Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with accents?

Episode Date: August 17, 2017

Accents are truly fascinating. Put simply, they are how a person sounds when they talk. From England to America and all over the world, the way people speak in their native tongue can vary drastically. What are the influences? When do accents begin to take hold? Can you lose or gain an accent? Learn about all this and more in today's decidedly interesting episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright, and there's Noel on the wheels of steel.

So that makes this Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. So Chuck. Yeah. How you feeling? I, before you answer, am so excited about this one because there is just no way it's not gonna be a Chuck accent bananza. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Well, I am super excited about this because I love accents almost more than anything in the world. I know it, man. I'm not doing accents because sometimes I'm okay, sometimes I'm terrible, but I'd like to try. I just mean hearing, there's nothing in the world, I love more than talking with someone

who has a really, really heavy accent of some kind. I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. So if you encounter somebody with a heavy accent that you're having trouble understanding, how do you feel? Oh, like in, say, Scotland? Sure. Well, what do you mean?

Like, are you just like, gosh, this is fascinating. Are you like, do you start to sweat and get nervous because the communication is breaking down? No, I'm delighted beyond words and I will like laugh and say, man or lady. I love your accent. Lad or lassie? Like, I can barely understand you

and I love it so much, I can hardly stand it. That's great. That's a great way to handle it. It's just the best, man, I love it. All accents, I mean, there are very, I can't think of one accent I don't like hearing. What about, no, I got nothing. Like, I mean, sure, there might be some accents

that might be a little grating to your ear on a personal level, but I even like hearing those just because it's just, it's so that person in that region, and especially when we travel for these shows and get to speak with fans from Boston or from the Midwest or... Canada? Yeah, God, this is the best.

I love it. I went on the UK tour, I was just like flipping out. You were, I had to calm you down like every few minutes. It's just amazing and it makes me like, makes me feel a little self-conscious that I have such a non-accent. But you do have an accent, you just can't hear it. That's one of the hilarious parts of accents

is that person with the accent can't hear their own accent. It just sounds normal to them. Sort of, but it's like everyone has an accent. They even say that in this article. But unmarked speech, technically, is what we're talking about, which is it doesn't have a hallmark sign of a geographic area. Yeah, because that's, if anything, what an accent is.

It's a telltale giveaway of where you live, where you're from, where you're raised usually. Yeah, you don't have, I mean, again, it's, you know what I mean, but you don't have an accent either. No, we have... Both of us are pretty unmarked. We have non-regional accents, non-regional American accents, I think.

Yeah, or Gen Am, I've heard it called General American. No, that makes sense. That's good, it's lovely. I mean, listen to us right now. I love this accent. But, and I may have told this story before, I heard a cassette tape of myself as a, like a 12-year-old a couple of years ago,

and it was heavily Southern. Oh, really? Yeah, and I didn't try to lose it. I didn't work on it, I'd never thought about it. Yeah. Where'd it go, Chuck? I have no idea. What'd you do?

I don't know. I really, I just, I was shocked. I was like, that's not me. Wow, that's really surprising. Cause, I mean, from, and we'll talk about it a little bit, but accents, they tend to develop in childhood. Yeah. And they tend to stick.

I don't know, man, I can't explain it. That's pretty interesting. The only thing I can say is that at the time, I was friends with a lot of rednecks. Oh, I gotcha. I gotcha. And I'm not now. No.

Even though I love the right kind of redneck. Don't get me wrong. Sure. I love the right kind of redneck. The salt of the earth, good to each his own kind of redneck. Yeah. Sure, that's a good redneck. They're the best.

Plenty of other kinds too. Plenty of other kinds. Boy, do you know what, this is kind of off the topic, but do you want to hate more than anything? What? Is when a fellow like, I'll just go ahead and say it, when a fellow white dude thinks you think like them, just cause you're a white dude.

Oh yeah. And they, you don't know them and they'll just start saying stuff. Right. And I'm just like, dude, that's awful. I'm not like that. Yeah. And please don't presume I'm like that.

You just throw your hands to your ears and stomp up and down and go, no, no, no, until they run off. That's the worst. I hate it. It's pretty bad. We're all that way. Yeah.

All right, let's get into this. Oh, we're not into it already? Well, I guess the first thing, technically, we should say is that dialect and accents are two different things. Yeah, accent is how something sounds when you talk. And again, it's usually related to where you're from

and usually where you're raised, right? Yeah, and in your family too. Yeah, yeah. And a dialect you're probably gonna pick up from where you're from, from your family, that kind of thing. But dialect more has to do with the vocabulary you use, like the words you use, the slang, that kind of thing.

There's grammar rules that can be different than the standard grammar of the language. So it's more like what you're saying is dialect. How you sound when you're saying it, that's the accent, that's the big difference. Yeah, have you ever taken one of those dialect tests online? No. It's pretty neat.

