By Olivia Roberts
A fellow freshman sitting across from me during dinner at UC Santa Barbara’s Portola dining commons suddenly interrupted me mid-sentence. “Wait, wait, wait, what did you just say?” he exclaimed. “I said it was wicked hot outside today,” I answered. The table broke out in laughter, forcing my left eyebrow to rise in confusion as I tried to chuckle along. “Wicked??
“Wow. I’ve never actually heard a person say that,” my dinner critic continued.
It was September 2017, a mere two weeks into my freshmen year as an out-of-state student at UCSB. When I decided to move across the country from Massachusetts, I knew that I would have a lot of adjusting to do. But I had not considered that others would have to adjust to me . Unlike the many lifestyle differences that were apparent between so-called “east coasters” and “west coasters,” such as weather tolerance and pace of life, language had not occurred to me as an area for special attention. But my frequent use of the east coast slang term wicked became a sure giveaway of my regional origins.
UC Santa Barbara linguistics lecturer Bob Kennedy.
That winter, I took a course called Language in Society, taught by Linguistics lecturer Bob Kennedy. Kennedy explores how language defines an individual’s relationship to society, and the role it plays in power, hierarchy, ethnicity, gender, ideology, and other aspects of social identity. Though I had previously never taken a linguistics course, or even knew what the study of linguistics was, I was a sociology major and something about this course description compelled me.
On that first day of class, as I scooted into my seat through the stuffy air of Embarcadero Hall, I had no idea that this linguistics course would unveil to me a deeper understanding of how I fit into the UCSB community. Nor did I know it would change the direction of my studies by presenting the option of minoring in linguistics. The various course topics included women’s speech, slang, folk linguistics, style, accents, and more. Under the subject of regional dialects, we discussed the marked Boston accent (which I had often been questioned about not having) along with many other dialectical differences, including the term wicked .
Much to my surprise, an oft-repeated subject was “California English,” a language littered with stereotypes like the “valley girl” or “surfer dude,” but also highly distinguished by what Kennedy describes in linguistics jargon as “goose fronting,” a sound change in which a back rounded vowel, like that in the word goose, is formed with the tongue further forward in the mouth.
The accent is known as the California Shift, according to Kennedy, a pattern in which each of the three front vowels, as in kit, dress, and trap, are progressively a little more open. “So kit in California sounds almost like ket to other Americans, while dress in California sounds almost like drass to others,” Kennedy said.
The class became animated when Kennedy asked, “What do you call the big paved road that many cars drive high speeds on to get far distances?” To me, an east-coaster, this was a highway. But to the Californians surrounding me, it was a freeway, specifically ‘the 101’. This placement of the before a highway number is a notably Californian attribute, Kennedy said.
Additionally, due to the massive size of the state, there is an inevitable variation in accents, dialects, and slang across regional areas.
Infographic by Aishwarya Jayadeep, courtesy of The Daily Californian.
Most commonly discussed was the word “hella,” a Northern Californian slang word used for emphasis, and “dude” used in Southern California to mean, well, nearly anything. Many of these words were ones that I heard daily at UCSB, and often caught myself muttering as well.
For Kennedy, these slang words and expressions were not poor uses of the English language, but simply styles that attach us to our home roots. Through this linguistics course, I came to understand language as a resource for expressing identity. In an environment where I was identified by the way I spoke, I was surrounded by Californians whose accents and slang sounded as different to me as mine did to them. I began to think more about these differentiations that mark each of us as individuals, and I am now pursuing a minor in Sociocultural Linguistics.
Speech is not something that you judge a person by on first glance, yet spoken words can tell a lot about a person’s background. What a wicked concept.
Olivia Roberts is a third-year sociology major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this piece as for her Writing Program class Journalism for Web and Social Media.
