cinderella, creole

[kaigou]

Japan's Cinderella Motif- Beauty Industry and Mass Culture Interpretations of a Popular Icon — Laura Miller

Too much evo-psych but still important observation, from Psychology Behind The Cinderella Complex:

...there is also a division between the smart and the pretty girl. “We can’t do both, evidently,” Fraser said. “And if you are both, then you’re universally hated by both men and women; women because they’re jealous of you, and men because they don’t know what to do with you.” She said that a woman “who is living up to her potential is often cast aside or becomes a social outcast.”

From Wiki's entry on prestige (sociolinguistics):

Some instances of contact between languages with different prestige levels have resulted in diglossia, a phenomenon in which a community uses a high prestige language or dialect in certain situations—usually for newspapers, in literature, on university campuses, for religious ceremonies, and on television and the radio—but uses a low prestige language or dialect for other situations—often in conversation in the home or in letters, comic strips, and in popular culture. Linguist Charles A. Ferguson's 1959 article "Diglossia" listed the following examples of diglossic societies: in Switzerland, Swiss Standard German and Swiss German; in the Middle East and North Africa, Standard Arabic and vernacular Arabic; in Haiti, Standard French and Kréyòl; in Greece, Katharevousa and Dhimotiki; and in Norway, Bokmål and Nynorsk.

Although those (I gather) are significant linguistic differences between prestige and standard, couldn't a situation like Southern/non-Southern be considered a kind of diglossia? My understanding is that code-switching is when you mix two languages (dialects?) in the same sentence/breath, like a kind of maladapted or hyper loanword use. Diglossia sounds more like a complete switch, like what I do when speaking with relatives versus the way I speak at work. It also sounds like what people are talking about for Black Americans, who switch easily from Standard American at work to Black American while with friends/family or non-work situations. As others mentioned on earlier threads, that as long as you use those structures and expressions, you're still speaking "Southern" even if your accent is soft (or non-existent), the accent of Southern American, like Black American, is not the key feature. It's the significant differences in the grammatical structure as well as the idiomatic expressions.

Now I am reminded of that segment from Airplane: "Oh stewardess! I speak jive."

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Tangential note: out of curiosity, I just looked up jive, wondering where the name itself (jive) originated. Still no idea on that one, but I did just learn that linguistically, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, or what I was calling Black American) is a creole. The bit about prestige dialects remains at the forefront of my lizard brain right now, so that popped back in as I got to the section about Ebonics... and I gotta say, I loathe that term. The political ramifications aren't helped by a strange kind of verbal synesthesia, where the capital E + the bon looks... I don't know how to put it. Like something you'd call a child's music toy, or something. Not quite plastic-cheap, but that kind of reaction. Hard to qualify/express.

However, it seems to me there's a prestige, of a sort, when a dialect is known as a creole, probably in part because of the association with "creole" and "New Orleans" (in terms of cultural import/impact). New Orleans is, and hopefully will continue to be, a huge cultural value for America. So maybe we have an association, thanks to that, that lends prestige to "creole", regardless of whether the listener understands the linguistic differentiation. I think maybe it's also because most people are aware that "creole" (unlike the maligned notion of 'pidgin') is a dialect-into-language. Credibility, perhaps, that isn't granted by a bizarre and frankly stupid invented-word like Ebonics?

Strange, to be reminded yet again (as though I could forget) that words really do make all the difference. Instead of Ebonics and its ridiculous assumption that the non-Standard English is a sign of Black American childrens' lesser communication skills (oh please)... by emphasizing the creole aspect, the truth becomes: Black American children are actually gaining a skill many Standard-American speaking children don't gain: multilingualism. There are huge benefits to having that kind of multi-linguistic exposure as small children, not the least of which is a facility to learn other languages, because the brain is already used to switching back and forth -- and we've got more than just American-English vs non-English languages, we've also got computer languages, these days.

Too bad I'm never a hiring manager, or I think this would be a valuable trait in potential developers. Someone who can code-switch (or use diglossia) between a creole and Standard American is possibly also someone who can do the same with computer-language syntax. It's just one more way of adapting and working with language, and long experience in code-switching gives you the tools to apply the same in a new area. I think that'd be incredibly valuable (especially in industries like mine, which are always stumbling over and into new developments that then need to be integrated with the old).

