Associate Professor Charles Boberg from the Department of Linguistics is an expert in language variation, dialectology and North American English. His recent book, , combines his personal interest in the history of film with his professional interest in analyzing accents in North American English.
Published in December 2021 by Cambridge University Press, the book gives special attention to the wide range of identities in North American culture and draws on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows to analyse the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today.
“I think it’s fascinating to study the speech of people recorded in the 1930s or 40s, the first decades of sound film, many of whom were born in the nineteenth century,” says Professor Boberg “That offers an amazing view of how North American English has evolved over time. For a film buff, moreover, there is something intrinsically thrilling about analyzing the speech of stars like Groucho Marx, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne!”
We asked Professor Boberg to share his insights on his research and how his current book contributes to linguistic scholarship.
Q: What inspired and directed your research for this book and its particular focus on film and TV?
This book provided an opportunity to combine my professional interest in analyzing accents of North American English and my personal interest in the history of film and television.
It applied techniques of computerized acoustic phonetic analysis of vowel quality, which sociophoneticians use to make detailed studies of variation and change in pronunciation, to a survey of accents in film and TV speech, from the 1930s to today. This produced a massive dataset of over 100,000 vowel measurements from 180 performances, which could be used to analyze how pronunciation has changed over the last eight decades and how it varies by region, sex and ethnic background.
Q: Can you give us a few examples from TV and film where ‘phonetic variation and change’ was portrayed in and influenced by film and television speech?
The book’s introductory chapter considers the relationship between public, on-screen media speech and private, off-screen speech among the general population. It is a complex relationship that is not easy to characterize with certainty. Nevertheless, it was found that every major change in pronunciation identified by previous research on the general population was also found in the film and TV dataset, so the two types of speech have evolved in tandem.
Whether media speech influences popular speech, or the other way around, was not possible to conclude in this study, but the parallel patterns of change and variation do indicate that film and TV speech provides a valuable record of change across the 20th century, which is not generally available from other sources.
Q: In what ways are speech and accent variations used in film and TV to denote a character’s class, race, educational background? Why do we infer a character’s background from their accent?
The analysis of variation by region, sex and ethnicity, like that of change over time, also found a close conformity between on-screen and off-screen speech, at least when authenticity was a valued criterion in casting. There are many regionally and socially authentic and inauthentic performances in films and on TV; this book’s analysis focused as much as possible on the authentic ones. There are stereotypes about certain accents, and we often see those reflected in casting decisions and performances.
The most important long-term change identified in the book is the gradual transition from a New York or eastern-based standard of pronunciation in the early period, before the mid-1960s, to a Los Angeles or western-based standard in the later period, after the 1960s. For example, dropping the ‘r’ sound after vowels, like saying ‘staht’ for ‘start’ or ‘hey-ah’ for ‘hair’, was considered fashionable in the early period, but became increasingly working-class -- and often comical -- in the late period. Characters with strong southern accents are also frequently typecast as having less education or having certain social or political views. Accents are one of the tools that screenwriters, casting directors, dialect coaches and actors themselves use to tell a story.
Q: When reading this book, what will students of linguistics and media studies discover about the role of language in the expression of North American cultural identity? Is this something that can be easily defined, why or why not?
The book gives special attention to the wide range of identities in North American culture. Its main analysis of change over time focuses on Standard North American English, but subsequent chapters look at speech differences between women and men, accents from New York City, the South, the Midwest and Canada, and the ethno-linguistic patterns associated with African Americans, Latinos, Asian North Americans and Indigenous peoples.
All these regional and social divisions affect how people speak, both on-screen and off, and this book is one of the first phonetic analyses to look at such a broad range of accents in a single study. It shows that there is no single, uniform North American English at the phonetic level, either in film and TV or in society at large. Rather, actors use accent to express their regional and social identities just as members of the general public do.
Q: Your book explores “how phonetic variation and change in the 'real world' have been both portrayed in, and possibly influenced by, film and television speech”. Why is it important to develop an understanding of how media representations influence us in the “real world”? What is the importance of this knowledge beyond a formal academic environment?
Looking at the relationship between on-screen speech and that of the ‘real world’ it portrays gives us an opportunity to think about that process of representation and the values it displays, as well as the way media representations can serve as models for behaviour in the general population.
At a broader level, accent is only one of many social behaviours that people use to express their identities, which are also influenced by media models: in this sense, the way we speak is not that different from choices we make in the clothes we wear, the cars we buy, the vacations we plan or the music we listen to. Social patterns like these are central to understanding modern human culture.
Charles Boberg is Associate Professor of Linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Prof. Boberg received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Alberta (1986) and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (1997). He is a co-author, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis (Cambridge, 2010). He recently co-edited the Handbook of Dialectology (Wiley, 2018) with John Nerbonne and Dominic Watt. His current research focuses on variation and change in the vocabulary and phonetics of Canadian English, as well as on accent variation in North American film and television. His most recent book is "Accent in North American Film and Television: A Sociophonetic Analysis" (Cambridge, 2021).