Language, Change, and Response

Abstract

Abstract On 4 July 2000, I received a telephone call from a local radio station that had gotten my name from my American university’s Experts Directory, where I was listed as a resource for the history and structure of the English language. Was it true, the woman inquired, that I was a specialist in English linguistics, and would I consent to a radio interview about the English used in the blockbuster movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson and then just-released? What about English in The Patriot, I asked, to which she replied: ‘The Americans don’t have British accents, and we want to know whether that’s accurate or not.’ I was to be live on the air in fifteen minutes, and despite this, and despite the fact that I hadn’t seen this film about the American War of Independence (though I since have) and had never really considered the issue, I quickly agreed to participate. What makes an accent an accent, I thought—a collection of features that a speaker uses or the perception of a listener? How determinative of a dialect is an accent? How and why do we make abstractions like a British accent from the demonstrable varieties of speech at any one time, thereby suggesting that all people from Britain (or America) speak alike? For that matter, to what extent would speakers on either side of the Atlantic at the time of the film’s setting want to sound alike or unalike? How can we reconcile the various conflicting eighteenth-century comments on the consistent, regionally non-specific quality of American speech, on its inferiority to British speech, on its similarity to the language as spoken in the south and east of England, and on its status as the future of the language? There were simply too many intriguing issues to let this interview pass by, and specialists in English linguistics, after all, get precious few opportunities for radio exposure.