"ANNOUNCER:" "How we talk to one another defines who we are." "ANNOUNCER:" "And American English is as rich, diverse, and lively as Americans themselves." "[man speaking Cajun]" "ANNOUNCER:" "From north to south..." "MAN: 65 is where l started." "ANNOUNCER:" "...east to west." "WOMAN:" "I say, like, "like" and "dude" every other word." "[rappers rapping]" "ANNOUNCER:" "We love to talk..." "ROBERT:" "is there somebody else that I could talk to?" "ANNOUNCER: yap..." "WOMAN:" "It's a "cah."" "ANNOUNCER: dish..." "WOMAN:" "La chica sexy." "ANNOUNCER:" "...and chew the fat." "MAN:" "It's not a fair piece to Rabbit Hash." "ANNOUNCER:" "It's clear that you are what you speak." "MAN: "lsn't" is not in my vocabulary." "The word is "ain't."" "ANNOUNCER:" "So butter my butt and call me a biscuit... and sit tight as we answer the burning question..." "ROBERT:" "Do you speak American?" "Do you speak American?" "Do you, like, speak American?" "Do you speak American?" "Do you speak American, dawg?" "Do you speak American?" "Tu parles americain?" "?" "Estas hablando american?" "ANNOUNCER:" ""Do You Speak American?"" "has been made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities." "Additional funding is provided by..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Like many Americans, I come from somewhere else." "I grew up along this rugged Atlantic shore in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia." "And my speech was colored by the dialect of maritime Canada." "It's one of the great family of North American Englishes." "But when I moved to the U.S., I began to speak more like Americans." "Words, accents, language have always fascinated me, so it was thrilling twenty years ago to work on a TV series about the English language." "In our television series "The Story of English,"" "we traced the origins of our language and how it spread around the world." "That was in the 1 980s." "I'm curious to see how the language has moved on since then." "One thing is clearer:" "American English has become the dominant form of the language." "So I'm setting out on a journey now to see what's happening to English in the United States." "What answers do you get today when you ask, "Do you speak American?"" "Our journey starts in the far Northeast on a misty road in coastal Maine." "Linguists who study the American language say the principal regional dialects remain strong, but some distinctive local dialects are dying out." "Here among the lobstermen in South Freeport, Maine, you can still hear the laconic, terse style that sounds so New England, but with mass communications and changes in population, many worry that the Maine way of speaking" "may become as scarce as lobsters." "JOHN coffin:" "We're down about fifty or sixty percent from what we used to do." "ROBERT:" "Really?" "JOHN:" "Six or eight years ago." "ROBERT:" "Because the lobsters just aren't there?" "JOHN:" "They're not here." "Something's happening, we don't know what." "ROBERT:" "Lobsters decided to move on." "JOHN:" "They have moved." "ROBERT:" "Would you be sad if the Maine way of talking kind of died out?" "JOHN:" "Well, yeah, I think so, probably." "I'd like to think my kids and grandchildren talk that way whether people laugh at you wherever we go, whatever." "ROBERT:" "Do people laugh at it?" "JOHN:" "Oh, they have lots of times." "They used to when I was in the military, make fun of me wicked." "ROBERT:" "So how do people from around here say, "yes?"" "JOHN:" "Ayuh." "ROBERT:" "Ayuh." "JOHN:" "Ayuh." "ROBERT:" "How do you spell it?" "JOHN:" "A-Y-U-H." "ROBERT:" "Ayuh." "JOHN:" "Ayuh." "Yeah, that's it." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Linguistically, the way Mainers speak is part of a regional speech pattern centered on Boston." "It derives from early British colonists who didn't pronounce the "R"" "at the end of words like "father."" "Local dialects thrive when communities are isolated." "When many outsiders move in, local speech changes." "That's why Mainers fear that their dialect, with its famous "ayuh,"" "is coming to the end of the road." "Hello." "MAN:" "Good morning." "And how are you today?" "ROBERT:" "I'm fine." "How are you?" "MAN:" "A good, educated monkey could do a job like this." "Yes, sir." "ROBERT:" "Thank you." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Linguists draw their own maps of North America to mark different dialect areas." "To use their terms, we've started in Eastern New England." "We're going on to New York and Philadelphia... then west into the Midland dialect, then the Northern, the Southern and on to the West." "Right now I'm in Massachusetts, and I'm short of gas." "WOMAN:" "Good evening." "What can I do for you?" "ROBERT:" "Will you fill her up with unleaded please?" "PAM HEAD:" "Sure." "ROBERT:" "When customers come from out of state, like me, what do they think about your accent?" "PAM:" "I lived in Oklahoma for a short time and I had a conversation with a girl from Texas one day and I was in the process of buying a "cah,"" "and she says what are you talking about?" "I said a "cah."" "She says, "What is a cah?" l said, "What's a cah?"" "I said, you know, automobile, vehicle, thing you get in and drive." "She goes, "Oh, you mean a car."" "I said no, "cah!"" "ROBERT:" "That's funny." "PAM:" "I did, I had to go through all the different words before she understood what I was talking about." "Yeah, it was a riot." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "With that accent we might as well be in the heart of Boston, whose way of speaking shows no weakening." "Americans consider themselves egalitarian and unsnobbish about accents, but they're full of notions about how not to speak." "I'm indulging a sentimental whim to retrace a road I took many summers ago." "This is the Priscilla Beach Theatre, one of the oldest barn theatres in New England." "Here I find actor-manager Geronimo Sands rehearsing his one-man show." "geronimo:" "Beware of respectable people, of people perfectly grammatical and proud of it, of persons who let their thinking be done..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "I spent one summer here as an actor." "We were all young, eager and ambitious." "We did everything from sweeping the stage to playing romantic comedies." "It was on this stage that I first learned that my speech was not considered correct." "And the first time I stood on this stage and opened my mouth, the director, he said, "What did you say?"" "And he said, "You can't talk like that,"" "because in Nova Scotia you pronounce-- at least I pronounced-- "out" like "oat,"" "and "about" like "a-boat," and so I consciously changed it, and this is a wonderful sentimental stop for me because it was, I was, I was 21 and that's 52 years ago that I was here," "and it was a great summer." "After that summer I drove to New York." "My acting ambitions fortunately died, but the city has become my home." "The crackling energy of the creative forces concentrated here, the sheer American power represented, make New York an enormous generator of language." "The latest money jargon of Wall Street traders." "The fresher than fresh slogans of our relentless advertising." "The language that fuels the great publishing empires." "From the city that never sleeps, 24-7 on TV, cable, radio, electronic media, come the words and ideas that define American culture and market it to the world." "You can make a case that New York City is now the global capital of the English language, but what a language-- restless, slangy, constantly changing and ever more informal." "Many people believe that change is not only inevitable but unstoppable." "But not John Simon, the acerbic theatre critic of New York magazine." "A Yugoslav immigrant himself, he speaks for many mainstream Americans who fear that if American English continues to flaunt the rules of syntax and grammar, it'll sow the seeds of its own destruction." "JOHN simon:" "Well, it has gotten worse." "It's been my experience that there is no bottom, one can always sink lower, and that the language can always disintegrate further." "ROBERT:" "How would you describe the state of our language today?" "JOHN:" "Unhealthy, poor, sad, depressing, and probably fairly hopeless." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Jesse Sheidlower stands for everything John Simon hates." "He's the American editor of the august Oxford English Dictionary." "With his dark suit, tie, and rolled-up umbrella, he certainly looks the part." "But you can't judge a book by its cover, for he is also the author of a scholarly history of the f-word." "Jesse's often in the New York Public Library looking for new usages." "American English has always been inventive, but it is now globally so influential that the Oxford Dictionary needs a full-time office in New York City." "JESSE:" "American English has always been, at least for the last hundred years, it's always taken great pleasure in its slang." "You can find even Walt Whitman writing in praise of slang in the 1 9th century, about how wonderful it is and how poetic it is and how, you know, this is the American spirit distilled into language." "ROBERT:" "So when you come here, what are you looking for?" "JESSE:" "We'll try to find magazines that have words in them that we think are going to be of interest, and these can be in really any field out there." "ROBERT:" "What are you looking at at the moment?" "JESSE:" "Right now we are looking at some magazines devoted to tattooing and body piercing." "There are terms for these different kinds of piercing and there are terms for different kinds of tattoos." "Blue. a music magazine, has a lot of stuff about hip-hop, which is a big influence on the language." "A guide to "zines."" "ROBERT:" "Fan magazines." "JESSE:" "Yes, they're just called "zines" nowadays." "ROBERT:" "So if you find a new word in one of these, in one of these really lurid magazines, and you decide to put it in, does that mean that the dictionary has adopted the word and, as it were, recognized it?" "JESSE:" "No, not at all." "For now, it just means that we have an example in the database, but then we have an example in Time magazine and then we have an example in New York magazine, and now we have an example in so-and-so," "and we start to think, well, OK, this is a term that started off as a very restricted subcultural thing, but now it's very widespread, and the fact that we did read something like this originally" "will tell us something that we wouldn't know if all we read was Newsweek." "ROBERT:" "I see." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Language enthusiasts tend to be either prescriptivists or descriptivists." "Descriptivists like Sheidlower and other dictionary makers are content to describe language as it changes." "Prescriptivists like Simon believe you need prescribed rules to preserve language." "JOHN:" "The descriptive linguists are a curse upon their race, who, of course, think that what the people say is the law, and by that they mean the majority, they mean the uneducated." "I think a society in which the uneducated lead the educated by the nose is not a good society." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Descriptivists deny treating uneducated usage as "the law"" "since they label it non-standard." "But they may record things like the often violent, homophobic, misogynistic lyrics of gangster rap." "The result gives new currency to words like "ho" and "bitch."" "Cece Cutler is an academic who has studied the appeal that hip hop has for white suburban teenage boys." "CECE CUTLER:" "For white male teenagers who are in the process of forming their identities as young men, the urban black male represents someone who knows how to pick up women, who knows how to handle himself on the street," "who perhaps knows how to handle a weapon and can take care of himself." "This kind of way of walking or talking or dressing can give one the trappings of a masculinity that doesn't perhaps exist in the safe white suburbs." "The sort of more hard-core rappers might appeal to young men who are sort of afraid of young women and are in the process of trying to figure out how it is that one deals with them." "ROBERT:" "So to call them "bitches" and "hos"" "is a kind of way of getting rid of that problem?" "CECE:" "Or putting away one's fear of those individuals." "DAVE:" "Were there bitches at the party?" "For real?" "Yeah, there's more, there's been more, there's more hos recently I've noticed at underground events than there used to be." "There used to be not so many." "JASON:" "Thank goodness for us." "DAVE:" "Yeah." "ROBERT:" "Can you think of some examples of words that have crossed over from hip hop into the mainstream?" "CECE:" "We have terms like "mad" as a quantifier, so you can say it's mad real or mad, it's mad raining." "There are terms like "my bad,"" "to mean, "Oh, I just made a mistake,"" "or the more colorful "bling bling"" "to refer to expensive, gaudy jewelry." "ROBERT:" "Any others?" "CECE:" "Well, you can use, you can say, "Wassup, B?"" "to ask how somebody is." "KATE:" "Snuttle: fun." "Chopsticks: hey, what's up?" "Snuttle: just chillin', you?" "SnuttleMYbubble:" "do u guyz still have examz?" "TOM:" "aaliyah: das kool." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Black English is an obvious influence on the language of lMing, instant messaging." "TOM:" "Birdman: so anything new?" "Birdman: u gonna to do anything else dis weekend?" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Written English has always been the preserver of Standard English, but written standards are always under assault." "The latest threat comes from instant messaging." "How much time do you guys spend doing this?" "KATE:" "An hour and a half." "ROBERT:" "An hour and a half a day." "Tom, how much time do you spend here?" "TOM:" "A lot." "I multitask, so I'll be lMing, I'll be listening to music, I'll be doing my homework." "KATE:" "I mean, no one does caps or periods or punctuation." "It's just "omg" is "oh my god,"" "and this is just short for "know."" "Like sometimes people say "g2g," which means "got to go."" "TOM: "jc," that means just chilling." "Then here's "lol," laugh out loud, and here, this means "l'm going," "l will," "ima"" "And then she does here, "you better call me on my cell."" ""Sup wit u" means "What's up?"" "It's like, you know, how you talk, so how are you doing, honey?" "JESSE:" "Written English in America has been evolving greatly over the last certainly hundred years and especially the last 30 or 40 years, but nowadays if you look at even the most formal publications, things like The New Yorker or The New York Times." "you will see a wide variety of colloquial or slangy language used even in news articles." "People are interested in this, people speak this way and want to reflect this way in their writing." "Written English has become much more informal than it ever used to be." "ROBERT:" "What do you say to the people like John Simon who are really angry about what they see as a serious decline in linguistic standards in this country?" "JESSE:" "Well, I think they're wrong, and I think they're misguided." "Language change happens and there's nothing you can do about it." "JOHN:" "I mean, maybe change is inevitable, maybe dying from cancer is also inevitable, but I don't think we should help it along." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "But casual grammar and disturbing new words aren't the only perceived threat to American English." "New York has always been the great doorway for immigration." "Today you can hear Spanish spoken all around you." "[woman speaking Spanish]" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The practical question is whether Hispanic immigrants will adopt English as other immigrants did." "In New York, as in many parts of the country, you'll find plenty of Latinos who don't speak English at all." "ROBERT:" "Hello?" "Do you speak English?" "ROSA:" "No." "ROBERT:" "No?" "ROSA:" "No." "ROBERT: ?" "Espanol?" "ROSA:" "Si, espanol." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Rosa has lived here for 1 9 years but speaks no English." "ROSA: ?" "Como se dice diecinueve anos?" "MAN:" "Nineteen years." "ROBERT: 1 9." "She says she has been too busy working." "ROSA:" "Ah porque siempre me dedicaba a trabajar." "ROBERT:" "Always working, yes." "American English is always borrowed from immigrant languages and then enriched by them." "But is Spanish something different?" "is it replacing English?" "Raspado..." "And it's a dollar?" "One dollar." "Thank you very much." "ROSA:" "Gracias." "ROBERT:" "Gracias." "Thank you." "Buenos dias." "We'll return to the Spanish question later in our journey, but for now I'm in search of Standard American." "Continuing down the eastern seaboard, we're headed for Philadelphia-- of course, the cradle of American democracy, but also, in a way, the cradle of what we now think of as the American speech." "At this stage what interests me most is the whole idea of what passes for correct or incorrect in American English." "Even before America declared its independence from Britain here in Philadelphia, the two Englishes had been going their own ways." "George Bernard Shaw once joked that the two nations were separated by the same language." "Bill Labov is the director of The Atlas of North American English." "What do you consider Standard American?" "bill:" "Well, most linguists recognize that there is a broadcast standard pronunciation which is not fixed, but which converges towards a pattern that is not local." "And that's changed over time." "ROBERT:" "It drew originally from where?" "bill:" "From England." "There was something called lnternational English that was really modeled upon British-received pronunciation." "It took its form in London at the beginning of the 1 9th century." "Americans were not all influenced by it, only the big Tory cities:" "Boston, New York, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond." "They adopted that R-less pronunciation whereby you say "cah," not "car,"" "and "store" is just a "staw."" "That's still the pattern in England today." "For me the model of that international English standard was always FDR." "He was a New Yorker who had the prestige pattern of the upper class in New York and was really R-less." "It sounded like this..." "FDR.:" "For those who would not admit the possibility of the approaching storm." "the past two weeks have meant the shattering of many illusions." "With this rude awakening has come fear." "fear bordering on panic." "I do not share these fears." "bill:" "So you notice that every time the letter "R" comes up, unless a vowel follows, it's going to sound like this." "FDR.:" "The approaching storm." "ROBERT: "Stawm."" "bill:" "Not storm but "stawm."" "FDR.:" "I do not share these fears." "bill:" "But it's more than just the "R."" "You notice the way he says "shattering,"" "and "utter good faith,"" "so the pronunciation of "T" as "T" in those situations, still found in Boston, was again modeled on the British pattern, and it held right up to the end of World War ll." "And then, to our great astonishment, it flipped." "So right after World War ll people growing up in New York City and in many other cities behaved in just the opposite way-- when they were careful, they pronounced their Rs, and when they were not careful, just speaking casually," "they stayed with their R-less dialect." "ROBERT:" "So people wanted to sound more English before World War ll and less so after World War ll?" "bill:" "We hear British people use that pattern, and we love it." "But it's not right for an American." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Labov believes Philadelphia shaped American speech more than any other city because it was the only east coast city originally to pronounce its Rs, and that "R" sound that so typifies American English migrated west." "We're heading west ourselves on the train to Ohio." "Ohio is the opening to what linguists call the Midland dialect." "Midland speech lies between the varieties of the North and those of the South." "For this leg of the journey we're joined by linguist Dennis Preston." "Dennis studies the strong opinions we seem to hold about what we believe is right or wrong in the speech of our fellow Americans." "dennis:" "There is a kind of American linguistic insecurity which is very, very old." "After all, we didn't invent English." "They're really English who had a hold of it before us and so there is a kind of lingering American insecurity that, well, maybe with English we don't do the very best thing." "On the other hand there is American populism and a desire not to be stuffy, not to be too correct." "I've been walking around this train asking people to draw on blank maps of the United States the areas where they think people speak differently." "You want to write anything on it, you can." "What they sound like." "They don't just do dialect areas, they identify those areas where they think the least correct or the most correct English is spoken and draw circles around them." "Nine times out of 1 0 when you ask people to do this they go for either the U.S. South, which is almost universally believed to be a place where bad English is spoken, or New York City." "But New Yorkers, you're sure, they don't sound like Pennsylvanians, right?" "WOMAN:" "They say "wawdah."" "dennis:" "They say what?" "WOMAN: "Wawdah."" "dennis: "Woodah?"" "WOMAN: "Wawdah."" "dennis:" "Instead of, what do you say?" "WOMAN:" "Water." "dennis:" "Water, well, that's what I say." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Americans are ambivalent about language." "They may think that New York and Southern accents are bad English, but they can also find them charming." "MAN:" "I like hearing people from the South." "dennis:" "Really?" "How come?" "MAN:" "I just, I just like the way they talk, I like to hear the way they talk." "MAN:" "Let's take race out of the equation." "dennis:" "Alright, OK." "MAN:" "If we take race out of the equation, if I go to a place in the South where at least they are not overtly racist or whatever, I would tend to feel comfortable around Southerners." ""Come on in here, honey," and that kind of thing." "Yeah, it makes me feel a little more... but I mean, there's some places in the South, me, as a black man, I wouldn't be caught dead in." "dennis:" "That's another story, yeah." "It would make no difference how they sound." "MAN:" "Absolutely." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "I want to make a short stopover in Pittsburgh because it shows how communities can cling to an accent as a badge of identity and local pride." "I'm here to meet with a linguist who's been studying her fellow Pittsburghers' idiosyncratic way with words." "She's Barbara Johnstone." "How would you describe the language of Pittsburgh?" "BARBARA:" "People talk about something they call Pittsburghese." "They have this strong idea that there's a way of talking that happens here and only here or in this, in this part of Pennsylvania, in this area." "Here's a store that's got some interesting stuff." "Shirts here with Pittsburghese on them, old Scotch-lrish words which you can still hear in Belfast." "ROBERT:" "That's a very unusual word for me." "First of all, what does it mean?" "BARBARA:" "This is a way of spelling "yins,"" "which is the plural of "you."" "ROBERT:" "Yeah." "BARBARA:" "It's also often spelled with a "Z" at the end, which reflects more how it sounds, or sometimes with a "U," "yuns."" "ROBERT:" "Do you have any sense of where it came from?" "BARBARA:" "Oh, yeah, it's actually a form of plural "you"" "that's found pretty widespread in Appalachia, but often it's spelled more like "youins."" "ROBERT:" "Youins." "In the Burgh, the words "in" and "out"" "sound more like "in" and "odd,"" ""down" and "town" sound like "dahn" and "tahn."" "How would you say them?" "Starting at the top." "MAN:" "Out." "ROBERT:" "Out." "MAN:" "Opposite of in." "Babushka: head scarf used for a bad hair day." "Blitzburgh: drinking town with a football team." "Chipped ham: thinly sliced ham sold only in the Burgh." "Dahntahn." "That's where you're at now." "ROBERT:" "We're at now, yeah, OK." "MAN:" "Here's the greatest." "We don't want the lady to read this one." "It's jagoff: anyone who pisses off a Pittsburgher." "ROBERT:" "What do you have to do to piss off a Pittsburgher?" "MAN:" "Just tell him the Steelers suck." "That'll do it." "BARBARA:" "I think I've always been interested in how people relate to places." "You often hear the claim these days that in the context of globalization and people moving around and places don't matter in peoples' lives the way they used to, and since I'm a linguist I've looked at this through language." "I've looked at how people use kind of shared ways of talking and shared ideas about ways of talking to connect themselves with places and to connect themselves with other people and communities." "ROBERT:" "So Pittsburghers' fierce pride in their own speech is a measure of the importance of place?" "BARBARA:" "I think so." "This local accent which is different from how people talk elsewhere is available as a way of talking about place, and all the while they're talking about who they are and where they live and what it means to live here." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "In a country full of linguistic variety, there's one variety that everyone sees as the norm." "dennis:" "There's a great deal of agreement in a sort of Ohio, Michigan, northern Indiana," "Wisconsin, Pennsylvania zone of normal English." "Even Southerners, for example, will reach right up and draw that Midwestern area and say it's normal." "So this is, this is where you say the kind of correct American English is spoken?" "MAN:" "It's without an accent or a twang." "SECOND MAN:" "But what's out here, what states?" "MAN:" "Kansas, Missouri." "dennis:" "Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska." "MAN:" "If you took a speech class, I think that they would want you to speak more like these people here." "dennis:" "Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota." "MAN:" "Wisconsin, Michigan, and I should add Ohio in there." "dennis:" "It's in there." "So if you were studying to be an announcer or something you think this is the...." "MAN:" "This is what they would, this is-- that's the target." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Technically, the dialect area they're talking about is called "Midland."" "Midland is spoken in much of the Midwest." "For most Americans this is the yardstick, the most normal and correct of all dialects." "And Americans are terribly concerned with correctness." "A lot of people are worried about the state of the language, particularly the written language, so much so that they've set up hotlines all over the country where you can call if you have questions about correct grammar." "In the last ten years or so they've produced a directory of grammar hotlines in the U.S. and Canada." "I think I'm going to pull over and call one." "Ulle Lewes manages the original hotline." "ULLE:" "We get calls from Canada," "We get calls from the United Nations." "We've gotten calls from many lawyers and law firms." "We've even gotten a call from the White House." "They would not say which branch." "ROBERT:" "I see." "May I ask you a question myself?" "ULLE:" "Oh, certainly, go ahead." "ROBERT:" "is it getting harder to maintain the written standards or the standards in the written language, do you find?" "ULLE:" "Yeah, we do have troubles with the grapholect." "ROBERT:" "What does that mean, grapholect?" "ULLE:" "Well, dialect means the way we speak." "There are about 60 dialects of English on our planet." "Pakistan, Nigeria, you name it." "If you think about it, a person from Scotland with a brogue might not be able to communicate with a person from Texas with a drawl or with a person from Nigeria with that very clipped speech, but if we all keep to the same grapholect," "written rules, then we can still communicate." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Some linguists question whether the written standard can guarantee universal understanding." "But that's an academic issue in the practical world of newspapers." "America's main city papers print millions of words of copy every day." "And every one of those words will or should have been vetted by a copy editor before the edition lands on your porch." "One of Ohio's leading papers is The Columbus Dispatch." "Kirk Arnott, assistant managing editor, is the language watchdog." "kirk:" "I'm a big believer in informal and conversational language." "We should be as conversational as we can be because we want to be as accessible as we can be." "I certainly don't want us to sound like the paper was edited by a schoolmarm." "But somebody's got to keep the language from sliding into the abyss." "Without policing, it will tend to slide away from being a useful communication tool." "ROBERT:" "Give us some examples of things that you, as the language cop, have to arrest before they get out." "kirk:" "I see a lot of words that are just downright misused." "ROBERT:" "What would be some of those words that you think are misused?" "kirk: "importantly" when all they mean to say is "important,"" ""more importantly," they say." "Importantly, of course, means to act as though you are important." ""Nonplussed" is another one." "The general attitude seems to be that it means "unperturbed,"" "when, in fact, it means "bewildered."" ""Bemused" is another one." "People seem to think it means "amused"" "rather than also bewildered or preoccupied." "Those are some of the ones that seem to be most common." "The people, people who work here watch cable TV and listen to radio and it just works its way into their heads." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Again the spoken is influencing the written, and newspaper copy is being affected, or infected, by the spoken journalism of radio and TV reporters." "Not because they are bad journalists." "kirk:" "No, no." "ROBERT:" "But because their delivery is discursive, colloquial spoken speech and not written, and it's a different discipline from writing." "kirk:" "It certainly is different, oh, yes." "You just have to know how to pronounce the words." "No offense." "ROBERT:" "I take none." "All over the country big-city newspapers work hard to uphold standards for written English, while the language we speak on the streets of our cities is by its very nature changeable and shifting." "For decades Bill Labov and his colleagues have been studying how Americans talk." "The result is a whole library of recorded voices and a fascinating discovery." "It's called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift." "Labov believes there is a revolutionary shift in the pronunciation of short vowels that have been relatively stable for a thousand years." "bill:" "What we're looking at is this mass of cities around the Great Lakes." "Here we have Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland, Detroit." "ROBERT:" "How many people is that?" "bill:" "It's about 34 million people." "This area used to be the closest to network pronunciation." "It was what the NBC standard was based on, and today it is moving further and further away." "ROBERT:" "Let's go into that in some detail." "Show us how that's happening." "bill:" "In these experiments we played first of all an individual word." "voice.: ... black." "And then people had to write down what they thought they heard." "So you can do that yourself." "What do you hear?" "ROBERT:" "Black." "bill:" "Right, and then in another series they heard..." "voice.: ..." "livingon oneblock." "bill:" "Now what do you hear?" "ROBERT:" "Block." "bill:" "Well, you've changed your mind and" "voice.: ... oldseniorcitizens living on one block." "bill:" "This person is saying the word "block"" "the way they say "black."" "ROBERT:" "The shift in this one vowel seems to have a domino effect on the other four vowels, and they all change, too." "The result can be serious misunderstandings." "bill:" "Now this is spectacular." "voice.: ... bosses." "bill:" "Everybody writes down what?" "Bosses." "Right, the guy." "ROBERT:" "Yeah." "voice.:" "The bosses with the antennas." "bill:" "Now you begin to wonder what are these" "ROBERT:" "The bosses with the antennas." "voice.:" "I can remember vaguely when we had the busses with the antennas on the top." "ROBERT:" "So "busses" has become "bosses."" "bill:" "Right." "And so this is very hard for most people to recognize." "ROBERT:" "So is it fair to say that North Americans are, in different regions, are going, growing further apart from each other linguistically?" "bill:" "It seems so." "It's hard to believe." "Everyone says to us we all watch the same radio and television, how can that be?" "It's a very surprising finding." "Let me tell you how we go" "Oh. yeah" "ROBERT:" "In the 1 960s, Detroit was the home of Motown." "Today there's a thriving hip hop scene." "Even the white crossover rapper Eminem comes from the area called Eight Mile." "but language can define you just as much as the color of your skin." "At the main bus station we meet John Baugh, a professor of linguistics from Stanford University in California." "John joins us in Detroit to demonstrate an experiment he's been conducting for years about how Americans react to different accents." "It's called linguistic profiling." "First he checks the rental housing section in the city paper, then he calls properties that are advertised for rent." "He calls first using an African American accent." "WOMAN:" "Can I help you?" "JOHN:" "Yes, my name is Michael Davis." "I was calling to see if you might have any houses for rent that might be available?" "ROBERT:" "Then he calls again speaking with a Latino accent." "JOHN:" "Hello, this is Juan Ramirez." "I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper." "Yes, alright." "ROBERT:" "Finally he calls in a perfectly neutral American accent, which is in fact how he really talks." "What kind of results have you been getting today?" "JOHN:" "I've actually been getting some mixed results today but generally speaking, the minority dialects do not fare as well, and particularly in the affluent communities." "ROBERT:" "is that race or economic class?" "JOHN:" "It's both." "Race in and of itself will not be the factor that excludes one from a particular neighborhood or a house for sale in an affluent community." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Linguists like Baugh believe such prejudice shows ignorance of black history and language." "That history is celebrated in this African American museum." "The stories of slavery and black English are inextricably linked." "It's often assumed by blacks, as well as whites, that African Americans speak bad or lazy English." "In fact, black English has roots as deep and a grammar as consistent as Scottish, Irish, or any other of the Englishes spoken around the world." "It was the dreadful traffic in human lives that brought English to the coast of Africa." "British and American slavers trading upriver introduced the English language to the African middle men from whom they bought the slaves." "Twenty years ago when we filmed our TV series" "The Story of English." "we went to an upriver trading post in Sierra Leone." "Three hundred years ago, blacks and whites communicated with a simplified English known as Pidgin." "JOHN:" "The contemporary African American dialects all grew from the trade languages that evolved from slavery." "[speaking Pidgin dialect]" "JOHN:" "The language mixing that took place between the African languages and English on the west coast of Africa for trading purposes still function today." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "This Anglo-African mixture is still the lingua franca on this river." "River trade carried it down to the coast in slave depots." "This is Bunce Island." "The ruins of an old slave fort still stand here." "To prevent revolts, traders made sure the slaves penned up here spoke different languages." "To talk to each other the slaves created their own pidgin." "So even before they left Africa, they were speaking an English that was all their own." "JOHN:" "And so the slave factories and these trading languages that you've illustrated here are the very origins of contemporary African American English." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Twenty years ago when we filmed off the coast of South Carolina, you could still hear the faint whispers of slave English." "On the islands of Kiowa, Edisto, Daufuskie, and Wadmalaw, older people like Benjamin Blaggen and his sister Janie Hunter still spoke Gullah and Geechee." "benjamin:" "Give me the old-time religion." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "When rural Southern blacks eventually moved to the cities of the North, they brought their own kind of English with them." "They're young men now, but 25 years ago Dwayne, Asheen, and Kihilee were students at this school." "Situated in a prosperous, mostly white suburb of Ann Arbor, there were not many black kids at the Martin Luther King School." "When they spoke as they did at home in African American English, their teachers simply assumed they couldn't do school work." "ASHEEN:" "They sort of felt like we were unteachable in a sense, how we'll fail, so it kind of made them go towards other students more and gave them a little bit more help than they would give us." "ROBERT:" "Can you remember some of the things that were said, teachers would say?" "ASHEEN:" "Actually, to be honest, the teachers really didn't even communicate with us too much." "Just was sort of like a sense that we were on our own." "ROBERT:" "Do you remember any of that?" "You were younger." "KlHlLEE:" "I was really young, but I mean, I remember enough to know that I wasn't being treated the same way as all the other kids in the class, a lot of other kids, you know." "That's the irony of it all." "It's Martin Luther King School, and, you know, they haven't learned anything from Martin Luther King-- well, hopefully they learned it, but they didn't learn it back then." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Three mothers refused to accept second best for their sons." "Annie, what was it that got you and other parents upset enough to bring a lawsuit against the school?" "annie:" "My kids was tested and was tested and was put into special ed classes." "And I felt like that they were not getting educated and was not treated equally, and I felt like that shouldn't be a barrier because of the language to stop them from being educated." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Ruth Zweifler is a social worker familiar with the housing project the boys came from." "Listening to Annie tell how her son and his friends were failing at school, she knew something was wrong." "RUTH:" "There were maybe 24 poor black children in a sea of affluent white families, and they really were having a very hard time." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Ruth became convinced that the kids were being discriminated against because of their African American English." "RUTH:" "Language is the marker for assumed attitudes." "Coming with an implied criticism, which is what I think a black child carries with him, we--as adults, as mainstream society, as Americans-- have really done bad by these little kids." "KEN:" "Hi, Ruth, how are you?" "RUTH:" "How good to see you." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Unable to make any headway with the school administrators," "Ruth went to Detroit." "One of the lawyers she consulted was Ken Lewis." "The legal strategy they and others thrashed out led to a landmark court decision on black English." "KEN:" "Our job was to see if we could come up with some legal theories that made sense that we could pursue on their behalf." "The initial thrust of the case was to deal with the children's poverty as the reason why they were not being educated." "There was really no constitutional right not to be poor in this country, and so trying to find some constitutional provision that would help us along those lines was a futile effort, so language became a part of it," "and since that language barrier seemed to impact adversely only on black youngsters, we were able to tie in the race issue." "JOHN:" "The most significant thing that I believe was raised during that trial was that you had a federal judge acknowledge formally that African American Vernacular English represented a significant linguistic barrier to academic achievement and success." "He confirmed that the school district was really insensitive to the linguistic background of the vast majority of African American students within the school district." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Years later, the argument Ken Lewis used in this courthouse was raised by educators in Oakland, California, but they claimed black English, which they called "Ebonics,"" "was a separate language." "That caused a national storm, and as we'll see, it's an issue school boards are still grappling with." "KEN:" "One of the things that I remember Judge Joiner indicating in his opinion was the need to help youngsters appreciate the difference between the language of the majority, how it would impact upon your being perceived by others." "That was part of the discussion we had to wrestle with in the black English case, because we thought that the teachers were not respecting the language as it should have been." "ROBERT:" "If a young black who talked like Puff Daddy applied for a job in this law firm, would he get it?" "KEN:" "The reality is he has to fit the criteria, the skills that are required for this particular job," "Just like if I wanted to go on to radio and become the commentator for the RB, rap, hip hop station, I'm going to have to change my language skills because I got a different audience I'm appealing to." "I'm wrestling with it now with my own 1 5-year-old, who, you know, communicates to me in language that I'm not necessarily sure I understand, but I'm working on it." "I'm finding I'm coming full circle with this thing called black English." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "This is the hip hop crew Athletic Mic League." "Some are college kids who can talk Standard American, but among themselves they speak street talk." "In language, as in music and fashion, it's the street that influences the mainstream." "[rappers rapping]" "WESLEY:" "Everything follows the streets in America, so whatever's going on there, it goes from here to here, then eventually mainstream America, which is, you know, which is white America." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Before they go on stage the crew rehearse bits of their routine." "[rapping]" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Classic features of urban black English include "we going," instead of "we are going,"" ""he start," instead of "he starts,"" "and "we be going" for a habitual action." "[vocal percussion]" "But another characteristic of black English is its love of playing with words, spinning new meanings out of words like "stacked," "live," "vibing," "sick" and "ill."" "TRES:" "Coming down, I'm edgy about what I'm about to walk into." "I hope the place is stacked, I hope that the audience is live, I hope when I step out this door that they are ready and anxious, you know, to hear us do what we gotta do." "They gonna feel us, are they gonna connect with us?" "MC:" "Y'all gotta represent up here for the Mike League." "Y'all can't be back there." "TRES:" "We got to come out there confident." "For me it's almost on the borderline of being cocky, get on stage and all of a sudden you've got that connection, you're vibing." "Let me see you in that crowd" "Put your hands up lt's about to go down" "Say "A"" ""M"" ""L"" "Say who, what, where, oh, stand up" "WESLEY:" "This whole game is based on how ill you are, or how sick a cat can be." "Sometimes it's about finesse, sometimes we're just on there spitting and just trying to be raw as we can be on stage." "And so you have to rock as hard as you can, so you-- you're recognized as the best, you got to look, listen, move, and, yeah, really feel it, and that's, that's when we, that's how we judge crowds." "Other people would judge a crowd different." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "These hip hop artists draw on local street talk for their lyrics and poetry." "[rapping]" "WESLEY:" "We use the word "nasty" for everything." "When somebody was on stage and they were really, you know, they were really gettin' off, they were rockin' the crowd, it was like he was nasty, his flow was nasty." "[rapping]" "TRES:" "We have a saying, "pro nasty,"" "professionally nasty." "It means it's quality." "This is, this is not just good." "WESLEY:" "That's our grade A, that's our professional grade." "TRES:" "If you want the best and you want the top, you want something from us that's pro nasty." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Nasty, pro nasty, sick, and raw, hip hop and rap are forcing new meanings into American English." "And if you've never heard these words used like this before, you probably will soon." "[rapping]" "ANNOUNCER:" "Next time on "Do You Speak American?"" "mosey on down to the heart of the South." "MAN:" "Down home where l'm from," "Tennessee and Kentucky both claim me." "Tennessee claims I'm from Kentucky, and Kentucky claims I'm from Tennessee." "ANNOUNCER:" "Here, you can sample some spicy Cajun... or try some straight-shootin' Texas talk." "WOMAN:" "His pants was so tight, if he'd have farted it would have blowed his boots off." "ANNOUNCER:" "So saddle on up." "It's a journey like no other." "Next time on "Do You Speak American?"" "For the downlow, the skinny, and the 4-1 -1 on how you speak American, visit us at pbs.org." "While you're there, get tips for starting your own PBS program club so you can continue to speak American with your friends and family." ""Do You Speak American?" is available on DVD for $69.95 or VHS for $59.95." "A companion book is available for $24.95 plus shipping." "To order, call 1 -800-336-1 91 7 or write to the address on your screen." "ANNOUNCER:" ""Do You Speak American?"" "has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities." "Additional funding is provided by..." "We are PBS..." "Had a piece o' pie, had a piece o' puddin'" "Well, I give it all away to old Sally Goodin" "ANNOUNCER:" "Down South, language is a colorful blend of vibrant parlance... [speaking Cajun]" "ANNOUNCER:" "...and down-home humor." "JEFF FOXWORTHY:" "Whichadidya." "Hey, you didn't bring your truck whichadidya?" "ANNOUNCER:" "In this part of our journey you'll hear flamboyant and distinctive dialects, from Appalachia..." "MAN:" "Hey, boy, put that car in the grudge." "ANNOUNCER:" "Down to the Tex-Mex border, where we'll see if English itself is endangered." "ROBERT garcia:" "They've got calls, threats, what are you doing speaking Spanish as an official language in America?" "ANNOUNCER:" "It's a sizzling combo of rich cultures and traditions." "MOLLY Ivins:" "We like our food spicy, and we like our language spicy." "ANNOUNCER:" "This time, on "Do You Speak American?"" "Do you speak American?" "Do you, like, speak American?" "Do you speak American?" "Do you speak American, dawg?" "Do you speak American?" "Tu parles americain?" "?" "Estas hablando american?" "ANNOUNCER:" ""Do You Speak American?"" "has been made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities." "Additional funding is provided by..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "We're on a journey that takes us across the U.S.A." "and through the American language." "Now we're going to find out how today's Southerners answer the question," ""Do you speak American?"" "The greatest division America ever experienced was between North and South, and that is still reflected in our language." "Now we're running along the beautiful Ohio River to Louisville, Kentucky, the Ohio River, the traditional northern boundary of the Southern accent." "So is it true that the Ohio River..." "Walt Wolfram, a linguist from North Carolina, is on board for this part of the trip." "WALT:" "The first group to settle the area seems to have the lasting effect on the dialect area, and even though we've had all these changes over a couple hundred years, the original dialect boundaries seem to be fairly intact still." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The first English speakers to settle around here were frontier fighters like Daniel Boone and later Davy Crockett who pushed through the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio and Tennessee rivers." "Mostly Scots Irish, they spread their way of speech from Pennsylvania to West Virginia and down the Appalachian Trail into Kentucky and Tennessee." "That speech lives on in the hills of Appalachia, but it, too, is disappearing." "This was shot in the series "The Story of English."" "WALT:" "Sure, I know, I use it all the time." "ROBERT:" "You use this?" "Well, you know this, then." "WALT:" "Oh, yeah, I know it well." "ROBERT:" "This is Mrs. Hicks and Ray Hicks telling us how you get to their house." "MRS. HlCKS:" "You fly in an aeroplane as far as you can come." "Then you get in a car or a truck and ride as far as you can go in hit." "Then you get down and run as far as you can." "Then you crawl on your hands and knees as far as you can come." "Go that-a-way, and then you straighten up and then you find a house." "It's a old-timey one." "It looks haunted but it's really not." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Ray Hicks used to be famous around here." "People would come from miles around to hear him tell folktales in one of the last surviving examples of true Appalachian dialect." "child:" "Howdy, Ray." "RAY:" "Howdy, howdy." "ROBERT:" "Now, "howdy," that sounds more like Texas to me." "WALT:" "They do use some of that in Appalachia." "MAN:" "Howdy, Ray." "RAY:" "Howdy." "MAN:" "How are you today?" "RAY:" "Just a-makin'." "How are you?" "Just come on in." "child:" "Howdy, Ray." "RAY:" "Just come on in." "child:" "Give us a ghost story, Ray." "Ray:" "OK." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Ray Hicks loved to tell Jack tales." "The most famous is Jack and the Beanstalk." "In this story, Jack meets a beggar who gives him a magic sack." "RAY:" "He says I'm gonna give you somethin'." "He said here's a sack." "That a-feelin' gets to bothering' you, just say whickety whack into this sack." "ROBERT:" "Whickety whack into the sack?" "WALT:" "Yeah, well, he's got so many of the traditional features of Appalachian dialect, the "a" in "a-huntin"' and "a-fishin"' and the use of the tire, "tar,"" "and the "h" before the it and so forth, and it's really neat that you've preserved this because Ray recently passed away." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Today, fewer and fewer people speak like the late Ray Hicks and his wife Rosa." "The old mountain dialect may be vanishing, but when we went ashore at a little place called Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, it seemed to me the local talk was still distinctive and vigorous." "ROBERT:" "How are you?" "DWAYNE:" "I'm well." "Hi there." "I'm Dwayne Doyle." "ROBERT:" "Hi, Dwayne, Robert MacNeil." "WALT:" "Walt Wolfram, pleased to meet you." "MAN:" "Went down the road, road got muddy" "Stomped my toes, couldn't stand steady" "Up on the hillside I seen Sally comin'" "Well, I thought to my soul gonna kill myself a-runnin'" "Had a piece o' pie, had a piece o' puddin'" "Well, I give it all away to old Sally Goodin" "WALT:" "Do you think the language is changing much?" "TOMMY:" "Well, it is, you know." "Now down home where l'm from, I'm from close to Tennessee line, I say Tennessee and Kentucky both, they claim me." "Tennessee claims I'm from Kentucky and Kentucky claims I'm from Tennessee." "And down there they call a sheep, a female sheep, a ewe." "I mean a "yo."" "Up here, you know, they call it, they call it a ewe, down there they call it a "yo,"" "and they'd say, "Hey, boy, put that car in the grudge."" "You know, I said a grudge is something what you have against somebody." "Guy said no, Dad'd tell me put the car in the grudge every day." "So we talk like that, and "y'all."" "WALT:" "is that one of the things you grew up saying?" "TOMMY:" "Oh, yeah, and "over yander."" "WALT:" "And over yander, right." "TOMMY:" "And it's a fair piece." "I tell 'em it's not, like, when I go over to Ohio, I say it's not a fair piece to Rabbit Hash." "It's just three hops and a jump o' the Ohio River and two or three swamps and there you are." "Yeah." "Now, you know, you know, just like you say, you know, we'd say "you all," and up here they'd say "yous all,"" "and, you know, "yous" and "yos" and "you all" and "yo all."" "WALT:" "Did you ever hear of "yins?"" "TOMMY:" "Oh, "youins," oh, yes, sir." "My father was from North Carolina, it was "youins," and they'd say, like..." "WALT:" "In North Carolina they'd say "yins."" "TOMMY:" "And then when they would treat a person, you know, do a bad turn for him, instead of saying I wouldn't serve a dog like that, they'd say, I wouldn't "sarve" a dog like that." "ROBERT: "Sarve" a dog." "TOMMY:" "I wouldn't "sarve" a dog like that." "And "fetch," you know." "WALT:" "Go fetch it." "TOMMY:" "And get me a poke to put something in." "They don't call it a bag." "WALT:" "A bag, yeah, yeah." "TOMMY:" "Yeah, I know all that stuff." "I was playing up here one night in the, in a place where they dance, and some lady fell out on the floor, and I said, hey, come here and I'll pick you up." "[laughter]" "Looked on the hillside, I seen Sally comin'" "Well, I thought to my soul gonna kill myself a-runnin'" "Had a piece o' pie, had a piece o' puddin'" "Well, I give it all away to old Sally Goodin" "Had a piece o' pie, had a piece o' puddin'" "Well, I give it all away to old Sally Goodin" "ROBERT:" "You've studied so many different aspects of American speech." "What would you say is the most important trend in our language now?" "WALT:" "I think that one of the most important trends is the fact that we're coming to celebrate and recognize some of the dialect differences as a part of our natural cultural heritage, rather than simply try to stamp them out, to eradicate them." "Speaking is part of culture, it's part of simply defining themselves." "I think a sort of growing celebration of dialect differences is one of the most encouraging signs that I've seen." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Today, the country speech of Appalachia has absorbed other Southern dialects and traveled throughout the Sunbelt." "You can hear this influence all over the U.S.A." "in the lingo of truckers like David Swain with their CB radios." "David's handle is Spanky." "david:" "Northbound." "You're lookin' good up there at Franklin, up there at 65 is where l started, OK?" "ROBERT:" "Everybody sounds real country when they're talking on the CB." "david:" "They do, and I couldn't tell you why, I mean, I don't even know if I do." "ROBERT:" "You do." "Yeah, I thought you did when you were talking." "david:" "I don't know, it's that CB slang, I guess, I don't know what it is." "ROBERT:" "Uh-huh. is that the same all over the country?" "david:" "Uh, yeah, pretty much." "Everybody pretty much sounds the same way." "And I don't know why." "ROBERT:" "Spanky, you say you play music on the road." "What's your favorite kind of music?" "david:" "Oh, my favorite's country music." "ROBERT:" "Yeah." "david:" "As a matter of fact, I've got a nephew that's in the country music business, Cody, and he lives in Nashville." "To be honest with you, his CD has taken me many miles." "Well, some things make me fighting' mad while I'm motoring' along like to watch a brand-new backhoe tear down a hundred-year-old barn" "Well, it makes me wish that I was rich 'cause I'd buy up that farmland find the folks who were forced to sell and hand it back to them" "Now I'm inspired" "You better believe it" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Spanky's nephew is the country singer Cody James." "CODY:" "They cover up our soil so rich with motels, malls, and dealerships" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Cody looks, sounds, and sings pure country, but he and Kenny Hayes, his co-songwriter, aren't even from this part of the country." "CODY:" "Thank you." "ROBERT:" "Neither of you is from the real South." "You're originally from Oregon, you're from Maryland, which is near the South, but not in." "When you do this kind of music, do you have to sound country and Southern?" "CODY:" "I don't think that you necessarily have to, but it's real comfortable, and when you start doin' it, like "doin' it" right there is an example." "It's easier to talk that way than it is to when you start doing it and enunciating everything perfectly." "ROBERT:" "But when you start to saying "doing it,"" "it sounds funny coming out of your mouth." "KENNY:" "It sure does." "CODY:" "It has character." "ROBERT:" "And it's friendly." "CODY:" "Very much so." "ROBERT:" "What do you mean, it has character?" "CODY:" "It has character." "I don't, country's just, it's fun to hear it." "Blue eyes just gleamin'" "The sweetest thing I've ever seen..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Music like Cody's is part of the popular culture that is making talkin' country the informal way to speak American." "You can hear it almost anywhere, turning its Appalachian origins into a national trend." "John Fought has studied the New South phenomenon, that vogue for Southern ways and country talk that now seems to reach farther and farther." "JOHN:" "For a long time the most rapid population growth percentages in the U.S." "have been in the inland Southern area, the Sunbelt." "This dialect is a very large dialect and it's perfectly to be expected that we would see a lot of it." "It has probably the largest body of speakers of any of the American dialects now." "And this will only grow with time." "ROBERT:" "So Southern, inland Southern, is now the largest dialect in America and growing?" "JOHN:" "I hope so." "But it seems confirmed by the 2000 census." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "By contrast, the other strand of Southern speech, the dialect of the coastal or plantation South is losing influence." "It's being swept away by time and civil rights and the migration of Northerners." "City dwellers in the deep South are even pronouncing their Rs." "But here in Oxford, Mississippi, what's celebrated today is language that endures." "Among the cultural treasures of the South is its literary tradition, and Mississippi can boast two of America's greatest writers," "William Faulkner and Eudora Welty." "In their recorded voices, you can hear the cultivated speech of Mississippi of two generations ago." "For instance, this is Eudora Welty reading from her story "The Optimist's Daughter."" "EUDORA: "So I was forced to the conclusion" ""l'd started seeing behind me." ""They laughed a single high note as derisive as a jay's." ""'Yes, that's disturbing.'" ""Doctor Courtman rolled forward on his stool," "'Let's just have a good look."'" "ROBERT:" "Eudora Welty told me a story about her accent." "In the late '30s, she attended Columbia University in New York and lived in the women's residence." "The women around the residence would give free theatre and concert tickets to the students." "After a couple of months Eudora went to her and said," ""Why did I never get any?"" "And the woman said, "With your accent, we didn't think you'd be interested in cultural activities."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "That kind of prejudice is still alive today, if more good humored." "The stand-up comedian Jeff Foxworthy bases a large part of his act around it." "He must be on to something, because wherever he plays, he fills the house." "JEFF:" "Speaking of words, got a few more Southern words for you." "First one, mayonnaise." "Mayonnaise a lot of people here tonight!" "It's kind of a gift." "They come to me in my sleep, I write 'em down." "Innuendo." "Hey, dude, I saw a bird fly innuendo." "ROBERT:" "Do you think Northern people think Southerners are stupid because of the way they talk?" "JEFF:" "Yes, I think so, and I think Southerners really don't care that Northern people think that." "You know, I mean, some of the most intelligent people I've ever known talked like I do." "In fact, I used to do a joke about that, about the Southern accent." "I said nobody wants to hear their brain surgeon say," ""Alright, what we're gonna do is... saw the top of your head off, root around in there with a stick and see if we can't find that dad-burned clot."" "Urinal." "I told my brother urinal lot of trouble when daddy gets home." "And last but not least, whichadidja." "Whichadidja." "Hey, you didn't bring yer truck whichadidja?" "ROBERT:" "Down the great Mississippi River now we're leaving the South." "Ahead are the states where English rubs up against many languages and speaking American takes on a whole new character." "We're ten miles up state route 1 3 from Eunice, Louisiana, driving past flooded rice paddies." "We're going to sample some Cajun." "Cajun is a dialect that has only emerged in recent generations but has become a source of fierce local pride." "Crawfish plus." "To hear the sound of authentic Cajun, turn off the road at a big water tower that says "Mamou."" "Today, Cajun is as much tourist bait as crawfish pie or boudin sausage." "Here in Carl's Restaurant, which describes itself as the most famous restaurant in Mamou, you can hear English and French and Cajun, which is kind of a mixture of the two with other influences." "MAN:" "C'est la plus grosse largeur de corn stamps book t'as vu." "Oui je suis alle... des passe un magasin aussi gros que ca mais dix metres de l'autoroute." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "While I was hanging out in Carl's, there was a steady stream of people arriving at Fred's Lounge across the street." "Fred's motto is, "Laissez les bon temps rouler,"" "Let the good times roll." "The lounge has become an institution, as has its owner, Aunt, or Tante, Sue." "Tante Sue, would you describe what happens here on a Saturday morning?" "SUE:" "The one description I have about Fred's Lounge is we have a wonderful time and I think this is one of the places that you have the most true feeling of Cajun culture there is." "We have people coming in at eight o'clock." "We promote to offer them bloody Mary because it's a mild drink and it's very good." "Once that band starts playing, they do start drinking." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Every Saturday, it's not just drink that's being mixed, but language, too, as the local radio station broadcasts live from Fred's." "MAN:" "Est sponsor de la journee et ca c'est pour le magnifique barbecue sauce," "Jack Miller's barbecue sauce, le vrai gout de Cajun dans chaque bouteille." "Jack Miller's barbecue sauce amene le meilleur flaveur, mm-mm, c'est bon." "La sauce a Jack Miller's." "Jack Miller's barbecue sauce, alright." "Special request, "La Chanson de Mardi Gras."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "American English smothered in Cajun is what you hear in Tante Sue's speech." "SUE:" "We have Fred's Lounge t-shirt with the accordion on the front, which is our regular logo." "And when the accordion starts playing in the band, I play my accordion on my t-shirt and I have a great time and I don't miss a note." "I don't know how to play the accordion, but I don't miss a note on my t-shirt." "[singing in Cajun]" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Perhaps it's best to leave before Tante Sue gets too carried away with her accordion playing." "I'm heading out of Mamou to the west." "I'm on my way to the Texas border and the next leg of my journey through American English." "We've just been listening to French here in Louisiana." "In fact, this whole area could still be speaking French if Thomas Jefferson hadn't bought almost everything west of here in the Louisiana Purchase, or by another turn of history, it could be speaking Spanish, as some Americans still fear it might." "But Spanish is only one of the language influences we're going to be looking into as we move across the state of Texas and down to the Mexican border." "The Texas accent has its roots home on the range." "You can hear it on the Bar J Ranch near Beeville when the young cowhands, slow talking and laconic, tell how to round up cattle." "JAKE:" "You just got to go at 'em kind of slow and talk to them, and you cain't rush 'em 'cos they'll go to tearing' down fences and all that." "It's like the cattle we worked earlier this morning, we went out there nice and slow and they went straight for the brush, and they're probably still out there." "Depends on how much you work 'em and stuff." "COWBOY:" "Once you break one loose from the herd, she's gonna be a little bit wilder, a little bit more hot-headed than the other cattle because she's away from her herd." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Texas speech is a combination of two Southern dialects." "Some of those who settled here came from the plantation areas of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi." "Others came down from Appalachia, Tennessee, and Kentucky." "The result is a kind of Southern speech that's different from anything else." "Add to that a mixture of Germans, Poles and Czechs who immigrated directly to Texas, and you have something quite distinct." "COWBOY:" "The squeeze chute, well, you got your head gate there where you can get up there and work on the horns and tag 'em and all that, and you can get a brand on 'em without 'em moving around and all that." "COWBOY:" "Jake describes it right." "We're not hurting the animal, we're just restraining it so we can work on it properly." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "That Texas accent is so catching that outsiders who move here, like ranch owner Linda Blackburn, can't help picking up that twang." "You must really love this, do you?" "linda:" "Oh, I wouldn't trade it for anything." "Being out in the open." "I'm not a house person, love the horses, dogs." "They're working in command of this situation here, and of course, the boys, look at 'em." "Ha, wouldn't you like this, too?" "[laughing]" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Today only one percent of Texans ride a horse to work." "The rest, as they say around here, are all hat and no cattle." "Cowboy words include wrangler, maverick, rustler, and chuck wagon." "When we visited her ranch, Linda organized an old-time cookout." "CHEF:" "This is like a stew in a gravy." "ROBERT:" "This is all authentic, the way it used to be done?" "CHEF:" "Yes, sir." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The Wild West and Western movies have helped spread phrases like "hot under the collar" and "bite the dust"" "that go with the cowboy's deadpan sense of humor." "CHARLES:" "Well, the two A.M. call was no fun at all for a rancher who needs his rest." "To heck with that thing, just let it ring, old Bud wouldn't leave his warm nest." "But, Bud, Liz cried, maybe somebody's died, her voice so uncertain yet warning." "Well, Liz, Bud said, if somebody's dead they'll still be dead in the morning." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "One major influence on Texas talk comes from Spanish, originally spoken here when Texas was part of Mexico." "On the Bar J Ranch some of the boys practicing their rodeo skills come from Spanish-speaking families that have been American for generations and for whom a ranch is a..." "travis:" "Say it in Spanish?" "Rancho." "ROBERT:" "And what does it mean in Spanish?" "travis:" "Basically same thing it means in English." "It's a place where the cattle is." "ROBERT:" "Rodeo?" "travis:" "Rodeo?" "You know, you get a wild cow, you get a broncky horse and a cowboy tries to see how much pride he's got to ride him or to handle him." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Rodeo, bronco, stampede, corral, like today's taco, fajita, nacho, and enchilada-- it all comes from Spanish." "travis:" "Lasso--that's what you throw at the animal to catch it." "Bronco--a young horse that's not quite broke." "Pinto--the color of a horse or a bean." "Vamos--it means "let's go."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "When you think about Texas, you think about cowboys and cattle." "You don't think about cotton and slavery." "But that's in the history of this dry, flat, and stiflingly hot east central Texas." "This has been cotton country ever since the time of slavery." "After slavery was abolished, this land was worked by dirt-poor sharecroppers." "I'm meeting two linguists at the country store in Springville, a tiny community sandwiched between two Union Pacific railroad tracks." "For more than 1 7 years" "Guy Bailey and Patricia Cukor-Avila have been conducting a remarkable piece of research into the language of local African Americans." "GUY:" "How are you doing?" "Welcome to Springville, welcome to the train." "PAT:" "Welcome to the train, right." "ROBERT:" "Right, do you have these all the time?" "GUY:" "All the time." "PAT:" "Every few minutes." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "For generations of sharecroppers black and white, the country store was the center of their lives." "This is where they bought provisions, stores and tools, and this is where they borrowed money from the white store owner until they sold their cotton." "This store has been owned by the same family for more than a century." "In many ways it's hardly changed at all." "It's in a kind of time warp." "PAT:" "When I first started out with this project, I would sit out at the general store inside and basically hang out there most of the day and interact with people who came in and talk with them, not necessarily record right at first," "until I got to know people." "Hey, stranger!" "The mail is still delivered at the store." "There is no home delivery." "People oftentimes don't just come to get their mail and leave." "They come, get their mail, sit down, open it, sit around and talk." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Springville is a fictional name" "Guy and Patricia gave to the community so that local people would feel relaxed in their company." "To win their trust, Guy and Patricia also promised them they would use pseudonyms." "PAT:" "Willie is a lifelong resident of the area." "He grew up on one of the farms close to the store." "He's always lived out here and worked in agriculture his whole life." "He's a very good example of what we would call older rural African American speech patterns." "GUY:" "You told me that when you were a boy you did a lot of hunting and stuff." "willie:" "Yeah, I hunted a little bit, yes, sir." "GUY:" "What all did you hunt?" "willie:" "I hunted rabbits and anything I could catch." "GUY:" "Right." "is armadillo pretty good to eat?" "willie:" "Yes, sir, he good, sir." "GUY:" "Never had armadillo." "What's it taste like?" "willie:" "Taste good, like chicken." "GUY:" "is that right?" "willie:" "Yes, sir, sure do, sir." "You couldn't rice it." "GUY:" "is that right?" "How you cook it?" "willie:" "Well, my mama, she boil him, boil him in a pot, you know, put some onion round him and, you know, make gravy out of him." "PAT:" "What we've been able to do with this research is to look at how things change over time in a single community." "willie:" "We had some hard times in my day, yes, sir." "We worked hard, sir, 'cos my daddy..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Willie's way of talking can be traced right back to the time of slavery." "We know this because one of the things that makes this part of Texas so special is a series of recordings and photographs made here in the 1 930s and '40s." "GUY:" "These were pictures that were made by workers for the WPA here in Texas." "The top two are from former slaves who were from this district." "The others are from slaves in other parts of Texas." "ROBERT:" "You think of slavery being so long ago, so long in the past." "GUY:" "So much of it, though, was a 1 9th-century phenomenon." "ROBERT:" "So these people photographed in the late '30s or 1 940 or thereabouts could actually be the grandchildren or even children of people brought directly from Africa?" "GUY:" "That's exactly right." "Here are some recordings from the Library of Congress with former slaves who were born in Texas." "WOMAN:" "Born right there and stayed there until I was about nine, ten years old, maybe even more." "Stayed right there." "We didn't know where to go." "Mama never did know where to go." "Y'see, after freedom broke, it's like just like you turn someone out, y'know." "Didn't know where to go." "They just would've stayed." "MAN:" "I said I'm 61 or 2 years old, and I never had no trouble in my life." "I say I never asked a no ones for a nickel what they didn't give to me in my life." "And not a one of them never trusted me." "ROBERT:" "What is significant to you in the speech patterns on these recordings?" "GUY:" "They're very different from current day" "African American Vernacular English." "Many of the features that are most common in what linguists call AAVE, things like the invariant "be," "they be working,"" "or the deleted copula, "they working,"" "you don't see as much the invariant "be,"" "you don't see at all, hear at all, in the slave tapes." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "African American speech changed in the epic migration of rural Southern blacks to the cities of the North." "Over many decades, until the 1 970s, some six million made that journey." "And as always, when there are great movements of people, there are also great changes of language." "In the cities of the North the races mixed less than in the rural South." "Instead blacks and their language found themselves isolated in ghettos." "GUY:" "In the large cities you had spatial segregation, but you also had the formation of separate communities often with a kind of oppositional culture to the rest of the U.S." "This created an ideal context for African American Vernacular English to develop along this sort of a separate track." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "What we heard in Detroit shows how that separate development continues to this day." "MAN:" "I put two extra little loops in there." "SECOND MAN:" "While the beat's goin'?" "MAN:" "Yeah, like when it first start, so you don't gotta start with more rhyme right when you hear." "GUY:" "I think what you can say is that white speech and African American speech over the last 1 50 years or so have developed along different paths." "They've had sort of independent development, not influencing each other very much at all." "So that their grammars are very different today, probably more different than they've ever been, and their phonologies aren't very similar." "Their sound systems aren't very similar, either." "It's kind of independent development." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "I suppose you could sum up Springville like this:" "A hundred and fifty years ago, rural blacks and whites sounded more alike than you might have thought, but today whites and inner city blacks sound more different than you might have hoped." "After decades of civil rights advances the implications are pretty sobering, because more separate languages mean more separate peoples." "Late afternoon, the end of a long day's drive." "I'm heading for the heart of Texas, but I couldn't resist a little detour when I saw this name on the map." "Cut--Shoot is just one of a number of place names I jotted down from the map that shows something extravagant and imaginative in the Texas personality." "Here's some other names of places:" "Wink, Telephone, New Deal, Oatmeal, Old Glory, Pandora," "Rainbow, Best, Bangs, Birthright, Cash, Deadwood," "Grit, Gun Barrel City, Happy, and Joy." "The population of Best, incidentally, is one." "Somewhere around here there's a man who makes a good living out of Texas talk and an art out of being politically incorrect." "He started out writing country and western songs with clever lyrics." "Now he writes detective stories set in Texas." "He's also written a book called Texas Etiquette, which includes a chapter on Texas talk." "[honks horn]" "His name is Kinky Friedman." "Around here he's known to one and all as the Kinkster." "Hello." "kinky:" "Robert." "ROBERT:" "Great to meet you." "kinky:" "Kinky the friendly cowboy, two great Americans, or you're almost an American, anyway." "ROBERT:" "I'm an American." "kinky:" "You are an American?" "ROBERT:" "Yeah, recently." "Though Kinky wasn't born in Texas, he's become a professional Texan." "kinky:" "Anyway, welcome to Echo Hill." "ROBERT:" "Thank you." "kinky:" "Come on in." "This is-- always live in a house that's older than you are, I suggest." "ROBERT:" "I've never been here before." "kinky:" "Well, you haven't missed too much." "No, actually you have." "It's a very beautiful place." "What are you looking for, sort of thing?" "ROBERT:" "We're looking for Texas talk." "kinky:" "Are you looking for a man not smoking a cigar?" "ROBERT:" "No, you can smoke a cigar." "Kinky loves to work the colorful Texan way with language into song lyrics, books, and articles." "This is where you write." "kinky:" "Yeah, this is my typewriter." "This is the last typewriter in Texas." "I don't use any computers or the Internet." "I think they're the work of Satan." "ROBERT:" "What are you working on right now?" "kinky:" "I've just finished a book called Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned, which is about three people trying to shut down a Starbuck's in New York City." "ROBERT:" "Kinky's way with words has won him many fans, some of them quite important." "Who are your friends here?" "kinky:" "Well, we have George Bush-- kind of a friend of presidents these days-- and Bill Clinton." "ROBERT:" "They're both friends of yours?" "kinky:" "Yeah, I'm kind of like Billy Graham or Jesse Jackson." "I'm a professional friend of presidents." "My friend Don Imus accuses me of being best friends with Bill Clinton until one millisecond after he was out of office, then jumping to George Bush." "ROBERT:" "You're George Bush's favorite author?" "kinky:" "Yes, but George is not that voracious a reader." "ROBERT:" "But you suit his attention span?" "kinky:" "Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a great American." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Thanks to Kinky, non-Texans can relish Texan terms like these:" ""Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit,"" "to mean "all right" or "hi":" ""Catty whompus"" "for something that doesn't fit or is out of line..." ""Dag blame it, dag bum it, dag nab it"-- all euphemisms to avoid swearing:" ""larrupin," tastier than finger-lickin' good:" "and "all swole up"" "to mean irritated or proud and self-absorbed." "But to hear Texas talk in its tallest form, head for the state capitol in Austin." "The legislature is a kind of one-stop shop for every kind of Texas accent." "MAN:" "How about joining me in it," "Walker County, togetherness one more time." "MAN:" "We hereby recognize March 1 1 , 2003, as Walker County day at the State Capitol and welcome all visiting from this notable county." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Though Texans are far from formal, this is the only place in my travels where l have to wear a jacket and tie." "I'm here to meet an old friend, that redoubtable writer, columnist, commentator, and scourge of all politicians, particularly male ones," "Molly Ivins, because no one talks better about Texas language than Molly." "MOLLY:" "We like our food spicy, and we like our language spicy." "This is one of the greatest places in Texas to hear it properly spoken." "You get everything in this House of Representatives from the east Texas drawl to the west Texas twang." "MAN:" "Chair lays out HCR number twenty." "MOLLY:" "We've got guys serving in this house who sound exactly like Boomhauer on King of the Hill:" "you can barely understand a word they say." "[mumbling]" "ROBERT:" "You've described Texan as having a lunatic quality of exaggeration." "What is it in the Texas psyche that drives that?" "MOLLY:" "I think the best explanation for Texas is that Texas is just like the rest of the country except more so." "Everything here is slightly exaggerated." "You get some wonderful expressions:" ""meaner than a skillet full of rattlesnakes,"" "and "l'm happy enough to be twins."" "I have an old friend I camp with who always says," ""l don't want to die and go to heaven 'cos it couldn't be better than this."" "And Texan, properly spoken, involves inventing your own metaphors and similes." "ROBERT:" "Can you think of some examples?" "MOLLY:" "The late Bob Bullock was a great speaker of Texan, and he was one day complaining about some young whippersnapper from The Washington Post who'd been in to interview him, and for to explain to me why he didn't like the guy," "he said, "Molly, his pants was so tight if he'd have farted it would have blowed his boots off."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "This is the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin." "Few Texans have talked more Texan than America's first president from Texas." "To its credit, the LBJ Library hasn't lost its sense of humor." "JOHNSON:" "I was thinking about a story that occurred down in my own hills of Texas." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The real LBJ was famous for his salty turns of phrase." "He used to say," ""He can tell chicken ---- from chicken salad."" "During the Vietnam War I personally heard him say," ""lf l got 'em by the short and curlies, the hearts and minds'll follow."" "The uninhibited rhetoric and flamboyant style of Texas politics hit Washington with Lyndon Johnson." "I began covering politics with Kennedy and Johnson just as television replaced radio as the national sounding board." "The new political era brought presidential voices to Washington from different regional dialects, starting with Kennedy and Johnson." "MAN:" "The office of president of the United States." "KENNEDY:" "And I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Voters were comfortable with JFK's Massachusetts rasp, but LBJ's accent was another matter altogether." "JOHNSON: ...and will to the best of my ability." "EARL WARREN:" "Preserve, protect, and defend." "JOHNSON:" "Preserve, protect, and defend." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Back then, his Texan accent was openly despised." "CARTER:" "I, Jimmy Carter, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Even by the late '70s," "Jimmy Carter's Georgia accent did him no favors in Washington." "It seems to me we've come a long way since then, that former Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton saw no need to lose his Arkansas accent, partly because he could change it at will." "clinton:" "Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." "william rehnquist:" "So help me God." "BUSH:" "I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Today, ironically, President Bush, a scion of the East Coast establishment, wants to sound Texan." "BUSH:" "Preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." "REHNQUlST:" "So help me God." "BUSH:" "So help me God." "MOLLY:" "There was a popular intellectual theory about 20 years ago that the whole country was becoming more and more alike." "It was all covered with interstate highways and Howard Johnson's restaurants and everybody talked more and more alike." "You know, what's amazing is not the fragility of those cultures, it's their hardihood, it's their endurance." "I'm amazed by the tenacity with which custom and dialect endures." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The farther south we go, the stronger the Spanish influence." "The road signs tell their own story." "Alvarado, Bandera, Chico, Del Rio, El Paso, Frisco," "Gonzales, Hondo, Nada, Plata, Refugio, Rio Frio," "Santa Anna and Sierra Blanca." "By the time I reach the Tex-Mex border in the evening, it feels as if we're already in Mexico." "Every morning it's rush hour on the bridge from Nuevo Laredo in Mexico to Laredo in Texas." "It was so snarled up on the day we met Allan Wall that it was easier for him to park on the Mexican side and walk across to the U.S.A." "Allan's a language teacher who's married to a Mexican and lives there with his wife and children." "Many Americans are so alarmed by the amount of Spanish they hear that they want English to be made our official language." "Allan Wall is one of them." "ALLAN:" "It's a great advantage for us to have a common language." "It's good for the immigrants to learn English." "It opens up to the mainstream of the American society and economy." "It's also an important part of our common citizenship-- the Declaration of lndependence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the judicial precedents." "These are all in English, and I think it's a threat to the linguistic unity of our nation because the English language is our common civic language." "WOMAN:" "Atencion clientes de chivillo estamos invitando que pasen a sus registers donde puede llevarse en chulet..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Spanish is everywhere in Laredo." "It's not that the supermarket workers can't or won't speak English." "It's just there's not much call for it." "Even the local newspaper puts out editions in both Spanish and English." "The editor is Robert Garcia." "garcia:" "Look at what's happening to major newspapers in the U.S." "They're switching some of their segments to Spanish because they need to get to those folks and to communicate with those folks." "For example, I will work with both the Spanish and the English segment of the newspaper, so I am constantly switching back and forth, you know, but I'm used to that, I'm from the area." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "To see just how far the Spanish language has reasserted itself around here, I've come to a little border town called El Cenizo, Texas." "I'd made an appointment to meet the mayor." "Good morning." "WOMAN:" "Hello, sir." "Good morning." "ROBERT:" "I have an appointment to see the mayor." "WOMAN:" "Yes, sir." "ROBERT:" "is the mayor here?" "WOMAN:" "No, sir." "ROBERT:" "Did she say anything about our appointment?" "WOMAN:" "No, sir, she's at a very important meeting." "ROBERT:" "So is there somebody else that I could talk to here?" "WOMAN:" "Yes, with Mr. Hernandez." "He is commissioner." "ROBERT:" "A commissioner?" "WOMAN:" "Yes, sir." "ROBERT:" "You're commissioner." "You were just elected commissioner, were you?" "When was that?" "commissioner:" "In November." "ROBERT:" "In November." "How many commissioners are there in...." "commissioner:" "Right now we are just two." "ROBERT:" "Just two commissioners." "So you're one of two?" "And tell us what the mayor, where is the mayor?" "commissioner:" "The mayor is right now deal with the country." "ROBERT:" "In Laredo?" "commissioner:" "In Laredo." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "It's not surprising that the mayor and town commissioners want to avoid controversy." "Under the previous mayor, the town passed an ordinance making Spanish its official language." ""No ingles" in the border town of El Cenizo." "Spanish is in, English is out." ""Banning English divisive measure."" ""Spanish is official language in town."" "Suddenly El Cenizo found itself at the center of a national furor." "garcia:" "It was ugly." "They got calls, threats, people telling them you're in America, what are you doing speaking Spanish as an official language in your community?" "ROBERT:" "And they infuriated the U.S. English people, the people who want to make English the official language of the United States." "garcia:" "That also brought on a lot of heat from them." "ROBERT:" "Has any other town followed El Cenizo's example on Spanish?" "garcia:" "I think a lot of them wanted to, but after the reaction El Cenizo got, they stayed away." "ALLAN:" "Mexico would never allow that." "We could never take over a town in Mexico, declare English the official language, and declare it a haven from Mexican immigration law." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Under that previous mayor," "El Cenizo went one step further." "It passed an ordinance that no town official was allowed to collaborate with the U.S. immigration authorities." "So this is where this little town ends in the Rio Grande River, the Rio not very grand, in fact, because there isn't much water in it." "But through these bushes and across the river is the border with Mexico." "So it's a naturally attractive crossing point for illegal immigrants." "And this area is heavily patrolled by the Border Patrol." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "There are an estimated seven million illegal immigrants in the U.S.A." "Seven out of 1 0 probably slipped across the border with Mexico." "The U.S. Border Patrol has put huge resources into stemming that flow." "GUARD:" "The tracks being back on the fence is not good." "That means we're not too close behind these guys." "ROBERT:" "Imagine coming through here at night." "This is pretty rough country." "I mean, you'd get your clothes torn up on all these thorns." "DANNY:" "Correct." "ROBERT:" "Look at all this, it's very sharp." "So what proportion of the ones who come across do you think you get?" "DANNY:" "I would say 40, 50 percent, but overall, the usual people, I've heard different people say it's 1 0 percent." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Then the Border Patrol saw footprints in the sand." "MAN:" "I got bodies, bodies, bodies, people, under the helicopter." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The illegals were spotted huddled in the scrub." "A woman patrol officer moved in to make the arrest." "No one resisted, no one ran away." "They knew they'd be sent back to Mexico, and likely as not, they'd try again soon." "ALLAN:" "Living in Mexico has given me a different perspective." "There was a conference, a Spanish language congress in 2001 , and the president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, was there, and he made the comment that when the immigrants come here and continue to speak Spanish," "they are doing their patriotic duty to Mexico, and another speaker there was Carlos Fuentes, who is the, he's probably the number one literary figure, living literary figure in Mexico, and he spoke very clearly." "He said that there is a silent reconquista, a re-conquest of the United States." "He didn't even limit it to the Southwest as many do." "He just said, "of the United States."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Does the large Hispanic immigration, legal and illegal, really threaten American English, or like immigrant groups before, are Latinos merging into the mainstream?" "ANNOUNCER:" "Next time on "Do You Speak American?"" "girl: 'Sup?" "ROBERT:" "How do you say it?" "ANNOUNCER:" "We'll travel up the West Coast, from L.A. to Seattle, where knowing how to navigate the terrain is essential." "STEVE HARVEY:" "You do have to be bilingual in this country." "You can be very, very adept at slang, but you have to be adept at getting through a job interview." "ANNOUNCER:" "And look out..." "patricia LOPEZ:" "La chica sexy!" "ANNOUNCER:" "There are some dangerous curves ahead." "patricia:" "Un beso." "Oh, no, I made him blush!" "ANNOUNCER:" "Don't be embarrassed to join us... next time on Do You Speak American?" "TEENS:" "Word." "ANNOUNCER:" "For the downlow, the skinny, and the 4-1 -1 on how you speak American, visit us at pbs.org." "While you're there, get tips for starting your own PBS program club so you can continue to speak American with your friends and family." ""Do You Speak American?" is available on DVD for $69.95 or VHS for $59.95." "A companion book is available for $24.95 plus shipping." "To order, call 1 -800-336-1 91 7 or write to the address on your screen." "NARRATOR:" ""Do You Speak American?"" "has been made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities." "Additional funding is provided by... I am PBS..." "michael:" "Whassup, dawg?" "winnie HOLMAN:" "There's almost nothing more personal than how you express yourself." "ANNOUNCER:" "And in California, everyone has something to say." "GEORGE PLOMARlTY:" "That peak just jacked up." "CARMEN FOUGHT:" "What you mean, foo'?" "girl:" "Tiiiiight." "JAYK GOFF:" "You're gonna, like, give them props and it's gonna be something sick." "ANNOUNCER:" "In this last part of our journey, we'll travel the West Coast and explore an America that speaks many languages." "daniel RUSSELL: "My grandpop cook dinner every night."" "How do you code switch this into mainstream American English?" "MAlSO:" "My granpa cooks dinner every night." "ANNOUNCER:" "And computers who only want to be understood..." "COMPUTER:" "Navigation menu..." "ROBERT:" "Navigation address book." "COMPUTER:" "Navigation menu..." "Address book." "Pardon me?" "ANNOUNCER:" "It's like a..." "Ripping...blasting...good time." "ANNOUNCER:" "So ask yourself..." "ROBERT:" "Do I speak American?" "Man:" "Do you speak American?" "WOMAN:" "Do you, like, speak American?" "LOBSTERMAN:" "Do you speak American?" "Both:" "Do you speak American, dawg?" "cowgirl:" "Do you speak American?" "WOMAN:" "Tu parles Americain?" "patricia LOPEZ:" "Estas hablando American?" ""Do You Speak American?" has been made possible in part by the National Endowment For The Humanities... promoting excellence in the Humanities." "Additional funding is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation..." "The Ford Foundation..." "Rosalind P. Walter and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "In our previous episode of "Do You Speak American?"" "we looked at what's happening to Southern speech." "The farther south and west you go, the stronger the influence of Spanish." "Concerns about Spanish echo across the American Southwest" "New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California... where we're going to continue this journey through American language." "The first stop is L.A." "It's a bit far to drive, so we're going to fly." "Robert MacNeil (VO):" "Spanish is just one of the language influences we'll look at as we follow the West Coast from L.A. to Seattle and ask:" "Do you speak American?" "CONTROL BOOTH:" "Six, five, four, three, two, one..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "It's called "Mex To The Max"" "and it's hosted by Patricia Lopez." "LOPEZ: ..." "I hope you guys are sitting down 'cause we have a fun-filled hour for you guys." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Patricia, known as "Patty Longlegs,"" "is a former fashion model who's now a VJ, that's Video Jockey, introducing Latino music and Salsa videos on local TV." "LOPEZ:" "My language is Spanglish." "It's great because it's half English, half Spanish." "And you know what time it is, baby, it's time for the emails, yes..." "alright, let's get started with the first email here on this segment." "It says.... ..."Love you always," that came from Angel." "We have all these Latin people that are coming over to the States, and I mean we're everywhere." "And we might not feel comfortable speaking English." "They should catch on to it." "And we're, you know, we're putting it out there for them." "ROBERT:" "Why should they catch on to it?" "LOPEZ:" "Because it's, it's gonna be the second language of the States." "Everyone speaks English, so they say, but you have a lot of Latinos that are coming over that don't speak it." "My father is 72 years old, and doesn't speak it because, you know, you can get by not speaking it here in the States." "ROBERT:" "That's terrific, thank you." "LOPEZ:" "Thank you, thank you." "Beso..." "Oh no, I made him blush!" "ROBERT:" "Ah well, I blush easily." "LOPEZ: ..." "Right now, we're gonna go to Los Tucanes cantando con su tema, "La Chica Sexy."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Spanglish isn't the only Spanish-English hybrid." "Carmen Fought is a linguist who's been studying Chicano, one of the street-talks of Latino Los Angeles." "FOUGHT:" "Chicano English is a dialect of English that grew out of the historical contact between English and Spanish in the Southwest." "You get articles written that say" "Chicano English is just a step on the way to mastery of English, and that's not true at all." "Chicano English is now its own vibrant, thriving dialect." "It's not going anywhere... luckily, for me, because I do research on Chicano English." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Carmen did much of her research with high school kids with Spanish-speaking parents." "She took us to a nearby park to hear some Chicano English." "Wanting the kids to be as relaxed as possible, we've put radio mics on two of them, and then we, and the camera, are keeping well back." "michael:" "So wassup, dawg?" "What's cracking, dawg?" "What's crackin' tomorrow?" "." "jessie:" "About the Superbowl?" "I dunno..." "Wassup, then?" "We gonna throw a party?" "Wassup?" "jessie:" "What girls you gonna have over there?" "michael:" "Man, all I know, is that there's gonna be a bunch of primas there." "What about the, what about the party you took Mark to..." "What, Southgate?" "Yeah, Southgate." "That's his family, fool." "Nah, you serious?" "There's a bunch of hotness over there, dawg." "Fine women, ones that can [spanish]." "That's how fine they were, dawg." "FOUGHT:" "In terms of slang items, when he asked him who's gonna be at the party" ""ls there gonna be any hotness there"..." "ROBERT:" "Hotness?" "FOUGHT:" "Uh huh, meaning are there gonna be any good looking girls there." "jessie:" "I'm tired of talking to you though." "michael:" "I'm tired of talking to you, foo'!" "It's been awhile though." "FOUGHT:" "Also the pitch, the intonation, they'll hear some of the syllables drawn out:" ""Whaaat?" "What you mean, fooo?"" "like that, those sorts of things." "That's also very characteristic of Chicano English." "jessie:" "What about these foos?" "Think they're gonna grow up to be some real football players or what?" "michael:" "Man, that little short fool with the cut-off sleeves, that's my cousin, dawg." "He might probably be something." "FOUGHT:" "The use of "foo," for "fool"" "as a term like "man" or "guy,"" "that's very common among kids that speak Chicano English of this age group." "In fact, occasionally when I was doing field work, and I was interviewing kids who spoke Chicano English, they would actually call me "fool;"" "you know, just kind of slipping it in there the same way we might use "man" or "guy."" "ROBERT: ...or "bro" or..." "FOUGHT:" "Yeah, yeah..." "michael:" "Keisha, dawg." "Keisha over there in Southgate." "jessie:" "She's Mexican with a name like that?" "michael:" "Yeah, dawg." "Does she speak Spanish, too?" "Nah, she don't even speak no Spanish." "ROBERT:" "And they throw in the occasional word in Spanish or" "FOUGHT:" "Yes, and, in fact, what's interesting is that many people believe that Chicano English is a Spanish accent-- someone whose first language is Spanish and doesn't speak English well yet." "But, in fact, as we just heard, we heard Jessie speaking, and he doesn't, in fact, speak Spanish... only enough to throw in a few words, and those words actually tend to be taboo or swear words." "FOOTBALL PLAYER:" "Que?" "Le Que?" "No entiendo..." "FOUGHT:" "And it's still the classic pattern that the first generation born in the United States often will retain the home language, but by the second generation born here, the home language is very often lost." "So I don't think Spanish is a threat to English in any way." "I think, if anything, it's Spanish that's in danger and that we might want to look out for." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Like Carmen, other linguists believe Spanish is no more a threat to English than German or Italian, which once provoked similar fears." "radio ANNOUNCER:" "Six minutes before the hour, I am Shirley Strawberry right here on the Steve Harvey Morning Show." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Morning drive time in L.A... early in 2003, Hispanic Americans passed African Americans to become the biggest minority." "STEVE HARVEY:" "We are a "shake yo' booty" radio station." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "But with young Hispanics moving into English, will Spanish ever have the impact of African American English?" "HARVEY:" "You won't believe this one, but guess what?" "It's another Common song." "This is my man..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Spread through rap, hip hop, soul, and DJs like Steve Harvey, the Black English influence on mainstream American is profound." "ROBERT:" "Do you speak American?" "HARVEY:" "I speak good enough American." "You know, I think there's variations of speaking American." "I don't think there's any one set way because America's so diverse." "So I don't think that there's a certain way to speak American." "You know, man, upward America is not my audience." "My audience is mostly grassroots people." "And I sound mostly like they uncle-- so see, I said, I sound mostly like "they" uncle, and I was cool with that." "That sound good to me." ""lsn't"...you know, "isn't" is not in my vocabulary." "The word is "ain't."" ""lsn't" requires my mouth to stretch in a way that it don't stretch..."isn't."" "And then I leave it out there too long, I look really stupid when-- "He isn't telling the truth."" "I actually almost black out when I say that." "ROBERT:" "But what do you say to those people, like some of the people in the school system in L.A., who say that African American kids need to learn standard English in order to get on in the world?" "HARVEY:" "Well, you know, you do have to be bilingual in this country." "And that means you can be very, very adept at slang, but you have to be adept at getting through a job interview." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The L.A. school system knows its minority students will need to be, in effect, bilingual." "P.S. 1 00 in Watts is one of 60 schools using an experimental program called Academic English Mastery." "RUSSELL:" "I need all groups to pay attention." "Cloyd, I need your focus now..." "and Gerardo." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Daniel Russell uses a game ofjeopardy to teach his grade five class how to translate their "home language,"" "into mainstream American." "RUSSELL:" "Okay, here we go:" ""My grandpa cook dinner every night."" "STUDENTS:" "Third person is singular..." ""Cooks"..."my granpa cooks dinner every night."" "RUSSELL:" "Which linguistic feature is not mainstream American English?" "MAlSO:" "Third person singular." "RUSSELL:" "Yes, and Maiso, how do you code switch this into mainstream American English?" "MAlSO: "My grandpa cooks dinner every night."" "RUSSELL:" "You just got 500 more points." ""He funny."" "Okay, Ariel Barone, what's the answer?" "ariel: "He is funny."" "RUSSELL: "He is funny"..." "excellent translation!" "Here we go..." ""We don't have nothin' to do."" "Okay, quiet please." "STUDENT:" ""We don't have nothing to do."" "RUSSELL:" "Oh, I'm sorry." "that is not accurate translation into mainstream American English, so you're at minus 400." "So let me roll and see which team will have an opportunity to get it." "I might roll you guys again." "One!" "STUDENTS:" ""Anything, anything, anything."" "STUDENT:" ""We don't have anything to do."" "RUSSELL:" "Excellent translation!" "NOMA LEMOlNE:" "I think perhaps the biggest misunderstanding is the idea that we are somehow teaching African American language-- teaching "ebonics"-- if you will." "We don't need to teach African American language." "ROBERT: ..." "They come speaking it." "LEMOlNE:" "They already know it." "Our task is to help move them towards mastery of the language of school in its oral and written form, but to do that in a way where they are not devalued, or where they feel denigrated in any way" "by virtue of their cultural and linguistic differences." "Because when you begin to devalue youngsters, and make them feel that who they are doesn't count, then we've turned them off from education." "RUSSELL:" ""Last night we bake cookies."" "STUDENTS:" "No, no, it's past tense, past tense." "RUSSELL:" "Are you ready?" "Number one, what language is it in?" "STUDENT:" "AAL." "RUSSELL:" "It is in African American language." "Number two, what linguistic feature is in AAL?" "STUDENT:" "Past tense marker, "e-d."" "RUSSELL:" "Past tense marker, "e-d," that's two." "And how do you code switch it to mainstream American English?" "STUDENT:" ""Last night we baked cookies."" "RUSSELL:" "You got 500 more points." "STUDENTS:" "Yes!" "RUSSELL:" "is it too easy, or I just taught you well this year?" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Students in the program show significant gains in written English." "Those behind it believe that unless more teachers treat home language as sympathetically, they'll condemn more generations to school failure." "Language remains a formidable frontier in the legacy of slavery." "ROBERT:" "Three helicopters overhead, and there's a police roadblock up here." "In any other big city, you'd think it was a crime scene or an act of terrorism or a bomb scare or something, but this is Los Angeles, the beginning of Beverly Hills here." "And this is a big night for the movie industry, the Golden Globe Awards." "TV:" "Nicole Kidman..." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Movies, TV, and the music industry help to spread new language." "KlDMAN:" "And the nominees for Best Actor:" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "And because the stars live in Hollywood, and Hollywood's in California," "California English gets an extra boost." "The next morning, I'm in Beverly Hills to meet the movie writer and director Amy Heckerling." "Though she herself comes from the Bronx, she puts a lot of California slang into her scripts." "Amy even compiled her own dictionary for her most famous movie and the TV series that followed it" ""Clueless."" "ROBERT:" "We noticed, looking over your shoulder a minute ago, that you had a page for expressions for "good,"" "something that's good, and some for bad." "Would you read us some from each of those pages?" "HECKERLlNG:" "Swiss, flava, butta, coolio, smooth, super, money, nails-- "tits," as in "it's the tits"-- feeion--like "fine" broken up into a bunch of syllables" "kickin', juice, keen, funky, monster, proper, rad, noble, wicked, tubular, trippy, stoked... rules, rocks, stellar, tasty, sweet." "ROBERT:" "How about "bad," page for "bad?"..." "HECKERLlNG:" "This could go on forever." "Random, heinous, cheesy, blows, bites, bogus, bunk, brick, bum, bum deal, bunk, busted, bug, chicken --, dreaded, drip, wretched, clueless" ""sucks," the classic." "And whenever young actors came in, I would always say," ""What do you say for 'good?"' "for 'bad?"'" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Amy's movie "Clueless" achieved iconic status and introduced California teen slang to the rest of America." "alicia silverstone:" "Eew...get off of me!" "Uh, as if!" "BOY:" "Nice stems." "Thanks." "Whatever." "SlLVERSTONE:" "Did I miss something?" "is big hair back?" "This is ragin'!" "Let's do a lap before we commit to a location." "Heello." "Survey says... I thought it reeked." "SlLVERSTONE:" "I thought that was your designer imposter perfume." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" ""Clueless" satirizes California mores and teen talk." "Winnie Holzman aimed for naturalism in the cult TV series "My So-called Life,"" "in which she chronicled teenage angst." "She often writes in this coffee shop." "HOLZMAN:" "A lot of the waitresses would be around 1 7, 1 8, and I would hear them discussing certain things that I just would write right down." "I'd like a Diet Pepsi." "ROBERT:" "I'll have an iced Tea, please." "Thank you." "You said you were trying to put yourself inside the head of teenagers, one of which you used to be." "HOLZMAN:" "Well, I think it just, you know, it's like I said, it's a biological time." "I mean, biologically, you're-- everything in you is telling you to move on, to move away, to grow up and to leave behind the things of childhood." "ROBERT:" "Tell us your thoughts about why they create their own language, teenagers?" "HOLZMAN:" "I think it's perfectly natural at that point, you know." "Your peer group becomes incredibly important to you, your little tribe of friends becomes your new family, and you need to have-- everything symbolizes that... everything-- the clothes you wear, the way you speak and, I think, people... I mean, language is" "there's almost nothing more personal than how you express yourself." "TEENAGER:" "Can I have a slice of cheese pizza and a small soda, please?" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "I'm curious to find out how California teenage slang has moved on since the early '90s when "Clueless" and "My So-called Life"" "were first released." "So I'm in Irvine, south of L.A., to meet a bunch of teens from the local high school, whom I can call, as we all seem to these days, "you guys."" "ROBERT:" "Do you guys still say "so, not, whatever?"" "TEENAGERS:" "Yes." "catherine:" "Yeah, "Clueless"" "'cause, like, now I'm, like, permanently like, like, messed up because-- ...'cause, like, I say, like, "like" and "dude"" "every other word because of that movie." "It's horrible." "ROBERT:" "You can't get "Clueless" out of your system?" "TEENAGER:" "I saw it once." "TEENAGER:" "It became kind of a cultural trend sort of, so, like, a lot of kids started saying it and then people would do the, do the 'whatevers."" "TEENAGER: "Whatever, moron, get the picture."" ""You're a total loser."" "ROBERT:" "Hey, could I ask you some expressions and ask you what they mean?" "Uh, "tight."" "TEENAGER:" "Tiiiight." "ROBERT:" "How do you say it?" "Tiiight." "ROBERT:" "is it about appearance?" "catherine:" "Well, if you got a new car, and it's really nice, you say, "My new car is tight," you know?" "." "ROBERT: "Uber."" "TEENAGER:" "You can be an uber-nerd, it's like, it's like super nerd... or, uber-anything." "ROBERT: "F-O-B."" "TEENAGER:" "Asians who came to America not too recently." "Like, when you speak and you still have an accent, and, like, your English is still kind of fobby." "ROBERT: "Fobby?" "Word."" "TEENAGER:" "Like "l agree." Word." "ROBERT:" "How do you say it?" "TEENAGER:" "That test was so hard." "Word." "ROBERT:" "Meaning?" "TEENAGER:" "I agree." "ROBERT:" "Oh, the other person says 'word."" "Oh, I see." ""That test was so hard." Word." ""What's up?"" "TEENAGER:" "Wassup, girl?" "catherine:" "A lot of, like, those kinds of things come from, like, the rap and the rap music 'cause you hear them say, "Oh, my peeps," and "y'all, yo."" "TEENAGER:" "Guys always, like, they're walking and they see another guy and they're like, "Hey, 'sup."" "catherine:" "The middle seat in the back seat, like, it's the bitch seat, like, you're sort of like the bitch, like, you know, like, "You're my bitch."" "You know, sort of like that." "But we use "bitch" like, "Dude, you're my bitch"... or "so-and-so's gonna be my bitch"" ""for, like, Homecoming or whatever," you know?" "." "ROBERT:" ""l made that test my bitch."" "TEENAGER:" "You nailed that test, and, like, you aced it, or yeah, you did really well on it." "FOUGHT:" "Many people across the country are familiar with the California dialect from movies like "Clueless."" "It includes some shifts in the sound system." "So, for example, one of the things I've studied is "oo" fronting-- words that have "oo" in them in California English are often pronounced very close to the front of the mouth." "So the word "do" might be pronounced more like "do"... I do." ""Do."" "FOUGHT:" "Oh, very good." "That's it..."l do."" "And also words with "o"..." "go, "go."" "ROBERT:" "Go." "FOUGHT: "l'm going to go." Yeah, that's also common." "ROBERT:" "Put those together in some sentences that sound like Californian." "FOUGHT:" "You're gonna go?" "Oh my God?" "!" "You like him, you really do?" "I'm totally surprised." "I do, too, though." "ROBERT:" "And is that growing or is that just a passing thing that we recognized as Valley Girl or whatever it was called 20 years ago?" "FOUGHT:" "Oh no." "I can hear these features in radio announcers now... my age or older, on TV." "It's definitely--the California dialect is here to stay." "It's not just a passing fad." "ROBERT:" "What are some of your favorite examples of that?" "FOUGHT:" "Of California things?" "I like "l'm all." l think that's a very good one." "To be "all something" as a quotative, introducing quoted speech... so I'm all, "l don't think I'm gonna go,"" "and he's all, "l think you should."" "And I'm all, "Why?" and he's all," ""'Cause it'll be fun." And I'm all, "l don't think so."" "et cetera." "ROBERT:" "It suddenly occurred to me, do men speak Valley Girl?" "FOUGHT:" "Ah, that's such a good question and it's one I wanted to explore." "Men speak surfer dude." "ROBERT:" "Surfer dude?" "Yes." "PLOMARlTY:" "Dude, that was gnarly." "That peak just jacked up so quick." "There was no way, man." "I got thrown with that lip, couldn't even get to my feet." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Surfer dudes and surfing slang have had a seminal effect on California speech." "PLOMARlTY:" "Dude, I sunk my inside rail on that turn, man." "Man, that was lame." "ROBERT:" "So much new language is generated by the California culture of being extremely energetic in the sun." "Where better to start than Ventura County and Surfer's Point, and the place where many surfers hang out, the Bad Ass Cafe." "In the 1 960s, the Beach Boys were the first to put surf slang into hit songs like "Surfin' Safari."" "ROBERT:" "Hi." "PLOMARlTY:" "Hi there." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "I've come to the Bad Ass Cafe to meet someone who lives to surf." "ROBERT:" "You busy?" "PLOMARlTY:" "Not too much today." "The surf's too good?" "Surf's too good, for sure...for sure." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "George Plomarity has qualified as a paralegal, but he prefers to work here at the Bad Ass." "PLOMARlTY:" "...three bucks please." "ROBERT:" "Yes." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "What he earns here pays for his passion:" "to surf." "When he finishes work," "George agrees to take me for a ride in his classic Volkswagen minibus and show me world famous Rincon Point." "PLOMARlTY:" "I've had this car about seven months now." "Oh really, you haven't had it since 1 970?" "PLOMARlTY:" "No, I haven't even been alive since 1 970." "I was only born in '75!" "Right." "Oh, oh God." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "California speech seems to be having a growing influence on mainstream American." "PLOMARlTY:" "When we get out to Rincon, you'll see." "The Point actually comes all the way into here before it ends." "These little guys are surfing a spot called The Wall." "That's a fun little surf spot." "That single fin's gonna killer." "This is gonna be great." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "I want to know if surf slang is still shaping California speech." "PLOMARlTY:" "Wow, there's a lot of people in the water." "Look at that great wave..." "That guy's still going on it!" "He's gonna set up for on the inside." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "20 years ago for our TV series" ""The Story of English,"" "we filmed a rock band called the Surf Punks." "I started by showing George a clip from our old film." "ROBERT:" "I think it'll interest you." "SURFER:" "So, uh, Mark, what'd you do today?" "MARK:" "Well, like, you know, I got this new stick and I was, like, cranking on some radical tubes." "SURFER:" "Oh yeah, sure." "How big was it?" "MARK:" "It was, like, radically overhead, man..." "SURFER:" "Oh, give it up." "This is take two, "Life's a Beach."" "PLOMARlTY:" "That's great." "SURF PUNKS:" "So check it out, dude, you know, like, I was cruisin' the beach yesterday" "And, you know, the waves, they were totally crankin' I mean, it was really hot" "SURFER:" "These certain words find their way into the whole language, and some, it's pretty off the wall." "In surfing, when the wave curls over, that's, like, "the tube," or "the pocket."" "So if you're in the tube, you're taking the highest risk and you're very rad." "SURFER:" "I saw this chick, and she had a totally tight bod, and she was totally buff, and that, that means that she is in shape and she's clean, and she's looking good." "SURFER:" "Well, some guy's wearing some rad outfit, and just go, "Wow, man, that's rad, that's pretty gnarly."" "SURFER:" "Cookin'." "SURFER:" "Look at this:" "we all, the same watches;" "they're totally rad." "SURFER:" "Way rad." "Way rad." "ROBERT:" "So is that stuff still current?" "PLOMARlTY:" "Yeah, I think it is." "I think it is." "Those words are all used and definitely, like, find their way into vernacular speech, you know." "You can hear everyone describing things as "rad,"" "or, you know, or people being like, like "hot,"" "or truly radical." "A lot of those phrases that came out in the early '80s, got co-opted, you know." "They got taken over by, like, some corporate people that use them to schlog t-shirts." ""To the max," that's a wonderful example of something that was taken by Pepsi in the '80s, you know, and just whored until it's not used anymore." "ROBERT:" "What are some of the new expressions?" "PLOMARlTY:" "Uh, "full on." Full on's a great example." "Uh, "off the wall;" he uses that." "That's another phrase you hear a lot, you know, or "right on," or "fully," or like..." "ROBERT:" "Fat?" "PLOMARlTY:" "That was "phat," like a phat air." "It's "phat" like with a "ph."" "ROBERT:" "And "phat air" means going off the wave, in the air?" "PLOMARlTY:" "Exactly, exactly, and being really high." "Surfers themselves have just moved into the mainstream of the culture, and that's why their expressions are heading in that direction, you know." "We have, like, a lot of people that are professionals, they'd go out and surf in the morning, you know... get as crazy as they can and really push themselves to their limits, and then, you know, take a shower and go to the law office," "and they're going to carry over that language with them, you know." "And a great example of that would be, like, the phrase" ""caught inside."" "You know, you hear that all over the place in describing any situation where you suddenly have to, to try and deal with a whole lot of stuff coming at you at the same moment." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "It seems that surf slang remains as vigorous and inventive as ever." "Listen to George describe the perfect "ride."" "PLOMARlTY:" "You know, waves break in sections, so you can talk about, like, wow, you know, that first section was sick." "You know, that drop was really heavy." "It made that bottom turn, came around, went through that mushy part, and then it just jacked on that second bowl, got that floater, came into the inside, and just cracked that lip as hard as I could," "set up for that barrel and just right out into the green room, man." "Sick." "ROBERT:" "That's very interesting." "Have you done any writing on the language?" "PLOMARlTY:" "No, not really." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "New language always grows at the cutting edge of life, and California's lifestyle is nothing if not cutting edge." "STEVE BADlLLO:" "We use a lot of terms that help describe skateboarding... goofy foot, regular foot, switch, going fakey." ""Rippers"...you know, "ripping," are just adjectives to describe kids or skaters that are just ripping, tearing it up out there on the course and just having a good time and ripping." "When you get into a park and there's a lot of guys skating, and everyone's hyping each other on and everyone's trying to outdo each other, you know, that's the time to just really go out" "and, you know, blast the biggest airs you can, and do the longest grinds you can, and just perform as best you can." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Steve Badillo's slang is so far out for me, that he needs to translate almost every other word." "BADlLLO:" "In skateboarding, one little false move, one little thing off, and you're, you're slamming, you're taking a fall." "But I like blasting airs, for sure." "ROBERT:" "And that's what you were doing over the doorway here?" "BADlLLO:" "Sure." "That was a frontside air over the gap." ""Coping" is basically the steel pipe or plastic pvc that's on the tops of the lip of the ramps." "We call it "coping."" "ROBERT:" "That's what you grind on?" "BADlLLO:" "That's what you grind on and do the tricks on is on the coping." "Street skating, vert skating, pool skating and downhill bombing-- which, you know, most skaters love-- just the basic natural form ofjust going down a hill and going as fast as you can and carving it up" "and having fun with it." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "There's a whole new lexicon for snowboarders." ""Sticking it clean"" "means pulling off a trick to perfection." "If you can repeat the trick again and again, you've got it "dialed in."" "GOFF:" "That's sick." "That's the super..." "like, super sick stuff." "ROBERT:" "Sick?" "GOFF:" "Yeah, it's pretty much sick." "Like, someone goes off and does something, and stomps it clean, then that's-- you're gonna, like, give him props and that's gonna be something sick." "And it's gonna raise the level of riding and just get everybody amped up." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Jayk Goff's snowboard lingo isn't the only thing that fascinates me about his speech." "Young Californians, and now much of the world, say "like" where we once said "um" or "er."" "And they use "like" to mean "quote - unquote."" "Jayk uses "like" 1 3 times, in both senses, in the next 74 words." "GOFF:" "l--like, what I say, "like" sometimes people just don't understand it." "Like, l--like, my terminology for certain things, which is, like, like for my clique, my group, of, like, my friends, like, nobody else understands it." "so if I go someplace else, or someplace new, they are, like, they don't know it, so, like, and they're like, what are you talking about?" "ROBERT:" "Hi." "I'm from Public Broadcasting." "We're here to do some filming." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Wars and armies have always added words to our language..." "drill instructor:" "Loud and viscious on the pivot!" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "...words like "shock and awe,"" ""collateral damage," and 'weapons of mass destruction."" "The U.S. military has always been a forcing ground for social change." "They were among the first national institutions to confront racism and segregation." "Now they're on the frontline of the war on sexism." "The Marine Corps drills this into its new recruits." "SCOTT McLAUGHLlN:" "There's a green zone, a yellow zone, and a red zone." "The green zone would be just a normal interaction between male and female." "The yellow zone would probably be the sort of comments where it could be taken as something that may be sexually oriented or may cause someone to feel uncomfortable." "The red zone is considered just to be a blatant sexual remark, like, "Check him or her out," "look what they have there,"" "or "l want to get some of that."" "denise RUlZ:" "How has the language changed as far as..." "ROBERT:" "The way, the way the men talk." "RUlZ:" "Like cursing and telling jokes?" "Yeah." "RUlZ:" "Like I said, it all depends on how you are." "If you can tell a joke just as good as they can, laugh, tell yours, too." "If you're the type that you don't wanna hear jokes like that, you tell them that." "And they should respect that." "If you'd like it hey, by all means." "If you don't, say something." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The military reflects what's happening in society at large." "The triumph of political correctness, or euphemism, perhaps, but in language these days," "Americans seem reluctant to give offense to anyone." "ROBERT:" "What is the Marine Corps policy on gays in the Marines?" "ANDY BEAVERS:" "Marine Corps policy on homosexuals in the military is that we don't ask, and they don't offer that information up." "Basically, the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy." "ROBERT:" "And is that working?" "BEAVERS:" "I think it is, sir." "TOM AMMlANO:" "Happy Gay Day!" "Alright, Happy Gay Day!" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Gay Pride Day in San Francisco..." "Tom Ammiano, a gay comedian in the 1 980s, ran for mayor in 2003." "Today, many of the words Tom uses to describe the march-- queen, queer, fag, dyke-- would once have been seen as offensive, homophobic." "But today, these women delight in calling themselves "dykes on bikes."" "AMMlANO:" "Dyke and bikes is always a thrill." "Dykes on bikes-- which always traditionally starts off the parade because we're now accumulating a history." "You'll see the S  M community and the leather community, the cross-dressing drag queen community-- gay cops--always have a big contingence in that group-- gay clergy." "You'll even see--yes, my friends--gay Republicans." "I used to do a joke about them about their cheer being," ""We're here, we're queer, we're sorry."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The word "queer" was once a hot topic for the committee that organizes the Gay Pride March." "calvin gibson:" "I think the Pride Committee got very radical in 1 993 when the theme for the parade was "The Year of the Queer."" "That forced us, that placed it on a national platform, the word "queer."" "ROBERT:" "Calvin, is it analogous to some blacks calling themselves "nigger" nowadays, but being very offended if..." "if some white person" "gibson:" "That's..." "that's exactly... that's exactly what it is." "ROBERT:" "And how do you describe that movement of the word?" "What..." "why has it evolved like that?" "gibson:" "I believe it's because people feel disempowered, and this is one way to empower themselves." "If we can use the word "queer" so many times that it just becomes a normal word in our language without any consequence, then I think we see ourselves as being more empowered." "So it sort of proves the point that you can change the meaning of words." "AMMlANO:" "We're here, we're proud, we're not hiding, and we want to take away any of the prejudices and want to say to you, "l'm not going to hide it"" ""so that you can continue to persecute us."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The ability to speak and understand language almost defines what it is to be human." "But some human abilities are increasingly being matched, or surpassed, by computers." "Today, in fact, the cutting edge of research in Silicon Valley involves teaching computers to speak to us, and understand us, and thus be easier to use." "That research raises fundamental questions about American speech and about language itself." "To learn more about all this, I've come to meet Cliff Nass, a professor here at Stanford University." "NASS:" "Humans are what we call "voice activated."" "The minute the brain hears something that sounds even remotely like human speech, we bring to bear all the rules and expectations that we do when dealing with other people." "So we listen for the same cues-- what's the gender of the voice?" "What's the emotion?" "What's the personality?" "How should I speak back?" "What are my expectations and understanding?" "And we basically can't help it." "ROBERT:" "And so, what sort of things do they do?" "NASS:" "Well, they respond with politeness and a whole range of other responses." "ROBERT:" "So it isn't such a bad joke that Canadians say thank you to their automatic teller machine, is it?" "NASS:" "No, in fact, it's highly natural, and it's probably much harder to avoid saying it than to say it." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Voice-activated technology has enormous commercial possibilites." "The German automaker BMW hired Cliff Nass to research the right voice for its latest luxury sedan." "A BMW salesman let me test drive the vehicle and the voice Cliff chose for it." "COMPUTER:" "Navigation menu." "You have selected the following entry..." "ROBERT:" "It talks to you." "I mean..."Telephone."" "COMPUTER:" "Pardon me?" "Telephone." "COMPUTER:" "Telephone menu." "ROBERT:" "You see, then it keeps asking you." "Oh, it didn't like what I said, so it turned it off." "NASS:" "So one of the things, the first consideration in choosing a voice is should it be male or female." "In fact, in the original German version of the interface, they chose a female voice." "And German reactors reacted very negatively saying that, "l don't wanna be told how to drive by a woman."" "And, in fact, they actually had a product recall requiring them to, in fact, have a male voice instead." "ROBERT:" "But what about American men?" "I mean, they're much more amenable to being told by women how to drive, aren't they?" "NASS:" "Well, I don't know that they'd wanna pay extra for it, though." "ROBERT:" "So just tell me, what your input was in arriving at the voice that the BMW uses?" "NASS:" "We've generated about 25 models-- everything from Knight Rider to Hal, the computer in "2001 ,"" "to the guy who's usually the main buck on the stage coach-- a sort of wacky older guy who rode shotgun-- to a best friend, to a golfing buddy, etc., and went through all those and said, which one" "would best fit the positioning of the BMW automobile." "We then went through and listened to hundreds and thousands of voices to come up with those that sounded like a co-pilot-- male, slightly younger than the average age of the driver so they wouldn't feel threatened... a masculine voice, but not overly masculine... speaks relatively slowly" "so that it doesn't feel like he's trying to take control." "And from that, we then selected the voice." "ROBERT:" "Are other products than cars going to have voices and personalities, too?" "NASS:" "There's going to be a spread of voice technologies from the high end to lower-end things, more and more products having those technologies." "And then there are gonna be the issues of how do we integrate them all?" "Do we want a cacophony of voices in our home screaming for attention at various times?" "ROBERT:" "Oh my god, you get home after a hard day, and 1 5 things in the house trying to talk to you." "NASS:" "It's not clear that people are gonna want to have long conversations with their toasters or refrigerators." "You have to design around that problem." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "The way we react to voices becomes much more complicated when we can also see who's talking." "NASS:" "This is Baldy, and what's special about Baldy is he is able to say anything you want him to say with extremely good lip movement that matches what he says." "ROBERT:" "Get him to say something." "NASS:" "Okay, what would you like him to say?" "ROBERT:" "Um, how about..." "my name is Baldy, welcome to the Stanford lab." "NASS:" "I'm going to type that in and then we'll just have Baldy repeat it." "Baldy:" "My name is Baldy." "Welcome to the Stanford lab." "ROBERT:" "What about a real human with a synthesized voice?" "NASS:" "Well, we can show you what that looks like." "Image: "Windfall" is the story of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances." "Ben Linedburg is a financially- challenged English professor with a wife and two kids..." "NASS:" "That mismatch leaves people to think that he's less intelligent." "They trust the synthetic voice less, and trust his face less, than if he spoke like "a real person."" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "In experiment after experiment," "Cliff Nass has found that this kind of mismatching creates mistrust." "Baldy is not trusted when he speaks with a real human voice." "Baldy is more trusted, and more liked, when he speaks with his synthetic voice, because he, himself, is synthetic." "The implications of this research become really serious when mismatching is applied to race and gender." "ROBERT:" "Oh!" "NASS:" "Here we see a picture of you." "Image:" "Do I speak American?" "NASS:" "Here, we're using a technology called "veepers."" "And what we were able to do is just take a still photograph of you-- you'll see that the face moves and blinks-- that's all being generated by the computer." "But, most powerfully, we can make you speak in different voices." "Image:" "If I spoke like this, would you hire me for a job requiring contact with the public?" "NASS:" "So we know immediately that that's a male, an older male speaking, a strong, deep voice-- suggesting credibility-- and it fits very well with the face we see." "Now we can ask the question, what would happen if that same face spoke with a voice that didn't match?" "And here's what that sounds like... Image:" "If I spoke like this, would you hire me for a job requiring contact with the public?" "ROBERT:" "That's funny." "I mean, it's...it makes me sound like a White Southerner." "NASS:" "Exactly, but, interestingly, that voice is not from a White Southerner." "That voice is the voice of John Baugh, who you spoke with earlier, and here's John Baugh saying the same sentence." "Image:" "If I spoke like this, would you hire me for a job requiring contact with the public?" "NASS:" "Even though those two voices were literally identical, people listening perceive them differently." "ROBERT:" "And we know he doesn't speak like that normally, he puts these accents on for his own research purposes." "Do you have him speaking with his own voice?" "NASS:" "Yeah, here's something we heard him say earlier..." "BAUGH:" "Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper." "NASS:" "That mismatch can lead to mistrust-- perceived lack of intelligence, unwillingness to purchase, etc." "ROBERT:" "You mean somebody seeing a Black, African American, speaking without an accent they consider appropriate, they mistrust?" "NASS:" "Exactly, and that wouldn't just apply to African Americans, that would apply to any ethnicities." "People, when they see a face, they bring to bear stereotypes of how that person should behave, think, and speak." "When those stereotypes run counter, people say there's something wrong here, and that mistrust has consequences." "ROBERT:" "As we've seen, all across the country there are stereotypes of the way people perceive some racially-associated accents, regional accents, and so on." "is this technology just going to reinforce those stereotypes?" "NASS:" "Whatever stereotypes people bring to bear when hearing a human speaking in a certain way, they bring those exact same stereotypes to bear when dealing with computers." "If the computer has a female voice, it will be perceived as doing stereotypically better in areas that are typically associated with women, for example, discussions of love and relationships." "It will be perceived as being a worse teacher of technical subjects, like physics." "ROBERT:" "So what will determine whether this use of computers and synthesized voices reinforce those stereotypical perceptions or is there the potential for erasing them?" "NASS:" "It's a great question." "It has the potential for both." "So, for example, let's say we know that this regional accent is stereotyped as being unintelligent, let's make sure we never use it in any application that would imply a need for intelligence, then those stereotypes would be strongly reinforced." "But let's say if we do the opposite, that would then, because of the way our brains are voice activated, would lead us to weaken that stereotype and potentially eliminate it." "ROBERT:" "Going back to the comedian who does the brain surgery jokes with a Southern accent, in other words, have all brain surgery instruction done with a Southern accent?" "NASS:" "Exactly." "That would tend to lead us, over time, to believe that, in fact, brain surgeons can be or should be Southern." "ROBERT: 9-0-3-6..." "COMPUTER:" "9-0-3-6, and next?" "ROBERT:" "Dial." "answering machine:" "Hi, you've reached Allison and David." "Please leave us a message and we'll get right back to you." "ROBERT:" "Hi, sweetie, lt's Daddy." "I'm driving along the coast of California on a beautiful sunny day, and I wondered how things are in Cambridge, Mass." "Anyway, talk to you soon, love." "Bye for now." "ROBERT:" "Navigation system." "COMPUTER:" "Navigation menu." "ROBERT:" "Navigation address book." "COMPUTER:" "Navigation menu." "ROBERT:" "Address Book." "COMPUTER:" "Pardon me?" "You have selected the following entry:" ""Help" takes you, at any time, to this general help." "With "Options," the possible command options are read out to you." "Help." "Yes or no?" "ROBERT:" "Yes, help...help." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Everything in the American experience, each new frontier encountered-- geographical, spiritual, technical-- has altered our language." "What kind of a frontier are we crossing by teaching computers our most fundamental human skill, to speak?" "That question leaves us one last stop on our journey." "From San Francisco, I follow the coast north to the city of Seattle an early start this morning to meet someone who's at the cutting edge of voice activated computers." "But his job at Microsoft keeps him so busy that the only chance we had to talk was on his drive to work." "XD Huang is an immigrant from China, and he's the man who's teaching our computers to talk to us." "HUANG:" "We want to bring this benefit to the computer so people can easily get information from computers." "ROBERT:" "is technology tending to homogenize language?" "HUANG:" "If you have a strong accent, computer will probably just ask you, "What?"" ""l'm sorry, what did you say?"" "If you've actually entangled with today's computer system, probably you have heard that many times." "I'll just park here, is that okay?" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Microsoft aims to develop computer programs that will recognize any American dialect." "Right now, however, business logic suggests an initial investment in speech that is easiest for computers to understand." "ROBERT:" "I think you told us earlier that if they sounded like CNN, they would be recognized by the computer?" "HUANG:" "If you use Standard American English, probably you will get the work done easier, faster." "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "So if XD Huang is right, voice activated computers could create an enormous drive towards a standardized American English." "People are always telling me that television has this effect." "But on this journey, we've seen that, in many ways," "Americans are talking less alike, not more." "And it seems to me that radio, television, and movies help us understand other ways of speaking, but they don't make us speak that way." "Perhaps computers will." "And if they do, we'll all end up sounding much more like one another-- or rather, sounding much more like our computers." "voice:" "Welcome to United Airlines flight information line." "Please enter or say the United flight number." "United 24." "voice:" "United flight 24 is scheduled to depart on time at 9 am from Seattle, Washington." "ROBERT:" "Hello?" "ROBERT MACNElL (VO):" "Will we all end up sounding like that?" "Personally, I don't think so." "We just aren't programmed that way." "Our rich diversity, the strong pull of local identity, the joys of newjargon and slang, are all too much part of who we are as Americans..." "and as human beings." "Well, I've reached the end of the road." "We began our journey on the ferry boat from Nova Scotia." "We end heading out from Seattle, heading not into the sunset of our language, as some fear, but a continuous new dawn." "ROBERT:" "As it comes to an end, what an experience this has been, this journey through the American language, and the people who speak it in all their variety and vitality, informality and creativity." "How to sum all that up?" "Certainly no better than Walt Whitman did, more than a century ago when he wrote," ""Our language is not"" ""an abstract construction of dictionary makers,"" ""but has its basis broad and low,"" ""close to the ground." Truer than ever." "And, like, how cool is that?" "ANNOUNCER:" "For the downlow, the skinny, and the 41 1 on how you speak American, visit us at PBS.ORG" "While you're there, get tips for starting your own PBS program club so you can continue to "speak American"" "with your friends and family." ""Do You Speak American?" is available on DVD for $69.95, or VHS for $59.95." "A companion book is available for $24.95 plus shipping." "To order, call 1 -800-336-1 91 7 or write to the address on your screen." ""Do You Speak American?" has been made possible, in part, by the National Endowment For The Humanities... promoting excellence in the Humanities." "Additional funding is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation..." "The Ford Foundation..." "Rosalind P. Walter and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations." "I am PBS..."