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Monthly Archives: June 2012
The Goose Room and the Foot Room
Some differences in pronunciation cross traditional dialect boundaries. One such curio is the word ‘room,’ which has two common variants: one with the vowel in ‘goose,’ and the other with the ‘lax’ vowel in ‘foot.’ I use the vowel in … Continue reading
British ‘LOT’, 2012
The last post inspired a brief debate in the comments section about the LOT vowel (i.e. the ‘o’ in ‘not,’ ‘Todd,’ and ‘rot’) in contemporary British English. The question, it seems, is whether this sound has shifted closer to the vowel space … Continue reading
Canadian Vowels vs. California Vowels
Canadians and Californians share more than a few passing similarities, speech-wise. After all, it didn’t take much suspension of disbelief to buy Canadian Keanu Reeves as a Valley native in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. (L.A. natives would probably disagree … Continue reading
Posted in American English Tagged california accents, Canadian Accents, cot-caught merger, vowel shifts 36 Comments
A New (Rhotic?) Dialect in New Zealand?
Needless to say, I was quite intrigued by this recent article at Stuff.co.nz about a new urban dialect spoken in South Auckland, New Zealand. A unique type of youthful, urban speech has emerged, not dissimilar to Multicultural British English in terms of … Continue reading
Whatever Happened to the Northumbrian /r/?
As I’ve previously discussed, English accents exhibit various types of /r/ sounds. Yet few are as peculiar as the /r/ once typical of an accent known as the Northumbrian burr, spoken in rural areas of Northeast England. The burr was notorious … Continue reading
-ness: A Darn Productive Morpheme
The English lexicon contains numerous nouns formed by adding the suffix ‘-ness‘ to an adjective: ‘weakness,’ ‘fullness,’ ‘brightness,’ and countless others. And at least in American English, we find creative new uses of ‘-ness’ all the time, which seem to be … Continue reading
Poor Dick’s Profane Conversion
English-speakers have a unique way of appropriating everyday words to describe sex. From sports to farm animals to botany, we have a vast trove of erotic symbolism at our disposal. One of the stranger of these conversions is that of … Continue reading
The Englishness of H-Dropping
Longtime readers may notice that I rarely discuss h-dropping. Novices might remember this accent feature from some unfortunate community theatre production of ‘My Fair Lady‘ in which the actress playing Eliza Doolittle bleats ”enry ‘iggins!’ Systematic h-droppers drop the letter ‘h’ at … Continue reading
Posted in British English Tagged class and accent, Cockney, Northern English accents, phonetics 37 Comments