Baltimore

INTRODUCTION

My breakdowns are structured around accent features and influences described by Knight-Thompson Speechwork, a 21st-century, skills-based approach to speech and accents that celebrates language diversity. KT Speechwork offers the “4 Ps” below as a framework for exploring many different facets of an accent:

    • PEOPLE. Who speaks with this accent? Where does this accent come from, historically? What common cultural elements might influence people’s manner of speaking?
    • POSTURE. What is the habitual shape of the vocal tract for speakers of the accent? We all have a habitual way of resting our mouths that allows us to move it into the speech actions of our accent as economically as possible. The posture of this accent might be different from your habitual one.
    • PRONUNCIATION. What are the sounds of this accent? I’ll be using both recordings and the International Phonetic Alphabet to describe speech actions and the sounds they produce. As you listen and read, listen with your mouth–can you make the shapes the speaker is making as you listen?
    • PROSODY. What are the musicality and rhythm of the accent like? What are the intonation, stress, and pitch patterns that speakers might use? This is the soul of the accent. We could nail the pronunciation, but it’s not a manner of speaking until we find how it flows.

 

PEOPLE

Baltimore, Maryland and its neighbors on the Eastern Seaboard

In this breakdown, I’m aiming to describe the features that distinguish the accent of Black Baltimoreans, specifically those from East and West Baltimore, a geographical shape sometimes called “The Black Butterfly.” I’ve focused on features that might be salient for Black actors from the UK who don’t speak this accent natively. It seems important to say: I’m a white person from the midwestern US who has worked in Baltimore for about a decade and moved here permanently four years ago. When we look at this breakdown together live, I’ll make time for you to define how we work, in a way that best serves you and takes into account the historical, social, and psychological terrain we’re entering into.

It’s also worth mentioning that the accent donors are my students in an undergraduate actor training program. We recorded a couple students at a time to try to side-step any code-switching they might do in conversation with their professor, but they and I think code switching is probably a part of these samples.

A bit about Baltimore. The story of the Black Baltimore accent is one of linguistic segregation, created by the US’s violent racial history. Maryland was a slave state until the Emancipation Proclamation, though it remained on the side of the Union in the American Civil War. Because of indentured servitude and “term slavery,” Baltimore had the largest population of free Black people before the Civil War. This population grew with Emancipation, and again with the Great Migration in the early 20th century of Black people escaping racial terrorism in the southern United States and moving to northern cities. By the 1970s, Baltimore had a majority Black population, a little over 60% as of the 2020 census. The city’s population distribution was profoundly influenced by the practice of “redlining” (refusing mortgage loans or homeowners insurance policies to people on the basis of race), which created sharp geographical segregation of Black and white neighborhoods. Public school districting (in the US, “public” schools are funded by taxes) and policing practices reinforced this segregation.

Portrayals of Baltimore in the media have focused on high poverty and crime rates concentrated in some of its Black neighborhoods — perhaps most notably HBO’s The Wire in the early aughts. These are important parts of the story: it’s true that the homicide rate is one of the highest of major cities in the US; that the city has been rapidly losing population since the 1980s, largely due to poverty and lack of opportunity; and that the poverty rate of 20% is well above the national average of 12.8%. But the story of Black Baltimoreans is much larger and more diverse than these results of racial segregation and terrorization. This is a large part of why I wanted to teach this accent: I like The Wire, I think it shed needed light on the way US institutions have failed in Baltimore. But I think there are other stories about Baltimore worth telling, and I hope they do get told.

Situated as it is on the harbor off the Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore has always been an international hub and a cultural destination. Black Baltimore has a rich scholarly history, driven by its two HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Morgan State University and Coppin State University. Its literary scene boasts Black Classic Press, one of the oldest independently owned Black publishers in the country; its artistic scene boasts the oldest continually producing Black community theatre in the country, Arena Players. The arts in Baltimore are thriving: it is home to one of the nation’s top public high schools for the arts, Baltimore School for the Arts, where colleagues tell me Tupac had to be told to go home from the library at the end of the day because he wouldn’t stop reading.

