More Than One Voice
Transcription by Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com.
Sadie: This episode contains some swear words and some frank discussion of Santa Claus. So those of you listening with small kids, or adorable older kids, might want to be careful of that.
This is Accentricity, a podcast where I examine the eccentricities of language and identity. This is Episode 2: More Than One Voice. In this episode I’ll be asking why do we sound different with different people and in different situations? Is it to do with how we want to present ourselves? Or is it just about us trying to be understood?
We all have more than one way of speaking. For some people their linguistic repertoire includes more than one language.
This is my friend Emilia. She’s seven.
Emilia: When it’s my first day sometimes I get mixed up. See when it was my first day and I was talking to my best friend. I was talking to her in Polish.
Sadie: By mistake?
Emilia: And when the teacher asked me if I’m here I said [speaks in Polish] and that means “yes, I am” in Polish and I just went [speaks in Polish] and that’s my teacher from the Polish school.
Sadie: And this is also Emilia.
Emilia: [speaks in Polish]
Sadie: Emilia lives in Glasgow. Her mum is Polish, and she goes to the Gaelic school. She moves between several very different languages all the time in the course of her day. But even those who don’t think of ourselves as multilingual don’t use the same voice all of the time.
Here’s Jennifer Smith, who’s professor of sociolinguistics at Glasgow Uni, explaining what it means to style shift.
Jennifer: We have this term in linguistics, style shifting, and what that means is within each speaker, in each individual, we all have, very simply, different styles of speaking. So just like we’ve got different styles of dressing – so today I’m wearing a fairly boring white shirt and leggings. Maybe at the weekend when I go out to a club I’ll put on my, I don’t know, my, leopard print boob tube and that’s an entirely different style in dress. And just as we’ve got different styles in dressing, we also have different styles in speaking.
Sadie: We can compare linguistic style to clothing style but they’re not exactly the same because while I do have some friends who only ever wear plaid shirts, I don’t know anyone who only ever uses a single speech style.
Jennifer: When you look at style shifting -- when we as linguists look at style shifting -- what you tend to find is -- Labov says this classic quote that “there are no single style speakers”. We’ve all got this ability to move from one style to another.
Sadie: Labov, by the way, is the granddaddy of sociolinguistics. He’s been researching style shifting in America since the 1960s.
Jennifer: And when we think about that we think of it as your classic telephone voice. I might normally say hello but on the phone I might say [posh accent] “hello”? That’s my telephone voice but actually that’s not my telephone voice because that sounds kind of ridiculous. But it’s the classic telephone voice. So we have these different styles of speaking more, what we call in linguistics, vernacular. That’s how you would talk to your friends and family when you’re very relaxed and then a more formal style towards what we call more standard English: your sort of more posh voice as it were.
Sadie: This is something that linguists study, and describe, and find evidence about, but it’s obviously not a secret thing that only academics know about. It’s something we all notice, experience, and talk about. Here’s the barber who I met at the Barras in Episode 1 telling me about his experience of style shifting. He’s from Coatbridge which is to the east of Glasgow.
Male voice: People fae Coatbridge they call us “hauf and halfs”. Like as in “the breid is in the breadbasket”. Like we’re slang sometimes when it suits us then other times we’ll say, use the proper word rather than the Scots.
Sadie: Do you think it depends on who you’re talking to or where you are or…?
Male voice: No, because see my job, I meet loads of people fae different countries, so I need to tone it down sometimes, my accent, or speak slower but half the time I don’t bother, you know what I mean? And then they just look at me in the mirror and fucking nod and smile and go hahaha.
Sadie: In that clip of Emilia you heard earlier, it’s pretty easy to spot switches between different languages but it’s not always so easy to separate out a speaker’s different voices or to pinpoint when they’ve moved from one to another.
Jennifer: A good way to think about it is -- well to conceptualise it -- is you’ve got this big continuum from the vernacular to more standard and you slide up and down that continuum depending on the different situations that you’re in. Now the really interesting thing is when we look at that as linguists, what we tend to find is that speakers slide up and down that continuum quite minutely really. These wee, little differences in how they’re speaking. So an example of that might be something like if I’m talking to you, Sadie, I might say “I’m goin’ swimmin’ tonight” or “I’m goin’ runnin’”. That’s unlikely, never mind. But maybe if I’m talking to the Queen, if I happened to be hanging out with her, I would say “I’m going swimming” and “I’m going running”. So I’m making those wee, little, minute adjustments to my speech.
