Bernard Ollila
Philadelphia’s Language: The Most Influential and Advanced form of English in America
English spoken in America differs tremendously from English spoken in the language‟s motherland, Britain. The most significant difference between the language in England and the
United States does not lay in the vocabulary or slang of the countries, though. Linguistically, what sets the two countries apart the most is the way the language sounds in either place. In their book, Do You Speak American?, Robert MacNeil and William Cran note that what makes
American English so unique is the pronunciation of the letter r. However, the phonological revolution surrounding the letter r in the United States did not happen coincidentally, nor was it deliberate. It came as a result of immigration patterns during the original colonization of the
United States.
In American Voices, Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes note that the original
British colonial settlers migrated in groups according to their places of origin in the British Isles.
But, there was one territory in the colonies that was not as regionally correspondent in regards to its immigration patterns with Britain as the others, that territory being Philadelphia. In his study,
Ethnicity and National Origin among British Settlers in the Philadelphia Region, Ned Landsman establishes that Philadelphia‟s populace was an amalgamation of sorts regarding the nationalities of its settlers. Unlike the way in which Boston‟s first settlers can be traced back to a specific group of separatists, as Ryan Fitzpatrick mentions in Beantown Babble, Philadelphia‟s original settlers were a mix-up of primarily Scots and Irish, with some people from other areas of Britain and Europe.
Claudio Salvucci‟s Expressions of Brotherly Love indicates that Philadelphia‟s geographical position made it prone to newcomers and passers-by more so than any of the other Ollila 2 colonial settlements. This, in conjunction with the diversity of the city‟s settlers, changed the way English was spoken in Philadelphia, ultimately making the city the first to fully pronounce the letter r. Moreover, since people were so frequently coming and going in Philadelphia, the city‟s linguistic influence eventually spread to the west; and, today what was once a phonological trait exclusive to Philadelphia is, as Cran and MacNeil mentioned, what provides
American English not only with its most distinct trait, but also with its identity.
Although, Philadelphia‟s linguistic innovation is not restricted to its relationship with the pronunciation of the letter r. Research conducted by William Labov and other linguists documents the evolution of speech patterns in the United States. To be specific, the research mentioned pertains to a number of vowel shifts occurring in the United States today, which have been identified in the north, south, west, and in Philadelphia. While the rest of the country is embarking on a series of phonological evolutions in association to large geographical areas, for instance the northern cities and the area from Pittsburgh to California, the city of Philadelphia and its immediate neighbors are in the midst of a linguistic movement particular to that vicinity.
In his article, Phillyspeak, Jim Quinn summarizes in a more layman friendly manner the findings of the research conducted by Labov and his constituents.
But first, in order to understand the impact Philadelphia has had on the development of
American English, one must understand what initially made American English a distinct variant of the tongue. The people who colonized the United States immigrated from different parts of the
British Isles. The regions in Britain from which the first migrants came had their own morphological and phonological practices of English that made them differ, to some extent, from one another. These settlers occupied territories in the colonies in groups, with those from given regions in Britain remaining amongst themselves once they were in the states. Ollila 3
Traditional dialect divisions in the U.S. reflect differences first established in Colonial
America by people from different parts of the British Isles. These differences were
cemented in early cultural hubs such as Richmond, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston.
(Wolfram, 2)
Thus, if a person from a small town in Whales relocated to the colonies, he or she would not only do so as a part of a group, but would move to a territory that was occupied by others from the same small Welsh town. Today‟s distinguishable American accents didn‟t take very long develop once their originators moved to the colonies; what‟s more, each accent can be traced back to a given region.
Once the settlers were in the United States, their particular accents grew and became what they are today. But, most accents maintained features of the English spoken in Britain.
Today‟s American English is very distinguishable from its British mother tongue in several ways. “In the rest of the English-speaking world, probably the most characteristic sound in
American English is the fully sounded „r,‟” (Cran and MacNeil 49). Thus, the most significant feature of American English that separates it from British English is the r sound.
How could such a dramatic change in language take place? There had to be somewhere in colonial America where the r sound began to be pronounced fully. “Boston, New York,
Richmond, Savannah, and Charleston were „r‟-less. Philadelphia was the only exception, the only East Coast city originally to pronounce its „r‟s,” (Cran and MacNeil 49). Philadelphia was not only the birth place of the Declaration of Independence, but also the birthplace of the r sound in America.