The accent donors for this breakdown stressed that while race and class are critically intertwined in the history of the US, they have experienced these as separate and distinct forces in their own individual lives. One donor describes herself as having experienced poverty; the rest describe themselves as middle class, from economically thriving neighborhoods like Walbrook in West Baltimore and Waverly in East Baltimore.

They especially wanted to share about Black Baltimore’s food. You might have heard about Baltimore’s crabs in the shell and crab cakes, but they’ve stolen the spotlight. As a quick introduction to the accent, here are the accent donors’ voices, letting us know about the Baltimore chicken box:

 

Click the image for more on the chicken box, with some video of East Baltimore, from a native speaker of the Black Baltimore accent.

The political and social forces I summarized above mean that Black Baltimoreans’ way of speaking can be significantly different from the white “Bawlmorese” Kathy Bates does in American Horror Story. With a hat tip to Phil Thompson for this way of thinking about it: what I’m calling “the Black Baltimore accent” isn’t a monolith. We can think of it as floating around on this venn diagram. A person might consciously and unconsciously adopt accent features from each of these three categories in an adaptable way, depending on context and even within a single utterance:

So, I’ll try in this breakdown to let you know which features are generally associated with which of the above categories, but it’s a shifting thing, and not possible to delineate strictly. My students tell me that, when traveling, people think they’re from New York and North Carolina in equal measure–their accent is a fascinating hybrid of some typically northern (mostly New York and Philadelphia) and some typically southern and also African American linguistic phenomena.

The accent donors for this breakdown are all born and raised in Baltimore (one split her time between Baltimore and York County, Pennsylvania), and they are between the ages of 18 and 24. Here are a couple of them telling stories, as an entry point into the sounds of this accent:

 

POSTURE

General vocal tract posture: Sometimes filler or hesitation sounds like uh and um are useful for finding the position speakers might rest their articulators in. Here are two I think are particularly illustrative, first at normal speed, then slowed down 50%.

Or, try mirroring from this visual. Felicia Pearson, an actor on The Wire who was “discovered” in a Baltimore club, is an iconic example of this accent. (Here’s the full interview, but what she’s saying is really interesting, so it might be hard to pay attention to the accent features!)

Here are some things to notice, both in the sound samples and the visual:

    • jaw: slightly raised. This is perhaps a less-released jaw position than many other American accents.
    • tongue root: retracted. Imagine that the tip of your tongue rests a little back from your lower front teeth. You can hear this more in the first filler sound above.
    • lip corners: often tensed or protruding. This is especially clear in the gif above. When the lips fully round in this accent, they round a lot. For many speakers from the UK, this might feel fairly familiar.
    • creaky voice: This isn’t exactly a posture phenomenon, but I do think some of the tongue root retraction might contribute to a general sensation that vibration “hangs back” in the pharynx and back of the mouth. Try the first “filler sound” above with a bit of creak, imagining that you’re sharing about 80% of your vibration with your listener, and keeping 20% in reserve in your mouth.

 

PRONUNCIATION

The below “Pronunciation Quick Look” covers what I think are the key features of this accent. You can use the more detailed Pronunciation information that follows to fill in with a fine brush, or to listen to recorded examples of features described in this Quick Look.

Click the image to download.

As you play the example recordings below, “listen with your mouth.” Try “mirroring” the speech gestures you’re hearing with your own articulators; make sound if you like. Take them slowly at first, then build up to fluency.

In all the example recordings, you’ll hear the speakers at normal speed first, then slowed down 50%.

CONSONANTS

Initial /ɹ/ → [ɹ̈]

At the beginning of a word and following a consonant, /ɹ/ is probably pretty close to your own if you’re from England, but it may be useful for you to really concentrate on bunching or bracing the back of the body of the tongue between the upper molars. There might also be some curling up of the tongue tip. Things get a lot more exciting following and between vowels—I’ll talk about that in the vowel section.

Example words: rip, reflect, recall, trees, drama, frosty

 

Intervocalic or final /t/ → [ʔ] or [ɾ]

When between vowels, /t/ is variably realized as a lightly articulated glottal stop [ʔ] or, as in many American accents, an alveolar tap [ɾ] or perhaps even a lightly articulated voiced alveolar plosive [d]. Especially before a pause, /t/ at the end of a word might be reinforced with a glottal stop [tʔ] or simply be realized as a lightly articulated glottal stop [ʔ].

