When Free Variation Isn’t So Free

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Ben

Tomato

[Ed note: I made two slight edits to an earlier version of this post for purposes of clarity.]

Like most people, my pronunciation is inconsistent. Take the word ‘thought,’ for example. I sometimes rhyme this with ‘lot,’ while other times I use a slightly rounded vowel to distinguish it. Such is an example of free variation. (The old ‘to-MAY-to to-MAH-to’ divide is another).

As you can guess, free variation refers to sounds of a language that can be pronounced a number of ways without changing the meaning of a word. To use another example, some speakers of General American English rhyme ‘bury’ with ‘berry,’ while others rhyme it with ‘furry.’ In either case, it refers to what you do with a shovel.

The term ‘free variation’ can be misleading, however. It suggests a degree of randomness, when such variation is often anything but. In his work on New York City accents in the 1960’s, linguist William Labov found that the presence of ‘r’ after vowels (i.e. in words like ‘car,’ ‘butter,’ and ‘for’) was not arbitrary. New Yorkers, as a whole, tend to pronounce ‘r’ more in these words the more formal the setting.

The formal-informal distinction seems like a common way in which such ‘free variation’ occurs. To use a personal example (which I may have used here before), my wife pronounces words like ‘lot’ and ‘top’ in two ways*: usually with an unrounded vowel ([ɑ], typical of American English), but occasionally with a rounded one ([ɒ], more typical of British English). The latter pronunciation, I have noticed, always seems to occur when she is talking to strangers (i.e. in a more ‘formal’ context).

The same is true of regionalisms in the speech of those who no longer live in their home region. Most transplanted Southerners that I know will vary between pronounce ‘time’ with the famous Southern monophthong (i.e. [ta:m]) and pronouncing the word with a diphthong (i.e. [taɪm]). When among Northerners, the former seems to come out most in informal contexts (a bar), while the latter in work settings.

Of course, formality is only one spectrum by which such variation can be observed. Can you think of any others?  And can anything be described as ‘free variation’ at all?

*Her speech is atypical of Greater Philadelphia.

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The Irish ‘Strut’

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Ben

Handbook of Irish dancesWhen English phoneticians refer to the ‘strut vowel,’ they mean the ‘u‘ in ‘luck,’ ‘fudge,’ and ‘cut.’  In American English, the sound usually lies somewhere between the ‘a’ in ‘father’ and the ‘a’ in ‘comma.’  Your ‘strut’ vowel may vary.

As described here and elsewhere, the vowel is important in delineating the boundary between Northern and Southern dialects in England: the South has this vowel, while the North lacks it (Northerners rhyme ‘strut’ with ‘foot’).  Yet when one crosses the Irish Sea, the picture gets a whole heck of a lot more cloudy (no pun intended).

Irish accents are remarkably inconsistent in how they pronounce ‘strut’ and words like it. This Trinity College study of the Drogheda dialect indicates a range of pronunciations: the vowel in ‘hugged’ overlaps with the ‘oo’ in ‘foot,’ while the vowel in ‘lungs’ overlaps with the ‘o’ in ‘lot.’ Quite a difference!

So can Ireland be said to have participated in the strut-foot split?

To review in a nutshell: until the 17th-Century or thereabouts, words like ‘foot’ ‘sugar’ and ‘strut’ were pronounced with the same ‘u’ vowel (as they are in much of Northern England to this day). In Southern England and elsewhere, this vowel split into two vowels: one in words like ‘foot’ and ‘would,’ the other for words like ‘strut’ and ‘cut.’

Ireland, though, seems a mixed bag. For at least one accent, working-class or ‘local’ Dublin, ‘foot’ and ‘strut’ sound nearly the same. By contrast, ‘educated’ Dubliners, for the most part, seem to make a fairly strong distinction between the two. Between these two extremes lies the majority of Irish accents, which use a wide range of ‘strut’ vowels.

In the Ireland chapter of Accents of English, J.C. Wells is notably hesitant in this regard:

My impression of Irish accents as a whole is that most speakers have at least a potential /ʌ-ʊ/ opposition (much more so than in, say, Newcastle-upon-Tyne) – but that the lexical incidence of the two vowels differs considerably from that used in standard accents.

