For nearly a year, news story after news story following the roller coaster that was Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate campaign rarely failed to mention his “gravelly” voice.
As Troy Jackson emerged as Democrats’ replacement nominee following the implosion of Platner’s campaign, the push to unseat Sen. Susan Collins suddenly had a new distinctive sound — that of the Allagash logger’s northern Maine accent.
Markedly different from the “r”-less lilt heard on fishing boats and butchered by Hollywood actors, this lesser-known, hard-to-define Maine dialect now has the attention of a national audience.
Few have even tried to define it, which is what led Katharina Pabst, a German-born linguist, to concentrate her studies on the subject. Now a professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands, Pabst started spending time in northern Maine about 15 years ago with her partner and fellow linguist, Thomas St. Pierre, who grew up in Aroostook County.
“I was immediately struck by a number of features of local speech that I encountered during these visits,” she said in an email last week.
There was the “r” added to the end of words like “area,” the “oot and aboot” that made its way across border from Canada and the colloquialisms, like saying someone lived “up to” rather than “in” a town. Taken alone, these features aren’t unique to the region, she said, but the combination of them is.
When she went searching for scholarly descriptions of what she was hearing, however, she didn’t find much.
“The more I looked, the more convinced I became that this was an important gap in our understanding of North American English,” she said.
So, she took it upon herself to change that, conducting interviews with 84 residents of Aroostook County, mostly from outside of Houlton. In telling their life stories, they provided documentation of the region’s speech patterns and its history. It’s work that Pabst hopes to continue doing throughout the County and into New Brunswick.
To properly place Jackson’s accent within this context, Pabst said, she would have to measure his vowels and compare them to those of other Mainers. In the interest of time, she instead conducted a close listening of a recorded speech and noted several trends in how Jackson talks.
One was his raised pronunciation of vowels, making words like “beside” sound more like “besoide,” which may originate from the region’s French speakers, she said.
Perhaps most divergent from the stereotypical Maine accent is the fact that he pronounces his “r”s — most of the time. They get softer in words like “forward,” Pabst said, which is consistent with what she found in her southern Aroostook County research.
At the same time, Jackson drops a lot of other letters, like the “d” in “spend” and the “g” of any word ending in “-ing.” In formal speeches, Pabst said, these features usually become less pronounced.
“The fact that he keeps on using them quite frequently makes him sound very down-to-earth and approachable, which supports his message of working-class solidarity,” she said.
And therein lies the reason so much emphasis is put on politicians’ voices, more than their height or hair color. Campaigns, after all, are largely about words and how they’re conveyed — on social media posts, in attack ads and, most importantly, from the candidates’ mouths.
That Platner’s forceful message about dismantling the establishment was delivered in a booming bass tone undoubtedly instilled confidence in his fitness to do so, even as evidence mounted to the contrary. At the same time, the tremor heard in Sen. Collins’ voice doesn’t help the perception that she’s vulnerable, whether it comes to the president or the polls.
It’s superficial stuff that we would all like to think we’re above. Time and again, however, we’ve proven we’re not; our elections are consistently decided on charisma. We’ve seen how a candidate’s voice can play a part in electability, from JFK’s broad “a”s to Bill Clinton’s drawl to George W. Bush’s Texas twang.
In November, we’ll find out if the northern Maine accent is a winnin’ one.