Accent Copy Cat
After Dr. Freeman moved to Oklahoma, she started wondering what people mean when they say Oklahoma has a "country" accent. How is that different from Southern? So, senior Jenna Curran recorded Oklahomans reading a short story naturally and then in several other imitated accents, including "Southern" and "country," to see what features people used to set these two apart. Turns out: not much! Southern and Country imitations didn't differ much from each other, leading us to our preliminary conclusion that the Oklahoman "country" accent shares many features (at least the ones we've examined so far) with a Southern accent.
This was some of the first work in the Oklahoma English project. In the next step, "Name that Accent", we asked other Oklahomans to listen to the recordings and give their first impressions of the speakers based on each accent. Could they tell Southern, Country, and natural Oklahoman apart?
Presentations
(*student author)
- Freeman, V. & *Curran, J. (2020, January). "Is Country the same as Southern?” Characterizing the Oklahoma Country accent via imitations. Poster, American Dialect Society (ADS), New Orleans, LA.
- *Curran, J. & Freeman, V. (2019, November). Country or Southern: Does it even matter? Language and Linguistics Student Conference (LLSC), Edmond, OK.
Related work
- Part of the Oklahoma English project
- Part of the Country Accents project
- Next step: Name that Accent
Student Corner
Students
- Jenna Curran
Data and Materials
- Audio recordings of ~30 Oklahomans reading short stories naturally and in regional accents (e.g., country, Southern, British, New York, Californian, misc foreign). Half were CDIS students (college-age, female), half were not necessarily (mostly college-age females, some males and middle-age speakers)
- Extracted audio clips of sentences in Natural, Country, Southern from 4 female college students who had (impressionistically) "good" accent imitations (used as stimuli for the Name that Accent experiment)
- Praat TextGrids that timestamp every word and vowel with hand-corrected boundaries.
- Measurements (formants, duration) of vowels before coronals (e.g., /t, d, s/), some nasals and liquids (e.g. /n, m, r, l/).
- Basic demographics of the speakers.
- Passages and instructions on slides; recording procedures, flyers, consent forms, IRB forms, etc
- Preliminary descriptions of common themes -- see LLSC slides above.
Project Ideas
- What phonetic features do people use to make Country/Southern different from natural readings? ("eye" vowels, /r/ pronunciations, slow rate, elongating certain vowels...)
- What features to people use to imitate the other accents? How accurate are they to real speakers?
- What traits make someone a "good" imitator?
- See also: Ideas in the Record Yourself at Home Student Corner, which includes 113 Oklahomans reading the same short stories and some word lists (add those stories to the natural readings here for 144 Oklahomans' sentence/story readings)
- See also: Ideas from the Name that Accent experiment for how the recordings have been used so far.