Example words: [ʔ] between two vowels: fighting; [ɾ] or [d] between two vowels: hurry it up, duty, little* kitten; [ʔ] at the end of a word: fate

*Why am I calling the /t/ in little “intervocalic”? Read on!

 

Post-vocalic or final /l/ → [ʊ̜]

After a vowel, /l/ is realized as a slightly lip-rounded, semi-close back vowel. It might even be helpful to imagine the labial velar approximant [w] to get there. This is similar to some London accents, but less lip-rounded. (The general tongue root retraction of this accent might also contribute to this being a little different from London.)

Example words: coal, pools, hell, subtle, struggle, little kitten

 

Intervocalic or initial /l/ → [l]

For many British English speakers, this may already be your realization, but this could be a shift for some Americans, who might tend to velarize /l/. At the start of words and between vowels, the lateral approximant may be realized with a relaxed tongue body and velum.

Example words: like, why did you lie, flooding, a lure

 

/θ, ð/ → [θ, ð] or [t̪, d̪]

There seems to be a lot of variability here. These fricatives are often fully “stopped”: realized as the dentalized plosives [t̪, d̪]. In the recording below, the clips progress from more to less “stopped”: more plosive-like to clearly fricative.

Example words, unvoiced: through the*, bathroom, Kathy, earth, north, death

*Notice in through the /ɹ/ is dropped, which often happens in initial /θɹ/.

Example words, voiced: these, these, their, this, father, without*

*In some American accents, the sound spelled th in the words with and without is unvoiced. But in Baltimore, it’s voiced, whether it’s a fricative or a plosive.

 

Final /d/, /k/, /p/ → [ʔ]

Like /t/ above, other final plosives, especially /d/ and /k/, may be realized as glottal stops, lightly articulated, or perhaps as plosives with no audible release: [d̚, k̚, p̚].

Example words: decided, cold, blood red, bird-like, black, quick brown

 

Final /n/ → Nasalization of preceding vowel [~]

Final /n/ may not be articulated, but a preceding vowel may be nasalized.

Example words: quick brown, woman, train, one

 

Final consonant cluster reduction

Consonant clusters, particularly /st/, /ts/, /sk/, and /nd/ may be “reduced” by dropping one or more elements, usually the plosive. This is a feature of many English dialects, and particularly African American English (AAE).

Example words: before it’s too late, last hurrah, land is this

Something related happens in alveolar consonant clusters that include /n/, as in couldn’t, wouldn’t. The plosive is realized as a glottal stop, followed by a syllabic /n/: [ʔn̩]. (I’m zeroing in on this detail because this realization is importantly different than the nasal plosion that happens in this case in some other American accents.) Notice that in the case of kitten, below, a vowel between the consonants is dropped.

Example words: genuinely couldn’t hold it out, little kitten

 

/stɹ/ → [ʃtɹ]

The fricative in this consonant cluster is articulated at the post-alveolar ridge.

Example words: struggle, strong

 

Yod coalescence: /dj/, /tj/ → [d͡ʒ], [t͡ʃ]

An alveolar plosive followed by a yod often “coalesces” into an affricate. In the example audio below, this happens where the yod is initial, as in the word you. You won’t hear yod coalescence in words like duke, duty, tune, etc., where there could be a “leading yod,” because this accent is a prime example of yod-dropping: in Baltimore, there’s no yod in those words, whereas there might be in a London accent. I’ll say more about this in the Vowel section below.

Example words: why did you lie

 

Final /ŋ/ → [n]

In the suffix ­-ing, the velar nasal is realized as an alveolar nasal.

Example words: fighting, just speaking and not thinking about it, working to get, trying to get*

*Here, trying to becomes tryna, an originally AAE contraction that’s now pretty much ubiquitous throughout the US.

