Arguments are more than common on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Throughout the history of the show, the queens have found ways to have a tiff over basically anything: each others’ fashion decisions, shady comments, talent level and even body weight. But last night’s debate between New York queen Monét X Change and basically everyone else was about something no fan ever saw coming — linguistics.
The conversation started when the queens in the Werk Room were commenting on Tennessee queen Eureka O’Hara’s southern accent. Monét interjected at one point to give the queens a history lesson. “The people in England sounded like us, a.k.a ‘Americans,’ but then they got their accent went they [Americans] went there [America],” she said.
Monique Heart and Asia O’Hara quickly jumped in to say that Monét was wrong — “That is lies and fairytales!” interjected Monique. The girls argued back and forth before agreeing to disagree, but the question still remains: Who was right?
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First, we have to establish that there are hundreds of different kinds of British and American accents. The general difference between standard British Received Pronunciation and the general American accent is rhotacism, or the way that we pronounce our r’s. American speakers have rhotic accents, or pronounce the r’s in words like “park” or “harp.” British speakers have non-rhotic accents, so the words sound more like “pahk” or “hahp.”
As science writer Natalie Wolchover explains in an article for Live Science, the British, in fact, used to speak with rhotic accents before Americans did. “Traditional English, whether spoken in the British Isles or the American colonies, was largely rhotic,” Wolchover writes. “It was around the time of the American Revolution that non-rhotic speech came into use among the upper class in southern England, in and around London.”
Writer Matt Soniak explains in a piece for Mental Floss that the reason behind the switch to non-rhotic speech was so the British upper class could distinguish themselves from the lower class. “This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably,” Soniak writes. “Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally ‘neutral’ and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.”
So condragulations to Monét X Change on being right after all. The original British accent sounded much like what we call an “American” accent today. Maybe next week the queens will argue about why the sky is blue and the grass is green!