Alright – this needs to be prefaced with the fact that I honestly don’t know much about Texan English. I know it’s an incredibly dialectically diverse area and I wish I knew more about it, but I don’t have the time right now to look into it as rigorously as I’d want to.

That being said, all of this wordvomit on language use in Supernatural has been building up in my head for a long time.

I’ll start this off with Labov’s study of Martha’s Vineyard. For those who don’t know, MV is an island off the coast of New England that’s popular for seasonal tourism. Labov did a study there that showed that of the permanent residents of the island, the people who planned to stay there their entire lives showed many features of the local dialect (Canadian raising, etc. etc. etc.) whereas people who intended to leave (teenagers who wanted to go to college or otherwise not be fishermen) ‘talked like the tourists,’ and exhibited significantly less local features.

(tl;dr if you want to fit in with a group, you talk like they do. if you want to break away, you don’t talk like they do.)

So, here’s the thing: both Dean and John Winchester exhibit similar dialectical features of that lower north/upper south/central dialect — some monophthongalization, slight breaking of short front vowels, slight pin-pen merger. It’s really amazing, to be honest, because Jeffrey Dean Morgan grew up near Seattle and definitely must’ve changed his speech to become John Winchester. Dean and John sound remarkably alike.

Sam doesn’t sound anything like John.

Why? He wants out of the family business. He wants to go to California, become a lawyer, and live an apple-pie life. He doesn’t want to be like John and Dean so he refuses their speech patterns and shifts to one that reflects the lifestyle he wants. This is consistent with Labov’s study, which, by the way, has been extrapolated to tons of situations other than Martha’s Vineyard.

Quick detour.

Jared and Jensen are both from Texas, and neither of them do anything to mask this fact when they’re talking. That’s how it’s been from day one, and that’s great – except that a) Dean spent his first four years growing up in Kansas and b) Jared and Jensen are from different parts of Texas. This is where Dave’s help came in; she was able to give me some insider info on how she could instantly tell that Jared was from San Antonio and Jensen from Dallas, and what sets them apart. Again, I seriously don’t know anything about Texan English, but I do know that Texas is incredibly linguistically diverse.

Making our way back to the main road here, I want to talk about child language acquisition for a sec.

First of all, if you write kidfic and you’ve got your eight-year-old speaking disconnected English, you first need to rethink your life choices and then you need to look up some resources on child language acquisition because trust me, that’s not how it works. This is 99% of the reason I flat-out refuse to read kidfic.

Second of all, from the ages of 2-3, kids will speak the language and variety their parents speak. After that, they start to take on the dialect their peers speak – other preschool kids, kids at the park and on the street, etc. By all means, Dean should sound more Kansas-y than he actually does. And yeah, you can account for his Texan English on account of Mary’s death and the subsequent never-ending road trip, but literally the only way for a Texan dialect (Dallas, specifically) to have stuck so hard with Dean would be if he’d spent a solid amount of time there as a kid/teen. Obviously, the same goes for Sam – except that they’d have to have stayed in or near San Antonio for long stretches of time.

As a short aside, Sam/Jared does something super interesting that Dean/Jensen and John/JDM don’t – he stops his z’s. “It dudn’t matter,” he says at one point, and that had me clapping with joy because how cool is that. And yeah, if it were intentional that would just factor in even more to the Martha’s Vineyard-esque situation Sam has going on.

Jared also either has less vowel-breaking than Jensen does or he just doesn’t use token words that often; it’s hard to tell, especially when Dean’s yelling SAM and CAS all the time. It took me a while to figure out what it was, too, since he doesn’t “drawl out” either of their names, just barks ‘em out really quick, so the vowel-breaking presents itself almost like a full raising. He realizes <Cas> ALMOST as [kɛis] or [kes] (esp. in 5x03) where it’s actually a slightly-raised æ breaking to [kæʲʌs].

What really stood out to me was when Dean says, “Sam, gimme the axe” in Mystery Spot, because there’s three things going on there:

One, he breaks the “Sam,” very audibly, in an exasperated way: [sæʲʌm]

Two, he’s got a pin-pen merger in “gimme”: [gɪ̞mi]

Three, he raises “axe”: [eks]

…and that’s probably the most Kansas he’s ever sounded on the show, to be honest. I’d elaborate on the low-back merger if I could, but since my dialect has the merger complete, it’s really hard for me to judge from casual speech whether someone has it or not.

Cas is probably the most interesting character, language-wise, especially when you contrast him with Jimmy. Are you guys ready to hear about the Northern Cities Shift? Yeah? Yeah?

Jimmy Novak and Castiel are two separate entities. Each of them have their own quirks with respect to the body they inhabit, and of course they speak differently.

Jimmy’s from Pontiac, Illinois. If you look at a map, Pontiac is a ways south on the I-55 from Chicago, thus placing it within the “I-55 corridor,” and that just so happens to be a corridor preserving the Northern Cities Shift. Vowel shifts work in lots of different ways – the big Thing about the NCS is that it happens almost exclusively in big cities (hence the name), so you’ve got shifted speech in the major 'strongholds’ (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Detroit, and Chicago) and their surrounding suburbs, but more standard vowels in the small towns between the hotspot big cities.

When Misha is playing Cas, he uses sort of a 'broadcast standard’ English, which is pretty similar to California English (and California English is very quickly on its way to being 'broadcast standard’ right now). I guess doing his growly Cas-rumble forces him to speak in a manner completely different to how he normally talks and how he grew up talking.

Oh my god, watching The Rapture for the first time and hearing Misha and not Cas threw me so bad that I had to pause the episode to do some digging on where Misha’s from. His vowel space is so radically different from anything I’ve ever regularly encountered and I had no clue what to do with myself. Turns out Misha’s from Massachusetts, which at least sort of explains it – Jimmy’s emphatic “I don’t know anything” is what made me ragequit trying to figure it out on my own, because really? Really? I don’t even know how to transcribe that; it still frustrates me.

In any case, all existential crises re: Misha’s accent aside, unless Jimmy was born and raised elsewhere, he should definitely have a very distinct NCS going on. To be honest, when I realized that Pontiac is in the NCS range, I was really disappointed that they didn’t have Misha speak with a shift.

Going back to this post I reblogged earlier, this is why SPN needs to hire dialect coaches. Or at least take on poor accidental graduates with BAs in linguistics who would be more than happy to do dialect/language stuff as unpaid interns.

Just sayin’.

(No, but really – SPN isn’t taking advantage of what they could be doing with language. They’re missing out on a lot by excluding dialect coaching and not bothering with at least looking up languages on Wikipedia.)