I think "judge" would be a more appropriate word than "discriminate."

Personally, even though I was born and raised in the South, many of my co-workers think I am origimally from elsewhere as I have basically no accent. Which is because I choose to not have an accent. When I get tired or drunk I sound quite different.

You can still catch a faint whiff of her BX accent in there, but only a whiff.

I'm still amazed that the Republicans propped up their leading racist as chair for this hearing.

Some people consider that phony, I consider it flexible. I mean, its not like I do it on purpose but get me talking to a Southerner and it comes out...

The judge was kind enough to set up 3 industrial fans, right between the witness and the jury. They never heard a word.

Like when Florida and the Evans gang got Ned The Wino cleaned up ahead of the Cleanest Apartment In The Projects competition, and Ned The Wino's wife happened to be one of the judges.

Okay, not exactly, but yeah.

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/02/the_burden_of_ebonics.php

One change I'd make is that I wouldn't argue against someone else's decision regarding their accent. I'm not a lawyer. I've never worked in the corporate world. (Not really.) And I don't have aspirations for the Supreme Court. Which is why I wrote that it wasn't a dis.

The power dynamics of accents are fascinating -- at some point, by contrast, I'd venture that the juxtaposition between Lyndon Johnson's position and southern accent/"earthy affect" reinforced the impression of him as an alpha male.

By the way, TNC, you'd enjoy Orwell's snippets on accents. There's a kind of 'tone-acuteness' that comes from being sharply aware of the relationship between accent and class position. It's one of the places where white English and White American sensibilities used to diverge.

There's something kind of charmingly ironic reading that line on some guy's Atlantic Monthly blog...

In the outerbanks of North Carolina, there are some communities that speak with an accent that sounds myseriously like Scottish.

As for Texas, I for one think of the stereotypical Texas accent as being something more of a Western accent and less of a Southern one. And Louisianna and the other Gulf coast/bayou folks are something all to themselves.

Senators are pretty aristocratic, for the most part, and even if their origins aren't, most have become so. And so many have a regional accent, either relatively mild or pretty intense. But of course, to be elected, they need to be one of the people they represent. They're supposed to be loyal to their origins.

So, Sotomayor has only as much accent as she simply can't get rid of (not everybody can scrub it out that easily), just an acceptable trace, in trying to be confirmed for the seat of highest impartial power. And those questioning her, to sound like they represent the regular folks, have the accents.

Sorry, maybe that's just interesting to me.

Brokaw and Rather are both from the West. Rather's a Texan. I think Brokaw is from one of the Dakotas or Montana. I think of them as having a sort of manly man, cowboy type of voice, which I'm sure a lot of people found sort of reassuring in the time when cowboy wasn't connected to Bush-types. Jennings was Canadian. Ted Koppel is British, or was once upon a time.

As for the Southern Accent. You also get the sort of stereotypical 'Southern dandy' typified by such pols as Lindsay Graham.

I hope she doesn't use any words with more than 3 sylables or possibly derived from a furrin language like French! They might accuse her of being "uppity"!

Obviously you haven't seen the original Cape Fear...

'WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.'

I come from a long line of strong-willed African American educators, who insisted on proper speech. Everyone in our church wereAs a result, I have been told that I talk white. Now, in communities that are mixed with different races, accents blend. Last week, my eight year-old son and his friends were told that they speak white. He said, "Do every black person have to talk the same? It is a good thing that there is not a black person police."

My own father spoke unaccented english at work but kept his southern accent at home. In speaking as with writing one should adjust ones voice to ones audience.

No doubt some accents communicate, rightly or wrongly, an underlying disposition. Southern accents to some signal slowness of thought; to others it signals wealth or privilege. A New York or Boston accent has always tipped the listener off to a rough-and-tumble, or perhaps unpolished, person. A Midwestern accent has meant honesty, sincerity, or in the extreme, gullibility.

These are prejudgments, and to the extent that they are demeaning or prejudicial, and remediable, people have struggled to rid themselves of them by polishing their speech. I am now a hoity-toity goil, and all the betta for rit.

I took creative writing in high school and I would always write speech with a dialect. My writing was generally heavy on dialogue for one reason. I could explain any spelling/grammatical error as the dialect of the person speaking. The teacher bought this argument, so I went with it for the whole class.

I think a fair amount of what's happening is just straight-up vocal tension, which makes the "scrubbed" effect TNC mentions sound much more audible. In those audio clips, she's generally relaxed, talking to a friendly audience, and while her accent is still her accent, she speaks more quickly and less in her head voice. During the hearings, she's slowed down and tensed up, and choosing all of her words painfully. Scrubbed and slow sounds more painstaking, because it is.

Of course, some of the tension could be because some of the senators questioning her are trying to railroad her with a few "careless" (or just not-insanely-cautious) words that she spoke while she was relaxed.

Completely anecdotal I know, but I wonder still...

Thanks Anna!

The whole accent/no accent thing is a "normalizing" thing that I'm surprised how many people don't get. It's like when people talk about "people" and "women". Or "blacks" and "Americans". Nobody gets to have the default identity. There isn't one. There's a dominant identity- a majority identity- in a lot of places, but it always has strong culture attached to it. It's not just how things are supposed to be.

And I would also pick an argument with "flawed diction as a cultural signifier". It is certainly true that people use language as a declaration of who they are, but I think if you actually tried to pin down what diction was "flawed" and what was "perfect", you'd get in a muddle in a hurry. You say tomayto, I say tomahto, y'know. One of them isn't "right".

When you say "I choose not to have an accent", it sounds to me like you want to sound like a white, middle-class, professional American. Bully for you. Those who choose to speak in a way that comes naturally to them who don't belong to those categories aren't necessarily flawed.

And I just have to add: that though I am usually of one mind with TNC's comments, something irked me about saying that Sotomayor sounds like "the hood". I grew up in Miami, a large mainly Hispanic city whose suburban geography conceals the fact that it is as complex and radically mixed-income as the Bronx; and there, there were as many styles of Hispanic accent as there were individuals. None of them were as simple as "hood", and those who tried to speak like the rest of America did so in a number of complex ways - none of which I can describe as "scrubbing away the hood accent." They were speaking according to their own style, reflecting the unions of their upbringings and self-images, with no style of speech being either natural or unnatural.

TNC, one of your great virtues is your unwillingness to be reductive, and your eagerness to see complexity; but something about the phrase "scrubbing away the hood accent" seemed to be the opposite of that.

http://www.ualberta.ca/~johnnewm/NZEnglish/origins.html

If I would categorise the Kiwi accent, I'd call it an Australian accent with Scottish vowels.

Maybe I'm over glorifying you and what you do, but let me ask you this: When you sit down to write, how often do you ask yourself, "What voice should I use?" Please understand, I'm not saying that writers who have "second voices" are dishonest; I am saying that it can complicate ones writing when one is aiming for clarity as you do.

As for the "what voice should I use," it comes up more than you think. The voice I use in my memoir is not "standard" English, but it certainly isn't how I talk now, nor is it the voice I blog with. And the voice I blog with isn't the voice I use in long-form. So I guess I do have a number of voices. My blogging voice is certainly much less formal than my long-form voice.

http://www.teara.govt.nz/NewZealanders/NewZealandPeoples/Dutch/4/en

http://www.mfat.govt.nz/Countries/Europe/Netherlands.php

The influence is not from the origin I thought, but it's there.

I have to disagree here: there are linguistically correct ways to pronounce words, and there are 'accents' -- variations from the dictionary norm. English happens to have no lingual governing body, but in France the Academie francaise regulates standard pronunciation and accents are identified as variants thereon. Likewise Spanish, Danish, Arabic, Italian, Thai, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, and a large number of other languages have linguistic regulators that set the norms; English is something of an odd duck in this regard for not having one. Linguists do recognize standard English forms, though -- for North America linguists call it General American, for Britain it's Received Pronunciation. Granted, no one (or very few people) actually speaks the theoretical linguistic norms, but the default is there, and generally when people say 'I don't have an accent' they mean that they pronounce more closely to the theoretical norm than people around them.

Of course, all this is a little esoteric and I agree that there generally shouldn't be value judgments attached to how much or little or what type of accent one has. Regional accents aren't 'flawed' in any way, they're an interesting and inevitable part of any living language (and a select few dead ones). But to say that there isn't a 'how things are supposed to be' baseline for pronunciations (especially for non-English languages like French in which there is an officially set out Way Things Are Supposed To Be) is a little misleading.

I suppose I have to freely admit to a certain prejudice regarding y'all. I am, after all, a fourth-generation Texan, and the phrase "you guys" isn't one I often heard growing up. It's certainly perfectly fine, for all the reasons you mention. And the grammar can get confusing. For example, in addition to the singular/plural usage, is the plural possessive all y'all's, all's y'all's, or what? ;)

I'm no fourth generation Texan. My parents are from Tennessee. My father grew up a farm boy on land my family had owned since the middle of the 19th century. I grew up in North Carolina and Georgia, so I think my Southern bonafides are pretty firm.

I don't know why I've never been big on y'all. I don't think I used it before I realized people mocked Sotherners for it. Maybe I'm blocking it out.

In the north, they have the ugly habit of saying 'yous guys.' Given the choice between those two options, I think y'all is far superior. Still, I've just never been big on it.