http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

You may note in the intro section that Billy Baker Jr. was not the complete success he might believe himself to be in the r department.

Also of great interest are the comments  — lots of people saying basically, “I’m not stupid, you’re stupid” (this happens to be one of my top two comebacks when I’m insulted). Many commenters insist that the Boston accent does not make them sound dumb, and that it has great cachet around the world, because they sound like JFK. To which I would respond with an “ahem.”

Interesting, too, is the claim that only about 15% of people from the greater Boston area speak with “the accent” all the time, and another 40% are “bidialectic” (able to switch that baby on and off). I feel like I’ve met all 55% in the course of my life.

So there I was, happily getting ready for as much Callie Crossley as possible before I would lose the signal around Palmer, and on comes Junot Diaz. Junot Diaz is a professor and author (and immigrant to the US from the Dominican Republic who has, in my opinion, a native English speaking accent) and was on the show talking about an essay he’d recently published about the social toll of disasters and how natural disasters make evident social problems in the places they hit. Here’s a link to the show (**Warning: I couldn’t get this to open on my computer, so not sure if it works**): http://www.wgbh.org/programs/The-Callie-Crossley-Show-855/episodes/Weds-May-25-Junot-Diaz-29162

It was a great interview; a discussion really between two thoughtful people. But I missed some of the content because I was focusing on the way the two spoke. I was struck by how many features of his speech are considered typically female and how many of hers’ male. He qualified a lot of his opinions with “sort of” and I believe he may have used some uptalk.

Callie Crossley, meanwhile, is directness personified. Her voice is clear and strong, and she doesn’t use a lot of qualifiers. She doesn’t engage in uptalk, as best as I can remember (since I can’t get the media player thingy to open, I’m relying on my unreliable memory here), and she doesn’t use extreme pitch variation (nor did Diaz).

I looked Diaz up on Wikipedia, which said he was born in December 1968. I couldn’t find a birth date for Crossley, but I would bet she is about that age (which is also about my age, for full disclosure purposes). I don’t know if these two public figures represent a shift in what’s acceptable in gendered speech norms being led by our generation, or just two individuals using their own speech styles. I like to think that I’m on the direct/straight-talking end of the spectrum of female speech, but there are definitely times when I add qualifiers to my speech to soften it up a bit (and then regret that I feel I need to do so).

I try to encourage some of my ESL students to find a more happy medium between being completely direct (“That hat is very ugly on you. Do not wear it.”) and utterly indirect (“Oh, I don’t mind if you take my last pencil, please, yes, you should help yourself, it will make me very happy to give it to you.”), and if I can ever get this link to play, maybe I’ll use it as an example for a class one day.

I can’t do IPA fonts, so I’ll transliterate.

I hear “bah-key-stahn” “bah-kiss-tahn” “pah-kis-taen” and other crazy variations. Why? The same offenders don’t say “Frahnce” so why are they trying to go native with Pakistan? I think it might be trickling down from Obama, who’s perhaps trying to be Mr. Cool, or maybe it’s a leftover from his years in Indonesia. But five’ll get you ten he doesn’t say “Frahnce” either.

It really rankles me every time I hear it. My favorite, though, is “pahk-is-taen” when the speaker forgets to be all “ah” by the final syllable. I think the reporters should be required to say “Frahnce” if they insist on saying “Bah-key-stahn.”

I’m all for communicative competence, and it’s what I strive for with my clients. And I think that speaking with the regional accent always helps one be understood. I wonder, though, if speaking only with a regional non-native accent can actually impact language fluency and correctness. My clients (and my ESL students) have ongoing tendencies to drop /s/ at the end of 3rd person singular verbs in both speech and writing. This is just wrong — I can understand them. You, dear reader, can understand them, but it’s still an error.

I’d be curious to see/hear some of the assessment standards being proposed or considered.

So here’s a clip of him speaking at a press conference a few days ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAt0OVCvvgE in which, I dare say, he says more than 100 different words. He seems to be completely proficient in English, but suffering from a DREADFUL foreign accent and intonation, and importing the (extremely annoying to Anglophones) Italian habit of umming and errrring between what seems like every other word.

What say yous, dear readers? Does Capello have an accent problem, a language problem, or just a sub-par team looking to lay the blame on the coach?

In the NYTimes article, the author, Joshua Foer, talks about learning and its limits:

In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner tried to answer this question by describing the three stages of acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the cognitive phase, we intellectualize the task and discover new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second, the associative phase, we concentrate less, making fewer major errors, and become more efficient. Finally we reach what Fitts and Posner called the autonomous phase, when we’re as good as we need to be at the task and we basically run on autopilot. Most of the time that’s a good thing. The less we have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more we can concentrate on the stuff that really matters. You can actually see this phase shift take place in f.M.R.I.’s of subjects as they learn new tasks: the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active, and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the O.K. plateau.

Foer goes on to talk about moving beyond the O.K. plateau, which he did with his memorization skill.

I think a lot about how my clients/students make progress in accent modification. These are people who have signed up to work with me and (unless their company is paying for the training) are shelling out significant  money and time to work on acquiring a new skill — a more standard US English accent. So they’re not happy with where they are, at least at some level. And yet, and yet… progress is not swift.

The first phase — cognitive — comes quickly. My clients learn the intellectual/practical aspects of creating a new accent and feel great success in learning information. But that’s not behavioral change or skill acquisition. Those parts come during phases two and three, and those are the slow parts. So slow, in fact, that they usually occur months, even years after we work together. I’m impatient! I’m more dissatisfied with their progress than they are. I wish they could/would make swifter strides. But progress is made, and hearing from someone months or even years after they trained with me is a great treat. Especially hearing them speaking autonomously with a more standard accent.

A British director interviewed in the Boston Globe says uncle, admits that American actors can do better British accents than British actors can do American ones.

I dunno. I’ve heard some real stinkers from both sides of the pond. Popping into my mind’s ear at the moment are everyone on Inspector Morse and As Time Goes By who was supposed to be American, and that Michelle Pfieffer in some production where she was supposed to be French but spoke in a dreadful British accent.

Other research mentioned in the NPR article says that songbirds do the same thing. When a Pennsylvania songbird hears a New York songbird, it tunes out his song.

The conclusion from NPR is that perhaps we (peeps and peeps alike) recognize the accented speech as someone out of our group and just plain tune out. Who knows why? Whatever the reason, it’s an interesting read.

A reporter in Brookfield, CT did some man-on-the-street interviews and asked the question, “is there a CT accent?” One lady says the way we say “button” and “mitten” with a flapped /t/ is an accent (but she’s from NY so she doesn’t know that the flapped /t/ is the correct pronunciation).

Most people interviewed think that everyone else has an accent — it’s the same the world around!

http://brookfield.patch.com/articles/accent-on-connecticuts-speech-18#video-4297357