MARSHALL BERGER, 77,
LINGUIST WITH A KEEN EAR
FOR AN ACCENT
His daughter Karen Berger said the cause was a stroke.
Although he taught a variety of speech courses, including debate and public presentation, Mr. Berger specialized in taking foreign students or natives with pronounced Brooklyn, Bronx or other distinct accents and teaching them how to speak more or less mainstream English.
A specialist in dialect geography, or dialectology, as it is known in linguistics, he was a dialectologist’s dialectologist, a man with such a keen ear for the subtle variations of speech patterns that after listening for a few moments he could often tell a speaker’s ethnic background, the neighborhood where he had grown up and his level of education.
And if he could not always identify the exact Brooklyn block, say, where a student had learned to play stickball, or just which of the Five Towns of Long Island he had moved to as a teenager, he came close enough often enough to awe his students.
Mr. Berger, a native of Buffalo, developed his interest in speech through a boyhood ambition to be a radio announcer. On a visit to a radio station, he was told that announcers need to overcome regional accents, an admonishment that impressed him so much that by the time he moved to Brooklyn at 13 he was well on his way to becoming an expert.
In addition to the myriad variations of American English, Mr. Berger was adept at foreign languages, working as a German translator with the Army Signal Corps in Germany during World War II.
It was the influx of veterans studying on the G.I. Bill that got him his academic start, leading him to become a tutor at City College, his alma mater, while studying for his doctorate at Columbia University.
Mr. Berger published one book, “Russian in a Nutshell,” and turned out a stream of papers for journals like Word, the publication of the International Linguistic Association.
One reason, perhaps, that Mr. Berger, a former president of the association, did not do more writing was that he regarded teaching as his real calling, so much so that it did not much matter what he taught.
As his daughter recalled yesterday, he spent hours every week coaching her and her sister on their schoolwork, going so far as to teach himself the New Math as they learned it, and not resting until both had obtained doctorates of their own.
Perhaps the best evidence of Mr. Berger’s skill as a teacher is that in his spare time he taught navigation for the Coast Guard Auxiliary even though he never owned a boat.
A man who made it a point to read his morning newspaper cover to cover, Mr. Berger seemed determined to know everything about everything. If that is impossible, he made such a run at it that his daughters and their husbands, all Ph.D.’s, developed a family game called “Stump Marshall,” in a usually vain effort to ask him a question he could not answer.
It is understandable that they steered clear of his field, for when it came to dialect geography, Mr. Berger had few peers. It was he, for example, who developed a table of telltale words to determine an American’s place of origin. People who grow up on the Eastern seaboard, for example, tend to distinguish the pronunciations of Mary, marry, and merry, while those born farther inland gradually lose the distinctions to the point that by Michigan all three are pronounced merry.
As for the vaunted Brooklyn accent, Mr. Berger helped establish that there are actually several variations, each so close to the others that some of his fellow linguists had to listen to recordings several times before being able to tell them apart.
Not content to recognize a Brooklyn accent, Mr. Berger drew on his broader knowledge of American speech and history to develop a theory of just how the signature “Toidy-toid Street” evolved. It was, he theorized, a result of the close commercial connections with the pre–Civil War South in which upper-class Southern speech, primarily from New Orleans and Charleston, S.C., was imported and hammered down to a lower-class Brooklynese.
In addition to his daughter, of Ossining, N.Y., Mr. Berger is survived by his wife, Gale; another daughter, Victoria Berger-Gross of Riverdale, the Bronx, and five grandchildren.
June 4, 1997