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Why some American accents have endured — while others have faded away

The history of how we talk mirrors the history of the country.

On Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we hear a lot of stories from listeners. Recently, we asked people to tell us about their accents: what they love about them, things they’ve noticed. The response was huge; we got the most responses we’ve ever gotten.

This was not a surprise to Valerie Fridland. She’s a sociolinguist and author of the book Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. “Accents are something that we share only with those people we most love and hold dear and who we saw ourselves to be in the foundational eras of our life,” she said. “It’s close to us in ways that language more generically isn’t.”

How did the modern American accent develop? And what do accents reflect about us? We answer that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Fridland, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Where did the American accent come from in the first place?

If you went back to [the year] 1600, you would probably think, “What the hell are you all saying around me? Because I don’t understand a thing.”

We start our accent journey in America with the first British colonists that came. It seems odd, because there are other colonists that were here [already], and there were indigenous languages that were here. So that isn’t the first language story of America. But the most pivotal voices for establishing that original American accent were those early British colonists. Those set up what we call “founders effects”: these sort of cultural and linguistic areas that........

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