Some Housekeeping

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Ben

Hi, friends and readers. I’d like to briefly apologize for being AWOL these past few days. After giving it some thought, I’ve decided posting will have to be light here these next two weeks. I have a move, a deadline for an article, and a job search, and between all three, I’ll have next to no free time.

A side note: there’s been an uptick in visitors to this site via search engines. I love hearing from new people, but there’s also been an increase in anonymous vitriol. This ranges from vague insults (“Americans know nothing about Canadian English!”) to seemingly intelligent commenters who implode for reasons I find baffling. So I’ll take this moment to reiterate my simple ground rules, which generally boil down to: avoid ad hominem attacks, or really any statement that could be described as ‘ad hominem.’ This is basic netiquette, but you’d be surprised …

When I have a chance, I’ll respond to some emails from readers (I haven’t forgotten you!) and I’ll be more active on Twitter, since I find that less time consuming. And I will hopefully be back in the swing of things shortly. Till then, feel free to browse around here or read the lovely folks I list in the “Sites I love” link on the right sidebar.

P.S. I’ve turned comments off, because, well, there’s not much to comment on here. I’m not sure why it still says ‘Leave a comment’ below. But feel free to email me or contact me on Facebook or Twitter.

Share
Comments Off on Some Housekeeping

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Some Housekeeping

South African ‘ee’

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Ben

African penguins in Cape Town

wikimedia

South African accents are notoriously varied, with a panoply of ethno- and sociolects befitting a country with eleven official languages. But almost all South African English is marked by its pronunciation of the ‘ee‘ in ‘fleece.’

In most English accents, the ‘ee’ vowel has a slight on-glide. That means that there is little ‘opening vowel’ before the main event, often close to the ‘i’ in ‘kit.’ For many accents (for example General American) this glide is so short that you wouldn’t notice it unless you were listening carefully. For other accents (such as Australian), the vowel is bit longer, making it sound slightly like the vowel in ‘face.’

South Africa, however, regardless of which particular sociolect we are talking about, tends to lack this glide. ‘Ee’ in ZA is usually a pure monophthong, much like the /i/ in Spanish ‘sí,’ or French ‘oui.’ I find it especially noticeable at the end of words such as ‘probably‘ or ‘already‘ (final ‘-y’ almost always has a somewhat more lax vowel in other accents).

You’ll notice this frequently in words like ‘three,’ ‘believe,’ ‘Keys,’ and ‘the‘ in this interview with South African singer Johnny Clegg:

Fans of old recordings made by Daniel Jones will note that South African ‘ee’ often sounds remarkably close to Cardinal 1; that is, it sounds like a ‘pure /i/’ sound. In most English accents, the sound in ‘me‘ or ‘fleece’ is at least a tad more lax. The Rainbow Nation is unusual in this respect.

A South African posted here earlier today saying, ‘We dont sound like anyone really.’ Between this unusual ‘ee’ sound, the unusual ‘ar’ in ‘car‘ (which is again, closer to a cardinal vowel than in most accents), and other little quirks, there is something to this sentiment. South African English is wonderfully ususual.

Share

Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged , | 15 Comments

‘This’ and ‘That’ in ‘Foreign’ Dialects

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Ben

FingerMy favorite line in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is in its first scene, when a strongly-accented rabbi,  mid-eulogy, lists ‘Eric’ among the deceased’s grandchildren. He interrupts his speech and addresses the audience: ‘Eric? This is a Jewish name?’

The rabbi uses ‘this‘ where most English speakers have ‘that,’ a common switcheroo in Yiddish-influenced English. Although ‘that’ is the ‘natural-sounding’ word in English, it would be hard for most people to explain why. Asked to define ‘this’ and ‘that’ sans dictionary, I’d say ‘this’ is the demonstrative pronoun referring to close objects, while ‘that’ pertains to objects far away. Simple, right?

Well, no. As the above example demonstrates (no pun intended), things become confusing with abstractions like proper names. Why is ‘That‘s a Jewish name?’ more ‘correct’ than ‘This is a Jewish name?’ (Isn’t the written word within close proximity to the speaker?)

The same seems true when ‘this’ and ‘that’ are used adjectivally. In a recent Project Runway episode, Heidi Klum (who speaks English with near-native fluency), said something along the lines of, ‘I like this pretty dress.‘ (She was referring to a piece of clothing under discussion). If Klum had said ‘I liked this dress,’ nothing would seem amiss. But inserting a modifier between ‘this’ and ‘dress’ sounds ever so slightly off*.

The problem here lies in in demonstratives’ quirky little nuances. Take, for example, paralinguistic factors like gesticulation. Lets say I greet a friend of mine, notice she’s holding a book, and it prompts the following:

Me: What are you reading?
Friend: The Great Gatsby.
Me: This is my favorite book.

At first glance, my use of ‘this’ instead of ‘that’ seems bizarre. But if I put my finger directly on the book as I exlaim ‘This is my favorite book,’ it makes sense.

Anyway, I’m out of my depth when it comes to this kind of thing, so if there are any English semanticists or semantics fans out there, I’d love to hear more. Why do ‘this’ and ‘that’ cause so much trouble for those whose first language isn’t English? And does anyone know any ‘native’ English dialects that do this?

*Here’s why it sounds slightly off to me: ‘this’ can also be used as an indefinite article, as in the sentence, ‘I met this weird guy on the street today.’  Hence, there’s some structural ambiguity in a sentence like ‘I liked this dress’. When the object of the sentence takes an adjective, it more clearly falls into the indefinite article side of things. This is apparent when you compare ‘I like this pretty dress [that I saw in the store],’ which makes sense, to ‘I like this pretty dress [that we’ve been discussing for the past twenty minutes], which doesn’t.

Share

Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged | 18 Comments

Is Rhyming Slang Irish?

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Ben
London Scene

wikimedia

An old saying goes “the Brits may have invented English, but the Irish perfected it.” Or maybe that refers to stout. Either way, there is truth to the sentiment: Ireland (besides providing the language with some of its most colorful dialects) produced Joyce, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett, Behan, O’Casey, Synge, Boucicault, Yeats, and Swift. A tall order for an island slightly smaller than Maine.

But were the Irish responsible for the quintessentially British phenomenon known as Cockney rhyming slang? It’s a notion I’ve seen repeated several places. Here’s the basic jist, from the Linguistics 101 textbook An Introduction to Language:

Another view is that during the building of the London docks at the beginning of the century, the Irish immigrant workers invented rhyming slang to confuse the non-Irish worker.

And here it is again, in lexicographer Jonathan Green’s article on the subject from Critical Quarterly:

Peter Wright, in Cockney Dialect and Slang (1981) … suggests a large input from the Irish navvies, recently imported to England to build railways and canals. According to Franklyn it was the linguistic rivalry between these navvies, and similarly recruited Cockneys, who worked alongside them and like them revelled in language, that created rhyming slang.

Green is aware that, given that rhyming slang is infrequent in Irish dialects, the theory is questionable. The problem with seeking the roots for rhyming slang, in my opinion, is that rhyming is such a universal pleasure that I’m surprised similar slang hasn’t popped up around the globe of its own accord.

Oh wait, it has. Caló, a type of argot in Southwestern US Mexican Spanish also relies on rhymes. They tend to be more of the “See you later, Alligator,” variety, as in the phrase “Al rato, vato.” Yiddish-English also contributed a type of rhyming slang to the American idiom, whereby in order to dismiss something, you follow an operative word with a rhyming nonsense word. For instance, this conversation I once heard between two friends:

Person A: I dunno. He’s really nice, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
Person B: Nice schmice. Do you even like the guy?

Which is why, getting back to the Irish question, I don’t find the Cockney rhyming slang’s origins as interesting as what separates it from other such slangs. Specifically, Cockney rhymers entirely replace the word being expressed with the rhyme, or in more extreme cases, replace the word with the first element of a rhyming compound (Hence “I’m going up the apples” meaning “I’m going up the stairs”).

Still, might rhyming slang have Irish roots?

Share

Posted in British English | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Fella, Winder, Tomorrah: ‘-Ow’ Reduction

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Ben

Back in my musical theatre days, I couldn’t get enough of Rogers and Hammerstein’s classic melodrama Carousel. I’m still a fan, but wish somebody would retool the libretto; many of the show’s lyrics and dialogue are penned in a goofy pseudo-New England accent, as evinced by this gem:

Carrie: You been actin’ most peculiar,
Every morning you’re awake ahead of me,
Always settin’ by the winder.

Julie: I like to watch the river meet the sea.

With the orthographic oddity ‘winder,’ Mr. Hammerstein indicates what might be called ‘-ow reduction.’  In various accents, when the vowel in ‘flow‘ occurs at the end of a multi-syllablic word (as in ‘window‘), it is reduced to a schwa (the little ‘uh’ sound in ‘comma,’ represented by ə). Hence ‘window’ becomes ‘winda‘ or ‘winder,’ ‘pillow’ becomes ‘pilla,‘ and ‘fellow’ becomes ‘fella.’

This feature is often attributed to Cockney, Irish, American Southern, and New England English. Like many other ‘pan-dialectical’ features, this one most likely involves ease of articulation. Words like ‘fellow’ and ‘window’ are a tad clunky because they feature a stressed short vowel followed by an unstressed long vowel, possibly creating the urge to render that final /o/ a schwa.

Here’s another literary example, from The Red Badge of Courage, this time with the word ‘tomorrow:’

“We’re goin’ t’ move t’morrah–sure,” he said pompously to a group in the company street. “We’re goin’ ‘way up the river, cut across, an’ come around in behint ’em.”

What’s odd, though, is that despite this feature’s attestation in so many Englishes, I’ve rarely encountered a spoken example. I see two possible reasons for this. On the one hand, the feature may have simply receded in contemporary speech. On the other, it possibly never spread beyond the broadest vernaculars in the first place.

Either way, it’s something of a puzzle: why did such a ‘useful’ feature never really become a part of ‘mainstream’ English?

Share

Posted in English Phonetics | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

The Speech of Old L.A.

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Ben
My Grandmother

My Grandmother (right), in 1940’s Los Angeles

My grandmother grew up in Los Angeles. Her L.A. was not the L.A. of contemporary stereotype. It was a city with one of the world’s finest rail systems, gracious Victorian homes in forgotten neighborhoods like Bunker Hill, and a bustling urban core which has only recently approached its former glory.

My grandmother’s accent, to my ears, did not sound Californian. I found it Eastern, worldly and sophisticated.  As a child I associated her crisp diction with the British actors I saw on PBS. Likewise, my father remarked that she sounded rather Irish.

I reacted similarly to another pre-sprawl Angeleno, the late Julia Child. Here’s a video of her from a very early television appearance:

There are several ways Child’s accent differs from contemporary Californian speech. The sound she uses in words like ‘goose’ is very conservative and back; California English today is known for fronting this vowel. Note also that where young Californians raise the ‘short-a’ before nasals (so that ‘can’ sounds something like ‘keh-uhn’ or kẽən), Child generally leaves this vowel unshifted.

What most strikingly makes her accent sound rather ‘upper-crust,’ however, are Child’s t‘s. Most Americans ‘tap’ the /t/ in between vowels so that ‘part of‘ is more or less indistinguishable from ‘pard of.’ Child, however, tends to keep these t’s as, well, t’s (although not consistently so). Note that, at 7:14, she says ‘part of’ with a very aspirated, un-tapped consonant.

I don’t mean to suggest that it’s possible to pinpoint what an ‘old’ Los Angeles accent was. If anything, the city’s English has long been incredibly diverse, with its waves of emigres from Europe, Mexico and New York.

But it’s amazing how quickly California English is developing its own distinctive accents and linguistic identities. Still, like photos of LA’s streetcards, I enjoy glimpsing the Californian English that once was.

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

Yes, Canada has Regional Dialects

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Ben
Toronto skyline

Photo: Chris McPhee

On a train to Canada several months back, I overheard a young man scolding his American companion with the following: ‘Listen. Canada has different accents. Alberta has an accent. Toronto has an accent. We don’t all talk alike.’

I’ve received similar lessons several times since creating this website. So let me make my stance clear: I do, in fact, think there is regional variation in Canadian speech.

When it comes to Canadian English, my go-to source is Canadian linguist Charles Boberg. In 2008, Boberg did an acoustic analysis of Canadian speech, and found that there are indeed differences between regions. Sample findings include:

  • Almost all Canadians have Canadian raising (whereby the vowel in ‘about’ can sound slightly like American ‘a boat’).  But around Toronto the diphthong tends to be fronted (əbɛʊt or ‘a-beh-oot’), while in Western Canada and the Prairies it tends to be back (əbʌʊt or ‘a-buh-oot’).
  • The vowel in ‘goose’ is a back vowel (u:) in the Atlantic provinces, but a more fronted (ʉ:) elsewhere.
  • Atlantic Canadians, and many Eastern Canadians in general, have a fronted ‘a’ in words like ‘start’ (ɐɹ).
  • In the prairies, the vowel in words like ‘face’ is frequently a monophthong (fe:s or fehs) than elsewhere.

Boberg’s study doesn’t much delve into isolated dialects like traditional Newfoundland or the Ottawa Valley Twang; such outliers are either outside the spectrum of mainland Canadian English or spoken by a tiny fraction of the population. But as Boberg’s study makes clear, there is reason to believe that mainstream Canadian English is becoming more diverse. So why do ‘all Canadians sound the same?’

In my opinion, this impression results from Anglophone Canada lacking several things: it has no strong urban lect* (like Cockney), no vast areas with radically contrastive pronunciation patterns (like America’s North/South divide), and few ethnolects (like African American Vernacular English or Multicultural British English). Canada lacks the standard markers of dialectical diversity.

But Anglophone Canada is young. Its language differences, in my opinion, haven’t evolved to the point that we can talk about a ‘Toronto accent’ as if it were as sharply defined as ‘Scouse.’ But that will no change with time, and the evolution will be exciting to watch.

*At least Anglophone Canada doesn’t. It’s a different story in Quebec, which has Montreal’s distinctive working-class ‘joual.’

 Source: Boberg, C. (2008). Regional phonetic differentiation in Standard Canadian English. Journal of English Linguistics, 36, 129-154.

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged , , | 35 Comments

Aristocratic American (Mrs. Roosevelt’s Accent)

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Ben

I often discuss Received Pronunciation, the British accent which was long the standard of educated speech in England. Although Americans have a hard time understanding how an accent spoken by so few people could be the ‘standard,’ we in fact had something of our own ‘RP’ in the late 19th- and early 20th-Centuries. It simply never caught on the way RP did.

What I’m referring to is the speech of the East Coast Aristocracy, a small group of elites from powerful old-money families.  You can get a good idea of how they spoke from this interview from Eleanor Roosevelt from the 1950’s:

My impression of Mrs. Roosevelt’s accent, first and foremost, is that it is quite like older types of Received Pronunciation. Her speech is entirely non-rhotic (r-less), with the vowel in words like ‘nurse’ a long mid-central vowel, often with some lip rounding and/or fronting (ə ~ ɵ ~ ø). She pronounces ‘again’ so it sounds like ‘a gain‘ and ‘been’ as if it were ‘bean‘ (although she goes with the American pronunciation of ‘category’). She preserves the ‘trap-bath’ split (note the broad vowel for ‘ask’ at 1:40 and ‘last’ at 9:12). Astute readers will no doubt find many other pronunciations of note.

So why did our own ‘RP’ never catch on the way British RP did? First, we never had a real aristocracy, only a de facto one. We never had a house of lords, schools reserved for the nobility, or an interconnected, nationwide land-owning class. In other words, there was never a systematic way for an ‘elite’ accent to transmit itself throughout the country.

And about that country; ours is huge. British RP had geographic limitations in its corner. The entirety of the UK is less than 100,000 square miles; the US is nearly 38 times that size. By the time ‘American aristocratic speech’ could be classified as a discrete phenomenon, moneyed elites had already sprung up in far-flung places such as Chicago and San Francisco. And that’s not even acknowledging the separate tradition of the Southern Gentry.

And so, rather than being a dominant if minority-spoken accent, American aristocratic English is little more than a historical curiosity. Still, it makes you wonder: If the US had stayed within the boundaries of the original thirteen colonies, would America have ended up with a ‘upper-class’ accent like the one that emerged in the UK?

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged , , | 29 Comments

The 4-1-1 on Urban Metonyms

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Ben
Area Codes of Louisiana

wikimedia

A metonym is a word which symbolizes another word with which it has some relationship. (Not the most elegant definition, I know). A good example is the way we substitute geographical locations for authority figures or bodies of Government. We use Capitol Hill for the US Congress; Downing Street for the British Cabinet; and of course, the White House for the US presidency.

There’s a unique type of metonym that has emerged within the past few decades whereby a US city’s area code comes to symbolize the city itself. You often hear this in Hip Hop: the New Orleanian Lil’ Wayne boasts of being ‘live from the 504,’ while there is an East St. Louis rapper who goes simply by Mr. 618. And Seattle MC Macklemore pokes gentle fun at the convention in his track The Town (Seattle is 206 territory):

Now when I say 2-0 … nah, you know the rest …
This is our music, our movement, the history lives through us.

(He seems to suggest that his love for his hometown can’t be reduced to a standard Hip Hop trope.)

What I find brilliant about area code metonymy is the way it’s recognizable by residents yet baffling to outsiders. For instance, a Philadelphian probably sees the digits ‘215’ twenty times a day, while the rest of the nation is oblivious to this detail of the city’s culture.

I believe this is an example of how cities have both ‘dialects’ and ‘registers.’ There is overlap between the two, but they’re not quite the same thing. A ‘register’ (I’m going off Peter Trudgill‘s definition) is both a kind of jargon and a way of indicating one’s belonging to a group. Just as physicists and Star Trek aficionados have registers*, so do those who claim ‘membership’ to a city.

Another example of such lingo can be seen in neighborhood names. How you use them in conversation is a way of displaying your value as an urbanite. Not only your knowledge of a particular neighborhoods’ existence (if you claim to be an Angeleno, you’d better be aware of a neighborhood called Los Feliz); but also your ability to demonstrate understanding of that neighborhood’s cultural nuances. This is why New Yorkers roll their eyes at a New York Times piece about Brooklyn as if it’s next hip nabe (because Brooklyn is not a neighborhood and this isn’t 1986). Some Grey Lady scribes don’t quite grasp the register of their employers’ namesake.

Other ways urban registers manifest themselves are through mass transit terminology (El, MAX, Muni, BART, MTA), the names of bars and restaurants, names of suburbs, foreign loan words, highways (Atlanta’s ‘outside the perimeter’), political boundaries (LA’s ‘behind the Orange curtain’), industries, weather (Seattle’s ‘the mountain’s out’), and many other terms both abstract and concrete.

To reiterate, though: this doesn’t constitute the dialect of a city. An ardent newcomer can speak the register as fluently as a native (not to mention that there are really many registers depending on the community within a city which you most closely identify with). But I find it fascinating how the two mingle and overlap.

*Um, I’m not saying they’re the same group.

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged | 19 Comments

The Cockney v/w Mystery

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Ben

When I think of ‘Cockney,’ my mind goes to gritty 1960’s tough guy films: Poor Cow, Get Carter, that kind of thing. That is, I imagine something like the hilarious ‘duelling Michael Caines’ from the Michael Winterbottom comedy The Trip:

We associate ‘Cockney’ with a particular type of 20th-Century speech. But the word has been around since the Renaissance, and has surely referred to several dialects, some unrecognizable to contemporary ears.

One such example of this evolution is ‘Cockney v/w’ confusion. Throughout the 19th-Century, literary caricatures of Londoners featured characters who mixed up /v/ and /w/. In a post on this topic, JC Wells notes that Dickens often has his East Enders switch the two sounds. And it’s attested even further back, as 18th-Century elocutionist Thomas Sheridan makes clear:

The chief difference lies in the manner of pronouncing the ve, or the u consonant as it is commonly called, and the w; which they frequently interchangeably use for each other. Thus they call veal weal, vinegar winegar. On the other they call winter vinter, well vell.

This ‘mistake’ reminds me of old Yiddish New York accents, which did something similar (Hank Azaria‘s ‘old Jewish man’ character from the Simpsons is an exaggerated example). London saw an increase in Jewish immigration in the 17th- and 18th-Centuries, of course, but I don’t suggest this influenced Cockney v/w confusion (I doubt many of these early British Jews spoke Yiddish). More generally-speaking, the various newcomers from throughout Europe (which would have included numerous Germanic languages that lack a v/w distinction) would more likely have contributed.

To my knowledge, this London v/w switcheroo didn’t survive into the age of recorded sound. So the question remains whether this was a ‘mixup’ between the two consonants, or some type of merger. It seems plausible that /v/ and /w/ were in reality conflated into an intermediate sound such as the labiodental approximant ʋ. This would give the impression that water is ‘vater’ and ‘very’ is ‘wery.’ (ʋ occurs in contemporary Cockney, as an allophone for /r/, although I doubt the two phenomena are related).

Anyone know of evidence suggesting one or the other?

Share

Posted in British English | Tagged , , | 15 Comments