Re: The Voice

Dear DePriest,

The short answer to your question is that if you speak the dialect of English known as black English vernacular, it is quite likely that someone would be able to tell that you are black by listening to your voice. I know you said you were not referring to dialects, but dialects really are at the heart of the matter, so I'm going to talk about them. Then I'll lay out some of the principal pronunciation features that identify black English. As you requested, I'll leave out references to grammar, but I'll provide a reference for some further reading. At the end, you'll have to decide whether the explanation I give applies to you.

Dialects

I'm sure you've noticed that Australians speak different than the British, who speak different than New Yorkers, who speak different than Southerners. These speakers are all using different dialects of English. A dialect is simply a variety of spoken language (Burling, 1973). All languages have dialects, and everyone, king and peasant alike, speaks a dialect of their language. From a linguistic point of view, all dialects are equally good, and no one dialect represents a "pure" version of a particular language. They all are able to express all of the ideas and concepts that humans might wish to communicate to one another.

Dialects arise when speakers are partially or fully isolated from one another's speech. People generally learn to speak like the people with whom they associate, their families and friends. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and I speak like others who grew up there. If I grew up in London, I would speak British English, and if I grew up in Sydney, Australia, I would speak Australian English. In each case, I would speak my dialect because a geographical barrier (the ocean) restricts my communication with others who speak differently. Likewise, social barriers, such as age, income or ethnic background, can isolate speakers and cause dialects to form. People from different social classes tend to live in slightly different areas, and tend to affiliate with others of their class. So, if I grew up in an affluent suburb, I would speak differently than if I grew up in a working class neighborhood, or in a poverty stricken section of the city, even if all of these places were in the same general geographical region. Given that the divide between black people and white people is arguably one of the greatest social divides in the United States, it is logical that blacks and whites would develop different dialects.

Style

One other factor can strongly influence a person's dialect: style. Style is the term used to refer to adjustments a person makes to their language to reflect their current social environment. For example, a person would likely use more formal words and grammar when delivering a eulogy than when drinking at a bar. They might use slang when speaking with a friend that they would never use when speaking to, say, an IRS agent. Or, to get more directly at your particular question, speakers are more likely to use vocabulary, pronunciations and grammatical constructions that more closely reflect the "standard dialect" (that is, the dialect with social superiority) when speaking to business associates, particularly if they're from a different geographical area or social class. These stylistic changes might tend to hide a native dialect. You'll have to determine whether style changes were a factor in your particular experience.

Now that we have considered what a dialect is, let's turn to the question of whether you can tell if a person is black or white from their voice. You can't.

The reason you can't is that the dialect a person speaks is not determined by their ethnic background, or skin color, or religion, or any other inheritable trait. It is determined by the dialect of those they were around when they were learning to speak, those with whom they most associate in their daily lives, and the current social situation they are in.

What you can tell, however, is if a person speaks a particular dialect of English. And it turns out that many black people do speak a particular dialect of English called black English. It is the pronunciations, vocabulary and grammar of black English that people are referring to when they say a person "sounds black".

So what are the clues? All of these examples are taken from Burling, 1973.

(In the interests of space, I am going to restrict my comments to major pronunciation rules for black English. If you have interest in other dialect features, such as grammar, you can look in the reference at the end.)

1. Black English speakers give special pronunciations to certain words. Examples include:

"Ask" pronounced as "axe"

"pattern" pronounced as "pattren"

"Threw" pronounced as "thew"

"po lice " pronounced as "po lice" (change of stress)

2. Black English speakers tend to pronounce their vowels with a southern type of pronunciation.

It is difficult to describe this without using phonetic transcription symbols, so your best bet is to try to get a person with a southern accent and a person with a northern accent to say the short word list I've provided, and listen for the vowel differences.

3. Black English speakers lose vowel contrasts that northern white speakers keep.

What this means is that black English speakers pronounce the vowels of certain words the same, and so can rhyme them, whereas northern white speakers would pronounce these vowels differently, and so could not rhyme the words. Examples include:

pride/find rhyme with prod/fond (if the vowel occurs before consonants b, d, g, n, m, r, l)

oil/boil rhyme with all/ball

Pin/bin/sinned rhyme with pen/ben/send (usually only if the vowel preceeds n)

Fear/peer/lure/poor rhyme with fair/pear/lore/pour

4. Black English speakers tend to pronounce consonants at the ends of words in special ways, or not at all. (All English dialects tend to lose final consonants over time, but for linguistic reasons black English loses them quicker than many other varieties of English.). Examples include:

TH pronounced as V ("With" = , "wiv")

Loss of R ("fourteen" = "fo'teen", "sure" = "show", "their" = "they")

Loss of L ("toll" = "toe", "bolt" = boat")

Loss of T and D ("last" = "lass", "left" = "leff", "told" = "toll")

Most of these consonant losses are also present in the speech of white northerners, but to a much smaller extent. For example, many white northern speakers might say "lass name" for "last name" or lose an R and rhyme "pour" with "paw" (loss of the "R" after a vowel is a particular feature of the New England dialect).

I hope that the foregoing has begun to answer your question. There are many elements to consider, and I have only outlined some of the highlights.

In constructing this answer, I have relied considerably on a book by Robbins Burling called English in Black and White (Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1973), particularly chapters 1 and 3. It is an older book, but in my opinion does a good job of describing the features of Black English, and does so in a way that is accessable to a non-linguist.

If you have any questions or comments, please send me an email.