New York Times has one where you basically go through like 25 questions that say things like, what do you call the strip of land between two streets? Or what do you call a house on the opposite corner of your own? And stuff like that. It's not just like soda pop. I gotcha, okay, yeah, that would be interesting.

Like I say median, I say kitty corner. Oh, I say catty corner. Oh, see, that was one of the choices. But I would say median as well. Right, some people say devil strip. Oh, one of them was interesting was, what do you call it when? Devil strip.

No, that's a thing. That's not a thing. It is. What do you call it when it's raining with the sun shining? Apparently that's highly regional. Raining with the sun shining. I didn't even know there was a name for that. Yeah, people call it different things.

We grew up calling it the devil's beating his wife. What's up with all this devil stuff? I don't know, it's all. The devil's beating his wife is what you call that when rain was coming down while sun was shining. Yep, that crazy? Yeah. Anyway, it's got, it has an interactive map

that as you answer the question, turns different colors like from red to blue, according to how heavy. You're like, no, no, no, no. I take that one back. Well, not politically. And then eventually after the last question, the reddest hot zones will be where you are from.

And mine was like Atlanta or Birmingham or, not Decatur specifically, but Atlanta, Decatur or Atlanta, Birmingham, Alabama, and I think like Nashville. Huh. So I was in the zone. So cosmopolitan Southern is your dialect, basically it sounds like. Cosmo-Southern.

Yeah, Southern Moe. Anyway, I highly recommend, it's kind of a fun test. Yeah, it sounds pretty fun. But nothing to do with accents. What, I mean, can you put like not applicable for the one about the rain when the sun's shining? Yeah, most of them have an option that says, I know what this is, but I don't have a name for it.

Gotcha, okay, cool. Well, then yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it right now. All right. So we've established what dialect is. Yes. We've established what accents are. And apparently now that we're diving

into the world of accents, if you are a linguist, there are basically two categories that you would put accents into. If you wanna start talking accents with linguists, they're gonna be like, wait, wait, wait. Are we talking about the accent that a person has when they're speaking their native language? Or are you talking about the accent a person has

when they're speaking what is not their native language? Explain yourself, says the linguist. Right. And when you go to learn a second language as a non-developing infant, like let's say high school, middle school or beyond, you have to, I mean, you took language class in high school, right?

Sure, French. But was this in Georgia or Ohio? Yes, and there were plenty, plenty of thick Southern accents speaking French, and it is about as grading as it gets. Well, it's funny, cause I took German, and it was the same thing. And I always had a knack for, Spreckenseiddeutsche?

Yeah, that's how it sounded. And it was always funny to me, cause our teacher would dictate or say something in perfect German, and we would repeat it back individually. And I always had a pretty good knack for, not accents, but just sort of parroting. I'm much better if I hear someone say something.

I can kind of say it back like they say it. And I just figured like, just do that. And then you're speaking correct German. And some of these dudes would, you know, Spreckenseiddeutsche? And I would just be like, how can you just like, can you not pretend to speak German? Right. Like with a German accent?

And they couldn't. And it was just fascinating. I just thought everyone could parrot something back. And that's when I realized, no, not at all. Well, they have, those people have very well formed, non-plastic synapses. Yeah. Is really what it comes down to.

In a lot of ways. Do you, you want to take a break before we get into the development of accents? I guess so. Okay. Well, let's do that. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

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All right, Chuck. So there's been a lot of study about accents, about when we develop language. There's a lot of debate about whether we're born with a language instinct, or if it's just something we naturally develop as a result of being social animals. Who knows? But one of the studies on accents specifically

has found that, apparently, babies, they recognize accents in the womb. They've tested newborn kids. I don't know what parent let this happen. But apparently, in the delivery room, or shortly after delivery, the baby was born. It's another way to put it. They've had people speak with different accents to the baby.

And the baby, just based on their gaze, tend to prefer the accent that they heard while they were in the womb. Interesting. It is pretty interesting, right? And apparently, from that moment on, even from the time their brains developed enough to start hearing and soaking this in,

and then after they're born, they're taking all of these little things we take for granted when we speak, when we use dialect, when we form an accent, all of the stuff is sinking in their little baby brains. And it's helping them develop what is called basically a map, a language map, a dialect map, an accent map.

And they're hearing how to talk, learning how to talk, just by listening to the people around them, even before they're six months old. Yeah, this researcher, speech professor named Patricia Kool, K-U-H-L, at U-Dub, Go Huskies. She said that she was describing the map, and she said, the sounds they don't hear, their synapses aren't firing when they don't hear those sounds.

So they just sort of fall away. And you can think of it as pruning of that network of the brain, which I thought was really interesting. It just makes sense. The sounds they hear most often will be reinforced over and over. And that's how a dumb little baby gets an accent. And there's a really good example, if not a super stereotypical one.