Then again, I'm not a hiring manager... nor has any hiring manager ever given even a moment's notice to the languages I've studied. Or maybe it's just that as far as I know, I've never had a direct manager who isn't mono-lingual. Maybe you only recognize the value when you're multi-lingual yourself, or spend most of your time in multi-lingual environments, enough to realize that mono-lingual is... well, it's a drawback. It's not something to be proud of.

Also, awesome quote: "A language is just a dialect with an army."

Comments

[kaigou]

Okay, I've watched it like three times, and... I know Streep is considered one of the best when it comes to accents, but it's like... I guess all I can say is that to my ears, it's like she sounds Southern and yet... not. Like, she's saying it how someone Southern might say it, but what she says isn't Southern at all. Little things. Like when she says "and everything", I was expecting the phrase "and all". And the "sss,sss,sss" sound followed by "thank you very much" sounds... off, just a little. So it's sort of like she's doing a Southern accent with a script that's not really a Southern part, if that makes sense. I would've expected, "hush, you," and maybe a "goodness" or a "gracious" thrown in there somewhere. Even if only partly said, and the rest is just left hanging, half under the breath. "Gracious" is a relatively common kind of expression in older generations that acts like the equivalent of "sheesh" or "geez".

Accent-wise, there are parts -- like at first -- where she sounds more Coastal (Mississippi, Delta), but that has some in common with Tidewater. And then it seems to shift, just a fraction, and by halfway through, she's starting to sound more like maybe Richmond, or the north part of the Carolinas. She's getting too much at the front of her mouth to be Coastal or true Inland, but she's not completely nasal-twang like upstate Alabama or the southern stretch of the Appalachians. She's not got a lot of dialogue to hear whether she's dropping r's (which can be partly geographical and partly generational, so that's not really a precise thing).

I guess... she sounds generic, but at the same time, false, to my ears. And the false-ness has (I realize, after thinking about this carefully) its roots in the fact that her phrasing is wrong. She has some of the cadence right, here and there, that makes me think Coastal, but... I would probably guess Tidewater, with assumption that she's only lived there since maybe college. That it's not her native accent, I guess is what I'm saying, and that's because the cadence of the spaces between words, and the syncopation of certain words -- and the word choices themselves -- feel too, I dunno, northern.

I imagine she was probably trying to aim for the classic Southern accent, not the extreme sing-song of Atlanta speech, but the gentler Tidewater version. And it's not that she does a bad job, it's just that what she's given to say doesn't fit the accent at all.

It's possible she sounds more like Carolinas. I haven't been in those parts for years, so I can't say, and I don't really talk all that much with the Carolina sides of my family, so I don't get constant reinforcement the way I do on other regional accents. I lived in VA for years and travelled all around the state. And I guess I'm surprised anyone'd expect the accents to be all the same, because VA is a big state! And there are major stretches of land dividing some very different geographical regions, with very different socio-ethnic backgrounds of the settlers. Or maybe it's population density? Seeing how Rhode Island wasn't exactly all one accent, either, and it was... well, teensy. Heh.

[My other reaction to your comment that her screentest was with southern accent was, "did she know going in that she was trying out for the part of the bad guy?" since if the southerner isn't the dimwitted fool, he's the ultimate evil wrapped up in an easy smile and a friendly drawl. And probably wears white, and walks with a cane he doesn't need. Bleah.]

[soukup]

Yes. When I first watched this I was wincing for the same reason, and I think that may have been why she chose to leave it blank in the end. But Streep's actually said in many interviews that she didn't consider Eleanor a villain -- her take on the character was that she was an extremely righteous, patriotic, self-sacrificing person; not at all an evil woman, just tragically misguided. I do totally grok that the accent was problematic because most people would have read it as the Eebil Southerner trope, but on reflection I think the intent may have been less about evil and more about insincerity. Eleanor is an extremely charming, warm-and-friendly sort of person, the sort of woman who smiles almost constantly, whether or not she's truly glad to see you. And I think that that type of excessive, fake sweetness is something that Northerners perhaps associate with Southern women. (Hopefully it goes without saying that I don't subscribe to this.) Which I suppose isn't much better, really, but my point is that the actress actually kind of loved this character, and I doubt that she would ever have meant to present her as a villain.

Now that you've pointed it out I can hear what you mean about the shift she makes halfway through -- in retrospect that was what caught my ear about that first "why." I think I'm just going to pin down her accent as being a soft Richmond one, with the caveat that her mother was from Connecticut and her dad's speech was heavily influenced by Washingtonese (he was in politics as well).

Thank you so much for helping me puzzle this out! Getting people's voices right is always really hard for me, so this was a crucial bit of my process.