That is to say, the two vowels (which correspond to the vowel in ‘strut’ and ‘foot’ respectively) are perhaps distributed differently in some Irish accents. Wells goes on to mention a County Mayo native who makes a distinction between ‘nut’ and ‘cut,’ which are pronounced the same in other dialects!

So where does Ireland stand in terms of this split? And how did its history lead to such diversity in ‘strut’ pronunciations?

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The Mississippi Accent in 1893

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Ben

Mississippi Plantation HouseI recently stumbled upon a remarkable 1893 tome on Google Books entitled Some peculiarities of speech in Mississippi by the delightfully-named Hubert Anthony Shands.  A glossary of words native to the dialect(s) of that state, the book opens with a detailed description of Missisippi pronunciation habits.

Of course, this being the Victorian era, Shands pens a number of howlers within the first few pages, such as:

I suppose this confusion of (i) with (e) is due to laziness or sheer negligence, as surely the great majority of people must possess ears delicate enough to readily distinguish between the two sounds…

Despite such archaisms, the book is remarkable for what it highlights as well as omits. In some instances, Shands confirms the presence of modern Southern English features in the 19th-Century. For example, note this description of African American English:

‘Th’ (ð) is nearly always pronounced as ‘d’ at the beginning of words, by negroes; as, (dis) for ‘this,’ (dæt) for ‘that,’ (dem) for ‘them,’ (den) for ‘then,’ etc. At the end of words, negroes generally give (ð) the ‘v’ sound; as (smûv) for ‘smooth,’ (brîv) for ‘breathe,’ (sûv) for ‘soothe,’ etc.

This corresponds to contemporary African American Vernacular English, which has preserved this distribution of consonants 118 years later. By contrast, many other features Shands ascribes to African Americans suggest a very different dialect from what can be heard in 2011.

Other passages hint at modern accent features, but suggest striking differences. Is Shands describing the pin-pen merger in this paragraph (the tendency for Southerners to pronounce ‘e’ as an ‘i’ sound before ‘n’ or ‘m’)?

The confusion of [the ‘e’ sound] with (i) is very common indeed among the illiterate classes, and is heard quite often among the educated: (simineri) for ‘seminary,’ (simiteri) for ‘cemetary,’ (sit) for ‘set,’ (pin) for ‘pen,’ (ʧist) for ‘chest,’ (git) for ‘get,’ etc.

Shands asserts that ‘e’ becomes ‘i’ not only before nasal consonants, but before all consonants generally. Was this pronunciation indeed true of all such ‘e’ words in 1893? Or is Shands overgeneralizing? I can’t say for sure.

And then there’s one very conspicuous omission. Contemporary Southern accents are defined by the vowel in words like ‘time,’ ‘fly’ and ‘five:’ these become a monophthong (‘tahm,’ ‘flah,’ and ‘fahv,’ to put it crudely). But Shands suggests something different in 1893:

Long ‘i’ (ai) is nearly always correctly pronounced, and seems to follow no rule in those changes that it does undergo. There is no group of related or similar words in which it suffers regular change.

Love the use of ‘suffers’ there. Anywho, this is noteworthy in light of modern Southern pronunciation.  Although as with the previous quote, I can’t draw conclusions.

Of course, there are pronunciations Shands describes that don’t correspond to modern Mississippi accents at all. He finds that the lower classes pronounce ‘garden’ as ‘gyarden’ and ‘car’ as ‘kyar’ (typical of contemporary Jamaican dialects!) ‘Palm’ and ‘psalm’ apparently rhyme with ‘Pam,’ while ‘parcel’ rhymes with ‘tassel.’ ‘Stamp’ and ‘tramp’ rhyme with ‘stomp’ and ‘tromp.’ ‘Boil’ and ‘boy’ rhyme with ‘bile’ and ‘buy,’ much as they do in Irish English. And this is only scratching the surface.

You can browse through the whole text here. I haven’t approached the enormous word list yet, which I’m sure is full of goodies. Have fun reading, and if you note unusual terms or pronunciations, let me know!

