Accents - Blog Posts

southern accents are very curly. the drawl does it, I think. lower pitched voices are thicker, and the more Midwest accents have a rough texture feeling. the coast tends to sound cooler than the warm, land-bound lilt.

You know how peoples accents will sometimes get thicker when they’re mad? Cuz I think most of Saxon’s acquaintances find him kind of insufferable because he goes all sing-songy when he’s annoyed

Let’s talk more about accents in the Riordanverse!

• Percy with rounded New York vowels and that quick run-together way of saying his sentences. Percy with an accent you can’t quite place until he orders some coffee or water.

• Annabeth with a Virginia drawl and long vowels that don’t quite go away, even after years on Long Island Sound. Annabeth, who will randomly spit out phrases like “nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs”, whose cup always fills with sweet tea in the mess hall/

• Carter with a fairly standard American accent until he pronounces a word so bizarrely it’s clear he must have learned it halfway across the globe. Carter, who gets slightly antsy in the same place for too long and goes to language classes at night just for an excuse to practice.

• Sadie with a London accent that’s begun to fade after years in Brooklyn House, who accidentally says “cheers” when people hold the door for her. Sadie, who skips over her t’s and who drops consonants and, like Carter, isn’t exactly sure where her home is.

• Magnus and Alex with strong Boston accents and nasally a’s that Hearth is glad he can’t hear. Magnus, whose accent gets stronger in battle, who intentionally leans into it when he’s on the West Coast. Alex, who makes people guess where she’s from and tells them something different every time, who argues with Magnus over whose accent is stronger.

• Jason Grace with languid California vowels, who drops the end of every word when he’s relaxed and over-enunciates when he’s in charge. Jason, whose accent is only present when he’s comfortable.

• Leo Valdez with a Texan accent to boot and quick clipping consonants, whose accent sounds nearly the same as Annabeth’s to the untrained ear, but insists that they’re completely different every time someone brings it up.

• Hazel Levesque with a thick New Orleans accent, whose vocabulary is peppered with French and old-fashioned phrases and the occasional Southern saying. Hazel, who sticks to Deep South manners (and passive-aggression, when necessary), who orders in French when she goes to a bakery and watched old black-and-white movies when she feels homesick.

• Frank, who sounds American except for when he says “sorry”, who speaks a bit of Canadian French (which Hazel hates, because she can’t understand it), and gets teased every time he says “about”.

• Piper with a slight valley-girl sound that she’s worked hard to get rid of, but tends to slip into when she’s tired or angry. Piper, whose voice becomes sweet and soothing in charmspeak, who understands every fluctuation and intonation and how to use them to her advantage.

• Nico di Angelo with a seemingly standard American accent, until you pick up on the odd transatlantic pronunciation or Italian rolled “r”. Nico with an arsenal of phrases so jumbled and eclectic that people do a double take when he talks.

Just. Yeah. Riordanverse accents.

Yes. Yes. Hello. Linguistics grad student here. Big fan of historical and socio- phonetics. Let's look at a few concrete examples.

"It is a widely held belief that colonial or Extraterritorial (ET) dialects are inherently conservative. Being out of touch with the trendier developments of their Mainland sources, they develop more slowly, and are likely to show distinctly archaic features. This property has come to be known as 'colonial lag'. The notion is alive and well in English folk-linguistics: the 'pure Elizabethan English' periodically supposed to be spoken in the fastnesses of Appalachia is one of its loonier and better-known manifestations. Even sober scholars are prone to hold similar ideas; though colonial lag as a global property of ET dialects has now been discredited in a fine study by Manfred Görlach (Lass, 1990)." Some examples from this article of cases in which neither American nor England English are the most traditional: Modern Scots, despite being, you know, in Britain, has a number of conservative forms such as the velar fricative (like the <ch> in "loch", or German "Bach", found in Old English pronunciation of words like "night") that are lost in most other Englishes. While most Englishes merged the vowels of words like "earn" and "urn", Southern Hiberno-English (Ireland, though not all varieties) has kept these separate (with roughly the vowels of "bet" and "but" respectively).

Many dialects of North America keep the r where standard England English drops it, but here's some sounds Americans changed and the English preserved (from Schneider et al., 2004): pin/pen merger: the "eh" vowel becomes more like "ih" when before nasals (n, m, ng), so where in the conservative form "pen" and "pet" have the same vowel, in the innovative form found in the speech of many Americans (MOST MARKEDLY IN THE SUPPOSEDLY TRADITIONAL SPEECH OF THE SOUTH), the vowel in "pen" merges with the vowel in "pin". Betty bought a bit of bitter butter: in RP English, every /t/ in this phrase is pronounced as a classic t sound, but becomes a light d sound in North American speakers. (Compare "bitter" and "bidder" in an American accent and a posh English accent.)

This is all just English, but I'm sure New World French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and other post-colonial European languages work similarly. Icelandic is another interesting example: often referenced because of its geographic isolation from other Scandinavian languages, it kept certain Old Norse verb endings, but lost features like vowel length (Lass, 1990).

So what did English of Shakespeare's time sound like? There were many dialects of English back then and the language was in flux, so there's no single answer, but in general, it was definitely not identical to any current living dialect of English. If you can imagine a slightly illiterate Canadian pirate, you're in the ballpark. (For examples and explanation from scholars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s )

Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood linguist

The sources: Lass, R. (1990). Early Mainland Residues in Southern Hiberno-English. Irish University Review, 20(1), 137-148. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484343 Schneider, E. W., Burridge, K., Kortmann, B., Mesthrie, R., & Upton, C. (2004). A handbook of varieties of english: A multimedia reference tool two volumes plus CD-ROM. De Gruyter Mouton Courses I've taken, including sociolinguistics, history of English, and historical linguistics.

In short: Statements like 'Americans kept the original British accent' or 'Southern drawl is slowed-down British' are drastic and misleading oversimplifications. Dialects that are conservative in some senses are innovative in others. Because languages - ALL languages - change over time. Also, Shakespeare would sound strange to any modern ear.

at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents

I relate to this on a very deep level. My grandmother is a west virginian hillbilly and I'm originally from ohio. My exes from the west coast were so confused when I used the words pop and spicket, and lost their mind when I said 'Lord love a duck!' When my hair came out looking like drunk Leia buns.

Writing Southern Accents 101

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for Keith with a southern accent (which I LIVE for)! Since I live in the southern us and have a pretty strong accent, I thought I’d give a few tips to anyone who wants to write people with a southern accent, especially someone like Keith who may not always have one.

- generally I have a proper voice, and try to keep the slang out of my words, much like Keith would had he been written with some kind of accent

- my accent really comes out when I’m angry, tired, comfortable around the people I’m talking to, or just don’t care anymore

- most accents are generally similar, but different parts of the south tend to have deeper or more pronounced accents (i.e. I’m from Tennessee, and Tennessee and Texas have IDENTICAL slang words and accents. Usually people ask if I’m from one of the two states when I’m out of town.)

- the south in America is Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the very upper half of Florida that borders Georgia. Otherwise Louisiana and Florida aren’t included because they have very different versions of southern culture hat aren’t stereotypical.

- If you use slang, don’t over do it. Southern slang is actually kind of complicated and doesn’t really come naturally to anyone who doesn’t use it on a daily basis.

- not everyone with an accent uses slang. People from the south almost always have an accent to people who aren’t from here, even if they can’t hear it themselves.

- We tend to clip words that end in -ing (i.e. “Fightin’, Runnin’, Walkin’)

- Some common slang used is obviously the classic “y’all”, but also “yuns” (another form of you all. ex: what are yuns doin’ over there?)

- improper grammar is a classic too. I love English and can write and speak perfectly, but sometimes I find myself saying things like “that don’t even make no sense”

- Metaphors, Hyperboles, and personifications are massive parts of southern speaking

- “It’s hotter n’ the pits of hell in here”

- ain’t is used more often than y’all

- “that ain’t even correct” “well ain’t she just sweet”

- we still use modern slang and sometimes it sounds really weird throwing slang words like “finna” in with our accents lmao

- bless your heart isn’t a compliment and if someone from the south says that to you, they probably think you’re an idiot

- people with southern accents aren’t idiots and having an accent doesn’t make them one!

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask me!

Everything about this woman is sexy, from her flawless face and body to her attitude. She’s my kryptonite 🥰🤤🤫