But speakers of Japanese have a very hard time saying L, making the L sound, right? Yeah. So rather than Lake, they may say rake. They tend to replace the L with an R sound. And it's simply because that's what they were exposed to growing up, and they didn't learn to make the L sound. Just in the same way that you and I

might have a lot of trouble rolling our Rs. Or if we had been raised in a society or a group or a family even that rolled their Rs, we could probably roll our Rs perfectly. But for all of this research is starting to show that accents are just acquired and developed, and they're reinforced through exposure by hearing other people around you,

and then speaking that way yourself. And that map that's formed starting before even six months old, it's what you use to navigate through spoken communication with the world. Yeah, she found out, this is cool still, in studying babies in Sweden, Japan, US, and other places, that at six months old, Japanese babies could distinguish between the L and the R,

just like American babies. But by the time they were one, they had lost that ability, again, because that was just sort of pruned away. Yeah, and I looked into this. I'm like, how would you set that up? And it's actually pretty clever, right? So they would put these babies in a room and let them all hang out.

Then there'd be like a loudspeaker, and then over the loudspeaker, hopefully they'd have normal volume. Wake up, baby! They would say, they would just have a voice, a nice, pleasant voice saying like, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, right? And then every once in a while, the voice would say, la, la, la, la, la, right?

And when that R would come out, instead of a la, like a bear would light up and start dancing and playing like a drum, like something that babies would love would happen, right? So they came to associate what would be construed as an error in the accent or the dialect with something going on with the bear. So the babies that were Japanese by the time

they were a year, when there was an error, they wouldn't look over at the bear any longer because they stopped hearing that la, la, la, and just heard it as la, la, la, interesting, isn't it? Yeah, and apparently they found that babies crying can even sort of mimic the intonation of their nationality. So like French babies, apparently French speakers

go up an intonation toward the end of a sentence and so French babies would, when they cried, I guess would go, la, la, la, and go up at the end whereas German babies would go down just like German. Yeah, la, la, la, la, la, right, it wouldn't say la. No, super interesting though. Yeah, and so all of this forms the basis of what a lot of people already know

but you might not know why, but it is way, way easier to learn multiple languages when you're younger than it is say when you're in high school and there's a big push among American educators to start language development, second language, third language when you're much younger, like even as young as nursery school rather than waiting till high school.

Oh, did Jerry's little baby is being raised bilingual from birth? Yeah, that's a really good way to raise a smart kid. Like Yumi speaks Japanese and English. She was raised in a household that spoke Japanese and English, right? And I mean, it's the same thing. I read another article about a woman

who was raised in the Philippines and her father was raised, I think her father spoke Tagalog, which is the national language and then her mother spoke a regional language. And so she spoke two forms, two languages from birth and then learned English as an older person. Interesting.

Yeah, so the whole idea that you should wait until high school to learn language because then you're old enough to understand is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Like you're supposed to be teaching kids multiple languages from a very young age because that's when their brains are plastic enough. And they wanted to know how that's possible.

It turns out that your brain creates multiple language maps. So you have a language map for your native language, you have another language map for this other one you learned in school, then another one for the language your grandmother speaks and you can just switch between them depending. Amazing. Isn't that?

So when you do learn another language though, and I guess this is probably true for any age, but as an adult for sure or a teenager for sure, when you already have your own home language solidified, there's something called language transfer that can happen or that always happens. And it can be either good or bad. So depending on what your language is

and what language you're learning, it might be a little bit easier to learn that language and say certain words or it might be a little harder depending on how close it is to your native tongue and accent. Yeah. So like a German learning to speak English may have a tougher time with the T-H sound and they may say like a T-Z or a harder S in place of it.

Like instead of the Germans, Z Germans. Right, or if you're Italian and you're learning Spanish, you might have an easier time because those are a little more similar, especially with the P's in Spanish. Right, because in Spanish, the P is a non-aspirated short onset time sound, right? Yeah.

In English, we would have a hard time with the P because we say P, we aspirate it, right? P, like you're breathing when you say it. Right. Stop. And it has a long onset time, right? So that also explains why native English speakers often have trouble distinguishing between P and B

when they're listening to Spanish being spoken. Yeah, and so depending on if it's easier or harder, it's called positive transfer or negative transfer. Right. And I remember in German, learning to roll those Rs was probably the hardest thing for most of the kids in the class. Sure, right.

And again, it's the same thing. It's like with the Southern accent with German, right? So their language map is so well-formed and so immovable that they are following the rules of that language map even when they're trying to speak this foreign language. Well, languages don't have the same maps, which accounts for different languages and accents and all sorts of things like that.

So on the one hand, it's cognitive, but on the other hand, there's also differences in motor function, right? Just like when you say L but not R as a kid and they seem interchangeable to you when you grow up, you have trouble actually making the L sound, like making your tongue make the L sound instead it wants to make the R sound, right?