Sadie: Let’s take me as an example: I don’t really think of myself as having more than one voice, I don’t think about using different voices in different situations and I don’t really notice myself doing it very often. But if I put my speech under a metaphorical microscope it’s possible to spot some of the small and subtle shifts that I make. To test this, I recorded myself in two different social situations. This is me giving a lecture.
“This graph shows the rate of “aye” use amongst the Glaswegian pupils that I worked with. Out of all the instances in which they were answering in the affirmative, they used the form “aye” 17% of the time. The rest of the time they used “yes” or one of the supralocal forms “yeah” or “uh-huh”. The Polish pupils used “aye” 11% of the time. So it’s clear that they are picking up aye, which suggests that they’re not just sticking with the language they’ve been taught in textbooks.”
Hear how I said answering and picking with the “-ing” sound at the end? Here it is again:
“So it’s clear that they are picking –"
And then for comparison, this is me with my sister after having had half a bottle of wine.
But I remember -- because I remember quite young not believin’ in Santa but definitely just knowin’ that I had to [inaudible-talkover] --
Martha: -- I was scared.
Sadie: You were scared of Santa?
Hear how when I’m with my sister I say “knowin’” and “believin’” with the “-in” sound at the end. Here it is again:
-- like not believin’ in Santa
I don’t sound massively different, but I am making subtle adjustments to the way I’m speaking in these different situations, even if I don’t know I’m doing it.
Jennifer: We don’t really notice most of the time that we’re doing this. It’s a really unconscious thing to make these highly complicated, highly minute, little changes in our speech.
Sadie: Whether or not you notice yourself style shifting, chances are you do. Something that we all do at least a tiny bit, but some people do have a much bigger style shifting range than others.
Jennifer: You’ve got the continuum of more vernacular - more standard. We slide up and down this continuum and, generally, in quite small and sometimes imperceptible ways. But what you can also find with some speakers is they can slide way up and down that continuum of use.
An example of that is myself: when I’m talking to you now, I’m more -- because I’ve got a big mic stuck in my mouth -- I’m talking more in the formal side of the continuum. I’m putting my telephone voice on. But when I go back to my hometown, in North East Scotland, I start “speakin’ like this to ma mum and dad. And fit ye dein the day and I ken far I’m gain. Fit’s that quine dein” etc. So that’s a radical shift.
I’m not just changing from “-in” to “-ing”, swimmin’ to swimming, I’m changing --so doo becomes dee. Where becomes far. I’m changing the lexical items I’m using; I’m saying quine instead of girl. I’m changing the sounds, I’m saying dee instead of doo, and I may also change the grammar. I may say when I’m talking to you “oh the houses were really big” or “the houses were really grand” and then when I’m up in Buckie I might say “the hooses was really grand”. So I’m saying were when I’m talking to you but was when I’m talking to my family.
The whole gamut -- it’s a big, big change across all these different levels of grammar and when we talk about those style shifters who are radically moving from one side to the other of the stylistic continuum, we tend to talk of -- we tend to talk about those speakers being bidialectal. So you get bilingual speakers, that’s the use of two languages and we know a lot about bilingual speakers in linguistics, and these are bidialectal speakers they’ve got two dialects within their linguistic repertoire that they can call on depending on the situation they’re in.
Sadie: Ros has an antique stall at the Barras
Ros: It’s funny I did the Antiques Road Trip, I’ve done it a few times, but the last time I done it, I did it with Charles Hanson -- now he’s English -- but I went straight into South African and when it was on the television I was all “ya and this and that” and all my friends said to me “you’re supposed to be Scots, you’re totally South African on that one”.
Sadie: Ros has moved between Scotland and South Africa her whole life. When I first started speaking to her, she sounded South African but then a friend of hers who’s Glaswegian walked past, and this happened.
Ros: Oh yeah. He’s not in today darling. No, I don’t what’s happened. Don’t know darling, I don’t know. No, he doesn’t no.
Sadie: Ros is one of these extreme style shifters or bidialectals. When you’re talking to her it’s pretty easy to pinpoint that she has one distinctly South African voice and one voice that’s distinctly Glaswegian. Switching the person she’s speaking to seems to prompt a switch in her voice.
