Y’all versus yinz: Accents may say more about who we are than where we’re from

Regional accents in the United States are far more complicated than their oversimplified stereotypes. Take that reductive “Southern” twang heard so often across pop culture. Researchers routinely identify significant differences throughout the region, with variants including Appalachian, Ozark, Coastal Southern, Louisiana Cajun, and many more. These geographic dialects evolve through a complex combination of cultures, demographics, ancestry, and class, but growing evidence indicates there’s even more to it. At The Ohio State University, linguists suspect your accent isn’t only a representation of where you live—it showcases who you see yourself as a person.

“We are used to language patterns like accents being regionally based—you talk like the people who live around you,” explained Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a linguist at OSU and the co-author of a small study recently published in the journal American Speech. “But here we found that aspects of language may be tied to identity rather than just where you happen to live.”

Campbell-Kibler and colleagues focused on Defiance County, Ohio. With a population of around 38,000 residents, the county in the northwestern corner of the state is located in a transition zone between two accents: the Inland North accent (lower Great Lakes areas like Toledo, Detroit, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois) and the Midland accent (portions of western and southern Ohio deeper into the Midwest). This result here is a mixture of distinct phonetic traditions from multiple locales, which got researchers wondering: do regional identity and personal travel patterns also contribute to someone’s accent?

To find out, the team recorded interviews with 22 men living in Defiance County. They then assessed five specific vowel patterns and how they aligned with the speaker’s travel and his self-defined, rural “country” personality. Although linguists initially hypothesized that personal travel might be a strong influence on speech, they only found one vowel case that supported the theory. Even then, the link wasn’t particularly strong.

However, just how a study participant identified himself appeared to say much more. During interviews, researchers questioned volunteers about their lives based on subjects including musical preferences, favorite vehicles, and their hobbies. The team then scored responses based on their associations with rural life (such as hunting, fishing, and farming) or other pastimes like golfing, video games, and biking. Finally, the participants were asked how they identified themselves in high school, and whether they felt they had more in common with residents in the nearest city—Fort Wayne, Indiana—or with someone in a place like rural Idaho.

Despite Defiance County being hundreds of miles away from the South or Appalachia, country-minded respondents more often employed two vowel patterns associated with those distant regions. Historical records indicate at least some Appalachian migration into Defiance County during the 20th century, but the study participants didn’t cite any direct connections to the area. They identified “country” culture more with someone’s lifestyle than a physical place. While the study pool is comparatively small, authors believe similar findings could be detectable in many other places.

“People today are influenced not just by the people they live near, but by all they read and see on the internet and television,” said Campbell-Kibler. “The way people talk can be affected by who they want to be, not just where they live.”

 

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