How Non-Rhotic Accents Become Rhotic

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Ben

ChildWhile we’re on the topic of rhotic and non-rhotic accents, I’ll address a frequently asked question:  why do non-rhotic accents switch so quickly to rhotic?  And vice versa?

Since World War Two, both the US and Britain have experienced massive changes in the distribution of rhoticity and non-rhoticity (i.e. whether or not the ‘r’ is pronounced in ‘car,’ ‘core,’ ‘father,’ etc).  In some regions in America (e.g. areas of Maine), local accents have changed from one to the other within a single generation.  And I’m sure the converse is true on the other side of the Atlantic.  So why does this feature seem so fickle?

As with many questions of dialect change, I’d say the answer is ‘children.’

Before expanding on that point, however, I should say this: rhoticity and non-rhoticity are not as easy to ‘learn’ as one might think.  As a young actor learning British Received Pronunciation, I struggled with non-rhoticity.  I found dropping the /r/ in words like ‘skipper‘ and ‘particular’ fairly simple.  But for words like ‘cart’ and ‘park,’ I found it difficult to reorganize the phonology of my accent so that ‘car‘ uses the same vowel as ‘father.’  And don’t get me started on words like ‘nurse:’ as an American, the concept of an elongated schwa-like sound was foreign to me.

I’m sure it’s no different for a British actor learning a rhotic accent.  She would have to adopt an entirely new phonological structure, splitting her ‘long-a’ into two different phonemes.  Again, not as simple as it seems.

Likewise, it’s more difficult for children to change their accent from rhotic/non-rhotic to non-rhotic/rhotic than it is to pick up many other accent features.  And if children have a hard time mastering a feature, it’s a recipe for dialect instability.  Linguist J. K. Chambers, to cite an example, did a study of Canadian children who immigrated to Southern England.  55% of his subjects managed to eliminate t-flapping (i.e. pronunciation of ‘butter’ as something like ‘budder’); by contrast, only 8.3% of his subjects had switched from rhoticity to non-rhoticity.*

If children have a hard time switching from rhotic to non-rhotic, then it follows that even a modest amount of inmigration might disrupt the balance of non-rhotic and rhotic accents in a community.  It seems likely that a decent proportion of children who have moved to a new place will maintain the rhoticity or non-rhoticity of their upbringing.  This can hugely alter the dialect landscape of their new home.  It’s not just adult transplants who can impact the rhoticity of local speech; it’s their offspring as well.

Compounding this effect is the fact that the children of newcomers often account for a disproportionate share of a community’s youngsters.  Hence transplants, in my opinion, are more likely to produce the next generation of linguistic innovators than ‘locals.’  And so accents switch from rhotic to non-rhotic more quickly than with other dialect features.

I think, for now, that this rapid switching is starting to level off.  Here in the US, we just don’t have enough non-rhotic accents anymore to create an American renaissance of non-rhotic speech.  Meanwhile, rhotic areas of England have remained fairly rural, preventing rhoticity from spreading there.

The only way I can see this changing is if, for some reason, there is a large influx of Brits to America, or a large influx of Americans to the UK.  Only time will tell, but I don’t see that happening soon.

*Chambers, J.K (1992) “Dialect Acquisition” in Language 68 pp. 673-705. 

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That’s the Idear: Intrusive ‘R’

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Ben

Letter RGenerations of Americans have puzzled over the British tendency to add ‘r’s where (it seems to us) ‘r’s don’t belong.  This can be found in such phrases as “an idear of it,” “pastar and sauce,” and  “sawr and conquered.”  Termed r insertion (or intrusive r), this feature impacts many non-rhotic (r-less) accents.  And as we’ll discuss shortly, the phenomena has given birth to an even more unusual feature, which might be termed the hypercorrective intrusive r.

R insertion, as strange as it sounds to us r-pronouncers, is in fact guided by simple, logical rules.  For someone from London, the r pronounced in “bitter end” is no different from the r pronounced in “pastar and sauce.”  Both follow the rule that when a schwa occurs at the end of a word, and the next word begins with a vowel, r makes an appearance*.  This is also true of /ɑ:/ words (the “Shahr of Iran” follows the same rule as “car and driver”) and /ɔ:/ words (“Drawr open” is treated no differently than “Drawer open”).

Really, then, for people with r-inserting accents there is no r after vowels, even if an r appears in the spelling. Rather, there is a set of rules that dictates that /r/ appears in between vowels in certain environments.

