I need a bet settled.  Is an "accent" in the context of regional
speech, specifically English, relative or absolute?

Details:

My view - Absolute
I maintains that unaccented speech is possible.  This view is
supported by the very existence of the word "unaccented" and also by
the fact that I often hear English actors mentioning that they had to
"loose" their accent to play certain American characters.  I've never
heard of a plain-spoken American actor "losing" their accent to play a
Brit - they always say they are learning to mimic the accent of the
Brits.

My friend's view - Relative
He says that any system of specific pronunciation, usually regional,
is an accent to those who speak differently, and to all native
speakers, outsiders are the only ones with accents.  This makes sense
to me.  I might even agree that this is what the word "accent" should
mean, I'm just not convinced that it is what the word does mean.

Bonus question: Is there a better word than "accent" for this topic,
or is there a better definition that the OEDs?

What I'm looking for is not consensus of opinion (interesting, but not
a bet settler), what I require is the current accepted position (if
one exists) of the academic community (linguistics?).  Let me know.

---

Clarification of Question by nouvelleorleans71-ga on 30 Oct 2004 14:24 PDT

Again, it seems like this should be so, but isn't.  I hail from New
Orleans, a city with three common standards which I would describe as
"no accent", "Southern accent", and "Irish Channel accent" (similar to
the accent you hear in Brooklyn, NY since the Irish Channel was
settled by the same Irish/Italian mix at about the same time as that
part of NY).  In my own family I speak with no accent, one of my
brothers speaks in the Irish Channel accent (picked up from his
friends in public high school) and another brother has a standard
Southern accent (picked up largely during collage at Ole Miss). 
Interestingly, when I asked them about this, they both immediately
agreed that they have accents, and I do not, whereas if what you are
saying is correct they should each maintain that they themselves have
no accent and that the other two do.  I asked the same question of the
headmaster of my lower school in New Orleans, who is from London, and
he too referred to his own accent and my lack of an accent.

None of this makes sense in the relative view of accents.  Nor does
the fact that so many people pride themselves on what they refer to as
"my accent".  My Headmaster assured me that no upper-crust Brit would
ever deny having an accent (and suffered through quite a lot of
attention from their parents and teachers to get "the accent right"). 
He also pointed out interestingly that amongst broadcast news
organizations, especially early in television, the BBC has always had
a standard accent that it requires of it's anchors.  Similarly US
broadcasters long required that their anchors speak "with no
discernable accent".

I'd love to conduct the following experiment: Visit 100 English
speakers who reside in the places of their birth.  Include people with
all manner of "accent".  Hand each the same arbitrary written
paragraph on a sheet with the written instruction: "Please read the
paragraph below aloud with as little accent as possible".  The
administrator of the test must not speak or otherwise give any
indication as to their own "accent" so as to keep the subject from
considering what the administrator personally means by the word.  My
hunch is that well over 51% of Brits, American Southerners,
Bostonians, and Brooklynites would do their best impression of Tom
Hanks, while most Americans that already speak like Mr. Hanks would
continue to do so.  I speak like Tom Hanks and I know I would.

Hi nouvelleorleans71,

Accents are indeed in the domain of linguistics, and the academic
community of linguists sides with your friend's relative view.

This is very clearly, even bluntly, stated in the Ask-A-Linguist FAQ
page on accents, written by Anthea Fraser Gupta, Senior Lecturer in
Modern English Language at the School of English of the University of
Leeds:

"An accent is a way of pronouncing a language. It is therefore
impossible to speak without an accent.

Some people may think they do not have an accent. Or you may think
that there are other people who do not have an accent. Everyone has an
accent.

...

There is no neutral accent of English."

http://www.linguistlist.org/ask-ling/accent.html

Ask-A-Linguist is a service provided by The LINGUIST List, the world's
largest online linguistic resource.  The FAQ answer presumably
represents the consensus of the 37 academic linguists who answer
questions for this service.

A Language Log page from Mark Liberman, Professor in the departments
of Linguistics and Computer and Information Science at the University
of Pennsylvania, agrees:

"Wells' way of talking reflects the linguistic truth of the matter,
which is that every way of talking is one 'accent' or another, since
the underlying descriptive system has no natural zero point."

