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Yearly Archives: 2011
Dialect Work in the Old Days
Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps is a wonderful piece of classic moviemaking, but there is something amiss with the accent (not to mention dialect) of its leading man, Robert Donat: Donat is the handsome chap who remarks, ‘Daaahhhling, fancy seeing … Continue reading
The Advance of ‘Goose’
Apropos of our recent discussion of the ‘oo’ vowel in Multicultural London English: The ‘oo’ vowel in ‘goose’ is undergoing a fairly remarkable worldwide shift. When we transcribe this vowel in the International Phonetic Alphabet, we typically use the symbol … Continue reading
What’s with the Western US and Velars?
I’d like to address something that has frequently been brought up in the comments. One of the most salient (and ‘exotic’) features of accents in the Western US is the way vowels behave before voiced velar consonants (i.e. ‘-g‘ and ‘-ng‘). This … Continue reading
Chicano English?
It’s not often that an American newspaper devotes a 1000-word article to a single dialect of English. So I was delighted to read an in-depth profile of Chicano English in this week’s LA times. Author Hector Becerra highlights one of … Continue reading
Guy
‘Guy’ is one of American English’s most amorphous nouns. Like many three-letter words, this monosyllable is more complex than it seems at first. Its basic definition is obvious to virtually any native English speaker: it means a person of the … Continue reading
Multicultural London ‘Oo’
One of English’s most rapidly evolving dialects is what is known as Multicultural London English (MLE). In a nutshell, MLE is a ‘young’ dialect (one might mark the birthday cutoff at 1970) that incorporates elements of Caribbean English and other ‘non-native’ … Continue reading
Posted in British English Tagged Cockney, Multicultural London English (Jafaican), phonetics 20 Comments
Halloween!
It’s funny that the last post here was about free variation, as today’s holiday is an example of that phenomenon in action. Here in America, there are two distinct pronunciations of ‘Halloween’ that can occur in General American accents. The … Continue reading
When Free Variation Isn’t So Free
[Ed note: I made two slight edits to an earlier version of this post for purposes of clarity.] Like most people, my pronunciation is inconsistent. Take the word ‘thought,’ for example. I sometimes rhyme this with ‘lot,’ while other times I … Continue reading
The Irish ‘Strut’
When English phoneticians refer to the ‘strut vowel,’ they mean the ‘u‘ in ‘luck,’ ‘fudge,’ and ‘cut.’ In American English, the sound usually lies somewhere between the ‘a’ in ‘father’ and the ‘a’ in ‘comma.’ Your ‘strut’ vowel may vary. … Continue reading
The Mississippi Accent in 1893
I recently stumbled upon a remarkable 1893 tome on Google Books entitled Some peculiarities of speech in Mississippi by the delightfully-named Hubert Anthony Shands. A glossary of words native to the dialect(s) of that state, the book opens with a detailed … Continue reading