Anyway, this brings us to the point of today’s post, the related phenomenon of hypercorrective intrusive r.  This is a largely American peculiarity whereby someone with a traditionally non-rhotic accent (as found in New York City and New England) hypercorrects and pronounces r regardless of whether it precedes a vowel.  Hence we get “I’ve got no idear what to wear!” and “He liked to drawr cats.”

I’m under the impression that the hypercorrective intrusive r is on the wane.  At the risk of stereotyping, I’ve mostly heard it among speakers over fifty from Long Island or working-class areas around Greater Boston.  It strikes me as a by-product of the dialect levelling that occurred in America after World War II, and hence a temporary product of that transition.

Mysterious to me, though, is why this levelling only seems to have produced the intrusive r phenomenon in the Northern U.S.  The American South, after all, has several non-rhotic accents that drop their r’s more extremely than New Yorkers or Bostonians.  In older Southern dialects, all r’s are dropped after vowels, in positions like that of “very” ([ve.i]) and “better off” ([beɾə ɔf]).  In essence, there never was a linking r in those accents.

Still, as non-rhoticity has receded in the South, hypercorrective intrusive r doesn’t seem to have occurred**.  The region adopted rhotic accents with a fairly effortless transition.  The same is true of African American Vernacular English.  Many AAVE speakers have transitioned to rhoticity, and yet I’ve never met an AAVE speaker who exhibits any type of intrusive r.

Why does this feature only impact certain types of accents?

*Well, really, it’s before a morpheme boundary: hence “drawring.”

**At least I don’t think it has: feel free to correct this assertion if there have indeed been Southern r-inserters.

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20 Years of ADS’ Word of the Year

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Ben

I went nearly this entire year ignoring an important milestone: 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the American Dialect Society‘s selection of its “Word of the Year.” The list of words upon which the organization has bestowed the award reveals a great deal about American culture’s evolution over the past two decades.  Here are some highlights:

1.)  The very first ‘WOTY,’ from 1991, is perhaps the most obscure on the list: bushlips.  A play on a popular obscenity involving bovine excrement, the word was a reference to then-president George Bush‘s habit of stretching the truth.  I can’t recall if the idiom was resurrected for Bush II’s term in office, but the epithet has nevertheless faded from memory.

2.) Some Words of the Year seemed destined for success, yet fizzled out after only a few short years.  Such is the case with the 2003 WOTY, metrosexual.  The word describes a young, heterosexual male who has effete consumer tastes and impeccable grooming.  Being young and urban myself at the time, I remember this word being all the rage in the early-to-mid 00’s.  Sadly, it took less than a decade for the concept to become dated.  Perhaps we’re less accepting of metrosexual materialism in the age of austerity.

3.) Another example of a word that receded from American dialects is 1992’s WOTY, …not! (a tag indicating sarcasm, as in “Those shoes look really nice on you … not!”).  Any American between the ages of 20 and 50 knows what this put-down means, but only in a satirical way: the construction will forever be associated with early-90s Generation X culture.

4.) Other WOTYs are still used, but in a different context than the one originally intended.  Such is the case with 1999’s Y2K.  At the time, the acronym referred to a massive computer glitch that was apparently going to kill us all.  Nowadays, the word is used to describe any stupid rumor of something that is apparently going to kill us all (e.g. “These 2012 warnings are going to turn out to be another Y2K!”)

Which is not to suggest that the ADS is unable to predict the survivability of a word.  Quite the contrary.  In fact, they created an entirely separate category from the very beginning of the WOTY awards termed “Most Likely to Succeed.”  Within the first seven years, they awarded this superlative to such time-tested terms as rollerblade, snail mail, drive-by, world wide web and nail (as in to perfect something, e.g. “I nailed that left turn”).  Even if the Word of the Year itself can end up being ephemeral, the ADS is eerily prescient with this lesser honor.

When you get a chance, check out the entire ADS’ Words of the Year Archive.  It’s a wonderful trip down memory lane.

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Yod-Dropping in American Accents

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Ben
Hebrew yod

Variants of Hebrew Yod (Wikimedia)

Of the many words that distinguish American accents from British, ‘tune‘ serves as a particularly good test. Many British accents insert a small ‘y’ sound before the vowel–resulting in something like ‘tyoon‘–whereas for most Americans, this word is homophonous with ‘toon.’ The process of losing the ‘y’ is termed yod-dropping.

