What your accent says about you with linguist Valerie Fridland

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1:09That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish. Cases closed. Requests handled. No extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. There are all those memes that I'm sure you've seen about sentences that are horribly misunderstood without an Oxford comma. Could you give an example of one of those? The one that I use in my class says, let's eat grandpa because there's no comma, right? And that's not an Oxford comma. But the truth is, you know, when my students are writing on a topic I gave them, it's rare that I'm going to misunderstand that they want to eat grandpa or something like that, right?

1:51I mean, it's just. Or is it? Yeah, it depends on the topic I've assigned them. When we get to family drama, maybe less so. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people who explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

2:20Valerie Friedland is a sociolinguist and the author of the book Why We Talk Funny, the real story behind our accents. She's an expert in how social changes affect the way we talk to each other. And I couldn't wait to word nerd out with her for this episode. I'm not opposed to Oxford commas. I also want that on record. I just also think we can love people who don't use them. Touché. We have a fascinating conversation about accents. How young are we when we first start to notice them? Does everyone think people sound smarter when they speak with a British accent? And I challenge Valerie to guess where I'm from based on how I speak.

2:56So one thing that's really interesting is you're part of an age group and here I'm calling you young that has less of a regional accent. It's a linguistic roller coaster and I'm excited to take you along for the ride. But I have to warn you, we kick off with linguistic pet peeves. Sorry, not sorry. Oh, great. I love pet peeves. That's my favorite. Good. Well, I was originally hoping that you would just explain to me why they bother me so much, but I have a feeling you might also try to talk me out of them. Oh, you know, we'll see. It depends on what pet peeves are. You know, some I think are fair, but I think we can all learn to be a little more graceful with our judgment on language.

3:38So I probably will, but we'll see where we go. All right, here we go. I've got a list of them for you. I came up with four for starters. I think the one that bothers me most is when somebody resends a message and says, I'm bumping this to the top of your inbox. My first reaction is, thanks, but I prioritize my own inbox. What level of entitlement leads somebody to think that it's their place to tell me what belongs at the top of my inbox? You've immediately just sank yourself to the very bottom of my inbox. I know. Okay, I will never use that with you, for sure. You know, I've actually, I'm not going to argue out of that one because I think there is a whole genre of email etiquette and email guidelines that we have somehow thrown out the window.

4:25And I am a proponent of spoken discourse and the way that language evolves there. I think it's very different when we get into written genres because they are, the whole idea of writing is it's based on conventions. If we didn't have learned conventions with writing, we wouldn't have writing, which is very different than speech. If we didn't have, you know, prescriptive rules about speech, speech would still exist. And it did for 150 ,000 years before we ended up writing it down. So it's a completely different animal. But I am absolutely with you on the whole lack of email etiquette. And email is a little bit like a mix between this immediacy of spoken interaction and the formality and non-timeliness of writing where it's sort of not in real time.

5:11And this whole bumping it up in your inbox is sort of like, hey, you're not paying enough attention to me. And I think that's why it peeves you. And I 100 % agree with you with that. I think there are ways that we need to sometimes be able to prod someone because people forget or they haven't gotten back to us. But then I think you need to take the onus on yourself of saying, hey, I'm just checking in. I have this deadline that I need to meet or I have this this thing that I I need to meet. And if you have time, I would appreciate a response or something like that where it's recognizing that it's an imposition on you.

5:46What's really, really interesting, I think, about this pet peeve is in spoken language, we see the opposite. So I don't know how you feel this might be on your list about how someone says the response to thank you. What do you say if I said, oh, thank you, Adam? Well, you would say I would say you're welcome, but I don't love it when people say no problem. Well, and, you know, what's interesting with no problem is it's kind of the opposite of what you're getting irritated about in the email format, because when you say no problem, what that's acknowledging is this idea of imposition and that we recognize that putting an imposition on someone is disfavored.

6:22And so when someone says, oh, it's no problem, that means I'm letting you know that I really did not mind the imposition because you're such a good person or you're such a good friend or I value you in some way. So it's actually a really nice thing because you're recognizing that there was imposition and dismissing it as a concern, which is the opposite kind of what irritates you on that email, which is like, I'm not really paying attention to this imposition. So I, you know, it's really funny in spoken language, we're actually moving to a culture with younger people, millennials and younger, where imposition is what drives our politeness.

