Why We Talk Funny summary

As newborns, we babble all sorts of sounds. Some of these exist in our native language and some don’t. Remarkably, though, by our first birthday, we’ve already pruned the set to just the sounds found in the language around us. Linguists call this statistical learning –⁠ the process by which baby brains learn which sounds to tune into and which ones to ignore. And it all happens before they actually understand a single word.

The catch is that this superpower fades –⁠ fast. By puberty, native French speakers will already struggle to say the “th” sound in English, English speakers will fumble with the rounded vowels in French words like tu, and Japanese speakers will strain to hear the difference between English “l” and “r.” 

As kids, we also learn what sounds are allowed to go together in our native language. In Spanish, for instance, “sp” and “st” consonant clusters never occur at the beginnings of words. Children unconsciously learn these constraints, which leads them to actually hear words like student or Spanish as “es-tudent” or “es-panish” and pronounce them that way. 

But sounds only make up half of an accent. The other half is social, and that’s where parents and peers come in.

It starts with baby talk. Studies show that mothers tend to use their most standard, careful pronunciations with infants. For example, linguist Julie Roberts found that Southern pronunciations like “bah” for bye and “todd” for tide were less pronounced in mothers speaking to their children than speaking to adults. As babies get older, though, moms decrease their use of hyperarticulate forms and standard pronunciations. This helps kids start shifting toward the specific speech patterns that will later benefit them socially.

Though kids first imitate parents, soon it’s peers who take the top place in the hierarchy. And kids start judging each other fast. By the ripe age of five, children have been shown to prefer both teachers and friends who share their same accent. This is true even among multilingual children with exposure to multiple accents. Children also show a preference for the accents that are considered prestigious where they live –⁠ like Standard English over Hawaiian Creole. Remarkably, accent beats even race in terms of children’s preferences. A kid will pick a child of a different race who shares their accent over a similar-looking one who sounds foreign. 

Why such loyalty to our own accent? In short, because it’s stitched into our very first relationships. The way we talk becomes associated with the people whose love and acceptance we count on.