The American Spectator

p> TONGUE TUGS br> Re: Lawrence Henry’s To Accent or No : /p>

Mr. Henry’s fun essay, “To Accent or No,” prompted a few observations. Trained theatre actors and singers will tell you that the secret to being heard and understood in a large theatre without amplification, is complete enunciation of your words, especially the final consonants. Twenty-five years back, when I took classes in both, I learned from several different teachers that the key was not as much volume, but enunciating the words completely. Speak naturally, in that you don’t over-enunciate, but say all the constants and the rest will come naturally. If you do so any English-speaking audience will be able to hear you and understand you, even in large theatres. If you carry out this behavior in regular speech your accent disappears. The modern trend toward stage amplification removes this necessity.

p>The other observation is that accents are not regressing to a mean, but are mutating and combining in new and novel ways. This effect is very prevalent in English as our language freely borrows words from other languages and also creates new ones fairly spontaneously. There are many interesting examples of the mutation/creation of accents, including the creation of the British “posh” accent in the 18th century and the effect of colonization on old/new accents, particularly with the colonization of the British Empire. Both logic and illogic effects language use in many and varied ways. The result guarantees that accents will forever evolve. br> — Tom Abert /p>

When I was working in International Law, I took a class called “Git the Souf Out Yo Mouf” (Get the South out of your Mouth). It was a course designed to teach people to speak without a discernable accent, a consummation devoutly to be wished when dealing with persons of foreign extraction on the telephone. This was pre-Internet so I spent a lot of time speaking by phone with persons whose English was heavily accented, and they did not need to deal with my michegoss of an accent — not only had I a Southern Mama and a Northern Daddy, but I spent 17 years in Atlanta after growing up in a part of New York tenanted mainly by Italians from the Bronx, and you have never heard anything like the way I spoke. My teacher described it as “Bugs Bunny does Alabama.” I now speak with what is called a Midwestern Television Announcer accent, and Germans in particular have commented that “You don’t sound like an American.”

However, I still yell in a Bronx accent (especially, my kids will remind me, “What the HELL ya doin’???”) and when calling someone across a long distance, I tend to bark “Ey Frank EEE!” And the one “Southernism” I cannot stop is “y’all”. That part of the South is stuck in my mouth.

p>As for relentless mispronunciation, my personal bete noir is the TV-speak “ADD-lt” for “adult” (which is of course pronounced “ad-DULT”). Where this came from I don’t know, but it needs to disappear. br> —