6:53But on email, it seems to be the opposite, which is what you are getting irritated with. So interesting. Okay, so two reactions to that. The first one is, I think this is why I prefer, instead of you're welcome or no problem, my pleasure, which says, actually, I was happy to help. It wasn't just no big deal. I actually enjoyed it, or it mattered to me to be able to support you. So I would go that route. That's the opposite of an imposition. I love it. That's very 18th and 19th century of you, because that was actually something that people said a lot more in that era. I love it. Now you're the second person and the only one who's not a teenager to call me old today.

7:30I'm not calling you old. I'm calling you classic. I like it. Always wanted to be classic. Never modern, never contemporary, never in vogue. Okay. The second thing is, I really like your alternatives email-wise to bumping this up to the top of your inbox, just saying, hey, I'm stressed or I have a deadline because you're right. It does signal, hey, I'm respecting your time and realizing that I'm putting something on you. I always think the easiest one is just wanting to make sure you got this, which is just checking in. Yeah. Just, I mean, which I like the, like, just making sure this came through because sometimes email gets accidentally filtered to spam.

8:07Sometimes it gets stuck in an outbox and you're not making any assumptions about the other person as opposed to kind of sending the message, hey, you're not prioritizing me and I should be number one on your list. Right. Which I think is something we see a lot more. I mean, and we can talk about it with how it relates to language and how language is evolving. But this idea of sort of this subjectivity of me being omnipresent in the way that people interact now, and that has changed a lot. That doesn't mean I think that people are more me focused necessarily, but in terms of what our culture is prioritizing, it can be that.

8:42One thing I actually think that's interesting with the bumping this up in your email box or your inbox, have you noticed that that happens a lot with spam emails? I've noticed that that seems to be one of the taglines that almost every spam email I get, which I haven't responded to, sends to, which also makes me hate it all the more. So see, I did not talk you out of that pet peeve. I just want that known because the rest I probably will. Well, you actually talked me more into it because you helped me understand the rationale for it, which is this is to me the way that a taker communicates, not a giver.

9:14And having spent most of my career trying to help people operate more like givers than takers, it seems like a violation of my values. But you're right. I think probably of all the unwanted pitches that we get for guests on this very podcast, approximately 84 % of them have a follow up the next day saying, bumping this up to the top of your inbox. Well, you will never get those again, I think, after this episode. Unless they're bots. No one will ever send you that one. This is a great forum for you to get rid of anything that you get in email you don't want. Here's how not to email me, although I'm also then going to make it harder to detect whose strategies I might want to do some red flagging of.

9:54Oh, yeah, there always will be another. I promise you. There will be. Okay, I'm going to give you another pet peeve then, which is this one is much more mild. But I don't like the phrase, can I pick your brain? Because number one, it's gross. I don't want my brain picked. The image itself. The image it brings up is not attractive. I will agree with you on that one. Secondly, it suggests that I'm just a passive receptacle. And you're going to come and extract things. When what you're really asking is, you're asking for me to spend some time getting to know you and trying to understand what your goals are and what you're hoping to learn.

10:33and then figure out if I have something worth sharing or teaching. And that requires energy and effort from me. And that could be a cost to your earlier point about imposition. But it also is an active conversation, not a passive one. And why not invite me to share some knowledge, to teach? Those are things I love doing, as opposed to giving me this visceral image of sitting in a dentist chair, and then you're kind of opening up my head and just pulling out the things that you want. and I'm just sort of an unwanted witness to the whole thing. You're just a victim, right? I am a victim of my brain being picked.

11:11Okay, so that one I'm going to argue with a little bit that there's another perspective that one could take. Please do. I want to rethink this one. Okay, I am empathetic to the idea that sometimes there are certain images we get and associations we have with words, and those are extremely valid that make us particularly as a person not really enjoy hearing them, even though there's nothing actually wrong with that term. And I think this is an example of one of those. Tell me why. When we talk about language evolving, a lot of times what people don't understand is that most of what we use with language is a metaphorical extension of something.

11:46So we don't just walk around talking in literal words all the time. I mean, we literally do talk in words, but we're not using the literal meaning of those words a lot. So for example, if we're walking somewhere and I say, wait a minute, what I'm usually meaning is not stop and time yourself for a minute and wait there, which is what the literal meaning of that is. It's actually a metaphorical extension of this idea of pausing. And I'm saying, oh my gosh, I just had a flash of something that means we need to go back and think about it again. So it's a metaphorical use of this idea of waiting a minute.

12:22I would say picking your brain is very much a similar thing. So the idea of there is this repository in which we can pick the things that delight us or the things that inform us or the things that create new knowledge for us. And that we get to, you know, have this wonderful experience of being able to pick out something that helps us in some way. And that this is a metaphorical extension of that rather than looking at you as this passive recipient of being picked. It's looking at me as the person that gets this opportunity when I have this, you know, cornucopia of brilliance in front of me to get some new knowledge.

