PicoBlog

My favorite scene in My Cousin Vinny involves a play on words.

Joe Pesci, a criminal defense lawyer with an infamously New Jersey accent, grills a witness on the stand, finally reaching the conclusion—that perhaps the witness was, in fact, mistaken. He asks whether it’s possible that the two yoots the witness saw weren’t the clients in question. Here’s the scene:

Fred Gwynne of Herman Munster fame plays the judge, and he is as deadpan as it gets. “What is a yoot?”, he asks. I think my favorite part of the whole scene is the way Pesci answers, making sure to softly pronounce the “th” sound, making it sound more like “yooooooothessssss.” He even swirls his hand around, adding a little flourish.

This scene is so cool because it encapsulates the observation that the English language has a really wide range of pronunciations. Words can be spoken with such different intonation as to sound like nonsense to the other person

I grew up in the land of y’all. South Carolina as a state has a range of accents, but to my ears, most of them share common traits. As a youngster, I began to reject this dialect as unsophisticated. I thought it made you sound like a dummy.

In my young (and overly simplistic) mind, the south also represented a lack of progress, of yearning for the distant past. The Confederate flag flying high above the state capitol building probably didn’t do much to dispel this perception, but it does serve as a vivid reminder that this land—South Carolina—was once part of a different nation, one that subjugated humans to slavery and fought to the death to be allowed to continue this practice.

I knew what past many of the people who said “y’all” were yearning for. I wanted no part of that yearning or longing.

Saying “y’all” was also simply incorrect! Grammar was important to me, so I began to deprogram myself around age 12. I had a challenge with my friend Tim, who was from Pennsylvania, where he wouldn’t allow himself to say “youse”, which we both began to regard as equally incorrect.

These little differences in language I noticed when I was a kid really planted the etymological seed in my brain. I noticed that geographical distance was a key factor in how different Tim’s family and my family spoke, but geographical divides (like a mountain range or a body of water) can do this, too.

The United States is vast. Each geographical region has its own accent, and this diversity in speech isn't limited to the US by any means. English, with its various accents, is spoken across the globe in places like Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Scotland.

Accents, over time, evolve into dialects. These dialects can, given enough time and isolation, transform into entirely new languages.

Let me ask you a rather obvious question: what language do people speak in Portugal? How about Italy, France, or Spain? Today, we identify these languages as Portuguese, Italian, French, and Spanish. Yet, if you asked someone living in those regions what language they spoke 1500 years ago, they would say “Latin.”

One way to think about this is that they’re all still speaking Latin today.

The transition from Latin to these modern languages didn't happen overnight. The fall of the western Roman Empire which led to the isolation of different regions. As these regions became more isolated, their unique dialects of Latin began to diverge significantly from each other and from classical Latin.

Dialect became language, but where and when that happened is completely arbitrary.

Of course, other languages have played a role, too. Invasions, migrations, and lots of trade meant that people were constantly communicating with people who spoke differently than they did.

The Germanic tribes' invasions of the Roman Empire and dominance of Germania introduced new linguistic elements, which, when blended with the local Latin dialects, gave rise to the early forms of the Romance languages. Over centuries, these languages continued to evolve, absorbing influences from other languages and adapting to the changing cultural and social landscapes of their respective regions.

This process of linguistic evolution shows us how fluid and dynamic languages are. The clear-cut distinctions we often make between different languages can sometimes obscure the fascinating continuum of language change and development. Just as 'yoots' and 'youths' can coexist in the same language, so too can Portuguese and Latin, albeit separated by centuries of linguistic evolution.

Today, we have something the ancient Romans (and eventual Portuguese, Italians, etc) didn’t have. We have a very, very small world connected by media.

Movies and TV play a significant role in both preserving and standardizing language. In My Cousin Vinny, the New Jersey accent, characterized by its unique pronunciation, collides with a slow Alabama drawl, highlighting the differences, and showing people at home that there’s more than one way to say a word.

Fortunately for us, television hasn’t simply forced everyone to have a universal dialect. Instead, linguistic diversity is more and more often celebrated, contributing to their preservation. However, TV has helped to create a neutral version of the language that virtually any English speaker can understand, at least in the US.

TV-speak is a connector. It’s more formally called General American English (GAE). GAE plays the role of a universal American language, helping to facilitate communication across wide ranges of accents, just like the role formal Latin played for those budding European nation-states.

I no longer have any revulsion to southern accents, nor to any US dialects. Instead, I become instantly curious as to how and why things are said so differently. There’s almost always a story behind something that seems confusing, and dialects can certainly be confusing!

Following your curiosity like that, are there any neat facts you’ve learned about how language (or a dialect) has come to be the way it is?

Can you think of a few words that are spoken distinctly or uniquely where you live?

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