Jennifer Smith has been working on a project called One Speaker Two Dialects. She’s investigating this type of extreme style shifting, or bidialectalism, using her hometown of Buckie in North East Scotland as a case study. She gathered together a big group of people from this community and did a sort of test.
Jennifer: We got these speakers talking to someone from the community. We call them a community insider. She was called Roseleen and Roseleen is born and bred in Buckie, lived there all of her life. And they chatted about local gossip, oh all sorts of things. Very vernacular, very natural. And then we had them sit down and talk to Sophie, the research assistant on the project, and Sophie is from South East England. She’s from Hastings in South East England. And [puts on accent] “Sophie sounds a bit like this, she doesn’t sound like she’s from Buckie”, right? She sounds very standard British English, middle class British English. So we wanted to see how they talked to Roseleen – well we know how they talked to Roseleen -- I’ve done a lot work on how people talk in Buckie but we wanted to see how much they switched on that stylistic continuum when they’re talking to Soph.
Sadie: So what happened? You’d probably expect to see these bidialectal speakers using their Buckie voice with Roseleen and then using a more standard Englishy voice with Sophie. And that is pretty much the result but it’s not quite the whole story. There’s another little added complication. There always is in linguistics.
Jennifer: What we found is that they switched some of their language but not all of their language. So the things they switched, to put it very simply, were lexical items, those are words, in linguistics we call those lexical items. So that’s things like when they were talking to Roseleen they would might say “that loony there” and loon or loony is boy in the dialect, but then when they were talking to Soph they would say “that boy there”. They would switch the lexical items.
They would also switch some of the pronunciations of words. So when they were talking to Roseleen they would say “‘at bonnie hoosey doon the brae” and when they were talking to Soph they would say “that nice house down the hill”. Okay they would switch from hoose to house or oot to out. So the pronunciations of words but what they didn’t switch was the grammatical stuff in the dialect. So a really good example of that is in this dialect you can say “that sweet over there” -- there is no sweet over there but imagine there is – “that sweet over there” or “that sweetie over there” -- but you can also say in the dialect “that sweeties over there”. Now we know that in standard English you can’t say that plus something plural, more than one, you have to say those. So it would be that sweet, those sweets, but in the dialect you can say that sweet, that sweets. When they were talking to Soph they didn’t move to those, they continued saying that sweets.
What we suspect is happening then is that people in Buckie know that there are differences with lexical items, with words. They know there are differences with pronunciations, they’re aware of that, but they’re not aware of some grammatical things that they use. And it looks like something like the grammatical structures -- what we call in linguistics morphosyntax. That’s a mixture of morphology, the shape of the word, and the syntax, the order of the words. Morphosyntax seems to be really -- what we call again in linguistics -- deeply embedded in your grammar. So you might get some things that are quite superficial in your language that you can change up like we go through our lives collecting more and more words as we get older and older or maybe -- well it goes up to a peak and then it starts disappearing again actually. But through our lives into our 20s and 30s -- I mean probably this week you have learned a new word, right? We do it all the time. But with our grammatical structures in our language, it looks like they’re fixed from a very young age and we can’t change those in the same way.
Sadie: So how does that work with you as a linguist who’s bidialectal? Because obviously you will be aware of all the grammatical things. Do you find yourself naturally switching the grammatical things or is it something that still doesn’t happen for you?
Jennifer: So I’m really, probably, one of those extreme bidialectals. I do the biggest move. When I go back home, I could never go back home speaking like this. People would be like “fah does she think she is?” – who does she think she is? So I switch right back into the Buckie vernacular when I go home and then of course when I’m here, I’m lecturing. There’s maybe 350 students in the class. You have to put on this much more standard Scottish-English, as it’s called, voice. So I'm probably a pretty proficient bidialectal. Well, I think I am, because those things, with the grammatical things I told you about -- that sweets -- I cannot control those in my speech. I know now as a linguist as soon as I say it, I check myself like “urgh, I’ve said that sweeties” but it’s too late, it’s out of my mouth. So I can completely control the sounds and the words but, just like my compatriots up in Buckie with the grammatical stuff, I have no control over them.
Sadie: Wow. So the awareness that you’re talking about is almost more than just knowing.
Jennifer: Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. I know, I’ve written many papers about this, but I cannot control it in that undrafted stream of speech. I cannot control it.
Sadie: When we’re talking about people shifting or switching do you think it’s something that people do just to make themselves understood better or do you think there are other reasons and other things going on?
