Love it or hate it, the Rhode Island accent has been around for centuries, and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, despite what some people think.

Jaime Benheim is a sociolinguist and Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Brown University. She is currently leading the Rhode Island Language & Culture Study, which according to its website is “documenting language and its relationship to social life in Rhode Island.”

What we call an accent is actually two different things, Benheim explained in a recent telephone interview. One is the sounds that people make when they pronounce words, and the other is the words themselves.

When people aren’t in contact, the language tends to diverge. And the closer you are, the more attuned you are to the subtleties. Most English speakers can’t distinguish a Boston accent from a Rhode Island accent or a New York accent any more than New Englanders can distinguish the accents from different parts of Australia or Scotland.

But the question is, what makes the Rhode Island accent unique?

“Some features we can trace back a very long time,” Benheim says. “Take not pronouncing Rs, something linguists call non-rhotic pronunciation. New England was settled very early by people from southern England, where people also don’t pronounce their Rs. But places like Pennsylvania were settled by people from northern England and from Scotland who did pronounce their Rs, and that difference has maintained over time.”

Coffee is an interesting word, she says, because people with the accent pronounce it the way people do in New York (“caw-fee”) but not like people in Boston (“cah-fee”). Benheim says that in the 1960s, sociolinguist William Labov did a study in different New York department stores and found that Italian and Jewish New Yorkers produced more extreme New York-like pronunciations of some vowels compared to other white speakers. The hypothesis is that as children of immigrants, they were picking up on some features of native English speakers’ accents and then overdoing it.

“I’m interested in how the differences emerge in the first place, and how they change over time, and what that says about you as a person,” Benheim says.

That’s what led to the Rhode Island Language and Culture Study.

“The goal is to interview as wide a range of people as possible in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and so on,” she says. “We’re trying to get people’s life histories and social backgrounds. So if we’re trying to see language over time, listening to older people and younger people will give a sense of what the change is and also when it happened.”

“A lot of people have the sense that older people and younger people sound different,” Benheim adds. “Language changes all the time, accents change all the time, and so it’s interesting that people are aware of this difference. When we see situations like this over time, one of the questions is why younger people shift away from some of these traditional Rhode Island features.”

“I was looking at past linguistics research and there’s not a lot out there about Rhode Island. Most of the research we do have is a little bit dated now,” Benheim said.

An informal guide to Rhode Island accents was published in 1982 by linguist Elaine Chaika. The 12-page booklet supports a lot of what Benheim says. First, there are several Rhode Island accents in the state. What we call the Rhode Island accent, found around Providence County, is very different from the Yankee accent that you’re more likely to hear in South County or Newport.

Chaika’s theory was that middle and lower-middle class immigrants and their children were aspirational and copied their Irish-American teachers. But in 1982, Chaika says, professionals were only just starting to uproot themselves for their careers. “It has been possible for professionals to retain ethnic, working class accents and still function as doctors and lawyers. But that is changing with the younger generation, which is less likely to stay here,” Chaika wrote.

Chaika’s book also explains the rules for when to use or not use the R sound. People with the accent pronounce it when the r comes before vowels (“four apples”) but not consonants (“Fawth of July”). They don’t pronounce it at the end of sentences if the last word is stressed (“Come heah!”), but will sneak an R sound in if a word ends with an “uh” sound and the next one starts with a vowel. (“The umbrellar is ovuh theah”) This also applies to plurals, for some reason (“Her idears are good”).

“There’s the Caught in Providence TV show, which is called that because “caught” and “court” sound the same,” Benheim says. “It’s a pun. But I had to have that one pointed out to me.”

“When I talk to people, they think the strongest Rhode Island accents come from people that have Italian or Portuguese ancestry, but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case,” she adds.

“I definitely think that contact with people who don’t sound like you is what drives language change,” Benheim says. “Especially with children, because they want to talk like their friends and don’t want to talk like their parents. When you have immigration, you have increased contact with people coming in from other places. That can lead to change in language over time.”

Benheim says that gender is not really a factor, despite what people might think. “Gender often relates to a lot of other characteristics that impact how people tend to end up in the world. A lot of the traditional Rhode Island-y features tend to come out in people working more blue-collar, working-class jobs. Women tend to end up more in service industry jobs where language is part of the job.” If you’re working in retail or as a restaurant server or an office administrator, you’re talking to people all day. In other words, if how you speak is important to your job, you’re more likely to be aware of what you sound like.

Sometimes accents actually have an advantage. “If a way of speaking can signal toughness, that can be an advantage in certain situations, and that includes jobs associated with masculinity.”

“I think there’s sometimes this tendency to think of working-class accents as not proper or professional, and I think that whatever working-class people are doing is going to be criticized or treated as wrong, and that has nothing to do with how people actually are. What you think about language basically comes down to what you think about people who use that language.”

“There is such a strong and consistent immigrant history in Rhode Island, which I think is interesting in terms of the role of language, but also in general,” she says. “A lot of people now think it’s very important to raise their kids bilingually, which is an interesting shift from older generations that only wanted their kids to speak English.”

“Even as the accent is changing over time, it isn’t disappearing. What it means to sound like you’re from here might not mean what it did 50 years ago, but it’s still the Rhode Island accent.”

“I’ve done fifty-something interviews, and I’m currently trying to balance out some of the demographics. I do want to make sure that I’m accurately representing the whole city, and I’ll be interviewing probably through the fall depending on how many people I can find.”

To learn more about the Rhode Island Language and Culture Study at Brown University or to participate visit: https://sites.brown.edu/rilang/