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Antarctica Has An Accent and It's Weirder Than You Think
Antarctica Has An Accent and It's Weirder Than You Think
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0:00
Accents tell us where someone’s from, whether they’re chatting
0:03
about pahking their cah or giving you their recipe for tater tot hot dish.
0:07
They’re often a legacy of the cultures and languages that influenced the people
0:10
in that part of the world, and they usually develop over decades.
0:14
Except for this one.
0:15
There’s a regional accent so rare that it has zero native speakers.
0:20
Because the only people who’ve ever used it were living in Antarctica.
0:24
[♪ INTRO]
0:28
First, let’s talk about what accents are, and why we have them.
0:31
Accents are the unique ways that a group of people pronounce their words.
0:34
That sounds obvious, I know.
0:36
Every language or region has its own inventory of linguistic sounds called phonemes.
0:41
Humans are capable of making hundreds of phonemes,
0:44
but there aren’t any languages out there that come close to using all of them.
0:48
We’re born with the ability to notice the subtle differences between virtually all of
0:52
the possible sounds, but over time, we lose the ability to distinguish
0:57
between them if they don’t exist in the languages that we’re learning.
1:00
For instance, in English, we use R and L sounds differently,
1:04
so English speakers need to be able to hear the difference between “r” and “l”.
1:08
But those sounds don’t show up in Japanese, so someone who was raised primarily speaking Japanese
1:13
might not hear the difference quite as well, or be able to reproduce both noises separately.
1:18
At least, not without some practice.
1:21
Celery!
1:22
Our brains pretty much figure out which sounds matter and which ones don’t,
1:26
and stop caring about the ones that we aren’t going to need and chuck them out of our heads.
1:30
It’s a real “is this going to be on the test” vibe.
1:34
And here’s why this matters for accents.
1:36
When you learn to speak another language, you don’t just have to learn new vocabulary.
1:40
You have to learn those new phonemes, too, and that can be really challenging if those
1:45
new sounds are really different from what you’ve been using your whole life.
1:49
For example, English has a lot of vowel sounds.
1:52
Depending on what regional variation we’re talking about,
1:55
English has as many as 15-20 unique vowel sounds.
1:59
Most other languages in the world average around 5-6 vowel sounds,
2:03
so this is just one of the many ways that English is weird.
2:07
That’s also why when someone is learning English as their second language,
2:11
they’ll often struggle to pronounce all of these different vowel sounds.
2:14
They straight up just don’t have that many in their mother tongue.
2:18
That’s why a Spanish speaker talking in English
2:20
might pronounce the words sit and seat similarly, because in Spanish,
2:24
the distinction between the vowel ɪ in sit, and the vowel i in seat, doesn’t exist.
2:30
So when you’re chatting with a non-native speaker of the language that you’re both using,
2:34
just know their jaw probably hurts, because they’re literally training
2:37
their faces to produce sounds that they’re not used to making!
2:41
Accents aren’t just about the first language you learned as a baby.
2:44
Your accent is also shaped by where you’re from,
2:46
your cultural connections, and even your socio-economic background.
2:50
So for instance, we know that there are a whole bunch of regional accents across the US.
2:54
One way that these accents form is through mergers, where over time,
2:58
people start saying two or more different vowel sounds the exact same way.
3:02
One of these is the Mary-marry-merry merger.
3:05
See, most people in the US say all three of those words
3:08
with the same vowel sound, including me, just now.
3:11
But without the merger, they sound more like Mary, marry, and merry,
3:16
and those un-merged sounds are found in New England and Philadelphia accents.
3:21
There’s also the caught-cot merger, where the vowel in the word caught,
3:25
as in “I caught the ball” sounds like the one in “cot” as in, the thing you sleep on.
3:30
I also say those the same, but without the merger, it’s more like caught and cot.
3:35
And over time, if you have enough people all in one place that start to mimic each
3:40
other’s pronunciations, those sound shifts can add up to a uniquely identifiable accent.
3:45
And as it turns out, our brains even react differently to different accents.
3:49
A study from 2014 looked at people’s brain activity while
3:53
they were listening to several spoken passages.
