Accent, Profanity, The President and the Machines That Talk Back with Dr. Chris Montgomery
About this episode
Dr. Larry Barsh interviews Dr. Chris Montgomery about accents, swearing, and the implications of language in society.
What does your voice give away before you've finished a sentence? Dr. Larry Barsh talks with Dr. Chris Montgomery, a dialectologist at the University of Sheffield, about the verdicts we reach in half a second — educated or backward, polished or rough, one of us or not from around here — and why nobody believes they have an accent.Montgomery leads the UK Swear Map, a national survey of how Britain actually curses, built in partnership with the satirical arts collective Modern Toss (creators of the push-button "periodic table of swearing"). From the Portsmouth insult "din low" to the predictable ways listeners rate northern English speakers as friendlier and southern speakers as more competent, the conversation traces how language signals belonging, class, and power.Then it turns to the present moment: a U.S. president whose public profanity has climbed from roughly 40% of speeches to the low 90s, what that swearing performs for its audience, and whether it shifts the Overton window of acceptable public speech. The episode closes on AI — voices scrubbed of accent and profanity, the uncanny valley of a synthetic regional Siri, the loneliness epidemic, and why face-to-face…
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