Aifel Towah

Over brunch, I told my roommate about a stand-up routine that included the comedian lost in Paris and stopping a French man to ask him how to get to the Eiffel Tower.

“Aifel Towah? Wat eez dis Aifel Towah? Ah have nevah ’eard oof dis Aifel Towah you speak oof,” the man scoffed. “Stoopeed American peepel!”

My attempt to imitate the comedian imitate the Frenchman led to my roommate attempting a British accent, which was hilarious because she sounded exactly the same as normal, except she also made these vaguely constipated facial expressions.

From this we talked about how and why certain accents can be imitated and others cannot. For example, we can imitate a British or French accent without a second thought but once we try to imitate an Indian or Ghanaian or Chinese accent, the act could easily become problematic or offensive. We thought a possible reason for this is that the latter accents have stigmas attached to them and that these accents have grown to label their speakers unwelcome foreigners and as a result, by “making fun” of the accents, one perpetuates the groups’ outside statuses.

I remembered this conversation when I read “The Social Weight of Spoken Words” and its discussion of “prestigious” accents, as the latter group of accents mentioned above may be perceived as less prestigious. As mentioned in “The social weight of spoken words” and explored in the experiment in “Effects of phonetically-cued talker variation in semantic coding,” the New York City accent is perceived to be less prestigious than the Southern Standard British English (Sumner and Kataoka 2013). I wonder if there are certain patterns in less prestigious accents, like dropped vowels or shortened words or shorter/faster speech speeds.

One thing that helps people “get into character” when they attempt a British accent is to talk about tea or the Queen. Whenever my freshman year RA talks about anything related to the Caribbean, where he’s from, he slips from his adopted American accent to his Caribbean accent. These phenomena remind me of King and Sumner’s semantic association article that explains that “listeners are sensitive to the probability of a word given a specific voice in a specific sentence” (1).  The voices of British people and Caribbean people are associated with their respective contexts; whatever characterizes either society is reflected in perceptions of their accents.

I’d like to know - what makes an accent prestigious? Is it related to class or race or both?