By that logic, today would be considered a utopia compared to several hundred years ago.
Do people with southern accents seem weird in oldTrek?
- Thread starter Wadjda
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By that logic, today would be considered a utopia compared to several hundred years ago.
TNG could have had "Geordie" LaForge:
"Why aye man! I can get Warp factor 10 for yas like!"
He could have spoken like a Jurassien (as he should have): "Zhordi, ta-ake us ou' o eh-warp."
I'm actually Creole (my family originated in Louisiana), but don't have the accent. I guess having a particular accent has as much to do with your upbringing as where you come from.
There are stereotypes associated with all sorts of regional accents. If a Star Trek character spoke with an English West Country accent, would you automatically think "farmer" or "pirate"? Or would a character with a West Indies accent "take you out" of the story because you associate that accent with reggae musicians and Rastafarians?
I live in the South - South Carolina, specifically - and have for 24 years. And I don't identify Southern accents (there's more than one) with mental inferiority on an individual level, but large parts of the South were always agrarian with an emphasis on that sort of work as opposed to the urban intellectualism of New England. And then the fact that the North targeted and destroyed much of what industrial base the South did have during the Civil War (especially in Georgia) really did not help, either. When I first moved here in 1990 - and this was from the Ozarks, hardly a mecca of modern urban industrialism and thought, itself - I would have sworn I had moved not just through space, but through time, back to the 1960s. The South has been slow to catch up in a lot of areas.
So all of that said, I can understand people from outside of the area thinking that generally people who speak with Southern accents are going to be less educated and modern, because generally, it's just plain true.
As to whether or not Southern accents pull me out of Trek or other futurist fiction, I'd have to say it doesn't entirely, but I have had to think about it. Modern telecommunications systems - TV, radio, web video, etc - mean that there is a general trend toward accent and language unification that seems to be headed mostly for the accent of the American Midwesterners. So one might think by the 23rd century, that process would be just about complete. BUT, there are internet niche communities with their own lingos and customs, Trek had a 21st century war that may have wrecked some communications infrastructure and caused some parts of the world to regress at least a bit, and there would be colony worlds with citizens from all different parts of our own world that would fall out of touch with the majority of mankind to different degrees, too. So upon consideration, given the Trek future history, I don't find it odd that we would still have people with Southern accents. I find it odd that we don't seem to ever see humans with alien accents or original colonial ones! And, there's something else I find odd, but more on that below...
And the other thing related to this that I DO find odd is that we've never really seemed to see the Andorian that learned English from a British professor and thus speaks with a British accent - or the Vulcan that learned English while taking other classes in Atlanta and thus speaks with a Southern accent. "That ain't logical, y'all."
So all of that said, I can understand people from outside of the area thinking that generally people who speak with Southern accents are going to be less educated and modern, because generally, it's just plain true.
As to whether or not Southern accents pull me out of Trek or other futurist fiction, I'd have to say it doesn't entirely, but I have had to think about it. Modern telecommunications systems - TV, radio, web video, etc - mean that there is a general trend toward accent and language unification that seems to be headed mostly for the accent of the American Midwesterners. So one might think by the 23rd century, that process would be just about complete. BUT, there are internet niche communities with their own lingos and customs, Trek had a 21st century war that may have wrecked some communications infrastructure and caused some parts of the world to regress at least a bit, and there would be colony worlds with citizens from all different parts of our own world that would fall out of touch with the majority of mankind to different degrees, too. So upon consideration, given the Trek future history, I don't find it odd that we would still have people with Southern accents. I find it odd that we don't seem to ever see humans with alien accents or original colonial ones! And, there's something else I find odd, but more on that below...
Honestly, Picard's English accent has never bothered me in the slightest, and it's because people who learn a language fluently really do seem to speak that language to some degree with the accent of the place where they learned it or the person they learned it from. Think of the people from India and formerly colonial Africa that you've seen speaking with British accents because of their history with England. Given France's proximity to England, it seems to me to be mostly logical that most French people that learn to speak English well enough to drop the French accent while doing so would have at least a touch of a British one from the way their probably British teacher taught them to pronounce things.
And the other thing related to this that I DO find odd is that we've never really seemed to see the Andorian that learned English from a British professor and thus speaks with a British accent - or the Vulcan that learned English while taking other classes in Atlanta and thus speaks with a Southern accent. "That ain't logical, y'all."
At least DeForest Kelley's accent was genuine, unlike Connor (Trip) Trinneer's (he mispronounces "Mobile" [the Alabama city] in "These Are the Voyages").
I've heard that Trinneer didn't know that Trip was from Florida at first and based the accent on relatives from Arkansas and Missouri.
I think it has more to do with how I was raised, especially if you're taught not to speak a certain way.
I think it's even possible for English to be Picard's first language. It's not that far-fetched in an age in which global travel is almost as easy as a drive across town.USS Triumphant said:
Well, there was nuSarek from Star Trek XI that spoke with an English accent...And the other thing related to this that I DO find odd is that we've never really seemed to see the Andorian that learned English from a British professor and thus speaks with a British accent - or the Vulcan that learned English while taking other classes in Atlanta and thus speaks with a Southern accent. "That ain't logical, y'all."
Austrian Reggie Nalder, who played the Andorin Shras in TOS, spoke with an German accent. Celia Lovsky, who played T'Pau was also Austrian.I think it has more to do with how I was raised, especially if you're taught not to speak a certain way.
