at first, but I made it clear that this was not a graded assignment, only introductory exploration. Other students had had a semester or more of ASL coursework, and the students with less experience were able to learn from them. Bahan, being Ben Bahan, produces many witty, thought-provoking examples of all four subsystems over the course of the lecture.

The phonological subsystems are among the easiest sign language phenomena for a novice to distinguish, but as we watched the video I pointed out other common features of ASL and other sign languages, such as topic-comment structures and stance-shifting.

Later, when I started teaching Introduction to Phonology, we had the opportunity to get deeper into sign language phonology. I’ll cover that in a future post.

African American English has accents too

Diversity is notoriously subjective and difficult to pin down. In particular, we tend be impressed if we know the names of a lot of categories for something. We might think there are more mammal species than insect species, but biologists tell us that there are hundreds of thousands of species of beetles alone. This is true in language as well: we think of the closely-related Romance and Germanic languages as separate, while missing the incredible diversity of “dialects” of Chinese or Arabic.

This is also true of English. As an undergraduate I was taught that there were four dialects in American English: New England, North Midland, South Midland and Coastal Southern. Oh yeah, and New York and Black English. The picture for all of those is more complicated than it sounds, and I went to Chicago I discovered that there are regional varieties of African American English.

In 2012 Annie Minoff, a blogger for Chicago public radio station WBEZ, took this oversimplification for truth: “AAE is remarkable for being consistent across urban areas; that is, Boston AAE sounds like New York AAE sounds like L.A. AAE, etc.” Fortunately a commenter, Amanda Hope, challenged her on that assertion. Minoff confirmed the pattern in an interview with variationist Walt Wolfram, and posted a correction in 2013.

In 2013 I was preparing to teach a unit on language variation and didn’t want to leave my students as misinformed as I – or Minoff – had been. Many of my students were African American, and I saw no reason to spend most of the unit on white varieties and leave African American English as a footnote. But the documentation is spotty: I know of no good undergraduate-level discussion of variation in African American English.

A few years before I had found a video that some guy took of a party in a parking lot on the West Side of Chicago. It wasn’t ideal, but it sort of gave you an idea. The link was dead, so I typed “Chicago West Side” into Google. The results were not promising, so on a whim I added “accent” and that’s how I found my first accent tag video.

Accent tag videos are an amazing thing, and I could write a whole series of posts about them. Here was a young black woman from Chicago’s West Side, not only talking about her accent but illustrating it, with words and phrases to highlight its differences from other dialects. She even talks (as many people do in these videos) about how other African Americans hear her accent in other places, like North Carolina. You can compare it (as I did in class) with a similar video made by a young black woman from Raleigh (or New York or California), and the differences are impossible to ignore.

In fact, when Amanda Hope challenged Minoff’s received wisdom on African American regional variation, she used accent tag videos to illustrate her point. These videos are amazing, particularly for teaching about language and linguistics, and from then on I made extensive use of them in my courses. There’s also a video made by two adorable young English women, one from London and one from Bolton near Manchester, where you can hear their accents contrasted in conversation. I like that I can go not just around the country but around the world (Nigeria, Trinidad, Jamaica) illustrating the diversity of English just among women of African descent, who often go unheard in these discussions. I’ll talk more about accent tag videos in future posts.

You can also find evidence of regional variation in African American English on Twitter. Taylor Jones has a great post about it that also goes into the history of African American varieties of English.

Bloomberg at a press conference on Univision

The Mayor’s speech

The spectacle of two bilingual Presidential candidates arguing in Spanish last week reminded me of the Twitter feed, “Miguel Bloombito,” created by Rachel Figueroa-Levin to mock our former Mayor’s Spanish for the amusement of her friends. I may be coming late to the party here, but Bloombito is still tweeting, and was recently mentioned by one of my fellow linguists. If Bloomberg runs for President we can probably expect to hear more from El Bloombito, so it’s not too late to say how dismayed I was by this parody as a linguist, as a language teacher, as a non-native Spanish speaker and as a New Yorker.

If Bloombito were simply a fun, jokey phenomenon, punching up at a privileged white billionaire who needs no defending, I wouldn’t spend time on it. But the context is not as simple as that. Figueroa-Levin’s judgment is linguistically naive, and rests on a confusion of pronunciation with overall competence, and an implied critique of language learning that sets the bar so high that most of the world’s population can never meet it.