As mentioned, the accents in America particular to given regions are the result of mass immigration from one specific area in the British Isles to another. The Philadelphia r is a direct Ollila 4 result of this. Just as Jim Fitzpatrick notes in Beantown Babble, the Boston accent can be traced back to a group of separatists from Lincolnshire (64), as the Philadelphia r can be traced back to the city‟s original settlers from Scotland and Ireland, particularly the areas of lowland western
Scotland, Belfast, Dublin, and Londonbery. In correspondence with this, Ned Landsman observes that the settlement of Philadelphia and its immediate surroundings were so diverse because of the city‟s location, between New York and Maryland (Landsman 172-3). Unlike the other major hubs mentioned by Wolfram, the immigration to Philadelphia wasn‟t done by large groups of people; rather, Philadelphia was settled in waves by a number of different groups.
As Caludio Salvucci points out in Expressions of Brotherly Love, while people were flooding into Philadelphia from overseas, there were also people moving from the north to the south, as well as people moving from the south to the north, bringing with them their languages and incorporating them with the cultural jumble that was Philadelphia‟s English.
Philadelphia‟s position along the Eastern seaboard has also greatly influenced its
linguistic development. Northern and Southern features have always competed in the
city, given its close proximity to both New York City and the Mason-Dixon line.
(Salvucci 90)
That‟s interesting, but how can Philadelphia be credited with being the primary source for
American English today if people were coming and going so haphazardly?
It is possible that Philadelphia shaped American speech more than any other city, because
the „r‟ sound that so typifies American English migrated west from Philadelphia. That
makes Philadelphia not only the cradle of American independence, but the cradle of what
we think of today as modern American language. (Cran and MacNeil 49). Ollila 5
Where the language in the original colonial settlements grew out of mass, factioned immigration, the waves of people and abruptness with which they came to Philadelphia fused their dialects together and formed the original pronounced r in American English. Moreover, the Philadelphia r moved from the city with the expansion of the United States to the western frontier.
The Philadelphia r has not only made its way westward, though. In New York City, the letter r has become a larger point of linguistic evolution which can be traced back to
Philadelphia. Though the r sound in New York is not used the same as it is in Philadelphia, it is still recognizable; but, the New York r is more of an intrusive sound rather than a natural one. In
Michael Newman‟s examination of speech in New York, New York Tawk, he illustrates the intrusiveness of the r.
New Yorkers sometimes maintain [the r], particularly when a final r sound comes right
before another word that begins with a vowel sound. Just as the r is sometimes
pronounced in lore and legend, so it can appear in law-r and order. When they are
speaking carefully New Yorkers even occasionally maintain r‟s when there is no
following vowel. You get the idear? (83)
So, the Philadelphia influence made its way to New York. However, New York hasn‟t quite fully developed the natural r sound that Philadelphia and the rest of the western United States has. The
New York r is thrown in, so to speak, at the end of words in certain dialectical situations.
The Philadelphia r had not seen the end of its expansion finally in the west and in New
York. As the New York r is heard, though intrusive, the r can be heard in modern Bostonian speech patterns as well. Like New York, though, the r sound in Boston is also a rather unnatural sound. Though the generalized Boston accent can be easily differentiated from the New York accent, the Boston r shares with the New York r in regard to the way in which the r appears in Ollila 6 places it shouldn‟t, particularly when the word that follows an r sound begins with a vowel. The
Boston r is, however, slightly less intrusive because the r is so rarely annunciated, and its use has been so stereotyped that it isn‟t quite as significant. Jim Fitzpatrick elaborates on this. “The icon of the Boston accent is its r-dropping after a vowel sound, so that Spider Man‟s alter ego is
„Petah Pahkah.‟ However, some of these r‟s are not lost forever; they reappear across word boundaries when the following word begins with a vowel,” (66). So, the original Philadelphia r has undoubtedly moved north as well as west.