So you have the cognitive trouble with your language map, applying your language map to this new language, and you also have the physical trouble of actually making your mouth and your tongue and your airway do the things that it has to do to make those sounds like rolling an R. Yeah, it's simply unpracticed in doing so. Yeah, but that's it.

The good thing about it is that you can learn a good accent. You can learn to speak another language. It just is harder because your brain is pretty well set. You can retrain it though, it just takes practice. And apparently from what I saw, the best way to learn an accent and to learn a new language is lots and lots and lots of listening up front. Yeah.

That you shouldn't just jump in and start trying to speak, you should spend a lot of time just sitting around listening to it first. Yeah, I'm way out of practice now with remembering German and speaking it, but I got pretty good at one point to the point where when I went to Germany, I had a German saying, you speak very good German.

And that's like the best thing that can happen when you travel to a different country and you're trying is for someone to say, wow, you speak really good, French or German or whatever. Here, have a schnitzel on me. It's funny, my buddy and I, Brett, who did my first big Europe trip with, we went to a beer garden in Germany and in Munich

and got, had a lot of beers, a lot of Steins. Good safe. It's this local dude who didn't speak English and I spoke very little German and we drank with this guy for about four hours and bonded in two different languages over the music of the Beatles. Oh, cool.

And it worked somehow. And got our picture with the guy and it was just one of those travel moments that just one of the best travel moments of my life. And I always wonder if this guy remembered that at all. And that guy turned out to be Christoph Waltz. Yeah, I have a feeling this guy didn't remember. It's one of the things like as a young American,

I was like, oh my God, that was the best thing ever. I could see that happening in Germany, but in France, no French person has ever said, hey, your French accent's pretty good. Yeah, exactly. How else can I help you? Right. Well, let's talk a little bit

because this to me is one of the more fascinating parts of accents is the fact that British, English, and England as colonizers all over the world, we still ended up with so many variations of the English accent. Yeah, which makes sense. Fascinating. But it's basically like Britain went around the world

and said, oh, we're gonna have an illegitimate child here and we'll have an illegitimate child here and an illegitimate child here. And they all just kind of look like us a little bit, right? Okay. It's a little bit like that, but language wise or accent wise. So everybody who speaks English, I should say,

in India and in Australia and in Canada and in the United States, they all speak English. All of us speak English. We're speaking the same language, but we speak it with different accents. And when you start to look into why it just becomes extremely fascinating like you were saying, like Australia, right?

The Australian accent, anybody in the world can pick out an Australian accent, no problem, right? And it's such a unique accent, but it's also a hodgepodge of English accents because you had so many people coming from England in different parts of England, forced together in these small pockets over this large geography,

but relatively small pockets of cities and towns and stuff. And their disparate regional English accents came together to form a common unique one, which is now known as Australian English. Yeah. It was pretty interesting. Yeah, I've always heard that English actors have a easier time picking up the Southern American accent

because they're so similar. Oh yeah. And there's actually a lot to that. I read this great article from PBS called R Full Southern. That's the letter R, F-U-L, Southern, from John Faught. And it basically kind of lays out the history of the Southern American dialect, where it came from and how it's changed over the years.

And the fact, there's kind of two different ones there. They call one the R less Southern accent and one the R Full, meaning with words, when you have an R before a consonant, R less accents, you drop that R altogether. So like, there are different variations because you see this in like in New England, like in Boston, and then you also see it in places like

coastal South Carolina and coastal Mississippi and Alabama. And so you think, well, that's weird. But when you think about it, it's true. If you're talking about, you know, pockin' the cat, you're dropping the R with that hard Boston accent. But you can also pock the car in South Carolina. Here we go.

Sorry, I'm getting fired up. But it's the same thing and it came from the same thing. So what happened was, these coastal plains of early European settlements, and we're talking not New York City and not New Orleans, but all these other places came from R less areas of Southeastern England. And so as they were settled, they set up shop

and farmed around the coast and the coastline, didn't venture very far inland. And so then there was this second wave that started coming from our full areas. And this started to change apparently. And what we're talking about is ROTIC, R-H-O-T-I-C, and non-ROTIC dialogue, or dialect. ROTIC is where the R is hard.

Yes. Like park, and non-ROTIC would be like pock. Yeah, and apparently in England, and especially in Southeastern England, when they colonized America, they spoke, or they sounded a lot more like what you would think of as an American accent today. Yeah, probably a lot more.

We probably sound very much like they sounded back then. Right. Which is just knocked my socks off, man. Fact of, not just this podcast, maybe fact of the year. Yeah, but at some point, and I think there's a little bit of debate on exactly when there became a conscious shift in England for kind of to draw class distinctions

to have a more posh sounding accent, is that right? Yeah, yeah, there's something called, so the typical British accent, when you listen to say someone like Hugh Grant speak, what you think of as like kind of classy British. Yeah, like Hugh Grant. Right, classiest guy around. Sure.