13:04Flattery will get you nowhere, Valerie. But I think you're saying I should be saying thank you for thinking that my brain is worthy of picking. Exactly. Now, I think from your perspective, the reason you don't like it is because of the way that that word pick has been used in your experience more often. Yeah. Where picking is not necessarily an attractive thing. And one of those, anybody who's had toddlers instantly come to mind a different meaning of pick. As the mother of a toddler who did that quite often, and I'm not saying which of my children it was, so they don't hate me later. But picking became a really horrible word in my household for a while because one of my children was a big picker.

13:44Oh, no. Yeah, I also, I think of the Seinfeld episode, if we pick, do we not bleed? and also being a pick me is undesirable. So yes, there are a lot of negative associations. Or picking at a scab, right? There are a lot of bad associations with picking. And I think, you know, it's sort of like the word woke. There are a lot of different meanings with that word and it has a very cool history. The word has a very long history. And for much of that history, it was less controversial in its meaning. But your experience with that word will determine whether you use it, whether you like it, how you use it and whether you think it's a positive or negative term.

14:21And so I think, you know, now this one's not nearly as politicized, whether you pick somebody's brain or pick their nose. But I definitely would agree with you. If someone said, can I pick your nose on something, that would be not good. Don't pick Adam's nose. Second piece of advice people have learned this episode. And don't bump it up into his inbox if you do. But I do think that when people are saying that to you, what they mean is they're recognizing that you have expertise and wisdom and they get this chance to sort of have this smorgasbord that they get to pick from. That's a great visual, smorgasbord.

14:53Yes, I will take it. I also think, you know, now as I hear you talk about it, I think one of my longstanding favorite blogs was Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, and she was the brain picker, and that is exactly what she was doing. She found the most interesting little nuggets from books and from the internet and shared those in a way that was, you know, was thought-provoking and engaging, and I loved it. You got to pick, right? Or you get to pick your episodes, right? When people are browsing different shows. So I think there can be a lot of positive associations. But I will say there is also this idea of sort of a active versus passive behavioral pattern associated with it, which I think is very much what drives your dislike of it.

15:37And I do think there are sometimes people who do use it in a mercenary way, and that can feel like you're being used in some way. So I understand why you might have that reaction to it, but I would say I don't think all users of that term are mercenary. I think that's exactly right. And in fact, as I think about it, most of the people who have used that term, as what I think about, especially when it's a stranger reaching out and then I've ended up engaging with them in one way or another, what I've learned is most of them were trying to signal that they didn't want something from me that was going to be an ask that was added on as a burden.

16:11so they weren't just trying to get an introduction to somebody influential that I knew, or they weren't asking me to get them a job. They really just wanted to have an intellectual conversation or get my perspective on their career dilemma. And that should make it an endearing ask, right? Because there are no strings attached and it's not a Bob Cialdini foot in the door technique of, I'm going to make this little ask of, I just love five minutes, and then I really have a whopper coming. It's a genuine, I want to have a curiosity conversation. signal, which I should receive gratefully. Right. Well, I mean, maybe not always, but I think there are times when anything can be too much, right, depending on who it's coming from.

16:54And I think this is one of those that's really contextually driven, as much of language is. And the funny thing about our pet peeves, the things that bother us, what we often don't realize is they bother us because of the context in which we know them. And in a more generic context or in someone else's experiential context. They mean something entirely different or the reasons and motivations behind them are entirely different. And so sometimes what we do is get very much in our own head about where someone's coming from with those terms and those phrases, and they irritate us because of our own personal history with them, even though the actual use elsewhere is completely harmless and maybe even lovely.

17:35I mean, I'm not saying people are always speaking from good intentions and good places. But I think a lot of times we put our own baggage linguistically on them. And that's what drives a lot of our pet peeves. I think that's right. I think that's helpful context. And it makes me think, speaking of context, that before I do my other two pet peeves for you to react to, I should say the last time I, I might've aired some grievances about linguistic pet peeves not too long ago. And some people got upset and said I was nitpicking or I should be focusing on more important things. And like, you might be overthinking this was a common reaction.

18:11And I had two thoughts on that. The first one was, since when have I underthought anything ever? Like I overthink things for a living. That's my job as a psychologist. And secondly - That's why I get paid the big bucks, right? I mean, secondly, and maybe more importantly, as a psychologist, language is an extremely important clue for me to somebody's thoughts, feelings, and actions. And the patterns of speech that people use are often the first and sometimes the only signal I get about what their values and intentions are. And I don't take a thin slice of somebody's speech and then immediately judge their entire character.

