New England’s Influence

(Originally published 10/8/21)

Family Weekend at USC rolls by again, and the campus floods with parents, siblings, and the occasional aunt, all decorated in cardinal red and gold. I noticed how a hierarchy of regional dialects began to form, with Standard American English reigning at the top. I witnessed a pair of Michigan parents drop their accented ‘oo’s to ask questions of a Viterbi prof. I’ve also known Texans here who hide their accent until they get properly drunk and Wisconsinites who spare an ‘oop’ or two, hidden under their breath. When all these cultures get imported into a college setting, they erase themselves in order to fit in and be taken seriously.

This elevated level of school pride also made me think about the differences between my previous institution, modest Haverford, located in forested Quaker Pennsylvania, versus USC, smack in the middle of the secular badlands of downtown Los Angeles. And walking out from the USC Village and into South Central reveals how put on all that gothic architecture and red brick really is. Gothic architecture is central to Yale, New Haven, Hogwarts — in what world does gothic architecture scream Los Angeles? In tracing back Puritan cultural ideals to New England, I’ve taken note of how the built environment in Los Angeles, of all places, continues to uphold its legacy.

The perceived intellectual superiority of New England identity, especially in a college setting, seems to remain prevalent in the South, West, Southwest, Midwest, and really all states added after 1776. It’s as if every single American college was modeled after Harvard — oh wait, they are.

The Puritans built Harvard to train clergy for the new Commonwealth. Being that education was one of the Puritan’s most important (and later influential) tenets, Harvard owned the first printing press in all of North America. This would prove key in establishing the religion’s influence across the nation. By disseminating pamphlets, educating their clergymen to read and speak, and upholding education as a value, Puritans gained a huge advantage in creating lasting influence upon American society from the very beginning. In this way, they were able to establish American culture before it ever really started.

In American settings, the ‘proper’ and professional mode of speaking is to ‘remove’ your accent and speak Standard American English. We’re all familiar with code switching from casual speech to talking to your boss.

SAE is defined as a variety of English that is privileged by those who historically hold power in the academy and in our society as a whole. Because it is the language of people who have traditionally controlled American institutions of higher education, SAE is usually used on campus in our written papers, speeches, lectures, and presentations.”

• What is proper enunciation, anyways? Are we taught to affect a Valley girl accent to be taken more seriously? No (thanks, misogyny). There are racial implications too — being taught to talk ‘right’ is so often just being taught to talk ‘white’.
• “SAE is not truly “American” in that it is not the language of all Americans and has often been used to normalize white, middle- and upper-class language systems and to denigrate language systems that differ from them (and that hence, become “non-standard” and “improper”).

The New England ‘non-accent’ is our divided nation state’s lingua franca and is the manner of speaking you adopt in order to be taken seriously. Somewhere, in the American popular imagination, our idea of an American accent began to take shape.