Figueroa-Levin says that, “I think he’s just reading something on a card,” and maybe he does that with Spanish in the same contexts as with English, but that is not all there is to his Spanish. As reporter Juan Manuel Benítez told the New York Times, “the mayor’s Spanish is a lot better than a lot of people really think it is.”

Unsurprisingly, then, the tweets of El Bloombito do not actually resemble the Mayor’s Spanish very much at all. Instead they are a caricature of bad Spanish, with bad morphology and syntax, and lots of English mixed in. Linguists actually agree that mixing two languages is generally a sign of competence in both languages, and New York Spanish has several English borrowings that are absolutely standard. In contrast, the fictional Bloombito mixes them in ways that no real speaker does, like adding Spanish gender markers to every English noun.

For years now, as the population of native Spanish speakers has grown, politicians have made an effort to speak the language in public. With President George W. Bush and Governor George Pataki, Spanish seemed mostly symbolic. But Bloomberg seems to have taken more seriously the fact that twenty percent of the city’s population speaks Spanish at home.

The most noticeable feature of the actual Michael Bloomberg’s Spanish is a very strong American accent. He has no real success in pronouncing sounds that are specific to Spanish, like the flapped /r/ or the pure /o/, substituting sounds from his Boston/New York English. But in addition, when he says a Spanish word that has an English cognate his pronunciation tends to sound closer to the English word, giving the impression that he is using more English words than he really is.

There are ways of rendering these mispronunciations into Spanish, but Figueroa-Levin does not use them in her parody, probably because her audience doesn’t know Spanish well enough to get the joke. She also confuses accent for overall competence in the language. But if you listen beyond his accent, Bloomberg displays a reasonable degree of competence in Spanish. He often reads from prepared remarks, as with English, but he is able to speak extemporaneously in Spanish. In particular, he is able to understand fairly complex questions and give thoughtful responses to them on the spot, as in this discussion of the confirmation of Justice Sotomayor:

The bottom line is that, as Bloomberg said in the first clip, “Es difícil para aprender un nuevo idioma.” My experience teaching ESL and French has confirmed that. No adult, especially not a man in his sixties, is going to achieve nativelike fluency. But we can achieve the kind of mastery that Bloomberg has. And this city runs on the work of millions of people who speak English less well than Bloomberg speaks Spanish, but still manage to get things done.

In fact, before Bloombito I used clips of Mayor Bloomberg to reassure my ESL students that they could still function in a foreign language and be respected, even with a thick accent. After Bloombito I can no longer give them that assurance.

In the Salon interview Figueroa-Levin makes the argument that this kind of language work is best left to professionals, as Bloomberg did with American Sign Language, for example, and that Bloomberg was doing his Spanish-speaking constituents a disservice by speaking it imperfectly. I have made similar arguments regarding interpreters and translators. But speaking to the media and constituents in a foreign language is nowhere near as difficult as interpreting, and does not need to be professionalized. I’m sure the Mayor always had fluent Spanish speaking staffers nearby to fall back on as well.

What I find particularly disturbing about Miguel Bloombito is the symbolism. For centuries in this country speakers of other languages, particularly Spanish, have been expected to speak English in addition to whatever else they are trying to do (work, advocacy, civic participation). English has been associated with power, Spanish with subjugation.

Figueroa-Levin told Salon, “You get this sense that he thinks we should be honored that he would even attempt to speak Spanish.” What she gets wrong is that this is not just an empty gesture, like memorizing a few words. Here we have a native English speaker, one of the most powerful people in the country, who puts in significant time and effort every day to learn Spanish, and people mock him for it. It’s like if someone saw the Pope washing the feet of homeless people, criticized him on his technique, and told him to let a licensed pedicurist do the job. I could say more, but I’ve run out of polite things to say, so I’ll leave the last word to Carlos Culerio, the man on the street interviewed in the first clip above:

“I feel especially proud, as a Dominican, that Mayor Bloomberg speaks Spanish. It’s a matter of pride for us as Hispanics.”

Describing differences in pronunciation

Last month I wrote that instead of only two levels of phonetic transcription, “broad” and “narrow,” what people do in practice is to adjust their level of detail according to the point they want to make. In this it is like any other form of communication: too much detail can be a distraction.

But how do we decide how much detail to put in a given transcription, and how can we teach this to our students? In my experience there is always some kind of comparison. Maybe we’re comparing two speakers from different times or different regions, ethnicities, first languages, social classes, anatomies. Maybe we’re comparing two utterances by the same person in different phonetic, semantic, social or emotional contexts.