18:46I do, though, raise my eyebrows a little bit if somebody uses a series of patterns that in the past I've learned through evidence and or experience might be associated with a habit of selfishness. And I guess I'm curious about where you draw the line on that. I think, you know, my association with language is I have pet peeves. Everybody does. And for anybody to accuse you of being more pet peevish than they are is probably just because you are more out in the public than they are. And I'm sure at home with their wife or husband or children or whoever they're spending time with, there's a lot of pet peeves that get aired.

19:22So please don't email Adam and tell him that he's too narrow-minded on language after this episode. Well, even if you do, I will continue defending the Oxford comma. All right. You and I disagree on that one, I'm going to say, but that's okay. Wait, you don't like the Oxford comma? What kind of linguist doesn't love the Oxford comma? Valerie? Well, okay. I'm not a prescriptivist, so I think that's the difference. But I'm joined by many, actually, these days that seem to say the Oxford comma is a negotiable thing. I just find that I actually don't tend to do it. And when I was writing, I was co-authoring a book with a colleague of mine, a linguistics tech.

20:00So, you know, the 10 people that read it, you know who you are. And what we found is he used the Oxford comma and I didn't. And so that would tell you exactly, if you went back and read that book, the copy editor caught it, but it would tell you exactly what sections he wrote and what I did, because you could tell by the Oxford comma patterns. And so just getting to what you were talking about, how you speak and how you write and these behavioral things you do are very revealing of things about you personally. And in that case, you could actually tell who the author was simply by our pattern of comma use, which I think is just such a wonderful metaphor sort of for what I do.

20:36Totally fascinating. But I, you know, I really stress this with all aspects of language because people are always saying things like, well, you know, it's imprecise. I don't like it when people are imprecise with language. Well, the whole point of languages, that is imprecise so that we have a lot of flexibility with it. And, you know, there are uses, for example, like like, where people complain about, well, if you use too many likes, you can't understand what someone means. But there are really rare occasions when that is actually true. Okay, if you're talking to a 13-year-old, perhaps because we do find what we call an adolescent peak in their like use, so they can feel like all they say is like.

21:13but I would doubt there are many examples of a 25-year-old that's misunderstood because of their like use. And I think that's similar to the Oxford comma. Yeah. Okay. In light of that, I'm amending my philosophy. I am team Oxford comma. By that, I mean, I believe it is sometimes necessary, maybe occasionally necessary to your point. And the rest of the time, I just prefer it because I think it makes for a better looking and sounding sentence. I will absolutely agree with that. Exactly, exactly. See, now we're on the same page. Yeah, yeah, we are, actually. So, okay, I'm not letting you off the hook so easily.

21:50You mentioned that you have linguistic pet peeves. What are they? One thing I will say I'm kind of sad about is the demise of the L-Y on adverbs. So, you know, when they walk slow instead of slowly. Oh, yeah, that grates. You know, and my kids really just don't use the L-Y, and that's a growing tendency that it's going to kind of go the way of the dodo. And, you know, if I had a prediction for 50 years, I'd say that probably L-Y won't be around. That and the subjunctive, right, those are two things I think are definitely going to be dead in 50 years. But I also realize that this is the evolution of language, and it's just because to me it makes it sound naked.

22:28You know, like when someone says they walk slow, it just, it feels to me like there's some old guy naked walking across the street very slowly. I don't, that's the image. And you know. That's so funny because when I was picturing a sentence without an Oxford comma, I almost described it as a naked sentence. I'm like, oh, oh no, put on some clothes. Exactly. I don't want to see that. We're not at the beach. This is the pet peeves. I think this is the realm of the world of pet peeves, right? It makes us feel like we're exposed in a way that we don't enjoy. Yeah. So our, obviously our comfort with nakedness is our problem here, Adam.

23:05So, okay. So wait, if you think, if you think adverbs are going away, does that mean that? Well, not adverbs aren't going away. The L-Y that, you know, is like, hey, I'm an adverb. When you say go slow, the use is still adverbial, but it's just not marked with an L-Y. Right. Cause I was starting to formulate a sentence like, you know, sadly that might be true. They're not going to say, sad, that might be true, will they? Right. Well, that's a sentential adverb, so that's a little different. And those do still seem to have them, but these kind of, you know, one word, they're verbal in their modification rather than sentential.

