I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I think the thing about accent that's so wonderful is that it's so tiny a thing that we don't think about it every day

that that actually signals so big a thing because the groups we belong to are huge and one of the

biggest ways we signal whether we have an affiliation into those groups or not is through the way

we talk and our accents.

But yet we treat accents sort of superficially as if it's not that important.

But it's also really impressive that we can take some tiny little articulatory or cognitive

variation and make it mean something at a level of, you know, a country, a region, a race, a age, a class. I mean, we manipulate

these really tiny differences in such remarkable ways, and we're completely unaware of doing it,

which is what fascinates me as a linguist. That's Valerie Friedland. She's a professor of

linguistics in the English department at the

University of Nevada Reno. She was a clear and vivid guest in 2024, talking then about her book

like literally dude. That was a fun conversation, so we were very happy when we found out that

she has a new book out today called Why We Talk Funny, the real story behind our accents.

I love your book and what it's about, why we talk funny.

Why do we have all these accents?

Where does it come from?

You know, I love that question because we just assume accents have been there since the dawn of time.

We don't even think about what they mean.

We really only notice them when someone else has one, even though every single living creature, well, a human creature, has an accent.

Although I think my dogs would argue they do as well.

There's this feeling, this internal feeling of why do these other people not talk like they should?

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