Yod-dropping seems to be an ongoing process in English.  Earlier in the development of the language, words like ‘brew’ and ‘chew’ were also a part of of this category of ‘yoo’ words.  In contemporary times, the distinction between ‘brewed’ and ‘brood’ is only made (in this respect) in a select number of dialects (Welsh English being the most commonly cited example).

American yod-dropping does not impact every word of the ‘yoo’ type. John C. Wells summarizes the variability here in his Accents of English (vol. 1, pg. 207):

In GenAm, and also in parts oft he south and midlands of England, /j/ is lost after alveolars, /t, d, n, l s, z/ but not after labials or velars …

So, logically, for most Americans ‘news’ becomes ‘nooz‘ and ‘due’ becomes ‘doo,’ but ‘fuse’ remains ‘fyooz‘ and ‘cute’ remains ‘kyoot.’ For the most part, the American ‘yod’ seems easily predictable.

And yet, examining my own accent, the ‘y’ before ‘oo’ in some words seems more weakened than entirely dropped. One notable example of this is the word ‘news.’ I doubt many Americans pronounce this ‘nyooz,’ but in my own accent the word doesn’t entirely rhyme with ‘booze,‘ either. For me, at least, the vowel has a very slight onglide, something a bit like IPA [nɪuz]. So in some words for which I drop the ‘yod,’ there are nevertheless slight remnants of it.

Of course, Americans are not the most robust yod-droppers. In older dialects of East Anglia, yod-dropping impacts all words of the ‘yoo’ type. Hence ‘music’ becomes ‘moozik,’ ‘cute’ becomes ‘coot,’ and ‘fuze’ becomes ‘fooz.’ Why we Americans haven’t gone down this road is quite puzzling. Only time will tell if we do.

I’m afraid I’m going to finish this post with a question that sounds a bit unseemly: do you drop your ‘yod?’

*’Yod’ is a word of Semitic origin that refers to ‘y’-type sounds.

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Great Minds Who Kept their Accents

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Ben

Open Culture posted a fantastic video of the late Arthur C. Clarke discussing the future.  The clip is remarkable for its prescience (Clarke seems to predict the emergence of the internet), and is fascinating on all levels.  Given my interests, of course, I also noted something striking about Clarke’s speech: he maintained the West Country accent of his upbringing (he was from Somerset).  Here’s the full clip:

Clarke didn’t go to university due to finances, only earning a degree some years later. I can only wonder how different his accent may have been had he gone to Oxford or Cambridge as a young man.  Although Received Pronunciation seemed something of a standard among British intellectuals in the mid-20th century, it’s clear there were some who bucked this trend.

Clarke is one of several great thinkers, writers or other intellectuals who maintained strong regional accents before it was entirely acceptable to do so. The great physicist Richard Feynman perhaps owed some of his charm to his strong New York Accent:

Feynman’s accent, one of America’s more stigmatized, becomes a strength rather than a weakness.  It is a sad fact that we easily underestimate people because of their accents.  But in Feynman’s case, this prejudice becomes an advantage: his students are perhaps disarmed, feeling they are talking to a man on the street rather than a stuffy professor.

Even in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when one might assume the Queen’s English to be at the height of its influence, there were nevertheless those who did not adhere to the ‘learned accent’ of the day.  George Bernard Shaw, despite the Englishness of his plays, maintained some of the rhoticity of his native Ireland:

I’ve long hoped for a world in which we no longer associate certain accents with intellectualism.  And while such a world may never be possible, it’s worth noting that genius speaks in many different voices.

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Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged | 29 Comments

On the Hunt for the New Orleans Yat

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Ben
French Quarter

OSU Archives

Some English dialects are so uncommon that they adopt the mythology of the Loch Ness Monster. One such dialect, unique the city of New Orleans, is locally referred to as Yat. It is renowned not because of how strange it sounds, but rather its familiarity: the accent bears more than a passing resemblance to New York City English.

This is no mere laymen’s observation. Owing perhaps to New Orleans’ history of immigration, the Yat accent shares with New York something called the tense-lax split. This means that the ‘short-a‘ is pronounced two ways: in certain words (like pat and cap) it is pronounced as in most other American accents. In other words (like pass and bad), it is pronounced more ‘tensely:’ this usually means the accent realizes this as a vowel closer to the ‘e‘ in ‘dress.’

But outside of this one feature, I’ve long been confused about what separates a ‘Yat’ accent from a non-‘Yat’ accent. My own impression is that New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu has some Yat features:

My problem with someone like Landrieu, however, is that it’s hard to separate ‘New Yorkey’ features from features of other American Southern Accents: both New York and many Southern drawls are non-rhotic, for example (the ‘r’ is dropped at the end of word like ‘car‘ and ‘butter‘).

This is complicated by the fact that the most notable feature of American Southern English, the monophthongization of the vowel in words like ‘time’ and ‘five’ (so they become ‘tahm‘ or ‘fahv‘) is still present in New Orleans accents. Regardless of how otherwise ‘New York’ this accent may be, it can still be classified as Southern.

Another example might be the late Saints’ announcer Buddy Diliberto:

It’s difficult to unpackage the features of Diliberto’s speech. He seems to have the tense-lax split, which would probably put him in the ‘Yat’ camp. But other features aren’t as cut and dried.

For example, Diliberto exhibits a more conservative pronunciation of the vowels in ‘goat’ and ‘goose’ than one might find in other Southern accents (these vowels are pronounced more back than they would in, say, Tennessee). Is this an indication of some kind of northern or New York influence? I would say no, as many other Louisiana accents also feature more conservative vowels of this type.

Then there’s the fact that, like New Yorkers, older Yats reportedly pronounce words like ‘nurse’ and ‘verse’ with a vowel that sounds to outsiders like ‘noys‘ and ‘voyse‘ (IPA əɪ). This would again seem to be a remarkable example of New York kinship … were it not for the fact that this pronunciation is common in many older Southern accents as well.

Although ‘Yats’ don’t figure prominently in mainstream popular culture, there are at least two famous Yat characters in literature. Ignatius J. Reilly, of John Kennedy Toole‘s A Confederacy of Dunces was famously a Yat, as is (presumably) Stanley Kowalski, the working-class husband of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. The accent and culture clearly has place in the Southern imagination.

But my question remains: what separates a ‘Yat’ accent from other Louisiana accents? Is it a general impression of ‘New Yorkiness?’ Or is there something more specific that makes ‘Yat’ unique?

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Will English Dialects Become Languages?

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Ben
The Anglophone World

The Anglophone World (Wikimedia)

It’s a fair question to ask if English dialects may eventually split off into separate languages.  This has happened before, of course, Latin being perhaps the most notable example. And while I find it a compelling question, I think we’re a long way off from this split becoming a reality.

Some clarification is necessary. ‘Dialect‘ and ‘language,’ after all, are not easily separable phenomena. Italian, Chinese and Arabic are languages with ‘dialects’ that can seem like very different languages. The former Yugoslavia, on the other hand, has a number of ‘languages’ that sound an awful lot like dialects of each other (in my opinion). There are obviously subjective factors in the division of these two concepts.

One might argue, in fact, that such splits have already occurred in English. After all, the globe is dotted with numerous creoles derived from English. Yet when people wonder if English will eventually ‘split,’ I don’t think they have creoles in mind. Rather, many seem intrigued by the possibility that British English might split from American, Northern American English from Southern, or Australian from everywhere else.

I see several large barriers to English dialects becoming separate languages in our lifetime:

1.) Literacy. I realize that written and spoken language are different. But reading and writing do impact speech, and in ways more profound than many give it credit for. My own speech is affected by the way I write, and I in turn affect other people’s speech when I talk to them.  Despite frequent complaints about the English-speaking world’s crumbling educational infrastructure, literacy is far more widespread than it was when Vulgar Latin was spreading across Europe. In my mind, it’s a huge impediment to the production of separate languages.

2.) Lack of geographical isolation. People simply move too much. Media is shared by too many countries. The rest of the world is too accessible. Nobody lives on a (figurative) island anymore, or some remote part of the empire accessible only by ten days’ journey on horseback.  People are much more exposed to other varieties of English than they were even sixty years ago.

3.) Strong accents are not languages. When an American hears a Cockney accent (or a Cockney hears an Minnesota accent), it’s easy to get the impression of entirely different languages: they sound so different.  But when you compare what people are actually saying to one another rather than how they say it, most mainstream dialects of English are not even close to splitting into languages as disparate as Spanish, French and Italian.

Of course, at an earlier date, such splits seemed more plausible. England still has various traditional dialects that are indications of a language that, from Middle English onward, may have been primed to diverge radically.

Along with many other factors, industrialization hampered this process. I don’t believe technology will erode the existence of separate languages. Nor do I think technology prohibits the creation of unique dialects, within certain limitations. But I do think advances in media and transportation will make it increasingly difficult for entirely new languages to develop.  It is perhaps only in the least technologically advanced parts of the globe that English may produce offspring.

But will English eventually go the path of Latin, giving birth to a number of great national mother tongues? Maybe, but I believe it would take some fairly catastrophic, revolutionary or wildly unforseen events for that to happen soon. As things are now, this ‘split’ seems a long ways off.

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[hur-i-keyn]

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Ben

I am currently in the path of the hurricane about to pummel the Northeastern United States. We’re not entirely sure what the power situation is going to be for the next couple of days, which may or may not result in some light posting over at these parts.

In the meantime, I’m mulling over the interesting conversation about the Californian pronunciation of ‘almond’ that emerged in the comments of the last post!

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A Pronunciation Mystery: American ‘Father’

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Ben
Letter A

Brooklyn Museum

Sometimes the most common words have the most illogical pronunciations. Such is the case with the American pronunciation of ‘father.’ It seems so self-evident this word is pronounced with a broad a (i.e. an ‘ah’ sound) that this fact barely seems worth examination. Yet on closer inspection, there is something quite mysterious about American ‘father.’

In many British accents, the broad a in ‘father’ makes sense: it might be thought of as part of the BATH set. That is to say, it’s part of that curious category of British broad-a words that also includes ‘bath,’ ‘can’t,’ ‘pass’ and hundreds of others. This set isn’t entirely logical in and of itself, but it at least makes sense that ‘father’ is a part of it.

But Americans (well, most Americans) have no BATH set. As commonplace as the ‘ah’ in ‘father’ might seem to be, it’s really rather strange that we say it this way in the US. Shouldn’t it logically be pronounced with the short-a in ‘cat?’

John C. Wells comments on this mystery in his Accents of English:

This lengthening is essentially the same as that in the BATH words, and it has not been satisfactorily explained how GenAm [i.e. General American English]comes to have /ɑ/ in father, palm etc, but not in calf, halve, and the other bath words.

Now, in terms of words like ‘calm’ and ‘palm,’ I might blame the letter ‘l‘ (even if it’s silent). I can’t say for sure, but there at least seems to be a type of rule where /a/ followed by/l/ results in a broad ‘ah’ sound in American English. (The ‘l’ in words like this is not silent for many Americans, including myself). But ‘father’ is truly perplexing.

The reason why ‘father’ has an ‘ah’ sound isn’t a mystery in and of itself. Several hundred years ago, English /a/ began a process of being lengthened and ‘broadened’ before fricatives (i.e. /s/, /f/, /th/, etc.) This was an inconsistent process: it impacted English around London the most; many Southern English dialects to some degree; Northern and Midlands English dialects only minimally (i.e. in ‘half’); and American dialects, which split from British English earlier in the process, very little.

The mystery deepens even further when one considers the word ‘rather.’ Some Americans (like myself) pronounce this word with a short-a (i.e. the vowel in ‘cat.’) Others pronounce it with a broad-a, so that it rhymes with ‘father.’ And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Is this a feature of certain regional dialects?

So why are ‘father’ and ‘rather’ exceptional? And while we’re at it, why does this not extend to ‘lather’ and ‘gather?’

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How Do Falkland Islanders Speak?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Ben

English has a number of isolated speaker communities throughout the world.  Among the most isolated are the Falkland Islands, which comprise a sparsely populated British territory of about 3,000.  To date, I’ve only found one speech sample of someone truly born and bred in the Falklands, tour guide Tony Smith:

Although Smith’s accent resembles Received Pronunciation in some ways, it also has a curious sprinkling of non-RP features. Note his occasional rhotic pronunciations in an otherwise non-rhotic accent [Note: I discuss this more in the comments]. His pronunciation of “about” is also different than modern RP (it almost sounds homophonous with RP “a bite”). And like Australians and Americans, his ‘t’ between vowels is typically a tapped consonant (e.g. sort of sounds like “sord of”).

That’s only a small sample of the pronunciation quirks which pepper Smith’s speech. Although I know nothing about this man’s upbringing, his accent sounds like a unique mixture of different British accents, and perhaps a mixture of English accents in general: his intonation sometimes sounds slightly American.

Given the Islands’ proximity to South America, I was fascinated by the moment four minutes into to the clip when Smith reads the headstone of an Argentine grave:  he speaks Spanish with a very marked English accent. It’s a testament to the ability of islands to remain linguistically isolated from the mainlands to which they’re adjacent.  Although given the complex and painful history this small territory has with Argentina, the barrier is no doubt more than physical.

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