Speaking American

Bruce Shapiro

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781925359831
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

A simple and accurate guide to speaking in a General American (GenAm) dialect. Covers pronunciation, intonation, American lingo, phonetics and practical exercises, as well as phrases useful for improvisation work. Includes a CD.

1

Why We Speak Differently

Linguists have yet to determine precisely why people who speak the same language do so differently in different communities. To unravel this mystery they have studied many human aspects of society including ethnic origins, literacy levels, occupations, and class structures. For other clues, linguists have also explored the impact of the environment on a society—the physical geography and native plants and animals. However, despite their best efforts, too many unidentifiable variables have prevented linguists from distinguishing a universal pattern of dialect development.

We do know, however, that the settlement of a given area by different peoples affects the dialect not only of that community but also of the communities surrounding it. Likewise, shifts in the population from one community to another impact upon a country and so affect its dialect.

For example, before the first decade of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was little more than a collection of rural villages, farms, and ranches, with a population of around 50,000 people. Many of its inhabitants were descendents of the forty-four African American, Mexican, and Native American people that originally settled Los Angeles in 1781.

However, during the second decade of the twentieth century, the motion picture industry moved from New York to LA and the population soared. Within twenty years, partly owing to the migration of workers to the West Coast during the Great Depression, the population exceeded 1.5 million people. By 1960 the post–World War II boom had boosted the population to 2.4 million.

Today over ten million people live in Los Angeles. In fact, if you include the population of its surrounding suburbs, more people live in this small part of California than in almost all of Australia.

Thus, over the course of this century, a major influx of people from all over the United States and other parts of the world flooded into one relatively small region of the country. These newcomers must have had a major impact on the development of the dialect we now call GenAm.

The story of why Americans and Australians speak differently from one another is of even greater interest to us than the development of dialects in general. This history involves the very beginnings of both nations. For, as we shall see, the founding of Australia was largely the result of the American Revolutionary War.

Exploration and Settlement

A century of expeditions followed Columbus’s encounter with the New World in 1492. During this early period, England was neither the most powerful nor the dominant European nation. All the nations of Western Europe participated in the initial exploration and the naming of the continent. Indeed, America was so-named in 1507 after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. The Spanish established the first permanent European colony at St Augustine, Florida, ‘the land of flowers’, in 1567 and for three centuries they settled much of the American Southwest. Hence, many geographical features and place names in that region of the United States are Spanish. The French were the first to navigate the whole Mississippi River from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. They held most of the largely unexplored Midwestern United States until President Thomas Jefferson purchased it from Napoleon Boneparte in 1803 and doubled the size of the United States. The Cajun dialect of Louisiana—named after Louis XIV—derives from the original Acadian French immigrants.

It was not until its defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, two hundred years before the landing of the First Fleet in Australia, that England began its rise to world power. Shortly thereafter the British assumed dominion over the settlement of the New World and English, rather than Italian, Spanish, or French became the major language.

The British began 170 years of colonial rule over America with the establishment of the Jamestown settlement at Virginia in 1607. However, in 1613, the Dutch began a trading post on Manhattan Island. In 1626 they bought Manhattan from the Native Americans for trinkets worth about $24 and renamed it New Amsterdam. Forty years later it became New York after the Dutch succumbed to a British naval blockade. The Dutch settlers called the early British settlers to New England ‘Yankees’, which was originally a derogatory term for a plunderer or pirate. Ironically, six years later, it was a Dutch ship that brought the first Africans for sale as slaves to British tobacco plantation owners in Virginia.

The most significant event of early British settlement in America was the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts in November 1620. The settlers, who called themselves Pilgrims, made a peace treaty with the native Algonquians, from whose language we got the name ‘Massachusetts’. With the help of the Algonquians the Pilgrims managed to avoid starvation and survived their first winter in the new colony. Every November Americans commemorate the Pilgrims’ historic alliance with the Algonquians by celebrating the holiday called Thanksgiving Day. This important national holiday often features in American films and television programs, where it represents the humanitarian and family values that lie at the heart of the American ethic.