23:42They tend to, like, he went slow, he drove quick, but those seem to be fading off. And one of the reasons is because you don't really need them, right? They're additional. And to be fair, if you go back in history, the L-Y that marks adverbial is actually from the word like that got shortened. So when you say, you know, he was similar to ape-like, then it slowly would be apely. Oh. And then just ape. Resembling an ape. And then that's where L-Y, that's where that L-Y comes from. It's actually a short form of like. Fascinating. So the deletion of it all together is just one more step on that road to evolution, which is often the way that language works, but we only have a vision of it in that one moment of time where we see it annoying us because we think it's decay.

24:30But actually that decay is just one further decay down the road of something that has decayed already. So it's just our reference point, what we're used to. Right. Love it. Okay. Two other quick pet peeves before we go to accents, because I want to talk about accents. First one is, I have always felt a little disgruntled at the word disgruntled? Because why is there no gruntled? You know, I don't know the history of that word, but I guarantee you that one time there probably was a gruntled. Okay, can we bring it back? That we dissed at some point. I, you know, I think that you could start a trend.

25:05I would be very gruntled if we brought this word back because it would eliminate my pet peeve around disgruntled. Okay, so I have the same one. So ept. We don't use ept. You can be inept, but you can't be ept, right? Wow. And that's always been my disgruntled, right? That's always like, where'd the eft go? And historically, usually those were words that then got a prefix or suffix added to them. But then we lost the use of the original form. And so it's just, it leaves what we call in linguistics a lexical gap, meaning it's a noticeable omission of a word that should exist but doesn't. And most of the time, it's just because it did exist at one point.

25:44And so what happened is the frequency of use of disgruntled was clearly, we were more often disgruntled than gruntled. And, you know, that's what we tend to find is that the more frequent terms tend to stay. And whatever didn't get used that often got replaced by something else. Well, that's a cultural commentary. Yeah, exactly.

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28:41Okay, so I want to talk about accents because that is a hot topic for you right now. I guess the first thing that I'm curious about is when do accents emerge? I remember when we were living in England, a colleague friend of mine had young girls who had moved. They had been in Australia, England, and the U.S. And you could almost tell where they were when they learned each word because they would say things like, Mommy, I would like a hamburger. And their accent would change word by word. And it was hysterical to listen to. And I think it was the first time I really wondered, do we actually learn each word with an accent or is there a critical period for accent development like language development?

29:25So can you enlighten me on how all this works? Oh, sure. Okay. So many things in what you just said that are both fascinating, exciting, controversial. I mean, there's all so much, so much to talk about. But, okay, let's go first to just childhood and accents and kind of the emergence of accents in a child that would be in one place because you kind of have this more complicated example where these children have been moving around. But for most of us, our accent emerges by age four or five. We're really starting to use local accent variants. And the reason it waits till four or five is simply because our capacity for language is very limited until then.

30:05And so while we probably already have some understanding at some level of the social nuances of language for our local group, our community, articulating it is a little tricky before we can actually say, you know, I want cookies. So you have to be able to want cookies verbally before you can really throw in any accent spot. So by four or five, when kids start going to school, they start something called vernacular reorganization, which is a big fancy word to simply mean they start talking like their peers. So whatever group they're a part of, that will be the way they start to learn to talk. So the more local accents they hear in school and the more they identify with that from a sort of personal level, the group that they want to play with, the cool kids that they want to hang out with, the more they will acquire those specific features.

30:57In terms of whether they learn it on a word basis or a more phonetic basis, that's actually a really controversial topic in linguistics. So I'd say what I think as with many things, it's a little bit of both. What we find is that children and adults acquire systems. So they will acquire a sound system. So they'll acquire a vowel category that is in a certain range as a group. So every word with that vowel in it. So cat, bat, sat, rat. Yep. that will be learned in that range as, okay, all these words have that category and they're all going to be produced in a certain way for this group that I'm in.

31:40So, you know, for example, if I were British, I would say aunt. If I were American, I would say aunt. Some Americans may not say it that way, but most people do. So that would be your kind of group that you're learning that accent from. Your friends would say aunt, so you would be very unlikely to show up for school and start talking about your aunt. However, say you have British parents and you're that five-year-old and you have spent your life in this new place. Like, so you moved with your British parents when you were one and moved to, you know, Tennessee, for example, like in my case, that's where my parents moved to.

32:16They would say aunt, you might show up in school saying aunt, but by day one, when your little friend started teasing you about it, you would switch to aunt. So then you would have this, you know, kind of weird system where you have a few words that were learned from somebody with a different accent or in a place with a different accent that you still use that accent for until there's enough social pressure in your new place to make you want to adapt or make you notice that you need to adapt or not notice at all and never adapt. So I think that's what you're seeing with those kids. They were probably still pretty young.

32:52And so they just were in that transitory period where they hadn't done that yet. Got it. If that makes sense. Yes, it makes perfect sense. Thank you. That's enlightening. I mean, it raises a ton of other questions. Yeah, so many things. I think with another part of what you had asked before is sort of when we just acquire our accents as normal people. And that's a little different of an answer. When do we develop our accents? Generally speaking, from birth, we're acquiring the language of our environment. and if you are born to speakers of a different language in a community that speaks a different language or a different dialect, you almost always go with the community and not with your parents.

33:32So unfortunately for parents, we don't have that much of an influence on our children's speech because from birth, as soon as they start interacting with those way cool friends, the not so cool parents kind of fade into the background and the way cool kids become their model. And so really by the time we're in school, we are speaking with our accent. And really, really cool is sort of this research on when we hear with an accent, because we often think of accents as something in spoken language in terms of how we produce sounds, but accents are really about how we hear sounds first. So we get accents in the way we listen before we have accents in the way we talk.

34:10And by two or three days after birth, we see evidence that children have already acquired the ability to listen with an accent. Wow, how do we know that? Well, at that point, of course, you know, children's hearing doesn't develop until late in pregnancy, but they can hear in utero. And what they hear the best is their mother's voice. Now, it's filtered through amniotic fluid, so they're not hearing the mother's voice with cleanly articulated sounds come through, but they hear the melody of her voice and sort of the intonational patterns of their language. And we find that if you play babies, the sort of sounds that are in the melody of their native language versus those that are in the melody of a different language, they are much more attentive to the melody of their native language, which suggests they've already been attuned to it and recognize it and are more favorably inclined towards it from listening to their mother's voice in utero.

35:04Mm-hmm. Okay, so you write a lot about regional accents and have spent a lot of time thinking about them and studying them. I have some regional questions for you, but let me start by asking, what do you know about me from my accent? Okay, so I'm going to challenge you to a little accent test so that we can maybe play a little game. So I'm going to spell a couple words, and I want you to say them for me. I'm ready. Okay. And so the first word is spelled C-O-T. Cot. Okay. And the second word is spelled C-A-U-G-H-T. Cot. Okay. Say them together. Cot. Cot. All right. So you actually have a slight distinction in those words.

35:49So for me, they're different words, but the same pronunciation. So I say cot, cot. Oh, wow. And this is actually something that's really widespread in American English today. But there are a few dialect regions in which it doesn't happen. And the key dialect region in which the cot-cot merger does not happen, which is a dialect region that would probably define you, is the inland north. So I would predict, just on the way you say those words, that you are from a northern dialect region. because most other speakers, even in the South, especially in the Gen X and younger generations, no longer distinguish between those sounds.

36:29People that do that are people usually from the inland North. Okay. So far, so good. So then let's think about the at vowel. Okay. So I want you to say a word like C-A-T. Cat. Okay. And then say B-A-G. Bag. Okay. And then say B-A-N. Ban. Okay. Now, why don't you say those three together? Is this a test? No, actually say B-A-T, B-A-G, and B-A-N together. Bat, bag, ban. Oh, no. Interesting. You have a split nasal system there. So when you say those three words, they actually have historically the same vowel class, the ah vowel. But in certain dialect regions, in the north, particularly in the mid-Atlantic, they're called a split-ah system, which means that certain words are said with a lax-ah, more like sort of bat, and then some with a tense-ah, big.

37:27Oh, it creates. Right? And actually, the areas that don't have the low-back vowel merger, which is the cot-cot, tend to be areas, like if you were from Philly or New York, you would have a split-ah system. but you don't really have that. You have what's called a pre-nasal tensing system, which means the way you said ban, B-A-N, is higher than the way you said bat or bag. And when you first said bag, I heard a little bit of raising, which would make me say that you have the Northern City's vowel shift, which tends to be from like Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, that area range, because that tends to have raising not only in the prenasal sound like ban, but also prevelar, which is G.

38:19So you say bag, a little, not beag, but a little more raised than bat. So my analysis, if we're going to come down to the nitty gritty, is that you are from a dialect region in the inland north that is probably either Northern Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. Am I? You got me. Okay. One more thing I might ask is, say B-A-G-E-L. Bagel. Okay. Say V-A-G-U-E. Vague. Okay. Yeah. You don't really have a lot of preveler pinching. So I'm going to say not Wisconsin. Correct. All right. Say the word for the state where the Vikings play. Minnesota. Okay, you don't have any Scandinavian influence on that.

