Mare of Easttown and the Philly Accent

In the 7-part crime drama, Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet plays a flannel-clad cop with a thirst for Rolling Rock, an appetite for hoagies and a tendency to pronounce water more like wooder. John McWhorter — who also, it turns out, grew up in Philly — discusses his hometown’s enigmatic accent and Winslet’s courageous attempt at imitating those impossibly difficult vowels. Most actors don’t even bother.*FULL TRANSCRIPT*JOHN McWHORTER: From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and I want you to listen to this.MARE: I doubt the thing’s gonna live very long.STORE OWNER: Well, you'd be surprised. I mean, my mother turtle? Outlived her.MARE: If it’s taken care of, sure. If you feed it and give it clean water and make sure it's not swimming in its own filth. It’s for my grandson, he's four and has trouble focusing on tasks.That was from the newish series Mare of Easttown. That was Kate Winslet as the Mare protagonist talking. And, you know, if you want to be picky — and of course we don't, except just for this episode we do — there was something a little bit off about that line in terms of the pronunciation. And the reason we're going to be picky about that on this show is because finally, I want to do an episode devoted to the famous Philly accent, the Philadelphia accent. Finally, a Philadelphia show or movie actually takes the trouble to have people talking the way people actually talk in that city. Generally, if something's in Philadelphia, people either, you know, sound like they're from Los Angeles or there's this idea that people in Philadelphia must talk like New Yorkers because New York is close and, you know, you figure, well, Rocky must have sounded kind of like he was from New York because Sylvester Stallone looked like he was a refugee from a Scorsese movie. But no, there is a very distinct Philadelphia accent. And how do I know? Well, as many of you know, I grew up in Philadelphia. I grew up in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 80s. And the accent, the grand old accent is actually fading now. But I'm old enough to have been raised within it in its prime. And, you know, I have a fondness. I remember as late as the 90s, I’d call my mother's work and I'd get one of the the secretaries there on the phone, not the phone, but the phone. And one of them might say, oh, Shelly's out. My mother's name was Shelley. It would be Shelly's out. To me, that's warmth. That to me is a blueberry muffin. That to me is how people are supposed to talk. And to the extent that the white and the Black Philadelphia accent overlapped — and of course, they were different — but even now, I just love hearing either a white or a Black Philadelphian say now instead of now. Now we're going to do it now. That means that this is going to be a show about sounds, what linguists call phonology. And I don't usually go there partly because I'm not a phonologist, but mostly because it can be hard to make phonology fun without a whole lot of preparation. But this is about Philly and Philly is fun. And so I'm going to get this across to you. Mare of Easttown is in the news and it should be people, keep asking me how accurate it is, so let's do it.FIRST, FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT VOWELSAnd in order to do this, what we need to do, we've got to forget the alphabet. We're going to do vowels. I'm going to talk about Philly vowels. They're more interesting than the consonants. But we cannot have this idea that our vowels are a e i o u. Just forget that, that has nothing to do with the way those vowels are organized in your mouth, not even if you think about long a, short a whatever those are. It's not that. Here's how we do it. I want you to try something in your own mouth. Listen to me doing this: ēēē āāā aaa. Run them together: ēēēāāāaaa. Now, first of all, notice that when you go ēēēāāāaaa, you're going from up to middle to down. You're going downward: ēēēāāāaaa. Now, these things are both going from top to bottom, but they're also in the front. And you're thinking on the front of what. Because you know we're thinking of a e i o u, and we think well that's how vowels work. No, ēēēāāāaaa is front, because do this: oohōōōaah. Notice that not only are you going from top to bottom again, but they're further back: ēēēāāāaaa, up front; oohōōōaah, in the back. So that's how the vowels that we're going to talk about are actually arranged. So notice that āāā ōōō, they're both in the middle; ēēē ooh, they’re up at the top; aaa aah, that's not short a, long a or whatever. I was actually never taught what those were but they are on the bottom: aaa is the front version of aah. So, ēēēāāāaaa, oohōōōaah. Just remember that. Now what is the Philly accent? Often you read about it and it's considered so, you know, vague and strange and difficult and chaotic. Not really. You can think of it as something you do to a ...