In his book Albion’s Seed the American historian David Hackett Fisher explains that after these two settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth Colony there were four major waves of British colonization. The first wave began in 1629 when the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts. The Puritans came mostly from East England with hopes of developing a new Christian nation. This period of settlement lasted until 1640. A second wave of settlers, primarily wealthy Royalists and their servants from Southern England, began around 1642 and continued for about thirty years. The third wave, which lasted for fifty years from 1675, consisted of people from the North Midlands of England and Wales. They settled in the Delaware Valley, an inland area stretching along the Delaware River from southern New York through Philadelphia to Delaware Bay. People from North Britain, Scotland and the northern regions of Ireland made up most of the fourth wave of English colonization, which lasted from 1718 until the Revolutionary War in 1775. These Scottish, Irish and English immigrants came in large numbers, settling an area further inland called the backcountry of Appalachia, after the Apalachee Native American tribe. The map in figure 2 below, under ‘Conclusion’ at the end of Part One, shows these four regions of colonial settlement.

In the 225 years since the Revolutionary War, many immigrants from all over the world have settled in the United States. However, the most significant features of American culture derive from its original English heritage. In fact, the lineage of all but two of the 42 American presidents is traceable to a family from one of the first four waves of British colonization. Many other interesting facts about the early colonial settlers fall outside the scope of this book. Our main interest, of course, is in the way they spoke English; the historian David Hackett Fisher calls this phenomenon their ‘speech ways’.

Early American Speech Ways

The Yankee twang

When King Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629, Archbishop William Lund led a religious cleansing to eliminate the Puritans from the Church of England. During the so-called eleven years of tyranny that followed, 21,000 people left England to settle in Massachusetts. Their descendents, who populated all of New England from Connecticut up to Maine, were the original Yankees.

Well over half of these immigrants came from East England, particularly the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and most were church-educated middle-class citizens. A small percentage came from London and the rest from other parts of England. The names of almost all the counties and smaller cities around Boston, Massachusetts—including Boston, itself—reflect the Eastern English origin of these first settlers.

The Boston dialect of today still resonates with the sounds of East Anglia and one can hear variations on it throughout New England. This Yankee Twang, or the Way Down East New England dialect, as people came to call it, had its origins in the Norfolk Whine, so-called because of its harsh, high-pitched nasality.

One of the earliest specialty characters of the American stage was the Yankee, who spoke with a Yankee Twang. Royall Tyler first introduced the character shortly after the American Revolution in his satirical play The Contrast (1787). The Yankee quickly became a favorite comic character, moving from play to play throughout the early nineteenth century. Later, the songwriter and musical comedy star George M. Cohan, who was born in 1878 on the Fourth of July, American Independence Day, revived the Yankee character, adding a heavier dose of national patriotism. In his first big musical success, Little Johnny Jones (1904), Cohan played the Yankee Doodle Boy. In principle the Yankee character is not unlike the somewhat rowdier Aussie larrikin. Both figures uphold the idea of fairness and democratic values by mocking those with blue-blooded affectations.

The New England dialect remained prominent in America through the early twentieth century. A consciousness of it is essential for actors who are performing in some of the great plays of Eugene O’Neill such as Long Day’s Journey into Night or The Iceman Cometh. However, the Yankee Twang is fast disappearing. Actors rarely use it on stage (sadly, even when it is called for) or in films. When they do, it is often to distinguish rural, working-class or uneducated characters. Today one can only hear an authentic Way Down East dialect in isolated pockets of country New England.

Nevertheless the Yankee character, with its middle-class Puritan heritage, is an important American archetype for Australian actors to understand, because it continues to dominate the image of the American hero. Like Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington or Gary Cooper (who uses a Yankee twang) in Mr Deeds Goes to Town, the actor Tom Hanks has boosted his popularity playing Yankee characters. In The Patriot Mel Gibson masters the tongue-in-cheek persona of the Yankee character, to which he also lends his innate, larrikin energy.

The Indian and the Bowery Boy are two...