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Do Southerners Speak Slowly?

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Ben
US South

Wikimedia

One of the most commonly held assumptions about American accents is one with arguably negative connotations.  That would be the pernicious rumor that Southern people speak ‘slower’ than Northerners.  I put this assumption in quotation marks, of course, because it is very likely untrue.

Let’s turn to a relevant study.  In Joshua Tauberer and Keelan Evanini’s Intrinsic vowel duration and the post-vocalic voicing effect: Some evidence from dialects of North American English*, they find the following (emphasis mine):

The mean speaking rates (determined by excluding filled pauses and only consider- ing utterances containing at least five words) for 445 Northern and 1,421 Southern speakers … are both 193 words per minute.

Well, that didn’t take long.  It seems that after analyzing a huge number of speakers, Northerners and Southerners exhibit the same rate of speech.  Case closed?

You may notice that the above study is about ‘vowel duration,’ which is relevant here: listeners may confuse the length of vowels with the speed of speech.  And in this respect, the researchers indeed notice a gap between Northern and Southern accents, with Southern ‘word-final’ vowels** lasting 159 milliseconds, far more than the duration for New Yorkers, at 133 milliseconds.

One of the salient features of Southern drawls and/or twangs, of course, is that they lengthen or draw-out vowel sounds, rendering them diphthongs or triphthongs.  So in strong Southern accents ‘trap’ might almost seem to rhyme with Northern American English ‘pay up’ (i.e. IPA [tɹæjəp]).

You might expect this to equate to slower talking, but my (hardly unique) impression is that Southerners don’t draw out every single vowel, just ones that are prominent and stressed.  Hence a recent call to a customer service representative from below the Mason-Dixon line yielded “My name is Paaaaaat.  How may I help you todaaaaaay?”  Actors imitating Southerners will often make the mistake of ‘drawling’ every vowel (‘Maaaah naaaame eeeeeuuuz Paaaaat’), when I’m assuming most Southerners only do this with stressed syllables.

So my guess is that people perceive Southern accents as slower simply because Southerners pronounce certain vowels slower.  Not very insightful, perhaps. But I’ve yet to find evidence that this impacts the actual rate of speech.

*Tauberer, J., & Keelan, E. (2009). Intrinsic vowel duration and the post-vocalic voicing effect: Some evidence from dialects of North American English. Proceedings of Interspeech 2009, September 6-10, Brighton, UK, 2211-2214.

*A stressed vowel that appears at the end of a word: cat, attack, etc.

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Accents of the Pacific Northwest, Part II

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Ben
Mount Rainier

Wikimedia

Since moving across country, I’ve only had intermittent internet access.  I’ll be more active here and in the comments once we get everything set up on Friday.  A brief anecdote, however.

As I foreshadowed some time back, I just moved to the city of Seattle.  A week ago, while hunting for apartments, a spacey property manager handed me the opportunity dialect hounds dream of:  he identified where he grew up (Seattle), his age (late thirties), and gave a detailed account of everywhere he’s lived in the greater metropolitan area.  I’m still somewhat perplexed about what entails a ‘Pacific Northwest accent,’ so I took note of the following observations:

*He tended to use a monophthong in words like ‘face’ and ‘goat’ (i.e. ‘fehs‘ and ‘goht‘ or [e:] and [o:]).
*The vowel he used for words like ‘lot’ and ‘top’ was fairly consistently rounded (i.e. ‘lawt’ and ‘tawp;’ or [ɒ].
*Somewhat anachronistically, the speaker exhibited some indications of the pin-pen merger: when he mentioned ‘Kent’ (a suburb of Seattle), he pronounced so that it sounded like ‘Kint.’

The first two features are typical of Canadian English or some types of Western American English. The last, curiously, is more typical of the American South, although it can be heard in some Western states as well. To be honest, I’d need more information to deduce if this is truly the merger, or due to some other phenomenon.

None of what I’ve said here is particularly revealing (several people on this blog have commented on the same observations), but it was great to hear what seemed to be a true-blue Northwest accent.  That being said, I should note that other Seattleites don’t exhibit anything like what I’ve described above.  Are there perhaps ‘working-class’ Northwest accents? ‘Educated’ ones?