At the very least, he's one of the most charming, which is how he gets away with so much. But that accent is called received pronunciation. Yeah. And it developed in England as kind of an aspirational accent among the middle class. The middle class was starting to grow. From what I saw, it was the mid 19th century.

I know you saw something like that sometime in the 18th century. But regardless, it came out of the middle class in England getting a little wealthier, sending more and more middle class English kids off to boarding school, where they were kind of being instructed in this received pronunciation accent. And it became the educated,

Southern England accepted way to speak, right? Right. It was British. And that really got cemented in the 1920s when the BBC started broadcasting. They actually held a panel to try to figure out what accent or accents their broadcasters were gonna speak in and they settled on received pronunciation.

It became the one accent that all BBC broadcasts were done in from the 1920s to the 1970s or 80s. It became quintessential British accents, despite the fact that something like less than 10%, maybe even less than that of the population actually speak with that accent. But that's what everybody else in the world typically thinks of when they think of a British accent.

It's fascinating. And it's, again, this came after America was colonized. It came from what I understand after Australia was colonized. So at the time, Americans and the British sounded very much like we do today. Yeah, so starting in about picking back up with the R lesson, our full stories, starting in about the middle of the 18th century

for the next 100 years or so, you had more people coming over from like Northern and Western England and Scotland and Ireland. And they apparently started entering the US, not along the coastline, but through like the Port of Philadelphia, which that was the busiest in the nation at the time. So these folks move inland instead of hanging around

the coast and then west and southwest. And they had the R full accents. And so you had these inland varieties of accents that were R full, these coastal that were R less. And R less was far more prominent for a long time just because of the way migration happened and immigration happened. And then R full has since sort of taken over,

R full Southern has taken over and R full Northern because it's sort of the same version of the, or two different versions of the same thing. And now R full is what you kind of think more of as that sort of red necky Southern accent. Like orange glade, I said orange, like that. Sure. Okay.

What they say here in this PBS article is the prevailing dialect of like NASCAR. You think NASCAR, you say that hard R. Instead of NASCAR. NASCAR. I feel like I'm going to faint. Yeah, just think of Judy Davis and Barton Fink. Okay.

Or Barton, you know, that kind of, I always think of Charleston for some reason. Oh yeah. Because Charleston is super R less in that respect. And yeah, I think just like in say England or the UK that R less is associated with higher society, I think. Yeah, for sure. The non-Rodic speech for sure.

So then the Sun Belt gets populated and people keep going inland and more inland and our full accents, both Northern and Southern, sort of became the dominant speaking style in the United States. Well, you know, you said that a lot of those immigrants came to the US and stayed in the coastal areas or went inland. There's been a lot of speculation

that there's pockets of accents, say like tucked away in the Appalachians or in the Outer Banks or just kind of in less populated or trafficked areas where those original accents were captured and kind of frozen in time, which apparently all of that's been debunked. That you can't find the original Colonial

slash British Imperial accent in, you know, the people in the Outer Banks or in the Appalachians. But it's pretty romantic to think of. Totally. And I have to say, I gotta say this, speaking of the Appalachian accent, I've said before, you know, that airline pilot talk, how all airline pilots sound exactly the same.

Yeah, yeah. And they're all actually doing Chuck Yeager. Yeah. Chuck Yeager, who's Appalachian accent was kind of famous because he broke the sound barrier. All pilots kind of aspired to sound like him. So that's why all airline pilots sound exactly the same on the intercom

because they're all, whether they know it or not, trying to emulate Chuck Yeager, who actually did talk like that. And that raises like something pretty significant, Chuck, is you can acquire an accent just by aspiring to sound like somebody. And that's how a lot of accents have spread over time. That's how received pronunciation spread.

People listened to the broadcaster on the BBC and said, I like the cut of that guy's jib. And they started mimicking him. And that's how that accent spread. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take another break and we'll talk about media and the movies

and how accents can affect the perception of a person right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. All right, so I got a call one day from, uh, John Hodgman. Yeah.

And he, uh, if you don't know, is a writer and actor and more and more so an actor. And he was auditioning for a part where he had to speak with a Southern accent. So he called me up and was like, dude, I need some help. What do I do? Because I think he's heard me complain a lot about bad Southern accents and movies and TV and how that's just such an immediate

turnoff for me. Oh, yeah. Like that's why I couldn't watch House of Cards, because Kevin Spacey. Oh, his accent, you mean? Oh, yeah, I just turned it off. I thought you meant just Kevin Spacey in general. No, he kind of bugs me in general these days.