Sometimes there is no overt comparison, but at those times there is almost always an implicit comparison. If we are presenting a particular pronunciation it is because we assume our readers will find it interesting, because it is pathological or nonstandard. This implies that there is a normal or standard pronunciation that we have in our heads to contrast it to.

The existence of this comparison tells us the right level of detail to include in our transcriptions: enough to show the contrasts that we are describing, maybe a little more, but not so much to distract from this contrast. And we want to focus on that contrast, so we will include details about tone, place of articulation or laryngeal timing, and leave out details about nasality, vowel tongue height or segment length.

This has implications for the way we teach transcription. For our students to learn the proper level of detail to include, they need practice comparing two pronunciations, transcribing both, and checking whether their transcriptions highlight the differences that they feel are most relevant to the current discussion.

I can illustrate this with a cautionary tale from my teaching just this past semester. I had found this approach of identifying differences to be useful, but students found the initial assignments overwhelming. Even as I was jotting down an early draft of this blog post, I just told my students to transcribe a single speech sample. I put off comparison assignments for later, and then put them off again.

As a result, I found myself focusing too much on some details while dismissing others. I could sense that my students were a bit frustrated, but I didn’t make the connection right away. I did ask them to compare two pronunciations on the final exam, and it went well, but not as well as it could have if they had been practicing it all semester. Overall the semester was a success, but it could have been better.

I’ll talk about how you can find comparable pronunciations in a future post.

The positional neutralization of Marion Barry

In the wake of the death of Marion Barry, the former Mayor of Washington, DC, one of the most striking revelations was how many people had believed at one time that he was actually a husband-and-wife couple named “Mary and Barry.” Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, tweeted about this misconception and then discovered that lots of other people had also mentioned it.

The sociolinguist David Bowie mentioned that as a child he thought marionberry yogurt was named after the Mayor. I also thought until tonight that the Mayor was named “Marion Berry.” I had never heard of the berry or the yogurt, but apparently it’s a kind of blackberry that was first cultivated in Marion County, Oregon, when the Mayor was a child in Tennessee. It would have been the perfect Ben and Jerry’s ice cream naming opportunity, but given the Mayor’s controversial past, I understand why they didn’t bite. This may have been the seed for Barry’s fierce opposition to a “yogurt tax,” which could be a whole other blog post.

This widespread confusion between “Mary and” and “Marion,” and Bowie’s and my confusion between “Barry” and “berry,” comes from the positional neutralization of the /æ/, /ɛ/ and /e/ sounds in some dialects of English. As far as I know, no English speaker has trouble telling these two sounds apart before a /t/, so if there were a politician named “Mettion Batty,” no one would think that he was a couple named “Matty and Betty.” But in many parts of the United States, the sounds are pronounced the same before an /r/, so that “marry,” “merry” and “Mary” are pronounced the same.

Why do some people neutralize these vowels before an /r/? To make the American bunched /r/, we put our tongues in a place that’s very close to the place for /e/. That means to say “Mary” /meri/ we don’t have to move our tongues before the /i/, which is pretty convenient. For “merry,” those of us who say /mɛri/ have to raise it a bit, and for “marry” /mæri/ we have to raise it more. My guess is that for some of the ancestors of the marry-merry-Mary neutralizers would have occasionally raised their tongues a little early, or not lowered them so far in the first place, for those words. This kind of timing variability is quite commonplace in speech. They then discovered that confusions like “Mary and Barry” were infrequent and usually pretty easy to correct, and it was more efficient if they didn’t have to lower their tongues so much, so they kept doing it, and their kids picked it up from them.

I personally don’t have this neutralization (possibly due to the influence of a dialect that syllabifies /r/s into onsets), so I can pronounce all three sounds – and hear them, provided that the people speaking are pronouncing them differently. My first memory of this neutralization is hearing Mary Gross ranting about Christmas on Saturday Night Live: “People tell me I should be merry because my first name is Mary. Well, my last name is Gross, so have a gross Christmas!” And since I heard “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” today in the supermarket, it’s not too early to extend that gross Christmas wish to you all.