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Foreign Accents

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Ben

Arnold SchwazeneggerAs much as I hate to admit it, ‘foreign’ accents don’t pique my interest the way ‘native’ accents do.  That’s not to say I don’t love foreign languages.  I’m fascinated by the grammatic intricacy of Navajo and the differences between dialects of Spanish. But I find language most interesting in the way that it intersects with a person’s identity, and it seems few people want to be identified with foreign accents.  Usually quite the opposite.

The most remarkable thing about foreign accents, in my mind, is the question of why some L2 (second language) speakers have such ‘strong’ accents, while others sound nearly like natives.  While some details of a speakers’ upbringing can provide answers to this question, it remains somewhat mysterious as to why pronunciation vexes some more than others.

Of course, certain languages simply have phonologies ‘closer’ to English than others.  Hence someone from northern Germany may be more likely to speak ‘like a native’ than someone from Spain.  After all, Low Saxon languages have vowel inventories similar to that of English, while Castilian Spanish‘s five vowel system ostensibly makes it difficult to adjust to the tense-lax distinctions important to English pronunciation.

Even within languages, some dialects are more likely to be ‘compatible’ with English. Quebec French‘s vowel system is closer to English than Parisian French’s:  like English, Quebecois distinguish between tense and lax vowels and use a rich variety of diphthongs. I would argue, then, that Quebecois English speakers more easily grasp ‘native-sounding’ pronunciation than their French counterparts.

How a foreign speaker pronounces things, of course, can be misleading.  Some dialects of Chinese have vowel systems strikingly similar to English*, yet the languages have little in common otherwise.  I once met a young Taiwanese man who spoke English with flawless pronunciation, but whose grasp of the language’s syntax was quite poor.

But the phonological structure of someone’s native language doesn’t entirely predict how well they speak English.  Possibly the best non-native English speaker I ever encountered was from Croatia, where the local language offers few tools with which to master English vowels.  Conversely, while one may assume that Scandinavians pick up English without a hitch, I’ve met Norwegians and Swedes who speak with quite marked foreign accents.

But why do speakers of seemingly similar backgrounds vary in their ability pick up English pronunciation?  To cite a celebrity example, why does Austrian actor Christoph Waltz have such a mild accent where Arnold Schwarzenegger (a resident of the US for decades) has such a strong one?  The specific localities where they grew up?  Their socio-economic backgrounds?  Answers to such a question vary by class, upbringing, schooling, age, self-identity and parentage.  Which is to say there are no easy answers at all.

*Really, it’s a matter of numbers.  Because English has an unusually large inventory, you might argue that any language with more than 10 monopthongal vowels is ‘similar’ to English.

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The Vowel in ‘Yeah’

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Ben

Of English’s many alternatives to ‘yes,’ the word yeah is perhaps the most common.  I’d go so far as to say there is some type of ‘yeah’ or yeah-like word in nearly every native dialect of English.  Yet despite its ubiquity, there is something exceptional about ‘yeah,’ namely its curious vowel sound.

Just what is the vowel in ‘yeah?’  In my own accent, I pronounce ‘yeah’ with something like a lengthened, twangy version of the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ (for the IPA-literate, something along the lines of [æə]).  So (and forgive the repetition) should we categorize the vowel in ‘yeah’ as the same vowel in ‘cat?’

Probably not. This would break an important rule of American English whereby the short-a in ‘cat,’ ‘trap’ and ‘hat’ cannot occur at the end of word*. And yet if it’s not the ‘short-a,’ then what vowel can we call this?

It might help to look at how ‘yeah’ is pronounced in accents other than my own. In many non-rhotic (i.e. r-less) accents, ‘yeah’ is arguably the same vowel as words like ‘there,’ ‘bear,’ and ‘fair.’ Evidence for this? Some non-rhotic speakers insert a linking-r after ‘yeah’ if it comes before another vowel. I encountered this a mere two days ago, in fact, when an older Rhode Island native said ‘Yeah r it was very nice.’  Ergo, she followed the same set of rules with this sentence as if she were saying ‘There it was very nice.’

Furthermore, in Australian English (and probably several British accents as well), the word seems to undergo a similar shift as ‘fair,’ namely that it becomes a monophthong (a single vowel as opposed to two).  Just as an Australian might pronounce ‘square’ as if it were lengthened version of ‘sqweh’ (i.e. [skwe:]), he might also say ‘yeah’ as if it were a lengthened version of ‘yeh’ (i.e. [je:]).  So should we treat the ‘yeah’ vowel as the same as the ‘square’ vowel?

There’s a problem here.  The vowel I’ve described above (the vowel in ‘square‘) doesn’t really exist in my accent.  I pronounce the r in ‘fair,’ so there isn’t any obvious connection to the vowel in ‘yeah.’  Back to square one.

Perhaps ‘yeah’ is simply an anomaly.  After all, ‘yes’ variants can be elusive in regards to pronunciation.  For example, I answer in the affirmative with several words of the type ‘y___p,’ saying ‘yep,’ ‘yup’ or something in between.  Is it pointless to assign ‘yeah’ to a specific type of vowel?

*That is, cannot occur in an open syllable.

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Why Americans Don’t Get ‘Dialect’

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Ben
Harry Reid

Harry Reid

I first heard the word ‘dialect’ within a bizarre context. It was the 1980s, and some adult (whose identity I forget) used it as a euphemism for African American English*. It was something along the lines of, “He speaks dialect, so I had a hard time understanding him.” ‘Dialect’ needed no qualifier or article here; it was a given that this single word referred to the speech of an entire ethnicity.

This rather icky reinterpretation of the term was revived by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid during the 2008 presidential campaign, via this cringe-inducing anecdote (here recounted by CBS News):

[Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he said privately.

Although Reid awkwardly specifies the type of dialect he is talking about, I doubt he would have mentioned a candidate’s ‘Tennessee dialect’ or ‘New York dialect’ (he probably would have used ‘accent’).  The word apparently became reserved for African Americans at some point in twentieth century America.  (That using the word ‘negro’ is ridiculous in this day and age should go without saying).

And this is hardly the only example of ‘dialect’ being misused (or in Reid’s case, being used correctly but cluelessly).  I’d also cite an ill-informed adjunct professor of mine who once remarked, “I guess you could say an ‘accent’ is the way a native speaker says something, while a ‘dialect’ is the way a non-native speaker says something.”  Ouch.  Again, there seems to be a vague understanding of what a dialect is, and yet the speaker would be hard pressed to actually define it.

‘Dialect,’ I would argue, is not a household word in America.  As these anecdotes suggest, it’s often misused and misunderstood.  ‘Accent’ on the other hand, seems to cause no confusion, and has emerged as the more popular of the two words.  This is even true of Americans’ search habits: Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool estimates about 33,100 local monthly searches for ‘British dialect,’ but a more robust 60,500 local monthly searches for ‘British accent.’

And yet you could argue that ‘accent’ is the more vague and confusing of the two terms.  ‘Dialect’ describes the whole package that comes along with regional or sociolinguistic variation in a language: grammar, phonology, and lexicon.  ‘Accent,’ on the other hand, really only refers to our pronunciation.

So it’s odd that of these two words, the one with the largest number of unrelated meanings won out.  ‘Accent’ can be used in a number of ways in linguistics, and a whole host of other ways besides, whether we’re talking about the ‘accent’ of an interior decorating scheme, an ‘accent’ in a piece of music, or the Hyundai Accent.  Type ‘dialect’ into Google, and 9 out the first 10 search results relate to linguistics.  For ‘accent,’ this numbers only 5 out of 10.

To repeat something I’ve mentioned before, it’s possible America’s lack of ‘traditional dialects’ has prevented the word from taking hold.  In the UK, there are dialects that sound to outsiders like separate languages (although many of them are receding), retaining features that hark back to the very dawn of the language.  Here in America, a Pennsylvanian might say ‘The car needs washed’ where I would say ‘The car needs to be washed,’ but it is only in a select number of dialects (Appalachian English and the aforementioned African American English are the two often mentioned) where grammatical and lexical differences, as opposed to pronunciation, can create intelligibility issues.

