I’ve lived in Northern Ireland for a few years now and I still feel like a two-dimensional cartoon character. It seems all I have to do to conjure up images in peoples’ heads of George Bush, Britney Spears, and old episodes of Friends, is to open up my mouth and say a few lines with my stereotypically flat, Midwestern accent. I’ve had more conversations with the locals here about Disney World in the past two weeks than I had in the eight years that I lived in Florida. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my role as an unlikely ambassador for all things Americana but, to be perfectly honest, sometimes I’m just not in the mood to talk about Hillary Clinton, 9/11, or Hurricane Katrina. I’ve lived in many different places, places with strong regional accents and dialects—from the Cajun bayous of Louisiana, to central New Jersey, to the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, and now the world of Ulster. But my talk is still as bland as the Ohio suburbs where I grew up as a kid. I’m not sure whether somehow I’ve developed an immunity against other accents, or if I’m just overly concerned with it coming across as an affectation. Because I’ve got to say, nothing gets under my skin more than hearing Madonna, born and raised in Detroit, speaking with a British accent, and if one of my American students started using an ersatz Belfast brogue, I’d probably find that really obnoxious too.
But here’s the thing. I’d bet tomorrow’s lunch money that most people are like me in that they’re more irritated when someone from their own cultural in-group adopts a different accent (for you Americans, say, Renée Zellweger, who hails from Houston, Texas, doing sassy Londoner Bridget Jones) than when an out-group member “loses” their native twang (say, Kate Winslet, a Brit through-and-through, playing a poor little American rich girl in Titanic). In the case of the former, it’s just a visceral aversion and this niggling sense that someone’s trying to pull the wool over my and everyone else’s eyes. But for the latter, accents are hard to fake, and if you’ve done it so well that it doesn’t even occur to me you’re not from around here, well you must be one of us after all.
In fact, there’s an interesting empirical basis to all of this. In one of the cleanest, most straightforward series of experiments I’ve seen in a long time, a group of researchers led by Harvard graduate student Katherine Kinzler demonstrated that preverbal infants as young as 5-6-months of age “prefer” their own native speakers. In a recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kinzler and her colleagues report that American infants look longer at someone speaking with an American accent than someone with a French accent. The opposite pattern occurs with French infants. Even more astonishing, when two adults simultaneously offer a 10-month-old the very same toy, the baby reaches for the one being given to them by the native speaker, thank you very much.
The authors explain their findings from an evolutionary perspective. In the ancestral past, they say, neighboring communities were often at war with each other, and the most reliable marker of a potentially hostile out-group member wasn’t what they looked like (natural selection doesn’t work that quickly), but how they sounded. I don’t know about you, but to me, this innate, adaptive function of linguistic discrimination means trouble for our idealistic assumptions that cultural stereotypes can be easily undone. I’m not saying it’s impossible—just that these findings suggest we’re working against the grain.
For a slightly off-colored look at the accent in my neck of the woods, check out this YouTube clip:
