Photo: Jin Choi

‘Don’t forget your please and thank you!’ was perhaps your grandmother’s way of saying ‘try to be polite.’ Yet while ‘thank you‘ is still important to civilized discourse, I find that ‘please‘ has almost the opposite effect in American English. It can make a question sound urgent, blunt, and even downright rude. Take a simple query:

‘Can you drive me to the store?’

Now add please to the end of it …

‘Can you drive me to the store, please?’

Theoretically, there shouldn’t be much difference here. And yet, if I were asked the latter, I would wonder why that ‘please’ is tagged on the end. Did I cause offense? Is this an emergency? Haven’t I gone to the store a million times already? Fine, be that way!

I can only speculate about why ‘please’ became so blunt. It possibly turned into a misguided tool to avoid betraying one’s irritation.  Then at a certain point, it may have simply evolved into a tag meant to convey urgency or annoyance. With the exception of highly ritualized ‘May I please have the …’ constructions I’ve encountered at a few dinners, I don’t know that I’ve heard ‘please’s’ polite form since I was a child.

So what has taken the place of ‘please?’ In my mind, word constructions of the following type are more common these days:

Can we go to the store? … becomes polite … Is there any way we can go to the store?

Could you stop talking to me? … becomes polite … I’m sorry. Could you maybe speak with someone else?

Pass me the salt. … becomes polite … Is there anyone who could pass me the salt?

At least this is true of my own idiolect. If I want to sound polite, I add words, words, words. ‘Please,’ on the other hand, can easily be misconstrued as frustration.

I think it’s safe to say that the irate ‘please’ has been around for some time, though. This is certainly not an entirely new phenomenon. But is the word’s more polite usage alive in any part of the English speaking world? (That’s a non-rhetorical question).

I’ve never gotten a clear answer. As ‘bloody’ is used frequently in the Harry Potter books, it’s clear that the word’s shock value is mostly a thing of the past. But was the offense ever really that bad?

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion famously horrified audiences with the line “Not bloody likely.” (Although to be fair, I’ve never actually read any substantive proof of this outrage). Many things are less horrifying now, of course, than they were in 1914. Nevertheless, Michael Quinion, of World Wide Words, implicitly suggests it may have packed some residual punch in the late 20th-Century:

George Bernard Shaw caused a sensation when his play Pygmalion was first performed in London in 1914. He had the flower girl Eliza Doolittle flounce out in Act III with the words, “Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi”. The line created an enormous fuss, with people going to the play just to hear the forbidden word, and led to the jocular euphemism not Pygmalion likely, which survived into the 1970s.

Quinion also brings up a controversy in Australia over tourist ads featuring the phrase ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ (Former PM John Howard apparently took much offense.) But I would argue that the furor hardly centered on ‘bloody’ in and of itself. The question has a rather aggressive tenor that isn’t the most inviting. I doubt you would get any less of a reaction if the slogan were ‘Come on, people! Why won’t you visit already??”

Obviously, It’s difficult to say when profanities become more or less taboo. When did ‘bloody’ become innocuous enough to be uttered by the boy wizard?

Photo: Stefan Grazer

I’ve spent the past few days in Pennsylvania. Accents in the Southern half (or so) of the state tend to feature l-vocalization, the process by which /l/ at the end of a word or syllable becomes a vowel (usually some type of ‘w,’ ‘oo,’ or ‘o’ sound). The feature is common in a number of accents, but it is particular salient in PA.

I spent the weekend at a wedding, which for the casual dialect observer is a great way to listen to the local dialect of a particular region.  And being in Western Pennsylvania, I was treated to one of America’s most unique dialects, with its rounded vowel in words like ‘lot,’ its falling intonation in questions, and the numerous idioms native to the region (‘gumband‘ for ‘rubber band’ and second-person plural ‘yinz‘ being perhaps the most famous).

One of the things I noticed the most, however, was that ‘l’ is often vocalized in this type of Pennsylvania English even when followed by a vowel. For example, the word bowl will often sound like ‘bow’ (boʊ) to an outside observer; the word bowling will likewise sound quite similar to the General American pronunciation of ‘Boeing’ (boʊ.ɪŋ)*.

This is not what one might expect. It would be easy to presume, rather, that ‘l-dropping’ in PA is similar to ‘r-dropping’ (non-rhoticity) in British English. That is, the ‘l’ in ‘bowl’ is dropped, but present in ‘bowling.’ Instead, Pennsylvanians sometimes treat ‘l’ in something of the same way older Southerners treat ‘r.’ Just as the ‘r’ in ‘hearing’ might be dropped in Alabama, so the ‘l’ in ‘Polish’ might be dropped in Pittsburgh.

This naturally left me curious about the other English accents that vocalize ‘l.’ Is l-vocalization between vowel as common in, say, London?

*I’m simplifying with the transcription here. L is vocalized in a number of different ways.

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When we discuss ‘American dialects,’ we usually focus on English. And yet there are many other languages that have taken up root in the United States, a country with no real official tongue. Have non-English languages exhibited the same variety?

The question was on my mind while reading Steven Hartman Keiser’s recent Pennsylvania German in the American Midwest*, published by The American Dialect Society. Most people, when they think of Pennsylvania German, think of it as being native to the Amish in Lancaster County.  Yet the majority of its speakers live in small mid-Midwestern communities in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa. And like English, an East/West divide has developed, with Pennsylvania on one side and the Midwest on the other.

One of the most striking differences between these two dialects slightly resembles the difference between Northern and Southern American English: the [aɪ] diphthong becomes a monophthong in Midwestern Pennsylvania German. The vowel is also often fronted and raised, so where a PG speaker from Lancaster County might pronounce the name of his own language, Deitsch, as [daɪʧ], a speaker from Ohio might pronounce this same word as [dæ:ʧ]. (For the phonetically uninclined, the Pennsylvania pronunciation uses the vowel in English ‘kite,’ while the the Midwestern pronunciation nearly rhymes with English ‘batch‘).

Many of the other differences relate to the degree to which dialects have (or have not) been influenced by English. For example, Pennsylvania German has adopted the norms of Pennsylvania English /r/ and /l/.  For the former, /r/ is often pronounced with the English approximant [ɹ] (this occurs in Midwestern PG as well, but less frequently). Pennsylvania PG also uses a ‘dark’ /l/ at the end of words, as in English, and in some cases has the tendency to turn /l/ into a vowel the way Mid-Atlantic English speakers do (for example, the word elsht, meaning ‘oldest,’ is sometimes pronounced as [ɛʊʃt]).

As this suggests, assessing differences in non-English American languages often involves the degree to which English interferes. I would suspect that different communities of Spanish speakers in America, for example, incorporate English loan words at different rates. But there is probably as much variation within communities in this regard as between them.

Keiser finds this to be the case when he studies rates of loan-word acquisition. While he suggests that the Lancaster Amish may use more English loans than other communities, the East-West chasm is less salient than differences between smaller enclaves (The Pennsylvania Amish seem to borrow English words more frequently than, say, Pennsylvania Mennonites).

Conversely, it’s difficult to discuss non-English American dialects without discussing the countries whence they came.  The Spanish spoken in a community of predominantly Dominican immigrants is obviously going to be very different from a Mexican-American community. The question is whether non-English languages are actually splitting into distinctive dialects within the US.

As Keiser’s study shows, this is quite possible. Yet English will perhaps always dominate such discussions. Are there other examples of dialect evolution in America that don’t involve interference from English?

*Keiser, S. H. (2012). Pennsylvania German in the American Midwest. Durham, NC: The American Dialect Society.

Photo: Henry Stanford

When we discuss idiolects (the speech patterns or ‘dialect’ of a single person), it’s easy to focus exclusively on pronunciation. How we say something, with all those nuances of vowel placement and intonation, seems to exhibit more variety than what we say.  And yet word choice curios define our individual language just as much.

For example, when I ask where the bathroom is, I invariably ask ‘where’s the restroom?’ The question itself is hardly unusual, yet the frequency with which I use ‘restroom,’ rather than the ubiquitous American ‘bathroom*,’ is a personal peculiarity (I ask it even in informal situations). It stems from my puritanical side perhaps, which somehow finds more politeness in the affix rest- than the more licentious bath-. I realize it’s absurd on a conscious level.

Since idiolects involve personal word choice, they extend into one’s writing style in a way that one’s pronunciation obviously doesn’t**.  The word choices of a writer provide powerful tools to forensic and historical linguists. To cite a well-known example, the analysis of word choice and syntactic style helped famed English professor Donald W. Foster discern the author of the anonymous novel Primary Colors.

This type of thing also comes up in the authorship debate over Shakespeare‘s works.  The Bard had certain idiolectical quirks that allow us to deduce whether he truly wrote certain poems or plays. Shakespeare notably increased his use of the word most as his writing career progressed, to the point where it was unusually frequent toward the end of his career.

As the aforementioned example suggests, frequency is as much important to one’s idiolect as actual word choice.  In both my spoken and written English, for example, I use the word rather more frequently than more typical Americanisms such as kind of or sort of. A marker of an academic upbringing? (My father is a professor). Too much BBC as a child? It’s hard to say, but my rather pronounced use of rather could be a dead giveaway to an experience forensic linguist.

So, opening up the floor: what peculiar frequencies and word choices mark your idiolect?

*The word used to describe a room with toilets and sinks is one of the most striking divides between American and Canadian English, with the latter opting for ‘washroom.’

**Unless the writer is semi-literate.  Semi-literacy and non-standard spelling are, of course, a historical phoneticist’s best friends. As I’ve mentioned here before, for example, the common variation between the spelling of the first vowel of ‘Kendrick’ with an ‘e’ or ‘i’ in old census records from Kentucky, suggests the presence of the ‘pin-pen merger.’

Photo: Ildar Sagdajev

Can you get a feel for the local dialect of a city just by visiting there? The answer varies by city. There are towns like London or Liverpool where the accent is so pervasive that it would be hard to avoid. In New York or Boston, meanwhile, the traditional accent differs so strongly from General American speech that, regardless of the proportion of those who speak it, it holds a place in the our cultural imagination. But what if a city’s ‘local’ speech is unique in subtle ways? Here the picture is greatly complicated by inmigration.

‘Inmigration’ is, as far as I can tell, not a word used much out of the academic community. (My computer’s spell-checker certainly doesn’t recognize it). It’s a very useful way of describing transplantation within the borders of a single country. For linguistic purposes, after all, dialects between regions of one nation can be as distinct as between nations themselves. When African-Americans migrated north at various points in history, for example, the linguistic and cultural differences between the rural South and urban North would have been almost as great as if moving to another country entirely.

But let’s look at a more subtle example. This weekend I visited Vancouver. My initial thought while overhearing the conversations of passengers on the train was, ‘Wow, when you cross the border everyone suddenly sounds Canadian.’ But Vancouver has many inmigrants, as a waiter from Winnipeg would attest. Do these outweigh perceptions of whatever local ‘Vancouver’ accent may have once existed? (Which is sometimes attested as sounding ‘less Canadian’ than others.)

The point being, how we perceive dialects ‘on the ground’ can be very misleading. While living in New York City, I perhaps went days without hearing the traditional New York accent. Likewise, strolling through a street in a British coastal town one might make the assumption that ‘everyone here talks like Londoners,’ but how many London tourists, inmigrants and part-timers are contributing to that impression? What we hear on the street isn’t always the same as what we would hear in a local pub.

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Linguist Will Styler has a smart, funny website titled ‘The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vowels.‘ In the page ‘The Anti-Vowel Agenda,’ he elucidates his gripe:

Yet every day, vowels are bought and sold on national television, subjected to reduction (or even deletion) in unstressed environments and worst of all, in elementary and middle schools, students are systematically taught to deny the existence of more than two thirds of their ranks, focusing instead on five (sometimes six) lies spread by the million-dollar-a-year spelling bee industry.

This is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but Styler does have a point. When I learned to read, I was given a detailed description of the consonants of English. The vowels, on the other hand, were something of an afterthought. I knew what an ‘n,‘ an ‘r,’ and an ‘l‘ were as a child, but I certainly couldn’t identify an ‘ash’ (the vowel in words like ‘cat’ and ‘trap’).  It was only crude a, e, i, o, u, and occasional interloper y.

Much of this discrepancy can be attributed to spelling, as Styler suggests; those 5-6 Latin vowel symbols certainly give laymen the impression we have less vowels than we do. Yet I think there is more to this misperception than orthography.

In some ways, vowels seem to cause native English speakers less trouble than consonants. As I’ve mentioned here before, Scottish children can master their native dialect’s complex vowel lengthening rules quite early in the game, even as they struggle with the same consonants that most English-speaking children do.  Young children are prone to vowel ‘errors,’ of course, but I find they don’t have quite the salience of adorably ill-formed l‘s and r‘s.

So why do we tend to view vowels as less “important” than consonants? Probably because many of our vowels are more than a little disposable. (Not to put too find a point on it.) While we keep the front vowels fairly distinguished, the vowels in ‘book,’ ‘cut,’ ‘caught,’ ‘father’ are all merged with other phonemes in various accents*. That’s a whopping four vowel phonemes the absence of which doesn’t impact intelligibility. So we arguably don’t see vowels as ‘important’ because some of them, objectively speaking, aren’t.

Then, of course, there is the matter of dialects. One phone (IPA a) can be used to express the ‘o‘ in ‘lot,’ the ‘a‘ in ‘father,’ the ‘a‘ in ‘cat,’ or the ‘u‘ in ‘strut’ depending on which regional variant of the language we’re talking about.  I don’t need to repeat the countless ways in which English vowels shift, merge, and neutralize.

And yet, despite vowels being less ‘important’ in terms of comprehension, their sheer instability makes them arguably more ‘important’ culturally. Much of the debate and discussion here centers around vowels, and how vowels reflect class, society, and identity. Consonants are vital to discussions of English dialects as well (note the many posts here about l-vocalization and th-fronting), but they can’t quite compete with the vowels’ near-endless shades of sociolinguistic meaning.

*I’m hardly the first to point this out, but the ‘disposable’ vowels of English are typically the back vowels. Not surprisingly, this part of the vowel space is smaller than the front.

“Hey! Stop doing that.”

Or to express sympathy:

“Hey, now! Don’t beat yourself up.”

Or as a kind of greeting:

“Hey, man! What’s going on?”

By the way, The American Heritage Dictionary has an interesting dialect-related take on that last usage:

Until recently, this greeting had a distinctly Southern flavor. The national survey conducted in the 1960s by the Dictionary of American Regional English found hey as a greeting restricted chiefly to Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The friendly hey has since spread throughout the United States.

I’m not quite sure about that take on things. But if true, it’s perhaps another example of African American Vernacular English making its way into ‘Northern’ speech. (The states listed above strike me as fairly close to the ‘heartland’ of AAVE).

As you can tell in all of these contexts, we often use ‘hey’ as a kind of verbal exclamation point. It’s certainly more useful than screaming in public.

Trying to track down the etymology of ‘hey’ is nearly impossible, though, as The Online Etymology dictionary suggests. It is found in a number of Germanic languages, but was also common in (presumably classical) Latin:

c.1200, variously, in Middle English, hei, hai, ai, he, heh, expressing challenge, rebuttal, anger, derision, sorrow, or concern; also a shout of encouragement to hunting dogs …
In Latin, hei was a cry of grief or fear; but heia, eia was an interjection denoting joy.

I’ve noticed that, despite the somewhat extralinguistic nature of ‘hey,’ there seems something of a growing divide between how ‘hey’ is used in America versus England. In many dialects of the latter, ‘hey’ often equates to American ‘huh?’ That is, it serves as a short hand for ‘what did you say?’ This seems true of Australian English as well, as I discovered thanks to this exchange with a Brisbanian co-worker:

Me: Did you [unintelligible]?
Him: Hey?

There is a different ‘hey’-like word in Britain (and Australia), of course: ‘oi.’ This is exemplefied by Sir Ben Kingsley’s complaint that he can never set foot in a London pub without someone shouting, ‘Oi! Gandhi!’ (This being Cockney, the latter word rhymes with ‘candy.’)

A number of sources report ‘oi’ as being derived from the Romani phrase ‘oi mush,‘ which more or less means ‘hey you!’ The Romani were one of the immigrant groups who settled in London’s East End, so this explanation seems plausible. The East End was also the refuge of many Yiddish-speaking Jews, of course, who may (or may not) have reinforced ‘oi’ with they’re strikingly similar ‘oy*.’ Words like ‘hey’ and ‘oy’ don’t seem confined to one language.

One rather notable thing about such little exclamatory words is that they all seem to feature diphthongs. I’m thinking not only of ‘hey’ and ‘oi,’ but also of ‘ow’ (an English exclanation of pain) ‘ai’ (an exclamation of pain in many Romance languages), and bringing things full circle again, ‘oy’ (a Russian exclamation of pain). What is it about diphthongs that are so expressive of basic emotion?

*Yiddish ‘oy’ has a more exasperated tenor.

1.) Cool. This is still the reigning king of such pleasantries. Ostensibly an old jazz term, ‘cool’ once meant something hip or trendy. (And still does, of course). However, it’s become a half-hearted platitude in all kinds of contexts. ‘I’m going to an antiques fair this weekend’ might prompt a ‘That sounds really cool.’ I doubt the respondent in this interchange actually thinks antiquing is hip.

‘Cool,’ I would surmise, originally derived from a sense of laid-back joie de vivre. We still use the word in this way, for example when we tell an angry person to ‘keep their cool,’ meaning to ‘cool’ one’s passions. Which is why the word is somewhat strange in the context of praise or enthusiasm. It suggests something agreeable, not exciting. Which is perhaps Americans why adapted …

2.) Awesome. This word doesn’t much change from its dictionary meaning, keeping its definition of something awe-inspiring. However, the ubiquity of the word in contemporary American English robs it of much of its gusto. We say ‘This pasta is awesome,’ ‘My apartment is awesome,’ or ‘Your job in insurance adjustment sounds awesome.’ Are any of these things mind-blowingly impressive? Not necessarily. In essence, this is the inverse of ‘cool;’ In the case of ‘awesome,’ we take a word conveying breathtaking excitement and make it surprisingly banal.

One of the unfortunate results of this reappropriation of ‘awesome’ is that when one requires use of the word in its traditional sense it is easily misinterpreted. A classical music critic might write of Faure’s ‘awesome Requiem,’ and while the word makes sense in this context, it can be interpreted as alarmingly off-the-cuff by contemporary readers. Such is language evolution.

3.) Neat. I can think of few words laced with as much withering neutrality as ‘neat.’ When we describe an experience as ‘neat,’ as in ‘We had a really neat time at the zoo,’ we are suggesting something that is quite literally clean, ordered and convenient. There is nothing dangerous or exciting about something that is ‘neat.’ Rather, it’s something pleasant, non-threatening, and uncomplicated. And of course, the word’s more human-applicable cousin is …

4.) Nice. On occasion, I’ve heard both the terms ‘Seattle nice’ and ‘Minnesota nice’ refer to their respective localities. Neither equate to outgoing, gregarious demeanors. Rather, we refer to Minnesota and Seattle, two of America’s more Scandinavian-influenced cultures, as having a mixture of surface friendliness and cold weather reserve.

‘Nice’ is decidedly unsexy, which is why it’s something we Americans are very ambivalent about being called. ‘Girls don’t like nice guys’ is a common (and decidedly misogynistic) refrain, which exemplefies our strange attitudes about niceness. We all want to be nice, but don’t necessarily want what comes with it. And so, again, we use ‘nice’ to denote something we feel very neutrally about.

So what’s with all these words? Pragmatically speaking, they seem to serve the purpose of withholding judgement in as pleasant a way as possible. That’s not to say I have any problem with you going to the zoo, just that I am not particularly
interested in the fact that you are going to the zoo, and so interject with a meaningless, ‘Going to the zoo sounds awesome.’

I don’t mean to suggest this kind of thing only exists in America. Far from it. I’m fairly certain all the above pleasantries have made their way into the British Isles and elsewhere.

But I am reminded of all this when I hear a common British observation: that we Americans are ‘direct’ in our language. In fact, our tendency to use the polite words above suggests we may be indirect in a rather different way. Rather than buffeting our statements with a lot of ‘rather’s and ‘quite’s, we Americans seem to codify specific words so they are understood by all parties to be inexpressive of actual emotion.

It is this latter sense of ‘going to’ that is especially susceptible to contraction, the process of vowels and consonants being elided for the sake of efficiency. ‘Going to’ features an ‘ng’ followed by a ‘t,’ which is a rather awkward juxtaposition of sounds in English. Our inclination is to assimilate nasals so that they conform with proceeding consonants, hence ‘goin’ to‘ (with an alveolar ‘n’ that fits nicely with the ‘t’) is easier to say than ‘going to’ (with a velar nasal).

Of course, we don’t stop there. We often elide the ‘t’ and drop the diphthong in ‘going’ completely, resulting in one of the more ubiquitous ‘incorrect’ words in English: ‘gonna.’ This contraction is unique in that it’s only used in specific contexts. Namely, we can use ‘gonna’ when we’re describing the intent to do something (“I’m gonna talk with her”), but not our intent to go somewhere (‘I’m gonna my sister’s house’ doesn’t sound right, does it?).

‘Gonna’ can be reduced even further. I’ll cite an example from personal experience. Something I’ve noticed among younger American English speakers is the contraction of ‘I’m going to’ something like ‘angunna‘ (ɑŋɘnə). In this case, the ‘m’ in ‘I’m’ is assimilated with the ‘g’ in ‘gonna,’ (with the ‘g’ itself invariably dropped). Quite an evolution from ‘I am going to!’

Then there is a dialect-specific contraction that is one of the most extreme in the English language. That would be African-American Vernacular English’s ‘Ima‘ (ɑmɘ). ‘Gonna’ is entirely elided here; the 9-phoneme phrase ‘I am going to’ is contracted to a mere three sounds.

(I’ve noticed an interesting variant of ‘Ima,’ in which everything after ‘I’m’ is smoothed out into a single, nasal, rounded vowel. As a recent commenter here observed, this contraction might be more along the lines of ‘Imo,’ of which something like ɑmɵ̃ seems a good representation.)

Since we are so inclined to contract the living daylights out of ‘going to,’ it’s not unreasonable to ask why we use ‘going to’ so much in the first place. Why do we not just scrap it and go with ‘will?’ Both are variations of the same simple future tense.  But ‘I will’ is much more efficient than ‘I am going to.’

The answer is that there are subtle shades of meaning that ‘going to‘ expresses that ‘will‘ does not. Not that there aren’t situations where the two are nearly interchangeable. The difference between the meaning of ‘I will talk to Molly about it’ and ‘I’m gonna talk to Molly about it’ are slight. Yet while ‘I’m gonna ask Molly to marry me’ makes sense, ‘I will ask Molly to marry me’ sounds strange. The former is full of romantic longing, while the latter has the tenor of a waiter saying he’ll consult the chef about the wine list.*

And so ‘going to‘ perseveres, its clumsiness inspiring a variety of interesting contractions. Any others worth noting?

*I’d recommend this brief run down at The English Page for a more complete description of the difference of the two.