Without extreme examples of what a dialect is, the word has languished in the States.  A New Englander might note a Pittsburgh native’s use of ‘gum band’ to refer to a rubber band, but probably won’t associate it with the category of features that we term a ‘dialect.’  Americans tend to see such differences as isolated regional quirks more than anything else.

But perhaps ‘dialect’ will become a concept more common in everyday American conversation.  Given today’s reliance on written electronic communication, we are more exposed to the grammar and lexicon of our peers, isolated from their pronunciation, than we were twenty years ago.  Will we become as much aware of how our countrymen use words as the way they say them?

*I’ve previously used the term African American Vernacular English, but I’m trying the simpler African American English on for size in this post.

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Speech Recognition and Accents

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Ben

I don’t have time for a lengthy post today, which is unfortunate: the way software deals with regional accents deserves a longer discussion (led by someone more knowledgeable than me, frankly).  Regardless, I want to share a Slate article apropos of the passing of Steve Jobs. Apparently, Apple’s speech recognition software has a unique way of processing regional accents (thanks to Twitter friend ‘@opedr‘ for pointing it out for me):

Take, for example, the plosive consonant T…British people tend to pronounce the T sound in butter much more clearly than Americans, who swallow it. Eventually, the program establishes a kind of bell curve for the phoneme, and it will interpret any sound whose frequencies and other physical characteristics fall within the parameters of that curve as a possible attempt to produce that phoneme.

You can read the whole thing here. Forgiving the inexactitude of the descriptor ‘swallow’ (how do Americans ‘swallow’ t’s?), it’s an interesting, if brief, read.

If Apple’s speech-recognition program creates a bell curve for the accents of English, this prompts an obvious question: what accent does the ‘middle’ of the curve resemble? The program must start off with some type of ‘standard’ set of pronunciations and treat other accents as deviations from it. Is the ‘standard’ accent American? British? Or some kind of computated ‘average?’

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‘Aunt’ in a New England Accent

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Ben

Charley's AuntLike many New Englanders, I pronounce ‘aunt’ with a broad-a (i.e. the vowel in ‘father’). This is one of several ways the New England accent retains a linguistic connection to its semi-namesake (for most other Americans, ‘aunt’ and ‘ant’ are homophones). Many British accents, of course, also pronounce ‘aunt’ with a broad-a.

Here’s the problem, though. I don’t have a New England accent. I speak fairly unplaceable General American English, with the slightest hint of Kentucky (my place of birth)*.  My parents, like most Americans, pronounce ‘aunt’ with the short-a in ‘trap.’ So why do I still say ‘ahnt?’

Some years back, 60% of of the Connecticut respondents of the Harvard Dialect Survey stated that they pronounced ‘aunt’ with a ‘broad’ or back vowel. By contrast, slightly over 7% was attributed to New Jersey. It’s a startling fact given that Connecticut is often described as divorced from the classic ‘New England accent’ (outside of my neck of woods, the state’s rural East). So even in areas of New England that have ‘lost’ the accent, it seems that broad-a ‘aunt’ is still going strong.

It may carry even further. My wife is separated from New England by two generations, yet still uses broad-a in ‘aunt.’ It’s possible her New England-accented grandparents passed this feature on to their children, who in turn influenced their own children.  Where other aspects of New England English are quickly receding, this one has somehow survived.

One clue as to why New Englanders may persist with broad-a ‘aunt?’ This gripe from a former roommate from Maine: “Why do people pronounce it like ‘ant?’ There’s a ‘u’ in it!” Indeed, unlike words like ‘can’t,’ ‘bath,’ or ‘half,’ which featured a broad-a in older New England Accents, the spelling of ‘aunt’ supports the pronunciation (think of other ‘au’ words like ‘taut,’ ‘author,’ or ‘autumn’). Has orthography helped preserve this pronunciation, even as other Americans have gone over to ‘ant?’

*An astute actor once described my accent as ‘a Southerner trying to do a “Northern” accent,’ which is fairly spot-on.

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