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001273.html

While Dr. Gupta notes that there is no standard accent in the same
sense that there is standard spelling, linguists do apply the term
"standard" to certain dialects of languages, as described on this
Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_language

The Standard Midwestern or General American accent is probably what
suggested your Tom Hanks reference.  Wikipedia says, "The Standard
Midwestern pronunciation and dialect is not thought of as a standard
pronunciation, but is used because it is perceived as accentless by
most Americans."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Midwestern

While linguists accept that certain accents are commonly used in
certain social environments, such as General American being used in
broadcast media, they resist picking out any way of talking as the
pure, unaccented form of the language.  That would be too
prescriptive, and linguists prefer to be descriptive, as noted in
answer 3 of the FAQ of the sci.lang newsgroup:

"Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive."

http://www.zompist.com/lang1.shtml

To a linguist, there is no scientific basis for picking out one accent
as the unaccented way of talking, and to do so would be like a
biologist saying that poodles are the only pure form of dog and all
others are inferior variations.

I cannot dispute your statements that some people who are not
professional linguists talk about accents as if unaccented speech were
possible, but you asked about the current accepted position of the
academic community, and linguists' view of accents differs from that
of the people you cited.  Prof. Liberman refers to the absolute view
as "American folk linguistics" and "scientific nonsense."

I don't think there is a better word for this topic than "accent."  I
can't comment on the OED definition.


Additional Links

Wikipedia article on accent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_(language)

Page on descriptive and prescriptive linguistics from the web site of
the Linguistics 001 course at the University of Pennsylvania, taught
by Mark Liberman and Ellen Prince

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/prescription.html

Home page of the LINGUIST List

http://linguistlist.org/

Home page of the Ask-A-Linguist service

http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/index.html

Members of the Ask-A-Linguist panel

http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/panel-members.html

Autobiographical page on Anthea Fraser Gupta on the Contemporary
Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English web site at the
National University of Singapore

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/singapore/contributors/afg.html

Mark Liberman's personal web site

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~myl/


Search Strategy

linguistics accent

linguistics accent standard

linguistics accent faq

standard accent

I first found more specific discussions of accent in the archives of
the Ask-A-Linguist service, some of which mentioned the FAQ answer on
accents.


If you need any further information about this, please ask for a clarification.

--efn

Researcher was unambiguous, thorough, and prompt. Couldn't have asked
for more.  Thanks so much.

NouvelleOrleans

It seems to me that regional accents are relative. A person who is not
a native speaker of English will notice the difference between an
American accent, a British accent, and an Australian accent.
Typically, if your first language is not English, you'll tend to view
as "normal" the accent that most closely resembles that of the person
or persons who taught you to speak English. "Normal" is usually
whatever we have the most exposure to. Anything significantly
different sounds "accented." The same applies to other languages. I
used to live in San Antonio, Texas, where the Spanish that is spoken
is derived from Mexican Spanish. My husband once lived in Barcelona,
Spain, and to him the Mexican accent sounds strange. Naturally enough,
I feel the same way about the accent of the natives of Spain. It
seems, to me, stilted in the same way that some upper-class British
accents seem stilted to Americans. Both my husband and I found the
Cuban accents that are common in Miami, Florida to be rather exotic
and charming.

Note that the phrases "put on an American accent" and "put on an
English accent" get very nearly the same number of hits in a Google
search:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22put+on+an+american+accent

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22put+on+an+english+accent

If you're looking for another word for a regional accent, you might
try "patois." However, this word generally carries a connotation of
disapproval or substandard usage.

Nouvelleorleans71 --

I'll avoid the discussion of actors and actresses, who are a special
case, but accents in most of us are "imprinted" biologically in our
late teens.  This "imprinting" is similar to the phenomenon Konrad
Lorenz discovered in goslings: that they would follow any moving
object they saw in the period 13-16 hours after hatching.

Science writer Matt Ridley says in his book "Nature via Nurture":

"People change their accents easily during youth, generally adopting
the accent of people of their own age in the surrounding society.  But
sometime between about 15 and 25, this flexibility vanishes.  From
then on, even if a person emigrates to a different country and lives
there for many years, his or her accent will change very little. 
People may pick up a few inflections and habits from their new
linguistic surrounds, but not many.  This is true of regional as well
as national accents: adults retain the accent of their youth;
youngsters adopt the accent of the surrounding society."

A noteworthy example is Henry Kissinger and his younger brother Walter:

"Henry was born on 27 May 1923; Walter was born just over a year
later, on 21 June 1924.  The both moved to the United States as
refugees from Germany in 1938.  Today Walter sounds like an American,
whereas Henry has a characteristic European accent.  A reporter once
asked Walter why Henry had a German accent but he did not. Walter's
facetious reply was, 'Because Henry doesn't listen,' but it seems more
likely that when they arrived in American Henry was just old enough to
be losing the flexibility of imprinting his accent on his
surroundings; he was leaving the critical period," according to
Ridley.

