FollowReview of Valerie Fridland, Why We Talk Funny
Contrary to popular belief, we’ve all got an accent. In Why We Talk Funny, linguist Valerie Fridland digs deep into the notion of accent, offering an engaging tale of how they arise, how they work, and how they affect our lives. With relatable examples and current research results, she brings together linguistics, psychology, and history of English in a fresh, and sometimes sassy way.
Fridland is a University of Nevada-Reno sociolinguist who also pens a column for Psychology Today, so she is used to writing for real people. In the book’s seven chapters, she takes us from a baby’s first sounds to the prehistory of language and the history of English in Britain and the United States. treats Chapter One (“Baby Steps”) shows us how babies deal with sounds and the importance of the social and interpersonal cues they get about sounds. Chapter Two (Our Origin Story”) goes way back to eighteenth and nineteenth century theories about the origins of language and to the later work of people like Sir William Jones and Jacob Grimm (of fairy tale fame). Chapter Three (“Linguistic (R)-Evolutionary”) is about the formation of an American language and the way in which the r-sound divides British and American speech (among other things, you’ll learn why Brits say arse and Americans say ass). Chapter Four (“Divided Tongues and a Divided Nation”) is about how American accents developed, spread, and continue to change, including the surprisingly late development of Southern drawl and some weird West Coast vowels. Chapter Five (“Classing It Up”) introduces the ways in which social values are attached to accents and how pronunciations might be seen as sloppy, bougie, or more or less employable. In Chapter Six (“ What Color is Your Accent”), we learn about African American language, African American speech, and how we sound black and hear black as well. Finally Chapter Seven (“ Strangers at the Linguistic Gates”) looks at the sounds of other languages—their rhythms, stresses, sound inventories, and how it is that our perspective affects how we evaluate foreign accents.
Fridland also offers periodic SOUND BITES , as she dubs them, These are mini-lessons on topics that will capture the imagination of any reader: why many people find the word moist so execrable, what may have happened in the lost colony of Roanoke and how it relates to the Lumbee Indian language, and why we find certain accents pleasing or grating. As she did in her book Like Literally Dude, Fridland introduces the relevant scholarship without letting it get in the way and she has a knack for capturing the reader’s attention with anecdotes and humor.
Why We Talk Funny also has a consistent serious message: language differences are always with us and always evolving and our accents bring people together in an appreciation of who we are and what we share. Even when we talk different. Why We Talk Funny is a book about language for every language lover.
