The Odd Vowel Out

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Ben
IPA Vowels

Once again, the IPA Vowel Chart (Wikimedia)

Years back, an actor asked me a dialect ‘riddle’ of sorts: is there any vowel represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet that does not exist in any accent of English?

I don’t know how to answer that question; it depends on what one means by a vowel ‘existing’ in an accent. All languages, and their dialects, feature ‘allophones.’ That is, each speaker of English pronounces individual vowels of the language in several ways. And English exhibits seemingly infinite variety when it comes to vowels.  (Depending on the context, I probably pronounce the vowel in ‘but’ with four vowels)

Conversely, it’s worth noting that we represent many English vowels with IPA symbols that don’t entirely correspond with their pronunciation. For example, we denote the General American ‘a’ sound in ‘father’ with the symbol ɑ. This indicates an open, back vowel, a bit like the ‘aaaaah’ you make when you yawn.  Most accents, however, feature a vowel that is in fact pronounced with the tongue somewhat more front in the mouth: those with the fully back ɑ are probably in the minority.

So as the last two paragraphs suggest, to say that a vowel ‘exists’ in an accent is to make an overly vague statement.  But taking a quick glance at the IPA Chart, my tentative impression is that there are very few vowel sounds that don’t occur in at least some accents of English.

Even the exotic front rounded vowels get some play (for example, in the New Zealand pronunciation of ‘nurse’).  With all of English’s vowel shifting, it’s not surprising that the rarest of phones appear on the lips of Anglophones somewhere in the world.

I’d say if there is one sound even arguably unheard of in English accents, it’s that represented by the IPA symbol ɯ — a sound essentially like the pure /u/ heard in Spanish or Italian, but without rounded lips.  Even in that case, I’m not so sure: this vowel appears in some dialects of the Irish language, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some types of Irish English use it as well.

But this might be a meaningless quest: IPA symbols don’t have an easy one-to-one correspondence to the sounds they represent.  So as much as I hate to say it, the original question is perhaps unanswerable.

Share

Posted in English Phonetics | Tagged , | 30 Comments

The Changing Dialect of Hip Hop

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Ben

This morning, I stumbled upon the newest music video of Irish hip-hop artist Lethal Dialect. Take a listen:

As you may notice, this young man raps in a thick Dublin accent. Anyone accustomed to American hip hop is likely to find the effect jarring; rap was, for much of its history, the exclusive linguistic province of African American Vernacular English. Yet the past decade has seen a number of artists use entirely different accents, with varying degrees of success.

The question, broadly speaking, is whether certain genres of music are inextricably linked to particular dialects. For example, it’s hard to imagine American country/western music sung without some type of twang. Along the same lines, can hip hop truly be considered hip hop if performed in a dialect different from the one that originally defined it?

Many would argue this is a stupid question. Heck, I might even argue that this is a stupid question. Yet I will confess that as much as I like British rapper The Streets, I am sometimes unsure of how to categorize the music he makes:

This strikes me as a very British style of music that is not entirely contiguous with the conventions of American hip hop. If musical instruments define certain types of music, it seems just as valid to define them by dialects. Pronunciation arguably has the same sonic uniqueness as, say, a banjo.

But I admit this is perhaps a pointlessly semantic line of questioning; music is music, regardless of what ‘genre’ it fits into. And for the record, I’ve found the recent spate of hip-hop artists of so many cultural backgrounds a really great development in music. It will be interesting to see what new dialects the genre will accommodate.

Share

Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged | 33 Comments

When Twitter Words are Spoken Words

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Ben
Laptop

Photo (c) Matthew Bowden

Since the dawn of the written word, great minds have noted the separation between spoken and written language. Yet with social media, we have perhaps bridged this gap. The conventions of texting, chatting, and emailing dictate a conversational tone, an off-the-cuff quality that imbues the conversation with personality. Naturally, then, one might wonder if online communication habits are influencing our spoken language.

For example, I’ve noticed a recent trend toward using the term ‘OMG‘ in face-to-face conversation. For those you haven’t been around teenagers for the past five years, ‘OMG’ is a simple acronym for ‘Oh my God‘ that has become a popular staple of electronic communication. For a while, I only heard ‘OMG’ used semi-facetiously, but now I’m not so sure.

In fact, we may underestimate the degree to which online lingo has infiltrated American spoken language. Amanda Pawelski, an English as a Second Language specialist, conducted an empirical study of how such language has changed our vocabulary. That paper, Using Internet Slang in Spoken Conversation: LOL!, is not the most academically rigorous (it amounts to a written survey whereby participants indicated which internet words they use in spoken conversation). But her results hint at some interesting trends in terms of how people use such words in everyday conversation.

For one thing, women seem to show more variety when it comes to spoken internet lingo than men. Both genders use terms like ‘bff‘ (‘Best Friends Forever’), the aforementioned ‘omg‘ (‘Oh my God’) and ‘lol‘ (‘Laughing out loud’), but women do so in greater numbers. Meanwhile, a small fraction of women use ‘wtf‘ (‘What the f***?’), ‘brb‘ (‘Be right back’) and ‘ttyl‘ (‘talk to you later’), where men reportedly never use these. Is this evidence of a gender gap opening in information-era dialects? Hardly, but it’s intriguing to wonder.

I remain a tad skeptical about the degree to which online writing will impact spoken language. Most of what we’re talking about here is slang, and slang rarely stands the test of time. More startling would be if online grammar begins to influence its spoken counterpart.  But thus far it’s hard to identify what ‘online grammar’ even is, much less how it might be sneaking into oral discourse.

Only time will tell.

Share

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 13 Comments

Dialect Work in the Old Days

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Ben

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 you!’ within the first seconds of the trailer. Which is funny, because Donat’s character is supposed to be Canadian, not British. This is just one example of the way in which old films are endearingly anachronistic inaccurate when it comes to accents and dialects. Take, for example, the most popular film ever made:

As many a linguist has noted, the English spoken in the ‘Old South’ was very different from the English spoken there today. That being said, it’s unlikely that the accent spectrum of the plantation aristocracy encompassed both the plummy British vowels of Leslie Howard and Clark Gable’s all-American Ohian.

I love old movies, and don’t intend to suggest otherwise. But I find their careless anachronisms with regards to dialect telling about how our culture has changed over the past century. Perhaps even in the past few decades. My impression, which I’ve expressed here before, is that our electronic age has assisted English-speakers in identifying and understanding accents other than their own.

I don’t think it’s entirely a matter of the internet, either. Westerners have had a voracious appetite for media that began with the rise of cable television in the 1980s, intensified with the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, and boomed with the emergence of streaming video and Netflix in the 00s. And if America’s current craze for Dr. Who* is any indication, this has made for a more international palate in terms of media.

But has this truly made us more dialect proficient?

*Okay, an admittedly bookish subsection of America.

Share

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

The Advance of ‘Goose’

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Ben

GooseApropos 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 /u/. This denotes a vowel with the tongue high and back, and the lips rounded. But in reality, few English accents still pronounce it this way.

There are some accents of English that still realize ‘oo’ as a fully back vowel: the accent of my home region of New England is one, as are accents of Upper Midwestern States like Minnesota and North Dakota, not to mention some Irish brogues (particularly in the west). And there are no doubt a smattering of accents in the United Kingdom that maintain a back ‘oo’ as well.

But these are in the minority. In most regions of the world, this vowel is fronting (moving forward in the mouth). And while vowel shifts aren’t puzzling in and of themselves, it’s perplexing why this is happening on such a large scale.

The most advanced GOOSE fronting is found, arguably, in Southeast England, the American South, and the commonwealths of the Southern Hemisphere (Australia, NZ, and South Africa). In these regions, ‘oo’ may shift as far forward as the ‘i’ in ‘kit’ (albeit with the lips rounded) and perhaps even further. In all of these cases, ‘oo’ is fronted along with the /o/ in words like ‘goat,’ ‘rode,’ and ‘go.’ The two vowels move hand in hand.

But to a subtler degree, ‘oo’ is fronting in all parts of the English-speaking world.  It’s noted in California English, Canadian English, Dublin English, and even in types of English once thought resistant to ‘goose-fronting,’ such as African American Vernacular English.

So regardless of where and how this shift is found, it is occurring on a large scale. For example, one of the things I notice about older General American accents, when compared to accents typical of my generation, is that younger GenAm speakers front ‘oo’ a good deal more. I’m curious to see if this process continues: will ‘standard’ American speech eventually feature an ‘oo’ vowel as fronted as it is in London?

The bigger question, of course, is why this shift is occurring in so many parts of the English-speaking world in the first place. Why has this spread so far, so quickly?

Share

Posted in English Phonetics | Tagged | 11 Comments

What’s with the Western US and Velars?

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Ben

Letter GI’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 is especially noticeable in ‘-ing’ words: Arizonans, Californians and New Mexicans can pronounce ‘king’ as ‘keeng.’

But that’s not the only pre-velar curiosity.  ‘-Ag’ words, such as ‘bag’ and ‘tag,’ can be pronounced with the vowel in ‘face.’  To Southwesterners, Northwesterners, Western Canadians, and just plain westerners in general, ‘bag’ can rhyme perfectly with ‘vague.’

Remarkably, people who possess this feature often seem completely oblivious of its existence.  Some years back I played Jack Worthing in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.  The actress playing Gwendolen spoke in flawless British Received Pronunciation, with the notable exception of the line, ‘The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has reached the provincial pulpits, I am told.’  ‘Magazine’ sounded curiously like ‘MAY-gazine;’ the actress grew up in the Bay Area.  Even among people who are self-aware when it comes to their own accent, this feature is unremarked upon.

I can’t say for sure where these features come from.  The raising of ‘a’ before ‘-g’ also occurs in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but that strikes me as unrelated.  Nor are there easy answers for the tensing of ‘i’ in words like ‘king’ and ‘pink’. It’s odd that such a unique set of features is native to a region that is ostensibly a mishmash of different dialects.

At the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, researchers Adam Baker, Jeff Mielke, and Diana Archangeli proposed that the raising of /a/ in words like ‘bag’ was due to a process called ‘velar pinch.’  In essence, because the tongue body is raised when making a ‘g’ sound, this impact the preceding vowel.  (The same would be true of the ‘pink’ = ‘peenk’ phenomenon).

American accents exhibit other types of this ‘velar pinch.’  The raised American ‘a’ in ‘can’ and the pronunciation of ‘bang’ as ‘bayng’ are most likely other examples.  But this doesn’t entirely explain why Western Americans extend this effect to ‘pink’ and ‘bag’ where Eastern Americans do not.  Why has this feature managed to spread so far and wide? (I’ve heard it as far east as Ontario.)

I remain stumped!

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged , | 34 Comments

Chicano English?

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Ben
East LA

East LA (Wikimedia)

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 the more remarkable aspects of this ethnolect, its adoption by non-Hispanics.

Chicano English, which refers to the dialect(s) spoken by Mexican Americans, is here termed ‘The East LA accent.’ This is a slight misnomer; as the article mentions, the dialect itself has a unique lexicon.  (The author makes the common mistake of confusing ‘accent’ and ‘dialect,’ but it’s a forgiveable error.) The piece mentions such pronunciation features as:

*The unstressed first syllable in words like ‘together’ becomes an ‘oo’ sound (i.e. an [u] sound).

*Before velar nasals, lax ‘i’ becomes an ‘ee’ (i.e. [i] sound), hence ‘going’ sounds like ‘go-ween.’

*The /ou/ in ‘go’ and such words is apparently a monophthong, so that ‘goat’ would be ‘goht’ (i.e. [go:t]).

(With some of these, I’m making educated guesses–journalistic descriptions of pronunciation are sometimes tricky to parse.)

All this being said, the words themselves are what makes the dialect unique. Becerra cites the ubiquitous tag ‘eh’ (as in ‘I’m going to the store, eh’); the use of ‘barely’ to refer to the recent past (as in ‘She barely left the store’); and the interjection ‘watcha!’ (comparable to ‘look!’).

As I mentioned, Chicano English is not confined to Mexican Americans. And although the article relates this language spread to East L.A. specifically, my impression is that Spanish-influenced dialects spoken by non-hispanics can be found in many areas of the Southwest. I once had a coworker of Irish descent who grew up in Long Beach (in South L.A. county) whose speech was clearly influenced by the Chicano dialect. I’ve also heard working-class caucasians from New Mexico who speak with accents indistinguishable from their hispanic counterparts.

None of this should be surprising. Over the past decades, divisions between ethnolects have broken down considerably. It’s no secret that African American Vernacular English is not only native to African Americans, nor that Multicultural British English is confined to Anglo-Carribeans. One might presume Chicano English to be different because of its Spanish-language origins, but the principle remains the same.

It remains to be seen how Chicano English will impact ‘mainstream’ dialects. Ethnolects have already exerted a profound influence on the American voice. Will the rapidly growing Hispanic population continue this process?

Share

Posted in American English | 28 Comments

Guy

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Ben

Stick figure‘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 male gender. Yet in American English at least, the word has developed some mysterious ‘rules.’

For instance, why can ‘guy’ be gender-neutral in the plural, but not in the singular? A young woman might say to her friends, “Let’s leave, guys” or “Why are you guys being so difficult?” But she would never say “Molly is a really nice guy.”

Similarly, using ‘guy’ in the second person feels taboo. I refer to ‘guys’ dozens of times a day, yet I would never dream of saying ‘Can I talk to you, guy?’ This type of construction is not unheard of, yet in my experience second-person ‘guy’ is confined to comedy or threats (‘How’s it going, guy?’ sounds either facetious or menacing). As often as we Americans use the word, we find it impolite to refer to each other as such.

Perhaps ‘guy’ creates a mildly dehumanizing effect. After all, ‘guy’ is the only ‘man’ synonym I can think of that has developed an inanimate usage. A young American couple shopping at a grocery store might be overheard asking, ‘Do we want this guy or that guy?’ or ‘Should we buy the bigger guy?’ ‘Non-human guy’ is probably a recent development, too sporadic and rare to constitute a major shift in definition. But it nonetheless illustrates the impersonal nature of the word.

I often wonder where ‘guy’ currently stands within the context of world English. The term is clearly native to North American (and probably Australian) English. Beyond that, the picture is less clear. I’ve heard many Britons use ‘guy,’ but I can never tell if this is an unconscious adoption of American norms or a genuine reflection of the word’s spread. The British Isles, of course, have their own collection of ‘man’ synonyms (bloke and lad being perhaps the most notable). Where does ‘guy’ fit into this vocabulary?

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged | 19 Comments

Multicultural London ‘Oo’

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Ben

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’ influences. Although it is associated with Britons of African descent, it is spoken by inner-city Londoners of many ethnicities.

In some ways, MLE reverses the direction London English has been traveling for the past century. For an idea of what I’m talking about, watch this interview with hip hop artist Dizzee Rascal, a well-known speaker of MLE:

There is something clearly ‘London’ about this young man’s speech, yet he hardly speaks ‘classic Cockney.’ What is striking here are the diphthongs:

*In Cockney, the vowel in ‘face’ shifts toward the /ai/ in ‘price.’ In MLE, this vowel is the opposite: it’s more of a monophthong or close diphthong (IPA [e] or [ei]).

*In Cockney, the vowel in ‘price’ shifts toward the /oy/ in ‘choice.’ In MLE, the vowel becomes more of a monophthong, as in American Southern or some Northern English accents: (IPA [a:]).

*In Cockney, the vowel in ‘goat’ moves towared the /au/ in ‘mouth.’ In MLE, this vowel is more of a monophthong or close diphthong (IPA [o] or [ou]).

Yet in one respect, Multicultural London English does not reverse Cockney trends. That would be in regards to words like ‘goose,’ ‘food’ and ‘you,’ which in most London accents is pronounced with a central or nearly front vowel.  Not only does MLE participate in this forward shift, it actually seems to push this vowel further front than other types of London English (as per the study cited below).

Why is this vowel so typically ‘London’ when most other vowels of MLE are different from Cockney? Linguist Jenny Cheshire (et al.) explored this question in her Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English*. She found that MLE speakers seem to acquire many features of this dialect very early on in their childhood, the one exception being the fronting of ‘goose,’ which appears to slowly emerge during adolescence.

Remarkably, something similar is happening 5400 miles away.  Linguist Carmen Fought found that speakers of Chicano English in California** (that is, English spoken by Mexican-Americans) also participates in the fronting of ‘goose’ typical of other Californians.  As is the case with MLE, this is notable for how it goes against the dialect’s ‘non-native’ influence: the Spanish language typically has only a fully back /u/ sound.

So why is this one sound pronounced so ‘locally’ in these ethnolects?

*Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S., & Torgersen, E. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15, 151-196. 

**Fought, C. (1999). A majority sound change in a minority community: /u/-fronting in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3, 5-23.

Share

Posted in British English | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

Halloween!

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Ben

PumpkinsIt’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 first more or less treats the word as ‘hollow-een,’ while the latter treats it as ‘hal-oween’ (i.e. the first syllable sounds like Hal, the shortened version of Henry).

My impression is that the ‘Hal-oween’ (as in ‘Prince Hal’) variant is the more common of the two.  Although a quick search of Americans talking about Halloween on Youtube (we’re all about scientific rigor here) revealed that the ‘broad-a’ pronunciation of the word is quite popular as well.  I might even suspect that it’s on the rise, although I couldn’t say for sure.

One could argue that HAL-oween (i.e. rhymes with ‘pal’) is the nominally ‘correct’ pronunciation, as the word ‘hallow’ is pronounced this way.  So where does the more exotic ‘hollow-een’ come from?

Perhaps the double ‘l’ in ‘Halloween’ makes its pronunciation ambiguous.  I was never confused by the pronunciation of ‘Halloween’ as a child, but certainly perplexed by the related ‘hallowed’ (I didn’t grow up in a particularly religious household).  Its first four letters are ‘hall,’ which is normally pronounced with a broad-a or ‘aw’ vowel in American English. Perhaps people mistake the ‘hall’ in ‘halloween’ for similar reasons?

Happy halloween, everyone.  And to my friends and family on the East Coast, be safe on those icy roads!

Share

Posted in English Phonetics | Tagged | 15 Comments