Valerie Fridland with Matt Abrahams

Why do accents develop, and how do they shape our professional and social lives? Valerie Fridland explores the history, science, and power of accents.

About the Book

That long-running debate with your friend over the pronunciation of the word “marry”? It’s nothing new. Accents have long held our fascination. Almost three thousand years ago, Egyptian pharaohs tested out theories about the “original” accent. The Old Testament relays how a small difference in the pronunciation of s became a fatal litmus test of belonging: a story echoed in our own era, when Rafael Trujillo’s soldiers identified and then murdered their Creole-speaking victims based on their pronunciation of r in the Spanish word for parsley.

In Why We Talk Funny, linguist Valerie Fridland uses the tools of her own field, as well as those of psychology and history, to explore the evolution of human speech, why accents develop, and how they shape our professional and social lives. With plenty of her signature humor and captivating anecdotes, Fridland shows us how the sounds humans make—whether from the mouths of ancient ancestors or screenbound teens—all come from the same powerful desire to communicate and to belong.

Whether your accent hints at your hometown, your class, or your ethnicity, the sounds we utter reveal a lot about who we are and where we’ve been—even if you think you speak with no accent at all. (You do!) Fridland tells the story of language as the story of humanity. By definition, it’s your story, too.

About the Speakers

Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She writes a popular language blog on Psychology Today called “Language in the Wild,” and is also a professor for The Great Courses series.

Matt Abrahams is a lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB. He has decades of experience as an educator, author, podcast host, and coach.…