The influence of the Philadelphia r can be seen as one travels west of the city, as the country to Philadelphia‟s west uses the letter as Philadelphia originally had. However, the original cultural hubs, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston have continuously changed over the years. Furthermore, since the west has not been colonized for as long as the original settlements, that area maintains a specific dialect and speech pattern that has not changed much. In fact, one could travel clear across the country to California and hear only one specific dialect (Cran and MacNeil 31). That is not to say that areas like Texas and other south western regions have not developed linguistically; what they have in common with Philadelphia as opposed to the other original colonial settlements is the pronunciation of the letter r.
Evidently, Philadelphia‟s English was fundamentally different and innovative during the time of American colonization, and it remains so today. Around the turn of the 20th century, a vowel shift occurred in the United States which was, as the spread of the r sound had been, attributed to Philadelphia, though not as much. Nonetheless, R. Whitney Tucker recognized this pattern and hypothesized whether or not another American language trend was going to come from Philadelphia. Ollila 7
Do the Philadelphia…vowel sounds foreshadow in a similar way a future generalized
development of English? And if so, could this be considered as only a continuation of the
series of vowel shifts which have characterized Modern English since the end of the
fifteenth century? (42).
Tucker‟s research was done in the early part of the twentieth century. The impact of Philadelphia on American English from the initial colonization of America to the time of Tucker‟s research had shown that it would have been quite possible to theorize that the vowel shift in Philadelphia could lead to another nationwide linguistic phenomenon. However, it didn‟t play out quite the way Tucker proposed.
According to William Labov‟s Principles of Linguistic Change, Tucker was right about large geographical vowel shifts. Although, there are currently several, those being the northern city vowel shift, the northeastern vowel shift, the southern vowel shift, and the western vowel shift, and a vowel shift in Philadelphia which remains uncategorized because of its geographical exclusivity; but, Philadelphia has a large part of Labov‟s research dedicated to it.. What makes the Philadelphia vowel shift significant? According to Labov, “It appears as though that the particular pattern of vowel shifting found in Philadelphia is indeed characteristic of that city,”
(124). Labov goes on to add that the language in Philadelphia is more advanced than anywhere else in the United States because of not only the vowel shift, but also because the language remains the most conservative and intermediate (129). Basically, the language in Philadelphia is conservative and intermediate in that it changes based on what happens within its proximity, unresponsive to the influence of outside linguistic development whatsoever.
During an NPR interview in 2006, Labov discussed, in much simpler terminology, the findings of the research that appears in Principles of Linguistic Change regarding the current Ollila 8 vowel shifts in the north, northeast, south, and west. According to Labov, “the short vowels in
Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester began to move. It‟s called the northern city shift.” Labov provides the example of the pronunciation of the word block. To people outside of the areas of the northern city shift, the people who fall into the category of the northern city shift pronounce block the same as black. When a sample of their pronunciation was given to subjects from outside the northern city shift region, they couldn‟t discern the words being spoken by the northerners.
In support of the previous assertion that from Philadelphia and westward there can be one dialect seen, Labov‟s observation pertaining to the western vowel shift from Pittsburgh to Los
Angeles, a merger of vowels is taking place, shifting from their traditional pronunciations. “Half of this country has a merger of the word classes, cot, caught, don, dawn, hock, hawk,” (NPR).
These words are beginning to sound the same from Pittsburgh all the way to Los Angeles.
Furthermore, with the exception of Philadelphia, Labov says that the northeastern and southern cities, among their most significant vowel changes, are experiencing changes that can be exemplified through the shift in the sound of the words do and dew, the former merging with the latter. It is, according to Labov, a sound bearing striking resemblance to the French ieu sound.
In contrast to the vowel shifts taking place in Labov‟s specified areas, the shift occurring in Philadelphia is certainly different. Jim Quinn, a Philadelphia native and columnist, in his article Phillyspeak, presents the findings of Labov and other linguists in a more colorful, layman- friendly discussion.
Philadelphians talk great. Our dialect is so unique the University of Pennsylvania has had
a whole department, led by William Labov, one of America‟s most distinguished
linguists, studying it for more than 25 years…All language is changing. But Philadelphia Ollila 9
is changing language more, and changing it faster, than anywhere else in the English-
speaking world. (Quinn)
Quinn‟s presentation of the conclusions made by Labov and other linguists regarding the ways in which modern Philadelphian English is unique beyond that of the English spoken in the other shifting areas offers not only vowels, but also glottal stops, and the pronunciation of specific words that are exclusive to Philadelphia.
To begin, the pronunciation of the letter o in Philadelphia is quite different from everywhere else in the United States. The Philadelphia o begins with the mouth shaped as though it were about to make an eh sound and ends shaped as though it had made a long oo sound.
Where someone from anywhere else in the United States would rome the streets, a Philadelphian would rehooam the streets.
If you ask a person from Philadelphia who their favorite football team is, they more likely than not would say the Iggles. A characteristic of modern Philadelphian English recognized by
Labov‟s research is that long e sounds, as well as long a sounds coming before the letter g are shortened. What‟s more, the Philadelphia a sounds like it‟s from Boston in some instances, and from the west in others! Philadelphians mix how they pronounce a sounds according to the context in which the word appears. So, in Philadelphia, I rahn from a bad man holding a fan, a ham, and a hahmmer.
Finally, in Philadelphia, the letter t is spoken very distinctively in comparison with other places in the United States. Glottal stops in Philadelphia are commonplace during conversation.
Before the consonants m, n, and l, Philadelphians leave out sounds that normally complete the word in accepted traditional American vernacular. For instance, a Philadelphian who has to go to the dentist but doesn‟t want to cross the Walt Whitman Bridge would say, I made a commi’men Ollila 10 to go to the dennis but I didn’t wanna cross the Wall Women Bridge. Furthermore, for words like these, them, and those, a Philadelphian says dese, dem, and dose. This may sound like it occurs in other areas as well; it does, but in Philadelphia, the d sound replacing the th is very soft and unstressed. However, with the word the, the d sound may come out like an a, as in what’sa trouble.
In conclusion, the city of Philadelphia has served as the source for the most influential dialectical trend that has shaped American English as we know it. The silent r sound traditionally incorporated in speech was brought from England to the original colonies and remained in practice in the key cultural hubs, with the exception of Philadelphia. Philadelphia began the pronunciation of the r as a result of the extremely diversified cultural mix that was flooded into the city. Because of Philadelphia‟s geographical location, it was prone to not only the newest immigrants, but also travelers headed to the western frontier. Thus, those who passed through the city brought with them the most distinguishable dialectical trend the city had to offer: its r.
Though Philadelphia may have helped shape American English in the most significant of ways, over the course of time the city refrained from taking part in the trends that came to be associated with the r pronunciation in the characterization of American English. Where the north, northeast, west, and south are experiencing vowel shifts that encompass several cities and a great deal of land mass, the vowel shift happening in Philadelphia is exclusive to only that city and its immediate neighbors. W.C. Fields once said, “Last week, I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed.” There really is no better analogy to describe the language trend in Philadelphia since its early settlement than Fields‟s assessment.
Philadelphian English is an advanced form of the language as far as linguists are concerned, unresponsive to, and noticeably different from the outside. As Jim Quinn says, “A Ollila 11 person may have „a terrible Philadelphia accent.‟ To linguists, the person is a fascinating
„advanced speaker.‟” Aside from being the second capital of the United States, as well as the birthplace of American Independence and several notable American public figures, the city of
Philadelphia has made a contribution to a feature of America‟s identity: its language.
Furthermore, as the city‟s phonology was so starkly inconsistent with the rest of the United
States centuries ago, it remains so today.
Ollila 12
Works Cited Fitzpatrick, Jim. "Beantown Babble." American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Ed. Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. 63-69. Print. Labov, William. "American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift." Interview by National Public Radio. National Public Radio. 16 Feb. 2006. Radio. Labov, William. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. Print. Landsman, Ned C. "Ethnicity and National Origin Among British Settlers in the Philadelphia Region." JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2009.
Newman, Michael. "New York Tawk." American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Ed. Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. 82-87. Print. Quinn, Jim. "Phillyspeak." Editorial. Citypaper 14-21 Apr. 1997. City Paper. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.
Salvucci, Claudio. "Expressions of Brotherly Love." American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Ed. Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. 88-92. Print. Tucker, R. Whitney. "Notes on the Philadelphia Dialect." American Speech 1 (1944): 37-42. Print.
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. "Language Evolution or Dying Tradition? The State of American DIalects." American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Ed. Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. 1-10. Print.