39:10I'm going to rule out Minnesota. Check. All right, now say C-H for the city name, C-H-I-C-A-G-O. Chicago. Okay, you don't say the native way of that either, so I'm X-ing Northern Illinois off the list. What would you call yourself if you were from the state of Michigan? Well, I would be torn between calling myself a Michigander and a Michiganean. Okay. Well, you said a Michigander, so I'm going to assume you are one. I am. Well done. All right. So that was kind of a long, torturous route. No, I'm impressed. Because you're young, see, I'm calling you young like five times now, it's harder. I will say that if you were in your 60s or 70s, it is easier generally for me to do accent tests.

39:59we are finding there's a lot of research lately that really specifically generation X and younger are losing the diagnostic regional accent differences, but it wasn't easy. I would say you were a challenge. You were an accent challenge, Adam. I'm glad. Well, I, so this actually raises another question that I had for you about accents, which is, so I've lived almost exactly to date half my life in Michigan, and then all the rest has been on the East Coast. and I noticed that I lost some of my Michigan accent in the time that I've lived in Boston and Philly and North Carolina. And not all of it, but I noticed when I talked to people who stayed in Michigan through their 20s, for example, I hear them say pants as piants.

40:45So why did mine go away? And why does it seem that other people's don't if they leave at a different point? How much of that is life stage versus individual difference in accent susceptibility? How do you explain all that? What you tend to do is you kind of acquire a slightly different version of the accent you have that moves away from the place you left and towards the new place you're in, but never realizes that completely, but moves away from their native accent enough that it no longer sounds like that. So what we seem to see adults do is that they pick up some features. And when you had talked about children picking up certain words, adults do that even more.

41:33So children tend to pick up systems. Adults tend to pick up words. Okay, so a quick follow-up question. Do you know anything about individual differences in susceptibility? Our oldest, Joanna, for example, if she's in a foreign country or even around people who speak with a different language for a day or two, she picks up the accent very fast. What is that about? We absolutely find that there are differences in individual ability and sensitivity to picking up different sounds. So also the same thing with the people that are able to pick up other languages are often really good at imitating accents.

42:09So a couple of different things we think might be driving that. One is, does your daughter have a really good musical ability? Is she able to hear tone really well? Yeah. Because we do find a relationship. People that are really good with hearing tone differences in music, so they sort of have an innate musicality in terms of how they hear things, also seem to be very good at picking up languages. We also find that we look at studies of brain activity. People that are really good at picking up languages or multilingual tend to have greater brain activity in certain regions. And that seems to suggest there might be actually some differences in sort of the cognitive resources that they're marshalling for doing that.

42:52So there could easily be really substantive differences in the way their brains are wired and the sort of neural connectivity that help them command languages more quickly. It also just seems to be something about their sensitivity to hearing different nuances, which would translate both in music and speech. So interesting. So you work on your musical ear and you also improve your linguistic ear. Right. And another really fascinating thing is there's research that suggests children that are exposed to a lot of languages or to a language often as a child, even if they don't learn that language, seem to get a passive benefit if they then later decide to learn that language.

43:32Fascinating. I find it endlessly interesting.

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46:35First question is, why do British accents sound so smart? That's colonial superiority in a nutshell and our sense of colonial inferiority. So are you saying if somebody who had never heard American or British English before were exposed to the two, they wouldn't think British sounds brighter? No. Oh, wow. I thought that was a linguistic feature. No, no. No, actually, I mean, OK, so you said one sentence. I'm trying to be good about that. But no, we have actually a lot of good evidence that familiarity is the biggest driver of our likes and dislikes. And then the sort of social hierarchy we have with those accents that we're familiar with.

47:18And the hierarchy has always been right. British English is sort of where we come from. And it long dominated the American or the New World in terms of the linguistic model. And up through the early 20th century, the transatlantic accent was modeled on the, you know, prestige British accent. So both from the fact that we are a colonial nation and often colonial models stick around as what's considered good, and that for a long time the cultural model of London was considered very elite and prestigious, that has really shaped the way we think about the British accent. But if you—and we have actually research that does this.

47:54If you take a speaker of a language that is not English and they've never heard the different accents of English and you play them these different accents, they do not pick, you know, a prestige accent of American English either as being more prestigious. Mind blown. They instead will pick random things and there's not really a prediction we can make about what drives their knowledge. That is so surprising. I did not know. You know, it's funny you say that because, you know, if that were the basis, if we were going to go on sort of linguistic science to determine what sounds we like, there is some research on phonoesthetics, so what we find beautiful in sounds, and it would tell us that actually all English is ugly.