I think it's even possible for English to be Picard's first language. It's not that far-fetched in an age in which global travel is almost as easy as a drive across town.USS Triumphant said:Well, there was nuSarek from Star Trek XI that spoke with an English accent...And the other thing related to this that I DO find odd is that we've never really seemed to see the Andorian that learned English from a British professor and thus speaks with a British accent - or the Vulcan that learned English while taking other classes in Atlanta and thus speaks with a Southern accent. "That ain't logical, y'all."
I didn't recall this. Hrm.
This makes sense now that you say it, but I remember first watching this episode when I was fairly young and I guess I've just always assumed she was affecting a Vulcan accent.
It's clearly not the case.
Of course it does -- because the society we're talking about is Starfleet itself. Star Trek shows us characters who live and work together in an egalitarian, multinational crew free of racial or nationalist prejudices. The very fact that the crew of Kirk's Enterprise was not all white males was decidedly utopian by 1960s standards. The fact that Uhura was treated as an equal and a skilled professional rather than a menial laborer, or the fact that a proud Russian nationalist could get along comfortably with American crewmates, was emphatically a portrayal of a better society, a world where humans no longer hated or fought or oppressed one another simply for being different.
It's true in other parts of the country too. It's not like all the college-educated urbanites live in one part of the country and the rest live in another. It's more of an urban-rural divide that can be found throughout the country. So it's certainly not something that has any legitimate correspondence with someone's regional accent.
In fact, the standard American English accent 300 years from now will probably be unrecognizable as American to our ears, just as the reconstructed accent of Shakespeare's London sounds completely unlike a modern London accent. And the vocabulary of the language will probably have changed a great deal as well. And who knows if English will even still be the dominant language centuries in the future? By then it may well have been displaced by Spanish, Chinese, or Hindi. Characters in the future speaking present-day English with familiar accents and vocabulary is a conceit for the audience's convenience.
(If anything, given current demographic trends, America may well be a majority Spanish-speaking country within a century, or perhaps American English will assimilate an increasing amount of Spanish vocabulary and phonetics. Why not? It's already a hodgepodge of numerous different linguistic forebears.)
So I don't see any reason to single out a Southern United States accent as any more off-putting than a Russian accent or a Scottish accent or an RP English accent.
Quite right. People speaking English with a foreign accent is often just a fictional conceit to convey foreign-ness. In reality, if you speak a language fluently, that includes knowing how to pronounce it. True, there are those who aren't as good with the accent as they are with the vocabulary and grammar, and who retain strong accents even after becoming fluent in English, e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan. But there are others who have a good enough ear for accents to pick up the pronunciation of a foreign language as well as the rest. For instance, actor Michael Vartan is from France, but he can speak English with such a solid American accent that I was surprised when I learned where he was from.
Of course, in the 24th century, transporters let you commute anywhere on Earth, so Picard could easily have gone to school in England, maybe stayed in a boarding school, despite residing in France. He could've picked up the accent that way. (Assuming we buy into the conceit that present-day accents are still recognizable 400 years from now.)
I'm not sure about this point. I mean, I know why you're saying this, but I think it assumes that accents will continue to change at a more or less consistent rate as they have in the past. But recording technology might have a stabilizing effect on that that we didn't have before the 20th century.
Vocabulary, on the other hand, will change, I have no doubt. Heck, I think fairly regularly now about how much of what I hear of a day would have been half-gibberish just 20 years ago. "She instagrammed herself twerking and it was in my facebook feed." WHAT?
Vocabulary, on the other hand, will change, I have no doubt. Heck, I think fairly regularly now about how much of what I hear of a day would have been half-gibberish just 20 years ago. "She instagrammed herself twerking and it was in my facebook feed." WHAT?
20? Hell, that would have sounded like gibberish to me 10 years ago. Even 5 years ago I'd only know what "Facebook feed" meant and would be completely clueless about "instagram" or "twerking."
If it's not a value judgement, then what makes hearing a human speak with a southern accent weird in Star Trek?
Yes, I can understand a southern accent sounding weird from a droid in Star Wars - there was no American south in the Star Wars universe. I would likewise think it odd to hear a Bostonian accent or a Jamaican accent (oh, wait) for the exact same reason. These geo-ethnic regions did not exist "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
Star Trek, however, is different. These humans are either from Earth or have not to distant relatives from Earth. We should hear various accents, unless you think in 300 years those accents will have faded. In that case, we should hear no accents.
Now, if we heard a Vulcan, Andorian or Klingon with a southern (or Bostonian) accent, then that would be jarring.
But WHY does it take you out of the moment to hear a Star Trek human character from the southern United States speak with an accent from that same region?
I'm certainly aware of that hypothesis, but I'm not convinced. I recall hearing about a study that compared specific people's accents over the course of 2-3 decades and showed that even a single person living in the same place over that time can display subtle changes in pronunciation. And this was a modern study. We've had voice-recording technology for well over a century now, so if it were going to freeze accents, it probably would've done so already. But I don't think it has. I think that even with the ubiquity of TV and movies and radio and the like, people still learn their accents from their families, friends, neighbors, etc.
I mean, case in point: Anyone who grew up within the BBC's broadcast area anytime in the latter half of the 20th century would've grown up listening to people, both real people like news presenters and almost all fictional characters, speaking almost exclusively in Received Pronunciation, except for the occasional regional character speaking in dialect. So if recorded voices locked in accents, it would follow that most people in England would now speak RP. But they don't. On the contrary, the BBC itself has dropped its former restrictions and is now full of fictional characters speaking in Estuary or Yorkshire or Mancunian or Northern or a wide range of local dialects. So recorded speech has not "locked in" anyone's accent. It was everyday speech that changed recorded speech, not the other way around.
AZETBUR: "Inalien... If only you could hear yourselves? 'Human rights.' Why the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a 'homo sapiens' only club."
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