America’s Loveliest Accents: New Orleans

There’s a stereotypical “Southern” accent you’ll hear in mid-twentieth century movies and television, that owes more to Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh’s artificial accents than to anything that ever came out of the mouth of any real-life Southerner. It may bear a passing resemblance to the accents of real Coastal Southern gentry like Fritz Hollings, but it’s been used to portray people from all regions and social classes of the South. In the last fifty or so years we’ve heard a new stereotype that’s at least based on real Southerners like Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley, but it’s been applied to rich and poor white characters from Dallas to Knoxville to New Orleans.

YouTube user Mehrvigne, from Chalmette, Louisiana, wants us to know that some people from the New Orleans area don’t talk anything like that. Katie Carmichael, who just finished her dissertation on Chalmette accents after Hurricane Katrina, pointed me to Mehvigne’s “accent tag” video on Twitter.

Mehrvigne has a “Yat” accent, which bears an uncanny resemblance to working-class New York and Boston accents, and is said to have evolved from similar patterns of European immigrants acquiring an /r/-dropping dialect.

The “Yat” dialect is just one of several New Orleans accents, and it’s one that I actually didn’t hear when I visited the city back in 2010. It exists alongside other accents spoken by white, black and Asian (NSFW) people in New Orleans. To get an idea of the diversity of the area, listen to these two teenage girls doing an accent tag together:

This is part fifteen of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Charleston. Next, and last but not least: Baltimore.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Charleston

In my post about the Memphis accent, I discussed how the Mountain and Coastal (white) Southern dialects have very distinct origins. So why do they sound “the same” to many people? In part it’s because they’ve become more similar over the years.

At first it was the Mountain South imitating the Coast. Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia all controlled large mountain areas from their coastal port capitols in Williamsburg, New Bern, Charleston and Savannah, and later from their Piedmont capitals in Richmond, Raleigh, Columbia and Atlanta. It was fashionable among certain people to imitate the elites, and those elites spoke mostly with Coastal accents.

In the late twentieth century with the rise of the “New South” centered around Appalachian and Piedmont centers of cheaper labor, cultural and political power shifted to cities like Nashville, Charlotte and Louisville. With wider access to radio and television, and better roads connecting them to regional capitals, Southerners have had more exposure to regional accent role models.

African Americans in the South have also tended to shift from local accents to a regional or national model of “sounding Black.” Walt Wolfram and his colleagues have documented this divergence between black and white accents in Hyde County, in coastal North Carolina, in a fascinating series of studies.

Charleston

Charleston used to be known for its conservative, genteel coastal Southern accent, which you can hear in the speech of former Senator Fritz Hollings.

I’ll admit I had to look this one up. Darius Rucker, lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, is from Charleston. I’ve heard Hootie dismissed by some music snobs, but is there anyone who thinks Rucker doesn’t have a lovely voice?

What I find most interesting is that to my ear he sounds almost nothing like Hollings. Is that because he’s black, or because he’s younger, or both?

This is part fourteen of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Atlanta. Nextly: New Orleans, and finally Baltimore.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Louisville

We talk about “Southern” accents, but dialectologists distinguish at least two major dialect groups: South and South Midland, sometimes known as “Upper South” and “Lower South.” The different histories of the Coastal and Mountain South are presented in Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer’s accessible history of early British migration to North America.

Fischer shows us that there were two distinct migrations: the Anglican and Catholic planters and their indentured servants crossed from the south of England to Virginia ports like Arlington and Jamestown between 1642 and 1675, spreading out down the coast and importing slaves from Africa. It wasn’t until 1717 to 1775 that Presbyterians from the Scottish Lowlands, Northern Ireland and the English-Scottish borderlands arrived in Philadelphia and after a few years in Pennsylvania began migrating down the Shenendoah Valley and throughout the Appalachian and Ozark mountains.

My grandmother’s family history follows this stream: in the birth, death and marriage records collected by my cousins we see each generation moving down the mountains: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma and finally Texas, where my father was born. In Texas the Coastal and Mountain dialects merged to form something different from both.

Louisville

The Appalachian dialect covers all of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley, including Louisville. I’ve known several people from Louisville, including my first college roommate, and my friend and neighbor Elaine.

Dennis Preston studies American dialects and our attitudes to them. He also has a lovely Louisville accent, having grown up in New Albany, Indiana (“N’Albany”), just across the river. His dialect still maintains different pronunciations for “witch” and “which,” and “horse” and “hoarse,” as he demonstrated to me at a recent meeting of the American Dialect Society. Here’s a great video of him and Robert MacNeil riding a train across the mountains and talking to people about accents:

This is part eleven of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Tallahassee. Nextly: Memphis.