The Englishness of H-Dropping

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Ben

HLongtime 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 the beginning of words and syllables.

The feature is often mentioned as a divider between middle-class and working-class speech in the UK. It is notoriously common among speakers of Cockney, but appears all over the country, extending to Northern English cities such as Manchester. And it is perhaps the fact that h-dropping occurs in so many parts of England that I give it less thought. In some ways, it’s not dissimilar from the tendency for American urban accents to render ‘them’ and ‘those’ as ‘dem’ and ‘dose:’ Because such pronunciation are found in so many regions, one is hesitant to say they intrinsically belong to any.

For example, someone from Manchester might pronounce the sentence ‘Harry’s right here‘ with both /h/’s dropped:

‘arry’s right here! ([aɹɪz  ɹa:ɪt  ɪə] in the IPA.)

…or might pronounce it with both /h/’s intact:

Harry’s right here! (haɹɪz  ɹa:ɪt  hɪə in the IPA.)

In my mind, our hypothetical h-dropper doesn’t exhibit ‘more’ of a Manchester accent than the guy who keeps his /h/’s.  The first might be described as more ‘marked,’ or more ‘working class’ (maybe), but I don’t see h-dropping as being intrinsic to the Manchester-ness of one’s speech.

What I find peculiar, though, is that this feature, so common in England, is almost unheard of in the United States. That’s not to say it may not appear occasionally in rapid speech, (for example in the phrase ‘I’m not here’), but I’ve never heard an American drop an /h/ in prominent positions such as that in ‘Harry! How are you?’

Heck, forget about America for a second. Why is /h/ dropping seemingly confined to England? A map of the British Isles put together by Icelandic linguist Pétur Knútsson shows that h-dropping doesn’t (apparently) occur in Ireland, Scotland or a large chunk of North Wales*.

Beyond England, h-dropping accents tend to be found in newer colonies, such as Australia and New Zealand. This suggests that perhaps h-dropping is a ‘younger’ feature, and hence why the ‘older’ dialects of America, Scotland and Ireland missed the boat.  But then, why is h-dropping common in Caribbean English, which is in many ways closer to Irish and Scottish English in terms of its conservatism?

H-dropping seems like such a natural process, much like fronting the nasal in ‘going’ or tapping the /t/ in ‘bit of.’ So why does it seem that such a large concentration of h-droppers are in England?

*Knútsson’s map may be based on a work that appears in another text, but if so, he doesn’t state which. Also, while his map confirms my general impressions, I can’t confirm its validity 100%.

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Stating the Obvious About Standard English

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Ben

CursiveLike many language enthusiasts, I was dismayed by two recent New Yorker pieces implicitly criticizing the field of modern linguistics. The first was a negative review of Henry Hitching’s The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, the second a follow-up post by Ryan Bloom on the magazine’s ‘Page-Turner’ blog. Eminent folks like Ben Zimmer and Steven Pinker have already weighed in with excellent responses.

Here’s a particularly egregious quote, from Bloom’s post:

All of the complex linguistic theories of language acquisition and whether grammar is universally hardwired or learned through practice don’t matter one bit in practical everyday living.

This makes as much sense as saying, ‘all this junk about gravity and quantum mechanics doesn’t matter one bit when I’m playing tennis.’ Theoretical linguists don’t tell people how to speak, just as theoretical physicists don’t tell people how to play a game that involves physics. A tennis coach might indirectly draw on principles of physics to train a player, just as a voice teacher may draw on linguistic concepts to refine their pedagogy. But the sciences themselves are not prescribing anything.

But I’m taking an easy shot. The real debate, as the New Yorker articles describe it, is between descriptivists and prescriptivists. For those new to this feud, I’ll over-simplify: prescriptivists see language as something preserved by rigid rules and standards; descriptivists think language can only be described, not regimented. This is not an entirely accurate description of the ‘debate,’ but it seems to be the one that the New Yorker writers are working from.

I obviously don’t think we should do away with Standard English. I write this blog in a modified form of Standard English (sometimes more modified than others). I’ve worked as an academic copy editor, which obviously requires an acquaintance with the ‘standard’ forms of our language. I am not saying we should throw out all grammar rules. But we need to identify what Standard English is, and, as linguist Peter Trudgill has so eloquently discussed, what it isn’t.

Bell CurveStandard English is a dialect. If I have an issue with ‘prescriptivists,’ it’s that they miss this point. Dialects evolve. Dialects are fluid. They change depending on context. I don’t think we should eliminate Standard English, but I think we need to accept its complexity.

To state the obvious: Standards vary by context. Academic writing is perhaps the most clear example of how this plays out. PhD’s write in the dialect known as Standard English. Yet under this umbrella, there are numerous registers which are often contradictory, yet entirely appropriate given the discipline being discussed. Linguists and literary critics both use a standardized form of language, but they may use entirely different terminology to describe the same concepts (e.g. ‘lexical item’ vs. ‘word’).

In this sense, Standard English is not unlike statistics. Both are guided by certain universal principals (which are often debated), yet within individual disciplines there are different standards for how each is used. Yet the more important point to this analogy is that, like statistics, the structure and principles guiding Standard English need to be continually refined and questioned, their natural evolution understood.

Alas, arguing these points doesn’t constitute a response to The New Yorker’s recent diatribes, because neither piece acknowledged any of these self-evident objections. If you’re going to discuss a ‘debate’ between different factions, can we at least identify what that debate is about?

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The Brooklyn Accent (And the City it Stands For)

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Ben
Coney Island

Coney Island, 1884

Like almost any theatre student in New York, I spent my share of time during college at the Drama Book Shop. Naturally, I always gravitated toward the voice and speech section of the shelf. I remember browsing through a book on ‘stage dialects’ and being perplexed by the chapter titled ‘The Brooklyn Accent.’ Can the speech of this single borough be considered different from the city as a whole?

William Labov, American sociolinguist extraordinaire, explicitly warned against attempts to find sub-regions within New York City English in a New Yorker profile:

“People want me to tell them which block … The fact is—but don’t write this, because it will enrage people—Brooklynese is exactly the same whether it’s spoken in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island or in Brooklyn. Or the Lower East Side.”

Note, though, Labov’s choice to use a single borough to describe the speech of the city as a whole. There is something about that particular section of the Big Apple that seems to garner the most linguistic attention.

The colorful term Labov uses, by the way, dates back to at least 1893, where it appeared in a satirical magazine called Town Topics.  Even then, the borough had clearly earned a reputation for being a bit, well, different:

It should be mentioned here that the people of Brooklyn talk Brooklynese. Brooklynese is a language that is a mixture of Bowery, Pittsburgh, and Zulu.

Since then, Brooklyn speech has been the butt of countless jokes, sometimes loving, sometimes obnoxious. An example of the latter popped up on a TV show about hotel management I recently watched. The host, trying to make nice with a Spanish-speaking staff member, reassured her that ‘I’m from Brooklyn … so don’t worry, I don’t speak English so great either.’ Which is not a little insulting given that the borough was one of the 20th-Century’s great sources of literary talent.

A quick trip to Google NGram reveals pretty much what you might expect about the borough’s dominance. ‘Brooklyn accent’ (the blue line) takes the lion’s share of mentions of borough-specific English, followed distantly by ‘Bronx accent’ (the red line) and ‘Queens accent’ (the green line):

(I’ve included Staten Island and Manhattan for good measure, and both yield predictably insignificant results.)

Why is this term so synonymous with ‘New York Accent?’ Brooklyn is the most populated borough, so that may have something to do with it. One could argue that we name city’s dialects after their heavily populated, working-class areas, which is perhaps why ‘Cockney’ took hold more than something as general as ‘London English.’

That’s perhaps why Adele was described in a recent profile as speaking ‘Cockney’ (despite not growing up in East London). And it’s why I once described the old woman ordering rye at a local deli as having a ‘Brooklyn Accent’ (even though I was in Queens at the time). Sometimes the speech of a part of a city is equated with the speech of the city itself.

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Sean Connery’s /s/

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Ben
Sean Connery

Photo: Alan Light

Reader Jason Reid wrote me recently with a thoughtful question about a notorious celebrity quirk of pronunciation:

Comedians often imitate Sean Connery by pronouncing /s/ like /?/ (as in she). Does Sean Connery really not make a distinction between those two sounds? I think he does. I was thinking that his pronunciation may be an apico-alveolar or even retroflex fricative as opposed to (what I think is) the more usual lamino-alveolar fricative of English. This may sound like a “sh” to people who don’t use it. What do you think? Thanks for taking the time to read this e-mail.

I agree entirely with what Jason says here. Connery’s /s/ has always struck me as unusually apical, meaning that it is pronounced with the tip of the tongue rather than the blade (i.e. top surface).  Play around with your tongue a bit while saying /s/, and you’ll notice that the tip-of-the-tongue variety indeed sounds slightly closer to English ‘sh.’ No wonder comedians have been making jokes about ‘Her Majeshty’s Shecret Shervice’ for years.

The apical /s/ is not particularly common in English, but it is typical of Iberian Castilian Spanish (the type of Spanish you would hear in Madrid), which partially results in the impression of a ‘Spanish lisp’ (although the use of /θ/ (English ‘th’) in words like cena no doubt plays a part). Incidentally, the apical/laminal /s/ distinction is important to the phonology of another Iberian language, Basque. I would hesitate to say that one influenced the other, but it’s an intriguing connection.

Laminals and apicals do in fact distinguish certain English accents, although the fact often goes unremarked upon. Not to mention that it affects other consonants more than it does /s/. In the US, the dialects of New York City and Western Pennsylvania often feature laminal /t/ and /d/ (I once identified New Yorker David Duchovny in a voiceover for a commercial primarily on the basis of his laminal /d/ in the word ‘dog.’) I’ve also heard the laminal variants in natives of London, Belfast, and Chicago. It seems to have a somewhat ‘urban’ character, although I can’t for the life of me say why.

But back to /s/. Unlike certain laminal /t/’s and /d/’s, I don’t believe Connery’s apical /s/ is part and parcel of his Scottish accent. I’ve never met anyone from Edinburgh with a similar quirk. /s/, which can vary so much in its articulation, doesn’t really factor into our perception of English accents. Yet we notice individual /s/ pronunciation very readily. Perhaps the very salience of /s/ limits the variety of /s/?

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Place Names

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Ben

Old map of New EnglandDo place names offer us any insight into the formation of dialects? In a convenient alternate universe, one would be able to make a map of the etymology of place names in America, label which nations or regions these etymologies derive from, and have a perfect visual representation of the spectrum of American dialects. This county could easily be identified as ‘German-influenced,’ that county as ‘Irish influenced.’ Easy, right?

Obviously, such a situation is in the realm of fantasy. One needs only cite French as an example of just how little many American place names correspond to the language spoken there: you’d find no Gallic influence on the local English in St. Louis, Detroit, Coeur-d’Alene, or Des Moines. Some place-namers don’t stick around long enough to have a lasting impact on the local language.

The opposite is also true. There are parts of the country with place names that belie a rich linguistic tradition. Look at maps of the upper Midwest, with generic-sounding towns like ‘Little Falls’ and ‘Alexandria,’ and you find little indication of how recently German and Scandinavian languages were spoken natively by much of the population.

On the Eastern coast of the US, however, this question has some relevance. In New England, accents are often posited to bear a connection to the accents of East Anglia in the UK. And lo and behold, the largest city in the region is named after a small town near the East Coast of England (Boston)*, its county named after an East Anglian county (Suffolk), and the adjacent college town of Cambridge is named after its equally prestigious sister town in the East of England.

And yet these names are exceptional. The colonials of the Massachusetts Bay also had a penchant for naming towns after religious concepts (Salem is related to semitic words for peace like ‘Shalom’ and ‘salaam’); surnames (Quincy, obviously); and English towns that few inhabitants were actually from (as far as I can tell, few if any of the prominent early settlers of Worcester actually had ties to the city’s West Midlands namesake).

It all comes down to when a place is named, who names it, and why they choose that name. Sometimes it reflects the values and background of a real community (as in the ‘Welsh tract‘ of Pennsylvania), while at other times it is chosen by an individual (Portland, OR was given its name based on the decision of a single wealthy businessman from Maine). How useful such names are to linguistic research can only be decided on a case-by-case basis.

*Boston is in Lincolnshire, admittedly, which is not technically East Anglia. However, it is on The Wash, one of the most important bodies of water in Norfolk, and was likely a well known port to 17th-Century East Anglians.

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Impolite ‘Please’

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Ben
Subway Platform

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).

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How Dirty was ‘Bloody?’

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Ben

PygmalionWhen I was in elementary school, a teacher informed me that “in England, ‘bloody‘ is a dirty word.” Even at eight years old, this sounded like an exaggeration, the linguistic equivalent of those stuffy Victorians who were shocked by ankles. How could such an innocuous word be a forbidden expletive?

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?

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Bowling or Boeing?

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Ben
Bowling Pins

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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The Other American Dialects

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Ben
The Amish

wikimedia

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.

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The -lect in Idiolect

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Ben
Shakespeare text

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.’

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Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged , | 12 Comments