Jennifer: Yeah, so one of the things we know is it’s that purely functional thing of making yourself understood better and there’s something in linguistics called accommodation theory. That means that it’s been shown that when you’re talking to someone that sounds different from you, you move closer to them language wise: you move closer to them linguistically. Psychologists look, for example, at how we mirror people. So if someone’s smiling a lot that you’re interacting with or moving their hands, you will start smiling a lot and moving your hands as well, and we do the same things linguistically as well. It’s tiny, tiny imperceptible things but we move closer to that person. That’s called accommodation theory. Now you might do something different. If you’re talking to someone and you don’t like them, you might do the opposite and start moving away from them. Start differentiating your language from them.
So your question was, are they just making themselves understood? Yeah, that’s part of it but there’s also a whole load of other complex things going on. Because what you’re doing when you’re speaking is, you’re doing a primary thing of communicating a message -- I’ll meet you there at nine o’clock -- but you’re also doing a whole mountain of other things when you’re talking as well. So Labov says that “language does more than transmit semantic information.” Semantic means the meaning of something. It does more than communicate. What you’re doing when you’re speaking is, you’re saying “I am this person” or “I’m really funny” or “I’m from North East Scotland” or “I’ve read Dostoevsky”, right? You’re saying all sorts of things by the way you’re speaking and you’re manipulating the way you sound in order to project that identity that you want to project. Now most of that again is subconscious because, if we were thinking all the time on a conscious level, I want to project this identity by saying this, our brains would explode. It’s high-level work. Most of that is subconscious but we are doing it all the time.
Sadie: So let’s go back to Ros, the South African/Glaswegian stall holder from the Barras. We heard her using different voices with different people but when I was talking to her, she also moved between her different voices when she was just speaking to me. And it seemed like maybe these shifts were something to do with the parts of her identity she was showing to me at different points in our conversation. At one point she caught herself slipping further into her South African voice as she was telling me about her South African identity.
Ros: I class South Africa as my home because most of my life -- my daughters, my grandchildren were born there -- so that was it. See now the accents changed, see!
Sadie: Yeah, when you talked about it.
Ros: Soon as I mention and talk about it, it comes out.
Sadie: Just like our social identities, our linguistic identities aren’t stable. They have layers and dimensions, and we show different parts of ourselves to different people at different times. We might behave differently: change our clothes, use different cultural signifiers, and we might change the way that we talk.
Jennifer: The things in linguistics that are easy to look at are those things like who you’re talking to. Are you talking to the Queen or are you talking to your brother, for one? Those things are easy to look at but then when you get down to that nitty gritty of identity in what you’re trying to portray, or not portray, then it becomes quite slippery and becomes very, very complicated.
Sadie: This is something that linguists haven’t fully got to the bottom of yet because how do you measure identity? How do you find correlations between what’s happening with someone’s language and what they’re trying to communicate of themselves socially in that moment?
Of course, you can ask them, but I don’t know if you’ve ever tried asking someone “what aspect of yourself do you feel you were trying to convey in that given instance?” Remember a lot of what’s going on is subconscious but don’t get me wrong, we’re working on it. There’s a lot of pioneering research going on just now that aims to find out more about the allusive question of identity and how the way that we talk relates to who we are. Right now, it’s a work in progress. I’ll let you know when we have it all figured out.
Episode 3 will be out in two weeks. For updates, follow the podcast @accentricitypod on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can also visit the website accentricity-podcast.com.
Thanks always and forever to John McDiarmid for production support and to Seb Philp for making the music. Massive thanks for this episode to Professor Jennifer Smith, to Emilia, her brother Daniel, her mum Ula, and her dad Kyle. To the ever-excellent contributors from the Barras and to my wee sister Martha. Thanks to the patrons of the podcast; Iona Stevenson and Lewis Mackenzie via Patreon, and Gemma Archer, Dave MacLeod and my mum (thanks mum!) via the donate button on the website. All of the money received will go towards funding a second series of the podcast, which I’m already quite excited about. Finally, thanks to my excellent writer pals for their help with feedback, suggestions, and confidence boosting: to Bicola Barratt-Crane, Peter Wright, Angie Spoto, Eilidh McCabe, Joma West, Heather Sinclair, Josie Rodgers, and Agnieszka Checka.
See you guys next time.