After watching that Hardee’s Super Bacon Cheese Thickburger tie-in for upcoming Man of Steel, it got me thinking about how Superman’s dialect is supposed to be sounding like.
If you’re in the Midwest, there’s this extended oo sound, like a cow mooing. And it got me thinking, that’s what Superman is supposed to sound like since he grew up in Smallville. The idea is that because Midwesterners have been raising cows for however many hundreds and thousands of years, eventually they pick up the sound in their own speech. They don’t communicate with outsiders. So Midwesterners sound like cows mooing.
Then you can apply this to other regioners that raise different livestock. The Chinese or Mexican languages sound like chickens because they raise birds and dogs, so their language sounds like those livestock.
Germans and French raise pigs, so their language sound like snorting pigs.
Africans sound like gorillas, monkeys and apes because they live out there in the jungle.
Bare with me before you start saying it’s racist. This is pure logic. You pick up the sounds from your surroundings. This is how language develops. This is linguistics.
I think I’m onto something with this.
Superman should actually sound like, “Op, op, and owoy, Lowus!”
Tags: accent, animal, dialect, how, linguistics, livestock, man of steel, midwest, region, science, sounds, superman