Accent Expert Breaks Down 4 Amazing Things About Languages | WIRED

hi I'm Eric singer I'm a dialect coach so in the technique critique videos where we talk about accent performances movies Margot Robbie is really a fantastic accent performer I don't know if and have time to go into depth about this or that aspect of language and today I want to talk about some mind-blowing facts about language and linguistics so let's just talk about the inventory of speech sounds in a language English has about forty to forty four distinct speech sounds depending on the accent the variety of English and we're talking about sounds that can make the difference between one word and another [Music] English has an e sound and an S sound which can change the meaning of a word beat is different from bit other languages may not have both of those sounds in them what is the largest number of speech sounds that a language can have turns out it's somewhere between ninety and a hundred and ten depending on how you count them a lot of the languages with the largest sound inventories turn out to be click languages because there are lots of ways that you can combine those clicks let's have a look three clicks or C which is pronounced on the flip side what is the smallest number of sounds that a language can function with turns out it's about ten or eleven the piraha language in the Amazonian Basin is one of those languages yeah so there's a huge variety there in the ways different languages work and that doesn't mean anything about a particular language or its people or the way they think or what they're able to express language is just working differently it's a huge variety next up the great vowel shift [Music] so one of the fundamental facts about language kind of the fundamental fact about language that we know from linguistics which is the scientific study of language is that it changes one period of really interesting fast sound change in the history of English is something called the great vowel shift starting around 1400 a word that we know is named around 1400 used to be nama and then that the middle changed to AH so we had Nam then it was an a so we had men then it was a long a so we had name and then finally it came to the diphthong that most varieties of English have now something like name so it was a long distance to travel another example would be the vowel sound and a word like house started off as ooh so it was a hoose Val santanu word like time started off as an e so it was team and over time it became to be time and that was a period of really rapid and complete change but it's an example of the kind of thing that's happening all the time so why does this happen we don't know really for no reason at all again if there's something we know from the scientific study of language the field of linguistics it's that language change is essentially arbitrary moving on the American are sound I've talked about that in some performances and some of the technique critique videos as being a really hard or American English has a really weird R sound this thing that you do when you bunch up your tongue this is a really weird sound it barely exists in any other language on earth really mastering this kind of our sound and being able to slot it fluidly into a flow of speech is one of the hardest things for an actor to learn when they're learning American English in fact native speakers of American English find it really hard to it's one of the very last sounds that a child learns and kind of masters so why is it so hard it turns out it's really complicated it's a weird set of things we're doing with our tongue when we make that sound mostly the weirdest thing is that the sides of the tongue are sort of coming out you can imagine kind of if I'm a tongue and I'm raising my shoulders the size of those tongue will come up and they'll make contact with the upper teeth the molars and the bicuspids on either side and you can have a really strong version of that where they come all the way up inside and even press out against the sides of the upper teeth you can get a sense of this if we look at an MRI scan of a person pronouncing this kind of molar are let's have a look real in addition to that the root of the tongue is often pulling back in and you can even get a little groove in the back of the tongue so all of those things going on it's a really complex articulation hard to get right if you're a kid hard to get right if it's not your native language moving on there's this accent that often gets called transatlantic or mid-atlantic as though somebody were maybe born on an island halfway between the US and England you can hear a great example of this accent here build these foams out at the desk over there and bring them to me there's another great one here you mind if I ask you a personal question what are the things that's really interesting about it is it's essentially a made-up accent it's synthetic it's not a way that anybody talks natively I think so this is an accent that was essentially invented in its earliest form by one guy an Australian named William Tilley who at the end of the 19th century thought that there might be something to be gained by everybody who spoke English speaking exactly the same way so he devised this accent that was sort of the best accent of English it was correct speech and he wanted everybody everywhere to speak this it became a thing in the United States where he was teaching I was taught in the New York City Public Schools and it became the accent of stage and screen and so actors were taught to speak this way that this was correct speech so the early version of a dialect coach I was usually called an elocution teacher was really different essentially because they were teaching actors to speak correctly not teaching actors how to speak like the character that they were playing so this mid-atlantic accent this perfect correct speech that's this synthetic created accent I wouldn't love to put the world and all the men he'll so that's why we hear that in the old movies all the time so this has been a few kind of cool things about language things I think are cool thanks for listening [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,645,460

Rating: 4.9767895 out of 5

Keywords: accents, erik singer accents, erik singer, accent expert, wired accent expert, accent expert wired, language, dialect coach, dialect coach erik singer, erik singer dialect coach, dialect coach erik singer wired, erik singer wired, accents erik singer, human language, facts about language, language facts, dialect, laguages, languages, different accents, wired accent videos, wired accent video, accent expert languages, erik singer languages, amazing language, wired

Id: 5aXmNle560k

Length: 6min 57sec (417 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Bobbias]

It's a shame they don't make these videos longer from. They get some really interesting people, but the videos are so short that there's barely any real content in them.

[u/scharfes_S]

Just a (very) cursory overview of a few concepts by Wired and Erik Singer, different from their other videos where he discusses actors' accents in various roles.

[u/InternationalYellow9]

Wow, the youtube video that briefly appears on clicks is one of the first linguistics related videos I remember watching on youtube,

Xhosa Lesson 2. How to say "click" sounds by Khayav:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31zzMb3U0iY

[u/ohmarin]

love this dude

[u/the_hoagie]

This is very interesting, but I can't get over how much the host looks like he could be Glenn Howerton's older brother.

[u/30Litresof]

I really appreciate him making the point that number of sounds doesn't correlate to anything about the culture a language comes from, complexity of thought in that language etc., especially given this is for a mainstream audience. It's such a common misconception when people learn that languages have different numbers of sounds - though for some reason, the people who want to claim that languages with fewer sounds are "inferior" don't usually consider click languages the pinnacle of human linguistic achievement. I wonder why...

[u/_nardog]

I don't understand why he keeps referring to the bunched (molar) R as the American R. I'm pretty sure both bunched and apical R are found on both sides of the pond.

[u/Gatherer_S_Thompson]

How do they know what words sounded like hundreds of years ago?

[u/Jeanpuetz]

I love this dude.

Quick question though, isn't it a bit too simplistic to say that "we don't know" why language changes? I get the point that he's trying to make: Language change always happens, and it's usually arbitrary, and it's hard to predict or explain.

But there are plenty of theories and explanations for specific instances of language change, are there not? One of the most obvious ones that comes to mind are loan words - you can expect the lexis of a language to change when a language influences another one, for example due to invasions and occupations (looking at you, England). Plus, aren't plenty of linguists already trying to predict which features of a language might change in the near future?