 

VOWELS

To organize the vowel sounds I’m introducing, I’ll be using a tool called “lexical sets.” These sets, created by J.C. Wells, are lists of words whose vowel sounds tend to “behave” similarly within distinct dialects of English. For a full linguistic discussion of lexical sets, see Accents of English I: An Introduction by J.C. Wells (Cambridge University Press 1982). Or, for something geared specifically towards actors, check out Eric Armstrong’s (new!) open-source book, Lexical Sets for Actors. Or just google it! Believe it or not, the Wikipedia article on lexical sets will give you a decent introduction.

Rhoticity

For the most part in this accent, /ɹ/ after a vowel is pronounced and “colors” the vowel, whether followed by another vowel (a “linking /ɹ/”) or not. There is, however, a lot of variation. Vowels preceding /ɹ/ often centralize, yielding the most delightful TikTok ever:

In addition to centralization, you can also hear tongue root retraction in this video, so that a post-vocalic /ɹ/ sounds “strong” or “hard.”

Because of these features (centralization and tongue root retraction), I like the NURSE set as training ground for the other rhotic sets.

NURSE → [ɝ̙]

Example words: hurts, courage, earth, fir, work, hurry it up

Practice sentence: Hurry! The early bird gets thirty dirty worms.

 

CURE → [ɝ̙] or [ɔ̽ə̯]

CURE is mostly merged with NURSE, and leading yods (/j/ before vowels), common in this set in many accents in both the US and UK, are almost always dropped. The occasional CURE word distinct from NURSE seems to have a non-rhotic off-glide.

Example words [ɝ̙]: furious, lure

Example words [ɔ̽ə̯]: poor

 

SQUARE → varying centralization from [ɐ˞̙] to [ɛ̈ɚ̙̆]

The TikTok above, on the word Aaron, is a better example of what I’ve described as a mid-open central vowel with rhoticity [ɐ˞̙], but you can hear it in the first instance of carry in the recording below. A diphthong with a front onset [ɛ̈ɚ̙̆], perhaps closer to So-Called General American, also occurs.

Example words: [ɐ˞̙]: carry these, carry these, [ɛ̈ɚ̙̆]: sparrows, nightmare

Practice sentence: I’m furious. I can’t carry her square purse. 

 

A wrinkle that I found interesting is this one instance of the word nightmare, below, with the nasal consonant /m/ perhaps producing nasality in the following diphthong, somewhere in the neighborhood of [ɪ̝̃ə̯]. I didn’t hear this frequently enough to tell you anything about it except that it exists, but it could be something to pepper in after nasal consonants.

Example word: nightmare

 

LETTER → [ə] or [ɚ]

This seems to be variable whether followed by a vowel or not. The tongue root retraction I noticed in the previous sets doesn’t seem to happen here. The male speaker in the audio below also seems to be fronting the vowel slightly, so that it’s in the neighborhood of [ɛ̽].

Example words: [ə]: whispers, cluster, otters, father is, father is

Example words: [ɚ]: whispers, otters, cluster

 

The next three sets (note that NORTH and FORCE are merged) are more consistently non-rhotic.

 

NEAR → [ɪ̝ə̯]

Example words: queer, queer, fear, fear

 

START → [ɑ̽ə̯]

The onset here is mid-centralized, especially in heart and apart below.

Example words: heart, apart, barns

Practice sentence: You can’t argue with my artful garden.

NORTH/FORCE → [ɔ̽ə̯]

This is in the same neighborhood as the occasional CURE word (poor) above: a very lip-rounded (focus on the inner ring of the orbicularis oris) back vowel onset.

Example words: forms, north, four, anymore, hoarse

Practice sentence: She went overboard with love for her first-born.

 

GOOSE → [ʉ]

The native speakers I talked to cited this as the most characteristic sound of their accent, aside from centralizing vowels before /ɹ/. Especially when not followed by a final consonant (“unchecked”), this vowel is central, very close, and very lip rounded. The vowel is still “fronted” when followed by a consonant, more in the neighborhood of [ʉ] than [u]. In loom below, the /l/ might be drawing the vowel further back. Also worth noting that leading yods are virtually absent from this set–if you’re from England, this might be a big change.

Example words: too, two, zoo, knew, duty, loom

Practice sentences: You, too, are a thing of beauty.

