I went to see Knives Out over the weekend, mostly because Mrs. Darwin liked it, and I have some Thoughts about Daniel Craig's accent.
One useful tool for identifying accents is listening for what people do with the r sound, or checking on rhoticity. (Can you tell the title of this post is supposed to be a pun on rotisserie chicken, or is it too much of a stretch?) It's not much of a train ride from Edinburgh to York, but most Edinburgh natives will pronounce the r in "York" and most York natives will not. A Yorkshire accent is (usually) non-rhotic. If someone in Gladlyville directs you to the "fawth flaw" instead of the "fourth floor," you'll probably say, "Thanks, and where are you from?" -- because the Gladlyville dialect is rhotic.
So when Daniel Craig offered up a non-rhotic accent in Knives Out, it caused me to have an extended what-the-heck reaction. As some of you might recall, I spent about half of my childhood in the deep South and about half of my childhood in the upper South. As some of you might suppose given my enduring geekiness about language, I was intrigued by accents early on. I used to play a game with myself as a teenager, seeing if I could guess where a speaker was from. But then I moved to the Midwest for college/grad school/adult life, and in the intervening 30+ years accents everywhere have become more homogenized. Result: I am not confident about my guess-the-accent skills these days. But I was a little spluttery when I left the theater. "What was that about?" I asked Elwood in the parking lot. "That's only, like, deeeeeeep South. Like, coastal. Not Kentucky.*"
I came home and looked it up, and lo: non-rhotic Southern accents are indeed associated with the deeeeeep South and the coastal South. That blog post also talks about change across time in non-rhotic Southern accents, which is a connection I hadn't made on my own but which immediately rang true: non-rhotic Southern accents are much, much less common than they used to be. I discovered that Daniel Craig based his accent on Shelby Foote, and that's exactly why it sounded so implausible to me. Craig was born in 1968 -- so he's just a couple of years older than I am -- but it's mostly great-grandpas who sound like that these days. I have dozens of friends with some degree of twang in their speech, and yet I know no one under 60 with a non-rhotic Southern accent.**
Another thing that stood out to me was his choice to front velar nasals consistently, by which I mean that he kept turning -ing into in'. Climbin' the trellis, injectin' the medication, readin' the will, etc. Now this is an observation that my googling didn't corroborate, but I have the sense that Southern speakers only do that in informal situations. I might be talkin' to my kids or spendin' time with my siblings, but those verbs will turn back into talking and spending in a hot second if I'm a formal setting. (There's no such thing as a formal settin' in my idiolect.) A detective would not be conductin' an investigation, I don't think, because that's a more casual mode of speech and life doesn't get much more serious than a murder investigation. But I am curious about whether other speakers with Southern roots have the same feeling. I have only the faintest dregs of a Southern twang, and it only ever surfaces en famille.
*There are a couple of Kentucky references in the film, which is why the utterly un-Kentucky accent annoyed me. Only after I got home did I wonder if the family's slighting references to Kentucky were akin to their Uruguay / Paraguay / Brazil / Ecuador confusion -- a similar flavor of scorn for people who don't hail from these parts. Maybe we'll find out in a sequel that Benoit Blanc is actually from Savannah.
**My friend group is not a random sample, of course, and includes more people from the upper South than from the deep South.
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