3:55
The researchers found that people had increased brain activity in
3:59
regions linked to emotion and salience while listening to their own accent,
4:04
meaning that their brains treated it as more emotionally and socially relevant,
4:08
while hearing the other group’s accent reduced activity in the same areas.
4:12
So now that we’ve said all that, what’s the deal with this Antarctic accent?
4:16
I’ll tell you, but first, we’ve got to pay the bills, so here’s a quick ad break.
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5:00
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5:07
Thank you to Brilliant for supporting this SciShow video.
5:11
First off, no, an Antarctic accent isn’t something that the penguins are doing.
5:15
While there is some research about certain animals like whales having
5:18
regional variation in how they vocalize, this is all about humans and human language.
5:23
Now, the astute among you may have realized that nobody lives in Antarctica, at least not forever.
5:29
But there are still people there, pretty much all the time.
5:33
They’re researchers!
5:33
There are around 70 permanent research stations on the continent, belonging to
5:38
29 different countries, and traveling to and from these stations isn’t easy.
5:42
Due to weather conditions, there are only a few
5:44
months per year that workers can make it to Antarctica and back.
5:48
So if you’re there at the start of the southern hemisphere’s winter,
5:51
you’re not leaving for a while.
5:52
These Antarctic research stations make a perfect test case to study accent formation.
5:57
Everyone’s stuck in one place and can really only talk with people in their
6:01
group, without any influence from those outside the language bubble.
6:05
The first study to identify an Antarctic accent forming came out in 2019.
6:10
It looked at eleven researchers living at the British Antarctic Station, also called winterers.
6:16
Eight were British people, one was American, one was German, and one was from Iceland.
6:20
The winterers were asked to record their conversations with each other,
6:24
and to repeat the same set of words in all of those recorded conversations.
6:28
The researchers who created the study picked out several words containing
6:32
the same vowel for the participants to pronounce, so that the researchers could
6:36
measure and compare the pronunciation of those vowels among the entire group.
6:41
And when they crunched the numbers, they found two main effects.
6:44
First, the vowels of the different winterers converged to become more
6:48
similar to one another compared to before their Antarctic stay.
6:52
Meaning, they initially pronounced their vowels differently from one another,
6:56
but then their pronunciation started shifting and sounding more similar.
7:00
The reason for that effect is that when we speak to one another, we do a thing called
7:05
accommodation, where we change our speech to be as clear as possible to the person we are talking to.
7:10
Often, that means we shift our pronunciations to be more similar to the pronunciation of the
7:16
person we are talking to, and they do the exact same thing back to us.
7:20
This is probably why when I go visit my parents back in Florida I get,
7:24
like, a little bit of a southern accent.
7:25
So over time, the winterers were all copying each others’ vowel sounds so
7:30
much that they started merging together, like with those other vowel mergers we talked about.
7:35
The second effect they found was that one of the vowels - oh, like in the words flow,
7:39
sew, code started “fronting”, meaning it was pronounced closer to the front of the mouth.
7:45
So instead of oh, it’s more like … [fronted oh].
7:48
I know, subtle, but trust me
7:50
the researchers can measure a difference.
7:52
The really weird thing is that this vowel fronting wasn’t a case of imitation.
7:56
None of the accents of these speakers feature this fronted oh vowel,
8:01
which means that all eight of them started essentially inventing a new accent together.
8:06
This is what linguists like to call linguistic innovation,
8:09
and it’s a perfect example of how quickly accents can form.
8:13
Our brains are tuned to hear the smallest differences in how the
8:17
person in front of us sounds, in ways that we’re not even aware of!
8:21
And the weirdest part is that the researchers don’t know why these winterers did this.
8:26
There’s not really a precedent for something like this happening,
8:29
so they don’t know why the whole group would start doing this.
8:32
These eight winterers went their separate ways after the research season was done,
8:37
so there’s not really much more we can say about this Antarctic accent.
8:40
But with every season, there’s another chance that more speakers might start
8:44
to formulate their own Antarctic accents.
8:46
This could even mean that if there’s ever human settlements on Mars or the
8:50
Moon, the people living there will all have their own accent way faster than you might’ve thought.
8:55
And whatever vowels you use to say it, that sounds pretty cool to me.
9:01
[♪ OUTRO]
