Rhoticity Checkin'

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.

Comments

[MrsDarwin]

I sometimes wondered if Benoit Blanc was playing up his accent a la Hercule Poirot, for the sake of putting the suspects off their guard.

My southern family is from Baton Rouge, which has a very soft, refined accent, quite removed from either backwoods Louisiana or the harsher coastal accents of Georgia or the Carolinas (though perhaps people from those groups would be loath to be lumped together). Craig's accent was certainly not Baton Rouge (and neither is Shelby Foote, so that makes sense), but my own grandfather, born more than half a century before Craig, had some tinges of non-rhotic accent and the 'in thing. I think it's also true that accent gets more pronounced the older one is; I certainly see that in my uncles and aunts.

[Rebecca W]

Loved the movie, and Daniel Craig’s accent threw me off. It was like a flat note in a song, it just hit my ear wrong. Now is it for the reasons you state, I have no idea! But I loved reading about why it sounded off to you.

[Jenny]

I’m married to a native New Orleanian, whose 80-ish parents (also natives) are DEFINITELY non-rhotic. There’s a silly story from my in-laws’ courtship where my MIL mistook my FIL’s desire for an “ammeter” as a desire for an “airmeter”—because they sound exactly alike! In fact, when I was dating my husband, his mother referred to me as “autistic”—actually ARTISTIC—and I was definitely confused for a minute!
I’m from Montgomery Alabama, and am a reformed user of in’ endings—especially “fixin’”, as in “I’m fixin’ to go to the pool.”

[Jenny]

The only people I know with non-rhotic accents are from Louisiana. Our parish has several permanently resettled Katrina refugees, and I have heard non-rhotic speech pretty consistently from the older-than-me folk in that group. Tangentially related, my father, from West TN, has always said Georgia natives pronounce their state as "Jaw-jah."

As for dropping g's in formal and informal settings, I think it is true that Southerners who have higher degrees and higher SES do turn that off in formal settings. However if you wander out into no-man's-land and talk to some genuine country-fried people, the ending g is lost and gone forever.

[Lynn]

I have always found accents fascinating. Having been born in a mostly French Canadian area of New England to parents who grew up outside New York City, I might have been linguistically challenged. Most people say I have no accent, but I can tell after one short sentence whether or not someone is from New England and usually what state they lived in. However, a lot of people I know would not bother to correct themselves while talkin’ regardless of the formal setting.

[Tom]

What seems incongruous to me is making a pun out of rhoticity that elicits Detroit, think "Rock City", while the majority of chicken farming is done in Iowa.

[Marcie]

Can't wait to see the movie now! And my 55-year-old friend, born in southern Louisiana is a non-rhotic speaker in his native dialect. He code switches fairly well, though it has been amusing to listen to him speak Spanish or try on an Irish brogue because his southern accent peeks through.

[Joanna Miller]

I'd say the French name indicates a New Orleans-type background? It didn't sound Georgia/Carolinas/Alabama/Tennessee to me, either. Just from the sound of it, it seemed more ... mouth pursed? Jaw forward? Something like that? Than people around here - north Alabama - we tend to be so loose everything drips and slurs. Well. Not HERE - Huntsville is a very international engineering/army city and most people who have lived here very long don't have much of any kind of accent.

On the subject of accents, I noticed my preacher had an accent that reminded me very much of a mixture of my Grandmother (from Columbia, SC) and my great-aunt (from Charlotte, NC). When I realized that he grew up in Greenville, SC (just about equidistant between the two), I was pretty proud of my ear. :)

I did enjoy Knives Out, though.

[Lee]

Ooh, haven't read all the comments yet, but I'll tell you I've lived in the deep south my whole life, and can't STAND most actors' "Southern" accents. None of them do it right.

[Beth Mitcham]

I definitely thought he was supposed to be leaning into his accent (dropping all those 'g's) to make himself less intimidating, especially to the female lead.