There are other examples of "imprinting" in humans and other animals
but this one accounts for the "unlearning."  My own sister moved to
Florida in her early 20's and it must have been during the 'critical'
period because you'd never know now that she was ever a 'Yankee'.

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

Hi Nouvelle,

You sure know how to make a person think. If I was to make a bet, I
would agree with your friend that "accent" is relative. Sorry, but my
money is with your friend.

I understand your point. It's a matter of interpretation of how the
verbalists look at losing and gaining. If an Englishman chose to
"lose" accent and an American chose to "gain" accent, is that not one
and the same thing? I'm sure that most of us can "put on" a reasonable
accent. The "put on" accent would be perfected when we are continually
surrounded by it, or living in that environment. Hence the relativity.
You suggest "unaccented" presumably because the word exists. An
accented tounge is just a variation of the same language over
different demographies.

As an Australian, broadly we believe we have no accent. This must
relate to anyone, within their own demographic. That is because it is
relative to us. However, there are nuances from one particular State
which even I can detect. The other part of the language difference is
the use of, or omission of certain words.

What to you is a generic unaccented language? 

Thanks for your question, Phil

Many thanks for the rating, comments, and tip.

My view on the relativity of regional accents is nicely expressed by
this true story:

Some years ago, I was enjoying a scenic taxicab ride in New York City.
After a few moments, the cab driver said to me, "Yer not from around
here, are ya? Yer from the South?" I laughed and admitted that I was
indeed from the South. I asked the driver "How could you tell?"

He answered "Cuz youse guys tawk real funny."

I was taught in linguistics class that instead of saying someone has
an accent, we should refer to the dialect which they speak.  This
eliminates the negative connotation of patois as substandard, or the
idea that one "accent" is better than another.  According to the
linguistics folks, the way Tom Hanks or US newscasters speak is in no
way better than the southern dialect, the New England dialect, or any
other, just different.  The other useful thing about the word dialect
is that it encompasses all the peculiar words and expressions that
people use in a region.

I thought I spoke fairly standard American English until I moved to
Pittsburgh (from north of "youse" land and east of Syracuse, where
they have another way of speaking entirely).  The Pittsburghers think
I have an accent and I think they have a very interesting dialect
here.  It includes both pronunciations and different words and
expressions - "gum bands", yunz, and  "red up".

Sorry for this very late comment. My instinct is to agree fully with
other contributors that accents are relative, and we all have accents
- even the Queen speaking the "Queen's English". That said, I think
that I can detect a foreign (ie non-British)  accent, no matter how
gramatically correct (or incorrect) the speaker may be. I may be
unable to understand the broad dialect of a native of a northern
Scottish island or of the far west of Cornwall; but I don't doubt for
one moment that they are British. But no matter how gramatically
correct or colloquial their speech is, or how long they have have
lived in the country, someone born on the Continent or in the US will
almost invariably reveal themselves as soon as they open their mouths.
And I suspect the same is true of Brits who have lived for a long time
in the US - for us, back in the UK, they may seem to be talking like
native Yanks, but for Americans they probably sound like the newcomers
they are.

Relative.  It depends on where you are.  

If you were to speak like a Californian here in the Philippines,
people would say that you were speaking "with an American accent," and
you might very well be chided or teased for it.

Hi nouvelle,

You should be careful in making a few distinctions. First, what the
British people worked on is not their accent but their pronunciation.
They used the word accent, but they meant pronunciation.

Any spoken utterance differs from another, even when made by the same
person. You can easily measure this by computer (play with the fun
program praat (google on praat) for example). Your brain does not
detect all differences and will lump some pronunciations as being `the
same', even though sound-technically they are not. Whenever your brain
(ie, YOU!) detects a divergence from how it would expect a sound, it
will mark this as accented.

Obviously, how you expect a sound to be made is only dependent on how
you have trained your brain. If you are surrounded by people who
pronounce a sound one way, you will perceive an accent if that sound
is uttered in a different way. Your friends have learned that a
certain pronunciation is standard, and that their own pronunciation
differs from the standard one. That is the reason why they say they
have an accent.

Your friend can easily point to the fact that learning is so important
here. If you and your friend grew up together on a tropical island,
with no one else around, you would not perceive an accent, since you
would not know any other standard than the one based on your friend.
It is only because of a learned standard that you can have an accent
or not. Because anything learned is relative (it changes over time,
and over place), you just lost your bet.

Your experiment with 100 people would prove nothing. If you would have
50 percent Britons and 50 percent Americans, you wouldn't get 100
percent agreement. Same if you would ask Indian English, Australian
English, etc., speakers.