Yeah, I don't see Baby Driver then. Oh, no, I love Baby Driver and I liked him in it. And that's the first thing I've liked him in a long time. Wow. Yeah. I thought it was standard Kevin Spacey. Oh, really? Yeah.

Well, it was, but I used to love Kevin Spacey back in the day. In what, though? Oh, just in the early days, like usual suspects and, uh, American beauty. He was, okay, no, no qualms here with American beauty. Yeah, he just, I kind of just got tired of it. Yeah, I think Pay It Forward really killed it for me. I didn't see that.

You should go see it. Go see it? You should see it. Yes. Go to my bedroom? Yeah, wherever you have to see it, see it. Well, Baby Driver was great, though. How about that movie?

Yeah, fantastic. And no batting Southern accents in there, really. I mean, they were. Although the whole thing was shot and set in Atlanta. Yeah, I mean, Baby and the, the, the, uh... Oh, yeah, the waitress had a bad Southern accent. It wasn't bad. I thought it was okay.

Okay. It wasn't too bad, by my standard, at least. You gotcha. So anyway, Hodgman calls me and I told, I basically told him that even someone like me who, um, doesn't have a very strong Southern accent at the very least, there's still something we do in the South, which is, um, we soften our teas, generally.

Mm-hmm. Um, many times teas become D's and sometimes they become N's. Like, no one from Atlanta says Atlanta, Atlanta. It would be spelled A-D-L-A-N-N-A. You know, as funny as it's exactly how people from Toronto say Toronto. Toronto. But like, so we live in Atlanta, but we say Toronto.

Right, but whenever you hear someone say Atlanta, you just think, you know, get the stick out of your butt, pal. Relax. Don't be so formal. Yeah. So I went through and I took Hodgman's pages and sort of rewrote them phonetically. Well, I hope you charged for this.

Nah, of course not. And yeah, and it kind of helped him out, I think. I don't think he got the part, but that's because of his acting, not because of my poor Hodgman. Just kidding. But anyway, it's just, it's an interesting lesson in that accents, I think, oftentimes regional accents of the same language often come down to such subtleties as softening

certain letters or dropping certain letters. Yeah. R's or T's or whatever. But you also, yeah, you raised a point earlier where, you know, people in Boston and people in Alabama both drop their R's, their R lists, but you would never confuse an English speaker in Alabama with an English speaker in Boston.

So there's a lot more going on there. Well, sure, like the Irish immigration in Boston, that had a big impact. Sure. Because they weren't immigrating to Mobile. Right. But I mean, like there's a lot more going on accent wise to just dropping the R.

Oh, sure. But that's the reason why that one's brought up so much is because it's such a common and identifiable beginning point to differentiate different accents. Yeah, and I guess that's probably a good place to talk about perception because whether we like it or not, if you hear a very thick, like old school New York Brooklyn thing or a very southern kind of NASCAR talker, like you're

going to get stereotyped. Like it sucks, but you have a very hard southern accent. People are going to think you're dumb to a large degree. That's because of the hookworm more than anything. Well, true. But I think any really, really heavy accent can very much affect what a person thinks initially when they talk to you. Well, yeah.

So accents are at their base and in group, out group marker, right? Yeah. And we, despite how long we've been living in a larger, more integrated society full of more and more people that we interact with from different groups every day, we still have this kind of evolutionary spark where we are aware of people who are different from us, right?

Yeah. And we surmise different things, whether correctly or incorrectly, based on some of these markers. And one of the big, easy to identify markers that says, oh, oh, you're from a different group than me. Let me just put a little barrier between us here. Is the accent? Yeah, for sure.

They've even done studies. I know that the, is it Babel or Babel? Babel? B-A-B-B-E-L, the language app. They've done studies and they've had people mark like what accents they thought were sexy, which accents they thought were annoying, which ones they trust and don't trust. And of course, like a French accent was more favorable.

The German accent was the least favorable. Generally, they've done tests that find that people are distrusting of someone with a foreign accent, period. Yeah. And I don't know if that has to do with the fact that it is in-group, out-group, or if there's a, there's like a, kind of a much lighter-hearted explanation for it, which is that we tend to prefer people with our own accents or people who sound like

us or close to us. Because that's what we're used to. So we're just physically more comfortable hearing that, right? Yeah, that makes sense. Not in hearing something different, puts us on edge or guards up, or we're just a little more, a little less comfortable physically just from hearing somebody speak with an accent.