 

TRAP/BATH → [æ̝ə̯]

White Baltimoreans might have a TRASH/TRAFFIC split in the TRAP set, but that happens less for Black speakers. The nucleus of this diphthong is raised, in some instances approaching [ɛ], and it often has a central off-glide, as is characteristic of this set in most of the American South and in AAE. I think it will give you less of a headache to think of it as being in free variation than to try to identify rules for when and how much the vowel is raised (or “tense”). But here’s one pattern that might be helpful: in words where the vowel is followed by a nasal consonant (a TRAM subset), the vowel might have some nasality, and a central off-glide might be a bit longer: [æ̝̃ə̯].

Example words: flashing, savage, jazz, bags, last, planted, lambs

Practice sentences: My shampoo needs to last through the bath.

 

MOUTH → [æ̝ʊ̯] ~ [aʊ̯]

There is a lot of free variation in this set, in terms of the placement of the nucleus and the length of the off-glide. Surrounding consonants seem to affect the diphthong a lot–nasals especially cause nasalization of the vowel. Most often, the same raised front vowel as in TRAP/BATH forms the nucleus of this diphthong, although it can sometimes be quite open, as in about and house in the example words below.

Example words: [æ̝ʊ̯̃]: brown; [ẽ̝ʊ̯]: now; [aʊ̯]: about; [a̠ʊ̯]: house

 

LOT → [a̠]

LOT and CLOTH are not merged in this accent as they are in many other US accents. LOT words are unrounded and seem to be quite fronted.

Example words: flocks, fox, otters, cotton, not

 

CLOTH/THOUGHT → [ɔː] or [ɔə̯]

CLOTH and THOUGHT seem to be merged in this accent, realized with a rounded mid-open back vowel, perhaps so long that there is a central off-glide. Father, a PALM word, is in this set in this accent, and so is, importantly, on. This realization of on is often heard in AAE throughout the US–or it could also be a regional feature. Some accent specialists talk about the “ON line” between New York and Philadelphia, north of which on shares a vowel with don, and south of which, with dawn. (This line peters out the further west you go, where LOT and CLOTH begin to merge.)

Example words: frosty, frosty, fog, coffee, recall, claws, all about, father, working on

Practice sentence: I got a lot of frosty looks for falling on my father.

 

GOAT → [o̜ʊ̆]

This set is another that differentiates the accents of white and Black Baltimoreans. White speakers might use a front vowel onset, perhaps as far forward as [ɛ̽], but the example words below seem to have a mid-close back vowel onset.

Example words: coal, slowly, old, sofa, go

Practice sentence: Hold on, I don’t want to go to the ocean.

 

STRUT → [ə] or [ɜ]

STRUT seems mostly to be in schwa territory, but after an /l/ it might lower to [ɜ].

Example words: struggle, cut, sudden, fluffy, blood, flooding

Practice sentence: Don’t touch the bubble, we’ll all flood.

 

PRICE → [a] or [aɪ̯]

There’s some variability here, but this vowel is often an open front monophthong, as in many Southern American accents.

Example words: [a]: why did you lie, pride, decided, [aɪ̯]: ice, like

Practice sentence: I like to have a good time.

 

KIT → [ɪ], DRESS → [ɛ]

I include these sets mostly to note that they are realized with monophthongs, not diphthongs as is common in AAE and many Southern American accents especially preceding a voiced consonant.

Example words: [ɪ]: visions, is this, quick, sips, [ɛ]: red, breath, death

While we’re on KIT and DRESS, I’ll use this chance to offer these straggling details:

BITS’N’BOBS

A few details that defy categorization:

PROSODY

  • I think owing a bit to some consonant features like th-stopping and glottal reinforcement, there is a kind of percussive quality to this accent. Like many US accents, there usually isn’t a great deal of pitch variation within a single phrase. (There is an important exception to this, which I’ll note below.) Staying on a relatively consistent note, coupled with very distinctly demarcated syllables, creates a sense that tempo is more important than intonation. But the syllables aren’t regular, or of “equal weight”: it might be helpful to think of them as syncopated–a series of quick compressed syllables might be followed by a lengthened syllable. Here are some phrases where I think this is particularly clear: