Kate Winslet, Mare of Easttown, and the "Delco" Accent

HBO's Mare of Easttown, four of its seven episodes having already aired, is getting a lot of press these days―or, as we would say in Philadelphia, "anymore." Part of the reason for this is that creator Brad Ingelsby, son of Villanova basketball legend Tom Ingelsby and native of Berwyn on the Main Line, has provided us with a crackin'―once again, as we would say it in Philly―good mystery and a highly complex and morally conflicted lead character plagued with grief and, consequently, depression. It's also a poignant study of place. The fictional Easttown, located in Delaware County ("Delco") to the immediate southwest of Philadelphia, is a dreary place: sun rarely shining; people, socially and geographically stuck in the mud, as it were, mired in bleak, dead-end jobs; opioids readily available to wreak havoc on the populace; homes that, while not ramshackle, could certainly use some loving care and a bit of renovation. As a portrayal of the problems of working class America, it has few peers. 

[As an aside, it is interesting that real-life Easttown Township, located in Chester County on the border with Delco, is an upscale community on the Main Line and home of the prestigious Devon Horse Show. Indeed, for those unfamiliar with the area, Delaware County, though geographically small (184 sq. mi.) and densely populated (ca. 567,000), is a divided place; the northern part, consisting of Haverford, Newtown, and Radnor Townships, is characterized by middle/upper middle/upper class suburbs and boasts not one, but two, world-class golf courses: Aronomink and the storied Merion; the southern part is far more working class, with boroughs like Darby and the city of Chester even farther down the economic scale.  Implicitly, the show is centered in this southern part of the county. Indeed, the opening scene, in which the titular character responds to a personal call from an old lady about a prowler, is filmed in working class Marcus Hook; Mare's own middle class house is located in Wallingford. To emphasize the working class grit of the fictional Easttown, Ingelsby has utilized scenes from Phoenixville in neighboring Montgomery County and the hardscrabble steel town of Coatesville in neighboring Chester County. Rarely is a place portrayed with such unrelenting bleakness (one thinks as well of the rain-soaked Seattle in the estimable The Killing). It is tempting to believe that only a congenitally self-deprecating native Philadelphian would deliberately portray his hometown the way Inglesby has.]

Another reason for the amount of press Mare is receiving is the uncommon quality of the performances. This, of course, is not unexpected from the show's star, the Oscar-winning Kate Winslet. Once again, with this performance Winslet demonstrates herself one of the era's greatest actors, with an emotional elasticity and transparency few others can match. The supporting cast is likewise admirable: Julianne Nicholson as Mare's best friend, Lori ("Lor") Ross, Evan Peters as Detective Colin Zabel, Guy Pearce as love interest (and more?) Richard Ryan, Angourie Rice as daughter Siobhan, Sosie Bacon (daughter of Kevin) as daughter-in-law Carrie, and especially Jean Smart as her tart-mouthed mother Helen. The performances all lend a sense of authenticity, and at times genuine humor, to the show.

But nowhere is this authenticity more surprising, and more discussed, than in the matter of the supposed "Delco" accents attempted by the cast, most notably the famously British Winslet. Let me be honest. I was raised in Haverford Township, Delaware County, from the age of 7 and lived there until I was married at age 22 and moved away from the Philadelphia area to attend graduate school in Texas. Having moved back to Pennsylvania, I regularly go back both to the city and to Havertown, where my daughter and her family now live in the house in which I was raised. I know what a Philadelphia accent―in truth, a white Philadelphia accent―sounds like. Most linguists will also say that the same "Philadelphia" or "mid-Atlantic" dialect emanates from the city east to South Jersey, north to the Lehigh Valley, south to parts of Delaware and Maryland, and west to Delaware and Chester Counties in PA; the slight variations which may be found have less to do with geographical location (e.g., Delco versus South Philly) than to socio-economic class and the age of the speaker. Delco indeed has a large population of working class whites whose families have lived there for generations, and thus has a high percentage of people who speak with the classic accent. Studies have shown that the strongest, most recognizable Philly accents occur in people whose parents both hail from the area. The rest of us certainly speak the same dialect, but the relative strength is often diminished. 

I myself am a known, some would say "infamous," practitioner of what is colloquially termed "hoagie-mouth." During my long years of "exile" in Texas I consciously worked hard to retain my native dialect as an element of my fierce hometown pride. And it has always been one of my pet peeves that Hollywood has historically ignored the dialect when ostensibly filming in the city or its environs. What is the most famous movie set in Philly? Rocky, of course. What do we hear? Sylvester Stallone's New York tongue. Burgess Meredith's New York tongue. Bert Young's New York tongue. Infuriating! In Kensington, of all places! Yes, Sly made famous the favorite Philly call, "Yo," but, even though he graduated from Lincoln High in Northeast Philly, he never lost the Gotham accent he had assimilated earlier in life. The same goes for Silver Linings Playbook, filmed only a couple of miles from my old Havertown home in Upper Darby, Delaware County. What do we hear in that fine film? Robert DeNiro's famous Bronx accent and, even worse, Philadelphia-area native son Bradley Cooper's anodyne general American diction. M. Night Shyamalan famously shoots his films in the Philly region, but rarely do we hear any recognizable Philly-speak from the casts. The Australian Toni Collette made a valiant attempt in The Sixth Sense, and South Jersey native Bruce Willis still retains a sanded away tinge of one in Unbreakable. But little else. TV shows? The less said about The Goldbergs, the better.

There is a reason for this, of course. The Philadelphia accent is famously the most difficult American dialect for non-natives to assimilate or copy. Winslet, herself a master of accent assimilation, has said the "Delco" accent is one of the three hardest she has ever had to learn. Indeed, upon examination, the seemingly impenetrable complexity of its patterns is intimidating. Better, so the thinking goes, to be lazy and substitute the more famous accent from Philly's larger neighbor 90 miles to the northeast. But―and this is no small thing―Winslet and her fellow cast members actually made the attempt to pull it off. And, even more surprisingly, they even succeeded to a certain extent (to my ears, Evan Peters, surprisingly, was the most successful). Indeed, what is shocking to me is the degree to which people even recognize the accent as alien or unusual. None of the accents used are overly strong and, if I'm not listening too carefully or critically, most of the time they sound like they could be my neighbors. At the very least, it is a pleasure not to have to hear declarative clauses ending on an upswing or, what is worse, the phonetic scourge known as "vocal fry," both of which have seemingly become de rigueur in many varieties of today's American English. Winslet herself made the wise decision not to do the accent too hard so as to allow it to slide into parody (see last week's hilarious SNL "Murder Durder" Mare spoof [though how does "dawwter" turn into "durder?"]; better yet the 2017, pre-Super Bowl sketch featuring Upper Darby native Tina Fey).

As I said, to a large extent Winslet and other cast members, particularly Evan Peters and Sosie Bacon, succeeded. Perhaps the two most instantly recognizable features of the accent, the pronunciation of "water" as "wooder" and the infamously fronted and rounded long O's―Winslet's pronunciation of "overdose" near the beginning of episode 1 was a thing of beauty―were faithfully done. Yet genuine Philly-talk has a certain nasal inflection, cadence, fronted vowel sounds and swallowed L's that, together, are simply well-nigh unattainable for outsiders to master. Indeed, having watched each episode twice, I have detected an authentic, old-school Philadelphia accent only in two minor characters, Pat DeFusco's Officer Tommy Boyle and Patrick McDade's Glenn Carroll. When they talked, it sounded like I was back in Haverford High in the early '70's. Somewhat less strong, though clearly legitimate, native accents are also delivered by Connie Giordano ("Patty Del Rasso") and Jeremy Gabriel ("Steve Hinchey").

Winslet herself is particularly good when she just lets a sentence rip unselfconsciously ("Ma, we don't know what's gonna happen, alright?"; here both the "going to" = "gonna" and the raised long I in "alright" are perfectly done). She's also excellent in executing both the smashing together or elision of consonants in multi-syllable words and the hard to emulate multiple glottal stops characteristic of the dialect (e.g., the Walt Whitman Bridge = the "Wal(t) Whi(t)man Bridge" = the "Wall Women Bridge"). Famously, the people of the city often pronounce its name as "Filelfia" (or, as the city's infamous former mayor, Frank Rizzo, used to say, "Fluffya"). Along the same lines, Winslet's pronunciations of "probably" as "pro(b)ly" and "didn't" as "din(t)" were spot on. Another is the way she authentically pronounces "something" as "sum(p)n'." "Allatime" for "all the time" is yet another triumph on her part.