And then another study suggested that cognitively we're having to work harder to understand what a person with an accent that's foreign to us is saying, and that, and one way to put it is that we kind of resent them for making us work harder, so we're less trusting of what they're saying. Right. Which is just weird. Well, yeah, and all of this is reinforced and, born out of and

reinforced by movies and television to a large degree. Yeah. Because anyone who's ever seen a movie, they have these kind of go-to trope accents, depending on what kind of character it is, whether it's the dumb Southerner, or in the case of crime, like this New York accent for like petty criminals, whereas the criminal mastermind will usually have a British accent. Yeah, I read an article on that about villains having accents,

and usually it's British. And apparently that's just kind of lazy filmmaking in a way. Well, for many years for sure. Yeah. And so like the, no matter if it was like on another planet or a Russian villain, the villain typically has a British accent, and the article was saying that they had to do with, one, it's just an easy, cheap way of saying this person's foreign, this

person's other. So right there, they're the bad guy, right? And then secondly, it was British so that we can understand what they're saying still very easily. But on an unconscious level again, they're other, they're foreign. And then in America, there's something called cultural cringe. It's in America, it's in Australia, that there's this idea that the British colonized this country, and they were originally

like the parent country, and there's still some kind of unconscious resentment of them, so that making the villain British taps into that unconscious disdain for British people, which obviously don't have consciously, but it's called cultural cringe, where you're just kind of like unconsciously comparing your culture to their culture, and like irritation comes out of it. Yeah, it's funny, even the Star Wars universe, it was a long time ago in a different galaxy, and yet you have like some

American accents and some English accents, and it's kind of all over the map, like, I mean, even in that first Star Wars movie, Carrie Fisher sort of vacillated between English accent and regular American. Well she almost adopted a mid-Atlantic accent. Yeah, so that's, we're not talking about Maryland. In the early days of the movies, they called it Mid-Atlantic, which basically meant just somewhere between England and the United States.

Right. And that's how almost all of the early movie stars spoke. Yeah, and I think from what I saw, you could trace it back to a single dialect coach who taught, I think, Catherine Hepburn to speak that way, and that combined with Carrie Grant becoming a star, and he was born in England and raised there until he was 16, and then moving to America. Those two becoming big stars at the same time made this mid-Atlantic

accent just spread like wildfire because that's what people saw in the movies. That's what they aspired to. So some people started talking like that. Yeah, super interesting. There was a woman named Nancy Elliott that did a sample of American actors and American movies from the 1930s to the 1970s, and she showed a steady decline in R-dropping in the R-less accent,

which would support that what you're talking about with the Mid-Atlantic from 60% of actors in the 1930s to 0% in the 1970s drop their R's. And then she saw within people's individual careers that had long careers in movies, they modified their pronunciations over time. Really interesting. Yeah. One more thing about the British villain, or the villain, no matter where he's from, having a British accent, this article called out,

and I thought very, very rightly so, and Glorious Bastards is doing it right because there's like whole scenes that are spoken in German or Italian with subtitles. So the Nazis spoke German, which they would have spoken German. You have to read along. English with the British accent. Right. Yeah, exactly.

That's pretty funny. I thought this was interesting with the singers. Generally, and there are exceptions like the Proclaimers and Oasis and Madness at times, Phil Collins, people that would sing with a distinct British accent of some kind. But generally, what you hear on the radio is what this one linguist called pop music accent, which is there are a couple of theories on why you can't tell from Mick Jagger to Adele to George Michael that they're

not American. Right. And there's been a lot of debate over the years, but there seem to be a couple of accepted reasons. One is that this is just the pop music accent. This is what's popular. This is what sells. And so this is what people do when they sing, no matter where they're

from. Yeah. Another is that intonation has a lot to do with vowel quality, length of your vowels, and that when you sing, you follow a melody which sort of just cancels out or negates the uniqueness of the accent. That one makes sense to me. Both of them do, actually. Yeah.

I think it's pretty interesting. I think you almost have to work, well, maybe not. I was going to say these bands and singers that still sound very British are doing that on purpose. And that may be the case. I don't know. Yeah. Like the darkness, the guy from the darkness sounds super British.

They're from Suffolk. Yeah. And then have you heard any, have you heard of the genre UK grime? No. Apparently that came along and out of East London in the 2000s and it's sort of a descendant of drum and bass and dance hall and stuff like that. It's just this really heavily accented rap. Is it like Dizzy Rascal?

Is he UK grime? I think so. Okay. Well, then I have heard it and kind of like it. Because I'm not hip at all to this stuff. So I had to look it all up and I think he was on the list. Boom. I listened to a couple of tunes from some of these people and yeah.

Really cool sounding. Yeah. Yeah. Dizzy Rascal's cool. Roots Manuva. Check him out too. I think he was on the list. Yeah, man.

Okay. Dizzy Rascal. Yeah. Speaking of Great Britain, apparently like, so here in the States, if you have a different accent or whatever, especially if you have like a Southern draw and you just kind of sound slow, people elsewhere in the country think of you as slow. That's just how they take you initially until you have to work a little harder to prove yourself.

Right? Yeah. That's kind of aside from maybe like Valley Girl or Valley Guy accent, that's really the only accent that's super discriminated against here in the States. But apparently in the UK, accents are taken very seriously. Yeah. And discrimination is quite possible. I read a 2013 article from The Guardian that was talking about a study that had just taken

place and the study found that 80% of the employers surveyed admitted to discriminating against people based on their regional accent. Totally. Yeah. And that 28% of Brits said that they felt discriminated against based on their accents. I didn't see any study that found the same thing in America, but I guarantee those numbers would have been in the basement compared to that. Yeah.

It's definitely a thing in the UK because I've heard even friends of mine that are English when they talk to someone and also they're like, oh yeah, he's from this area or that area. Northern. I don't know, it's just a bigger deal, I think. Yeah. I think it is too. Over there.

I wish they all talked like Terrence Stamp from The Limey. I like Michael Cain's accent, which apparently is cockneyed. That's great. I had no idea that that was a cockney accent, although once I read that I was like, oh yeah, I could hear that. Well, it's funny that I love the Terrence Stamp in The Limey, but I read an article that where one reviewer said it was like the worst accent they'd ever heard from the Guardian. That's funny.

Did you see that movie? No, I didn't. Oh man. It's so good. Steven Soderbergh movie. Is it where he and his son build a house together? No, no, no, no. It's he plays a kind of a British tough coming over to get revenge for his daughter's murder.

And ends up working at a pizza place in Connecticut? Nope. Man. I know, I haven't seen this movie. Yeah. It's called The Limey. It's great, but there's this one scene where he goes off in front of the great Bill Duke who I think late grade is Bill Duke no longer with us.

I don't know who that is. You would recognize him. Okay. Bill Duke plays an American, I think he's a maybe a copper detective in the movie. And Terrence Stamp has this great scene where he goes into his office and goes off for like a minute and a half straight in this very thick cockney, not only accent, but dialect. And Bill Duke's just sitting there. At the end he goes, Bill Duke says, there's only one thing I don't understand.

I don't understand every mother effin word that just came out of your mouth. So classic. I got to see that movie. Oh dude. It's really, really good. Wait a minute. Does Terrence Stamp hire himself out as a toy for a rich kid and Jackie Gleason as the dad?

No. That's the toy. I really haven't seen this movie. The Limey. Peter Fonda's in it. Okay. I'll go see it. Yeah.

All right. It's excellent. You got anything else? No. It's weird. This is one of those where it was even kind of long and I feel like we just didn't even cover half of what we could have. Yeah.

No way. We definitely didn't. There's a lot to it. We'll do a part two one day. Oh yeah. In the meantime, I would direct everybody to, I think, Wired to look up movie accent expert breaks down 32 actors accents. This dialect coach is just doing, well, he talks about 32 different characters and some

are really good. Like Phillip Seymour Hoffman doing Capote apparently is dead on and Kevin Costner doing Robin Hood is supposedly the worst accent of all time in movie history. You know who I love a lot, but he can't do an American accent, but I'll still watch him just because I love him is Ewan McGregor. Oh yeah. He in the season of Fargo, he was great and I loved it, but he just has such a hard time. That Scottish accent just comes through.

Yeah. Same with the men who stare at goats. Yeah. He had trouble in there. I mean, it was fine, but you'd noticed it every once in a while. He really did the wet behind the ears thing. He's so likable though. I just, I don't care.

I just get over it. Whereas some people, I'm just like, nah, not going to watch it. Yeah. I'm with you. Well, if you want to know more about accents, get out there in the world, meet new people, listen to their accents, maybe try some on for size, who knows? And since I said try some on for size, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this switcheroo and it's kind of funny.

It was not really accent related, but voice related. Okay. Because we get a lot of comments about people that pictures differently, you know, but this one's interesting. Hey guys, a little funny anecdote that I'd share. I listened to the podcast for about three years. Shortly after I started listening, I pulled up a picture of you guys just to put faces to your voices.

Yesterday, for some reason, I pulled up a video, he watched our Google talk at Google headquarters. Oh, gotcha. And he realized that he'd been picturing us backwards this whole time. No, but that was jarring. So that's a little switch on the usual story we get that people don't even know. So he said, since I only saw a picture, I guess I just assumed I knew by looking who had which voice.

I've had that image for all these episodes as to who is who. So imagine how odd of an experience it was to watch a video, I saw Josh speak with Chuck's voice and Chuck and Josh's by far one of the weirdest moments I've had in recent memory. Thanks for all the great shows. Keep them coming. That is Nick from Indiana. Thanks a lot, Nick. I appreciate that.

Yeah. That's all I have to say about that, you just imagine that was probably pretty funny. Yeah, he's still laughing about it. If you want to get in touch with us like Nick did, tell us a funny story, we're always down to hear those. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast or Josh M. Clarke, you can hang out on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the

web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.