Accents really are contagious, linguistic study shows

Many of us imitate the voice of a friend or TV character after hearing them speak without even noticing it – a phenomenon known as ‘linguistic convergence’. 

Now, a new study reveals that even just expecting someone to speak with a southern US drawl can affect our own speech.  

Lacey Wade, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, found volunteers started making drawn-out ‘southern’ vowel sounds even though they didn’t hear the vowels themselves.

Our expectations about how other people might speak – rather than the speech itself – is enough to shape our own speech patterns, the results show. 

In the southern US states, people like Dolly Parton tend to use drawn out vowel sounds, so words like ‘ride’ and ‘dine’ with a southern-like pronunciation sound more like ‘rod’ and ‘don’.  

In the southern US states, people tend to use drawn out vowel sounds. Pictured is the approximate extent of Southern American English, based upon The Atlas of North American English

An example of this happening in the real world would be someone who is not from from the US south using Southern speech (for example, ‘y’all’) when conversing with a Southerner – without necessarily realising it.

‘The idea is that “y’all” is stereotypically associated with Southern speech, and an individual may converge toward this expected behavior in the absence of any real evidence that their Southern interlocutor uses this form,’ Dr Wade says in her study, published in the journal Language.   

For the study, Dr Wade recruited more than 200 participants for two experiments testing how participants’ pronunciations of certain words changed after hearing somebody with a strong southern US accent. 

Residential history was taken for labeling participants as either ‘southern’ or ‘non-southern’. 

Participants played a word-guessing game, where they had to name a word based on a clue given to them by a person with a strong southern US accent. 

For example, upon receiving the clue: ‘The saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, do this three letter T-word again’, a participant would respond aloud: ‘try’.  

Participants were recorded as they gave their response. When they finished recording, they pressed the ‘next’ button to continue to the next clue.  

Screenshot of how the experimental instructions looked to participants when presented on screen

Recordings were compared against a control group, where answers were given in response to clues given in Midland accents. 

Dr Wade found that the participants started pronouncing the vowel in words like ‘ride’ and ‘dine’ with a southern-like pronunciation – more like ‘rod’ and ‘don’ – after hearing a southern-accented talker.   

In one of the two experiments, ‘non-southern’ volunteers were less influenced to say southern vowels that they didn’t hear when compared with southern participants.   

The opposite of linguistic convergence, where our speech shifts away from that of a speaker, is called linguistic divergence. This image shows individual differences when hearing clues given in a southern accent. Gray indicates convergence. Black indicates divergence. Nearly a third (32 per cent) of non-southerners diverged from the southern model talker but only 18.5 per cent of southern participants diverged

What was most interesting was that participants never actually heard how the southern talker produced a particular vowel. 

They simply inferred the talker’s pronunciation based on their other accent features and imitated what they expected.  

So not only do we imitate what we observe from others, but we also actively predict what others will do and shift our own speech to match, the study shows. 

Even participants who had never lived in the US south show this form of linguistic convergence, suggesting that people can make these inferences about – and unintentionally imitate – accents that are not their own. 

According to Dr Wade, the ‘i’ vowel is a particularly noteworthy feature that is stereotypically associated with the south.

It is ubiquitous in media portrayals and caricatures of southern speech and people likely have strong associations between this feature and ‘southernness’, she claims.  

Previous studies focusing on a variety of accents have shown evidence for people shifting vowel styles. 

In 2010, Drager et al. found that New Zealanders shifted their pronunciation in a word-list reading task to incorporate more Australian-like vowels after reading facts about Australia.