48:36That would be the fundamental message, and that we should all speak Italian. I mean, that's really, if you look at what we like linguistically in that sense, is we like what we call sonarate sound, which are the sounds that require a lot of airflow and open articulation to make. So that's all vowels are very sonarate. L's, R's, M's, N's, those are flowing, melodious sounds. And we like open syllables. So French and Italian, for example, are both languages with lots of sonar sounds, a high frequency of sonar sounds, and open syllables. And they're very singable and musical. So there is a little truth to the fact that certain sounds do sound better to us.

49:16But English tends not to have a lot of those. So English itself would not be a very attractive language. But what makes English an attractive language is its global prestige. Yep. So it's all about what we believe and nothing about what is intrinsic in that sound at all. Wow. One other I have to ask about. We have noticed on and off that when I've had Irish speakers on the podcast, everyone loves their accent and finds it very pleasing. What is that about? You know, it could be that they're hearkening back to the revolutionary roots, but I think more likely it's because there's a sense of authenticity and sort of localness and sincerity that we hear with accents like Scottish and Irish.

50:03And Irish in particular, there's a friendliness and a warmth to it because of the persona. And we have this image of these beautiful hills and this beautiful landscape and coast and maybe not so great weather. But still, we have this really lovely, rugged, rustic kind of homey sensibility that we get when we hear it. And that carries over in the ideas we have about that language or that accent. Yep. Okay, great. My next question, one of our past guests, Adam Aleksic, submitted a question. You might know him as Etymology Nerd on Instagram. Yes, yes. And he said... Hi, Valerie. I'd love to hear about internet accents and why people might speak differently on social media.

50:47Well, I think one of the things we have to think about is the performativity of social media. And when I was just talking about Irish accents, it has a warmth and an authenticity. I mean, local accents have an authenticity to them, right, tied to a certain subjectivity and place and people. But when we talk on the Internet, we don't know what our audience is. And so we're going to use language that is kind of more generic, but also more performative, because not only are we trying to make sure that we can reach the maximum audience in terms of not identifying anybody by using a local accent, we're also going to want to get their attention.

51:25And so I think when we're speaking performatively, we project in a certain way and we're very hyperbolic in the way that we present ourselves. And we also use a lot of uptalk to keep people interested and engaged because uptalk tends to signal, I'm not done. Keep paying attention to me. Here we come. Here's the big thing. We're coming up to it. Keep watching. And I think what happens is because everybody's trying to do the same thing, the goal of making a post for social media is that people see it. People start talking that same way in this very performative model of speech. Oh, that's so helpful.

51:55Thank you. Very informative. Okay, last question for you. Did you see Project Hail Mary? I read the book. It's been a long time. I read it when it first came out. But yes, I love that he had a very unique language for the alien. What was the name of the alien? Rocky? Rocky was the alien. Rocky, Rocky. Okay, yes. It's been a while. I'm a little rusty on my Rocky, but yes. No, it's all good. Well, no, but it speaks to a post you wrote about exploring extraterrestrial language. And I thought a really fun lightning question would be, why and how should we think about alien language? What's the point of that?

52:31Well, I love the idea of alien language because I think it keeps us on our toes about these norms that we have about how language should be. And, you know, we're very prescriptive in the beliefs we have about language. We know this from the way we judge other people that don't meet those norms. But we also have never thought through, like, what would someone without a mouth, how would they communicate? But actually, there's been some really interesting research recently on whale language, which I think is very much like an alien language. And so if we look at other species and how they communicate on Earth, it might give us some ideas of what aliens might sound like.

53:04The fascinating thing about the whale language is this was the first time they did it with a sort of AI analysis where it could kind of listen on different dimensions than a human could. and they discovered that there were actually really fine nuances that actually were like vowels. So they were the equivalent of vowels, but humans couldn't hear them. Wow. And so until they did this analysis, we didn't know that they did this because we were not, we were not sophisticated enough to understand their sophistication. And I think that that's really what we get at when we get out alien languages is trying to figure out, well, how do we get out of the box in terms of what we think communication is?

53:45That's incredibly interesting. This has been such a generative conversation. I am leaving feeling very gruntled. I'm feeling very ebbed, so we're good.

54:00Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hilash, Benben Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.

54:30This is one of my favorite things to do as an amateur word nerd. To get to, with consent, pick the brain of a professional word nerd is always a treat. You can pick my brain. Not my nose, but my brain for sure. Any day. Any day.

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