Linguistics experts decipher what a Kansas accent is or is not

LAWRENCE — New York. Boston. Texas. Great Lakes. Appalachia. Many regions in the U.S. have identifiable accents. But what does a Kansas accent sound like? According to new research, the answer is rather complicated.

“Everybody has an accent. People think there’s such a thing as an accentless way of speaking, and people tend to assign Midwestern places this sort of neutral speech — Kansas being one of those places,” said Lacey Wade, assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas.

Wade, fellow KU assistant professor of linguistics Jeff Holliday and KU Sociolinguistics Lab’s undergraduate research assistant Tyler Hausthor just published an article titled “What does Kansas speech sound like? It depends who you ask.” Their results reveal contrasting beliefs: Kansans associate Kansas speech with “unaccentedness,” while non-Kansans associate Kansas speech with Southern-accented voices.

The article appears in American Speech.

“Most accents are really a combination of things. For instance, many Kansans pronounce ‘pin’ and ‘pen’ the same way. That is something a lot of people here have, but that’s also found in a lot of other places, mostly the South. Then there are other Southern features they don’t have here,” Holliday said.

Pinpointing what exactly a Kansas accent is or how it deviates from other Midwestern inflections proved challenging for the researchers.

“Kansas is interesting because it’s at the intersection of several different dialect boundaries. It’s pushing up against that Southern dialect boundary, but it has some other features from the West and the Midwest. Specifically, I don’t believe there’s any one thing that is uniquely Kansan,” said Wade, who specializes in sociolinguistics.

She notes that as population moves from the East Coast to the West Coast, dialect boundaries fan out. They’re more tightly clustered on the East Coast, where going one state over might elicit a dissimilar accent. As people go west, a lot more mixing and similarity occurs.

“I don’t know that we could necessarily say that Kansas is so different from Nebraska,” she added.

One of the intriguing aspects of their research involves the dichotomy between what Kansans think their accent is versus how people from other states perceive it. Wade points to the hit streaming series “Ted Lasso” and its creator/star Jason Sudeikis as a perfect illustration.

“Sudeikis is from Kansas City, and if you listen to him, he sounds nothing like his character Ted Lasso, who is also from Kansas City. Instead of just talking like himself to portray somebody from Kansas City, he uses this kind of countrified stereotype of K.C. speech,” she said.

To ascertain their results, the researchers recruited 64 participants from across the United States: 35 from Kansas and 29 from various regions outside the state. Participants then rated dozens of talkers from the Speech Accent Archive reading the “Please Call Stella” passage, a short paragraph that uses almost every possible sound in the English language. They then rated how likely the speaker was to be from Kansas. Participants also had the option of selecting 20 checkboxes of words used to describe the voice, which ranged from regions to demeanor to economic standing.

The last task listeners encountered involved specifically indicating where they thought the Sunflower State was located.

“They had to drag a Kansas-shaped icon onto a borderless map,” said Holliday, who specializes in phonetics. “We wondered if they associated Kansas with Southernness because they actually think of it as being more in the South than it really is … but they don’t. They were extremely accurate.”

According to the researchers, non-Kansans think Kansas sounds “Southern” because people associate Kansas with rurality, and rural communities have been shown to be associated with “country” ways of speaking — even in places not in the South, like California.

There were two accents that Kansans did not reliably identify as Kansans: a speaker from Salina (in central Kansas) and Dodge City (in southwestern Kansas). Both of these received higher accentedness ratings than the other talkers from the state, according to the researchers.

Wade said, “We haven’t done an acoustic analysis to see exactly what’s going on with those two speakers yet. But there’s something about these particular voices that make them sound ‘country.’ And the interesting thing is that because they sound country, Kansans think, ‘Oh no, that’s not us.’ Even though it is.”

Both professors grew up in Ohio (Wade in Youngstown and Holliday in Cleveland). Coincidentally, each came to KU three years ago.

“We’re both outsiders. While living here and going back to Ohio to visit friends, I noticed when having conversations about my life in Kansas, they would say things that to me seemed like they thought I now lived in the South. I don’t. I’m still on I-70 straight west of here,” Holliday said.

“Meanwhile, there’s a natural desire as linguists where we try to unpack that. Like, why would Kansans say that they don’t have an accent? And why would people not from Kansas think they have a Southern accent?”