Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and have you ever been charmed by someone's accent, or has someone ever asked you, where are you from? Well, our accents play a huge role in how people perceive us and how we perceive them. And Valerie Friedland is here today to talk with us

about her fabulous new book, Why We Talk Funny, the Real Story Behind Our Accents. Valerie, welcome to

the Grammar Girl podcast. Well, I'm so excited to come talk accents with you today. I know,

and our listeners should be familiar with you because you've written so many great segments for the show, and I'm excited to talk with you live here. So one thing that

surprised me is when I first learned that you grew up in the South, because you don't have a hint

of a Southern accent to my ears. So, but you've been interested in accents, it seems like,

your whole life. You know, I started my accent journey very So, but you've been interested in accents, it seems like your whole life.

You know, I started my accent journey very young, but without knowing it because no one thinks at five, huh, I think I'll be a linguist, you know, astronaut may be not linguist for

sure. But my parents were actually French speakers that moved to Memphis, Tennessee when I was nine months

old for a job. And obviously they stood out because they had French accents. And we were in a

place that accents were such a salient part of the southern identity. So, you know, I think this early

indoctrination into the world of accents and how it tied into identity, both with my parents being kind of outsiders in this place and Southerners being very aware of what people said about them with their accents, but also of its charm and sort of this cultural closeness that it helped in gender.

I think that really started me thinking about the social power of accents early,

even though I was obviously not sophisticated enough to realize that's what I was doing.

And when I went to college, I was very interested in languages,

and I took a linguistics class, mainly because it was required. I'll have to admit that.

But I took a class in general linguistics and it kind of rocked my world. I had never thought

about language that way. And I think that's an experience a lot of people have. When you say linguistics,

a lot of people think, ugh, right? It sounds kind of painful. It's sort of like saying calculus, you know, but when people actually understand what a linguist does in terms of studying, you know, how language is part of our social identity, how language follows these really cool rules and how sort of everything has a history to why it said the way it said.

Sometimes it's really eye-opening for a lot of things you've wondered about in your life that you

didn't even know were language related. And I think for me, this feeling of maybe being an outsider

a lot of times when I was a kid, I didn't understand as partially tied to the accents that my parents came with

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