Another peculiarity of the Philadelphia accent which Winslet nailed was the propensity to elide syllables when one ends with a long vowel and the next follows with a short vowel or schwa sound. Thus "towel" = "tal;" "poem" = "pome;" "crayon" = "cray-in," "cran," or even "crown;" and "mayor" = "mare" (indeed, when I heard the name of this show for the first time, and learned it would take place in the Philadelphia suburbs, I immediately thought the story was about the town's mayor!). Also, the name "Graham" is pronounced "Gram," as she dutifully does when meeting with the therapist of that name to whom she is sent for counseling.

One area where Winslet sometimes falls short is her inconsistent application of the region's complicated a-split system. For example, the classic Philadelphia accent uses a tense "a" sound, often bordering on a diphthong ("eh-ah"), in many non-prevocalic syllables, especially those ending in -f, -th, and -s (e.g., "bath" and "pass"), as well as other words such as "bad," "mad," and "glad" (but not, inconsistently, and contrary to New York, "sad;" you have to be raised there, I guess!). Unfortunately, Winslet, while nicely pronouncing such terms as "pass" and "ass," reverts to the typically American lax "a" when incorrectly pronouncing "mad." On the other hand, Philadelphians have traditionally used a lax "a" before a prevocalic "m" or "n" (e.g., "planet" or "animal"), whereas general American English uses a tense "a" in such instances. Thus, while at times she nicely used the lax "a" with words like "examiner" and "January," it was disappointing to hear her use the tense "a" in her pronunciations of "family," "nana," and the officer's name "Trammel."

Another area of inconsistency was in her application of the au/o split (hence, Philadelphia's traditionalist aversion to the general American "caught"/"cot" merger). Hence, whereas most Americans will pronounce both "caught" and "cot" something like "kaht," Philadelphians will pronounce the former like "kawt," often with a very pronounced, hard, "aw" sound (Similarly with the word "coffee," my pronunciation of which has often―in Philadelphian, "awffen"―attracted the attention of people unused to it; two years ago, while traveling out west, I was asked where I was from by servers in both Vancouver and Olympia because of how I said the word). Winslet does a good job at times, such as in her pronunciation of "call," "law," "fought," "and "dogs," but at other times, such as in her pronunciations of "awesome," "autism," "talk" and "saw," the pronounced "aw" sound isn't nearly strong enough.

Much more could be said, but I will limit myself to one, namely, the predilection of older Philadelphians (those born before 1983) to pronounce "er" as if it were "ur;" hence, the "merry"/"Murray" merger. My wife's name is Teri, and her Pittsburgh-raised parents howled when they first heard me call her something akin to "Turry," "Tur" for short. Winslet is inconsistent here, but considering this is rarely picked up as a Philly distinctive by outsiders, even this is a triumph of sorts. Thus she does well in her pronunciations of "ceremony" and, at times, "therapist" (she is inconsistent here). The one place she falls short consistently is in the name of the murdered girl, Erin, which, like most Americans, she pronounces along the order of "Airin." To be sure, this is the direction most younger Philadelphians are taking, so it isn't a big deal. But someone of Mare's age and social location would almost certainly pronounce the name, at best, "Errin," with a pronounced short "e."

All in all, I would judge Winslet's portrayal of the "Delco" Philly accent to be largely a triumph. It is certainly better than any other portrayal of a Philadelphian on film. Indeed, she sounds like nothing less than a transplant who has lived in the city for a long time and picked up a number of its prominent vocalizations. And that's not bad indeed.

To close, I would like to provide some clips of authentic Philadelphia speakers. These include Las Vegas Raiders GM Mike Mayock, a member of the Haverford School Sports Hall of Fame; retired political journalist Chris Matthews; Old Testament scholar Walt Kaiser (when I first met him and heard him speak, the first thing I asked was, "Where in Philadelphia are you from?" His answer: Glenolden, a working class town in southern Delco such as is portrayed in Mare); and actor Kevin Bacon.

Mike Mayock:

Chris Matthews:

Walt Kaiser:

Kevin Bacon: