Jamaican Patois (And English Schwa)

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Ben
Jamaican Coat of Arms

Jamaican Coat of Arms

I’ve recently become fascinated with Jamaican Patois, the creole language spoken on the island of the same name.  The language derives from African languages and various dialects of the British Isles spoken in the 17th-Century.  So it offers insight into both the origin of creole languages and the features of Early Modern English.

A few months back, I posted this “Jamaican Patois Night Before Christmas,” an excellent introduction to what this unique language sounds like.  Take a listen.

Jamaican Patois is too broad a topic for one blog post, so I’ll focus on an aspect of the language I find particularly interesting:  weak vowels.  Also termed “unstressed” or (with a slightly different meaning) “reduced,” these are vowels such as the “a” in afraid, the “a” in comma, or the “e” in pocket. Such syllables get less emphasis in most accents of English.

But as with many creoles, Jamaican Patois has a more interesting array of such vowel sounds than Standard English does. Where Americans and Brits uses a schwa sound, Patois assigns these unstressed syllables to an a, e, i, o or u sound depending on the context.*  And it’s not predictable from standard English spelling which of these is assigned to which vowel.

Take, for example, the name of the country itself, Jamaica. One might expect that the “a” in the first syllable would correspond to an /a/ sound. In fact, the broad Patois realization is Jumieka (IPA ʤʊmiɛka), with a clear /u/ for the “Ja-.”**

Then there are “-ion” words like nation, organization, and million, which one might expect to have an /-o/ type sound in the last syllable. Instead, these have an /a/:  million = milian (IPA mɪljan); separation = separieshan (IPA sɛpaɹiɛʃan). (Fans of 1980s one-hit wonders will remember this type of pronunciation from the opening stanza of “Pass the Dutchie.”)

On jumieka.com, an excellent resource for learning Jamaican Patois, an interesting distribution of unstressed vowels can be found in the introduction on the homepage (I’ll meet you guys at the bottom of this list):

/e/
cadence (kiedens)

/i/
attitude (hatityuud)
average (habrij)
classical (klasikal)
decendant (disendant)
divide (divaid)
English (hingglish)
language (langwij)
usage (yuusij)

/u/
Jamaican (jumiekan)
population (papiulieshan)

/o/
isolate (aisoliet)
oficial (hofishal)
potential (potenshal)
surprise (sopraizn)

/a/
conversation (kanvasieshan)
difference (difrans)
construction (kanschrokshan)
continue (kantiniu)
decendant (disendant)
jamaican (jumiekan)
unless (anles)
common (kaman)
million (milian)
missionary (mishaneri)
population (papiulieshan)
potential (potential)
official (hofishal)
regional (riijanal)
separation (separieshan)

Obviously, I’m working off a single text here, so it’s hard to come to conclusions.  It’s also important to note that “Jamaican Patois” may be applied to less extreme varieties of the language that use different pronunciations. But there are some interesting things to be gleaned. First of all, note that /a/ and /i/ are used as weak vowels a good deal, while /e/, /o/ and /u/ much less so.  So /a/ and /i/ may serve purposes similar to the constrasting types of schwa used in British/American rosa‘s and roses, respectively.

But note the contradictions:

u = /u/ in “population” but /a/ in “unless”
a = /a/ in words like “potential” but /i/ in /-age/ words like “average” and “usage”
e = /i/ except in the presumably non-native word “cadence,” where it’s an /e/

As a total Jamaican Patois novice, I would be way over my head trying to analyze what this means. But I’m guessing there’s a division here between words that are learned early in life (e.g. “Jamaican”) and those learned later (like “cadence” mentioned above). In a language that is in some ways a type of English, which words can be considered “natively” Jamaican? And which can be considered “loans?

*HUGE caveat here. Some scholars hypothesize that Jamaican Patois does not have stress in the same sense that non-creole English does, but rather is a tonal or pitch-accent language. So really, what I’m talking about here are syllables that correspond to unstressed syllables in more “standard” types of English.

**Jumieka.com has an interesting chart in which it shows how this word is spoken on different points in the continuum from broad Jamaican Patois to standard Jamaican English. It goes from “Jumieka” to “Jomieka” to “Jamieka.”

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Far Out: The Hippie Dialect

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Ben
Hippie Van

Wikimedia

The etymology of dialect words is an obsession for English language enthusiasts. And thanks to Google NGram, Google Books, Google Scholar and other Google-related tools, it’s never been easier for laymen to research the origins of slang. But the question of when (and how) dialect words disappear from the lexicon remains a difficult question to answer.

Which brings me to today’s topic, the lingo of the countercultural movement of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Linked to the Baby Boomers (the generation born in the decades after World War II), these types of words briefly flourished during the Vietnam era. Today, however, many such words are non-existent in the lexicon of contemporary American dialects. What happened?

I would define the countercultural era (so to speak) as being between 1966-1974, since that’s when the bulk of “classic boomers” (born 1943-1957) were of college age. One of the great generational shifts in American history, the period was marked by young people eschewing the corporate mindset of their parents in favor of a culture of relaxed mores and lifestyles.  It’s not surprising that this period was also associated with tremendous change in the American dialect.

The slang of this period is well-known, symptomatic of what might be called “hippie English.”  A small sample:

cat: a colloquial term for “man”
dig: verb, meaning “to understand”
far out: along the lines of  “awesome” or “cool” in contemporary American dialects
groovy: also along the lines of  “awesome” or “cool”in contemporary American dialects
mama: term of endearment applied to female significant other
grass: marijuana
foxy: sexually attractive (usually applied to women, but occasionally men as well)
ball: verb, meaning to have sex with

These terms have a variety of etymologies. Many (such as “cat” or “dig”) started within the lexicon of the dialect known as African American Vernacular English (“dig” is hypothesized to derive from Wolof). Other words seem to hark back to the beatnik era in the 1950’s. But all of these have become extremely old hat, at least in America.

So why did these dialect words (“hippie” or “boomer” lingo) become so passe? There are two possible answers:

1.) The children of baby boomers disassociated themselves from their parents. People of my generation (Gen Y) and the generation before it (Gen X) have something of a cynical attitude toward the generation of our parents, and probably the accompanying “dialect.”  It’s easy to see how we may have sought to wipe all traces of the countercultural excess from our vocabularies.

2.) Baby boomers THEMSELVES disassociated from the countercultural movement. When my parents use phrases such as “far out,” “groovy” or “can you dig?” it is usually in a spirit of contemptuous mockery. Many people of this generation have actively distanced themselves from the terminology associated with the drug scene of the late 60’s.

I think a bit of both factors came into play. The boomers notoriously became more conservative in the Reagan/Thatcher era, so it’s not surprising that they wanted to get as far away from the era of free love and communes as possible. At the same time, later generations became disillusioned with the irresponsibility and delusion associated with the ’60s and ’70s.

Anybody of that generation care to comment?

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The 3 Types of Australian Accents

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Ben
Australia

CIA

The Australian Accent is renowned for its lack of regional differences.  This is perhaps not surprising given that Britain settled the country fairly late in the history of the Empire (New South Wales was discovered over a decade after America’s Declaration of Independence).  But it isn’t quite right to say Australian Accents exhibit no variation: those differences just aren’t particularly regional.

So if Australian accents don’t really vary by region, what kind of accent differences do exist?  I’d refer you to the loose classification system developed by linguists Arthur Delbridge and A.G. Mitchell in 1965.   They separated Australian Accents into broad, general, and cultivated varieties.

Roughly speaking, General accents represent the most common type of English spoken in Australia.  Broad accents are usually described as more extreme (and associated with more working-class speech), while Cultivated Australian accents are a prestige variety somewhat closer to the British Received Pronunciation (although actual speakers of the latter are in the minority).

For a frame or reference, these corresponding celebrities might help:

1.) Broad: the late Steve Irwin.
2.) General: Australian PM Julia Gillard.
3.) Cultivated: Cate Blanchett. (Blanchett’s somewhat more “British-Sounding” accent may be a result of her being an actress, but her speech nonetheless resembles this type of elevated Australian speech).

You may disagree with my judgements here, and that’s fine.*  Australian English is clearly a continuum, and these three categories are rough markers on that continuum.  So how do we sort Australian Accents into these boxes?

A 1997 study in the Australian Journal of Linguistics** offered more precise parameters. The researchers started by making impressionistic judgements about a large number of recorded Australian subjects, placing them into the Broad, General and Cultivated categories. They then analyzed the vowel sounds of these speakers to specify which features correspond to each type of accent.

The results are not terribly surprising.  The further on the Broad end of the spectrum that an accent lies, the more markedly, well, “Australian” the features of said accent.  Here are the biggest factors:

–The diphthong in “kite,” “ride,” “mine” etc.  The more Broad the accent gets, the more this moves toward the diphthong in words like “choice” (i.e. retracted and raised).  Hence a Cultivated Australian speaker might pronounce “buy” somewhat close to an RP or General American speaker (i.e. IPA baɪ).  A Broad speaker, on the other hand, might pronounce it closer to American “boy” (i.e. IPA bɒe).

–The vowel in “mouth,” “loud” and “out,” etc.  The more Broad the accent, the more the first part of this diphthong moves toward the “e” in “dress.”  So a Cultivated speaker might have a diphthong closer to GenAm or RP (i.e. IPA aʊ), while a Broad speaker might pronounce it closer to an “eh-aw” sound (i.e. IPA ɛɔ).

Other features include:

–Words like “fleece,” “keep,” etc. are a more pronounced diphthong in Broad Australian accents.
–Words like “face”, and “make” move closer to the diphthong in American/RP “kite” in broad accents.
–Words like “goose” and “food” have a fronter “oo” vowel (presumably closer to IPA ʏ) in Broad accents.

If you’re already acquainted with the shibboleths of the Australian accent, none of this is particularly revealing. I was, however, struck by some interesting differences between men and women. For example, the researchers found more variation in pronunciation of the word “heard” (i.e. the NURSE vowel) among women, but significantly more variation among the word “who’d” (i.e. the GOOSE vowel) in men.  So although there are clear class differences within the Australian accents of both genders, these differences are not the same for each sex.

Still unclear to me, though, is the degree to which the Australian accent has developed regional varieties.  We’ve had past discussions about the TRAP-BATH split in Australia, which seems to be the main division between various regions in the country.  For the most part, however, I only have the vaguest of observations to offer about regional Australian accents (for example, the Melbourne accent seems slightly “clipped” to me).

In this way, Australia exhibits a paradox similar to another of the commonwealth’s largest nations, Canada.  Both countries have populations distributed over vast geographical distances, yet have startlingly few regional dialects.  What accounts for this contradiction?

*I’m mostly basing this on the degree/frequency to which each speaker retracts and raises the first vowel in words like “price,” “ride,” etc.  There’s obviously a lot of variation within the speech of individual speakers.

**Citation:  Harrington, J., Cox, F., Evans, Z (1997).  An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English Vowels.  Australian Journal of Linguistics 17, 155-184.

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More on the Ocracoke Brogue

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Ben
Outer Banks of SC

Outer Banks of SC (Courtesy NOAA)

Some months back I mentioned an unusual dialect of English known colloquially as the “Ocracoke Brogue.” Spoken in the remote islands off the coast of North Carolina, the brogue is sometimes mentioned as one of the “last living relatives” of Elizabethan or Early Modern English, a result of being isolated from the mainland United States for centuries.

In reality, studies have shown that the dialect of Ocracoke has evolved considerably over the past 300 years.  The notion that people on the island speak just like the groundlings at the Globe, therefore, is pretty silly.  But it’s a notion worth exploring:  just how close to Elizabethan English is the dialect on Ocracoke?

For an idea of what the Ocracoke Brogue sounds like, I’d direct you to the first speaker in this clip:

This woman, who I’m assuming is quite elderly, has features that are typically associated with Irish or other “brogue”-like accents: She exhibits strongly monophthongal vowels in words like goat (“goht”) and face (“fehs”), and a raised pronounciation of words like house. I have less to say about the other three people in the clip, who seem to have much more typical Southern features.*

This also seems true of this clip of several men from Ocracoke:

There are some slightly brogue-like markers in their accent.  For example, they occasionally exhibit raised pronunciations of the vowel in PRICE and MOUTH (as in Irish or some West Country English). But it’s clear that many features of mainstream American Southern English have made their way onto the island. When contrasting these men to the older speaker from the first clip, it appears the accent has softened tremendously over the past hundred years.

Back to the original question, though: is the Ocracoke Brogue really a cousin of “Shakespeare’s English?” I would say no (although the question itself is rather meaningless). Given, the accent seems to exhibit several features which are common to accents labelled “brogues” or hypothesized to be “Shakespearean:”

*Monopthongal GOAT vowel: goat = “goht” (go:t), road = “rohd” (ro:d), etc.
*Monopthongal FACE vowel: face = “fehs” (fe:s), day = “deh” (de:), etc.
*Raised KITE vowel: five = “fuh-eev” (fʌɪv, among other realizations)
*Raised MOUTH vowel: round = “ruh-oond” (rʌʊnd, among other realizations)

It is true that these pronunciations were (probably) common in Shakespeare’s time. But from what I’ve read, they also would have been common in varieties of American English well into the 18th-Century**. In my mind, Ocracokers don’t preserve features of English from 400 years ago, but rather ones that died out a long time after the colonization of America.

The Shakespearean association is also perplexing in light of the actual history of the island.  It’s true that Ocracoke was visited by the very Elizabethan Sir Walter Raleigh, but this bit of trivia doesn’t make up for the fact that the island doesn’t seem to have been fully settled until 1715.  Is the accent conservative?  Yes.  But Shakespearean?  Not particularly.

I’ll conclude with a brief recommendation.  Both of the clips I used in this post were put up by The North Carolina Language and Life Project, a fantastic sociolinguistics research organization that makes short documentaries about the accents and dialects of North Carolina. These mini-docs are handsomely filmed, contain great interviews, and really let the language speak for itself. It’s a great resource.

*Two points about this for the more phonetically-inclined: (1.) this clip only identifies speakers as being from Hyde County, which also includes a large chunk of mainland North Carolina, so I’m sure there are parts of the county without any trace of a Ocracoke Brogue. (2.) The notable exception is that speaker number 2 in the clip (who sounds younger) has a rather interesting pronunciation of the GOAT vowel within the first sentence: it sounds monopthongal (with maybe a slight off-glide), and centralized–I’d need to listen to the clip more times to make an accurate judgement.

**Probably less true of the raised HOUSE vowel.

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Question About the Speech Accent Archive

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Ben

A recent piece at WAMU profiles the Speech Accent Archive, an online database of accent samples compiled by the George Washington University‘s Linguistics Department.  A vast collection of recordings of English speakers around the globe, this eleven-year-old resource is one of the first accent-centric websites I ever encountered.

A good example of the SAA’s unique format is this accent sample, from Kilkenny, Ireland. As you can see, the site provides a useful International Phonetic Alphabet transcription to go along with each subject.

I have tremendous respect for the people who’ve created this database. And I appreciate that the study focuses an uncommon amount of attention on non-native English speakers. As such, I don’t intend the following to be taken as outright criticism.  But I’ve always been a little confused by the passage that the SAA’s subjects read:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

In the above-linked article, Steven Weinberger, director of George Mason’s linguistics program, states the following about the sample text:

“[The paragraph has] difficult clusters of consonants like P-Ls and S-Ts, just about every vowel in English, and just about every consonant …”

While it’s technically true that this passage features “just about every vowel in English,” the few omissions don’t strike me as exactly trivial. Notably, the passage lacks:

1.) “Mouth” words: house, loud, about, etc.
2.) “Thought” words: fought, caught, flawed, etc.*
3.) Words with stressed syllables that end in “r:” start, near, fair, etc.

I admit this sounds like nitpicking (or worse, backseat academia). But some of these phonemes are important, in my opinion, for getting the full picture of what an accent sounds like. For example, without “thought” words, it’s difficult to deduce if an American has the Caught-Cot merger.  The passage doesn’t leave out too many of English’s vowel sounds, but those it does are pretty noticeable.

Conversely, what I do like about the passage is that the researchers seem to have geared it more toward consonants (particularly consonant clusters), which are often neglected in the face of English’s diverse vowel pronunciations. At the same time, the lack of some of English’s most important vowels has always puzzled me.

Again, I don’t mean this as any kind of take-down. I’m just a little shaky on the researcher’s methodology, and am perhaps unclear on the aim of this text in particular. Anyone care to enlighten me?

*The passage DOES have words like “small” or “call,” however.  But due to “l-coloring,” someone with the Cot-Caught merger can pronounce these words in the same way as someone who doesn’t have the merger.

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The British Drama League Recordings

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Ben

I’ve been held back from posting due to the 4th of July holiday (compounded by some internet connectivity issues). But I’d like to briefly share a fun thing I found on YouTube recently. A user who identifies himself as EMGColonel has uploaded a large number of old phonograph recordings, including a number of wonderful accent samples created by something called the The British Drama League in the 1930s.

You can find his channel here.

I particularly enjoyed this recording of an classic “Geordie” accent:

That’s all for now. I will have a full-on post tomorrow. Until then, happy 4th of July (and for non-Americans, happy monday!)

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On the Evolution of “Douchebag”

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Ben
Profanity

Cartoon by Polylerus

I don’t much discuss profanity here, which is unfortunate. Swear words are an indelible part of any dialect, and no discussion of spoken English would be complete without their mention. Which brings us to today’s topic, the meteoric rise of the American English epithet “douchebag.”

31st Century-anthropologists, bereft of the electronic media now at our disposal, might be flummoxed as to how douche, a word meaning “shower” in French, came to mean something along the lines of “pompous jerk.” So it helps to look at the origins of douchebag (or douche), from this Wikipedia entry:

A douche ( /ˈduːʃ/) is a device used to introduce a stream of water into the body for medical or hygienic reasons, or the stream of water itself.

To make this more explicit, a douchebag is part of an apparatus  used to clean certain bodily orifices. A douche bag, technically speaking, is what contains the refuse created as a by-product of this cleansing process. Ick.

I must admit that douchebag (as an insult applied to people) didn’t enter my lexicon until the 2000’s. For many years, in fact, I assumed that the term was a 21st-Century coinage. After doing several searches using Google Books, however, it’s clear this isn’t the case. The first usage of douchebag/douche bag that I could find in the pejorative sense dates back to at least 1951, in the classic novel From Here to Eternity (here an adjective):

“The trouble with you, Pete,” the voice that did not seem to come with him but from that cigaret said savagely, “is that you can’t see further than that douchebag nose of yours.”

So douchebag seems to have been used in a vulgar context as far back as World War II or thereabouts. It’s worth noting, however, that this is the ONLY usage of the type found in 1950’s literature: all other examples of douchebag/douche bag refer to medicine or hygiene. I doubt the term was in popular currency at the time.

The next such usage doesn’t appear until 1964, in a stream-of-consciousness passage of another famous novel, Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn:

“…and she yelled to Jack to comeon and she/d f***in blind not like that f***in douchebag he was with and someone yelled we/re coming and she was dragged down the steps …”

Still, examples of the pejorative douchebag in the 1960s are few and far between. And seeing as that decade was famed for its relaxation of literary puritanism, I’d hazard to guess it was still uncommon.

It was only in the following three decades that douchebag seemed to make some headway. There are about a dozen examples of the word being used pejoratively in literature between 1970-1980. In the 80s, this increases to several dozen.* And by the 1990s, this skyrockets to somewhere between 100-200.

But it’s really the 2000s where we see “douchebag” take off. Google books records the word being used 868 times, the overwhelming majority of which appear to be non-medical. This was truly the decade of the “douchebag.”

If douchebag appeared to be an epithet dating back to at least the 1950s, why did it not become as popular until the 21st Century?  My personal theory relates to the fact that douching (the act of cleaning bodily orifices with a stream of water) has become steadily less popular as a hygienic technique over the past fifty years. This is likely a result of medical warnings such as this (from the 2005 health book What Women Need to Know):

At one time, doctors routinely instructed their female patients to douche; however, that is no longer the case. Studies have shown that there is a higher rate of infection of the reproductive tract among women who douche that among women who do not.

So let’s put the pieces together. In 1960, when douching was a much more common practice and perhaps more prominent in the public imagination, douchebag would have had a much more disgusting connotation, and likely would have been avoided for this reason. But in the 21st-Century, at a time when many people barely remember what douching was to begin with, it might be taken as a less offensive insult.

I could say a lot more about this word, but I’ll stop before I start to ramble.**  I’m curious what everyone else’s experience with douchebag is. And a related question: Is “douchebag” making headway outside of the United States?

*One interesting pop cultural example is that it appears in the novelization of “ET: The Extra-terrestrial.” I can’t recall if the word is used in the film or not.

**Two examples, if anybody wants to pick up the conversation:  (1.) the rapid evolution of “douchebag” to “douche” in the past decade, and on a related note (2.) that “douche” follows the pattern of many other English profanities by being a monosyllable containing a plosive and a fricative or affricate.

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The Elusive English Schwa

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Ben

Schwa symbolAn old trick question:  what is the most common vowel in spoken English? Is it the a in cat? The o in top? The ee in keep? In fact, the answer is the puzzling little sound known as schwa.

Schwa was first described to me as “English’s throwaway vowel,” a crude but apt definition. The term refers to the little vowel pronounced in the center of the mouth which you hear at the end of comma, the beginning of afraid, and the middle of salamander. If you speak a non-rhotic accent, as would be the case for many Britons, schwa is also a common realization of “er” at the end of better.  This English learning video offers a simple introduction to schwa (even if you aren’t an English learner):

As indicated, schwa is traditionally represented by the IPA symbol ə (an upside-down “e”), signifying a vowel pronounced smack dab in the middle of the vowel space. As any English phonetician will tell you, however, this a tad misleading as far as English is concerned. Our particular brand of schwa in fact represents a number of vowels which differ depending on the words they appear in.

To use a well-worn example, Americans make a slight distinction between the “schwa” at the end of Rosa’s and the “schwa” at the end of roses. The vowel in the former is pronounced relatively close to the “classic” schwa sound (i.e. right in the center of the mouth).  The e in “Roses,” however, is pronounced much closer (or “higher”), with a vowel more or less equidistant between the “ee” in feet and the “oo” in goose (i.e. IPA [ɨ]).

And there are “alternate” schwas even less apparent to the naked ear. For example, this 2007 study finds that the schwa in the first syllable of begin is closer to the “i” in American kit, while the schwa in the second syllable of probable is closer to the “oo” in the word foot*. English “schwa” is perhaps a blanket term describing any number of unstressed vowels, even if these actually vary in pronunciation.

Why is it we don’t notice these variations?  To look at one hypothetical analogy, if the “e” sound in dress were occasionally pronounced with the “a” sound in father, such a difference would be quite obvious.  But English schwa is a very, very short vowel.  To give a frame of reference, this study on the English of Drogheda (a city on the East Coast of Ireland) found that schwa was nearly 1/2 the duration of the next shortest vowel (the “i” in kit). This vowel is often pronounced so quickly that it takes the sharpest of ears to notice its precise phonetic properties.

Of course, many foreign languages have no schwa-like vowel, the lack of which results in a disproportionate share of pronunciation difficulties for English learners.  The standard schwa sound is not particularly difficult to make (just grunt and you’ve basically got it), but understanding how to use schwa in English is hardly intuitive.  If I were Spanish, for example, I’d probably have a hard time associating the “o” in renovate with such an “un-o-like” sound.

Given the topic of this site, I’ll conclude with something I’m curious about with regards to schwa:  how does it differ from accent to accent?  The 2007 study I linked to above indicates some slight differences within American English (for example, Roses and Rosa’s are actually merged for some Americans).  What other ways does schwa vary from one accent to another?

*Note to the phonetically inclined:  I’m extrapolating here based on their statement about the average F2 of this vowel.  Looking at the chart they provide, I’d say the schwa in “probable” would be more accurately rendered [ɤ].

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“Top o’ the Morning:” Myth and Reality

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Ben

Irish sunriseFew dialect myths rankle more people than the purported Irish phrase, “top o’ the morning.”  Any Irish person will inform you that they have never, ever heard even one of their countrymen utter these words. So where did the greeting come from, and why is it so ubiquitous in popular culture?

Like many such terms, “top o’ the morning” appears to be more archaic than outright apochryphal. Snooping around some old threads at the Daltai forum, commenters provide fascinating examples of the greeting in literature. For example, this poem from Henry Newbolt, written during World War I (emph. mine):

So I laughed, and felt quite well disposed to the youngster,
And shouted out “the top of the morning” to him,
And wished him “Good sport!”—and then I remembered
My rank, and his, and what I ought to be doing:
And I rode nearer, and added, “I can only suppose
You have not seen the Commander-in-Chief’s order
Forbidding English officers to annoy their Allies
By hunting and shooting.”

From the context of the poem, you may notice that Newbolt is English, rather than Irish. This would suggest that “top o’ the morning” was heard in various parts of the British Isles. Regardless of how widespread the phrase once was, it doesn’t seem exclusive to Hiberno-English.

Then there’s this quote, from the oddly-titled novel Knocknagow – The Homes of Tipperary, written by Irish author Charles J. Kickham in 1879:

They were met by the “man of the house” before they reached the kitchen door, and as he gave a hand to each, Father Hannigan’s hearty “Good-morrow, Maurice,” struck Mr. Lowe as being admirably in keeping with his appearance. And the words —”The top of the morning to you, Miss Grace,” suggested the idea that Father Hannigan affected the phraseology of the peasantry.

So it appears “top o’ the morning” was indeed spoken in  the Victorian era (at the latest), although Kickham suggests that the phrase was already something of an affectation.  While I can’t put a date on when “TotM” started to recede, a rough guess might put its extinction at some point in the early 20th-Century. Just how widespread the phrase was (if ever) is unclear to me.

To be honest, though, I’m not terribly interested in when “top o’ the morning” disappeared from Irish English so much as how this phrase entered the American consciousness. What in popular culture gave us the idea that “top o’ the morning” is the standard Irish “hello?”

One popular theory blames the famous Lucky Charms Leprechaun from American television ads. But the evidence is shaky. It doesn’t seem that anyone Irish was involved in the original ad campaign (the man who voiced the Leprechaun wasn’t even of Irish descent).  When the campaign first ran, in the early 1960’s, it’s likely that Americans already associated “top o’ the morning” with Irishness.

I’d guess, then, that the myth originates with an earlier source, perhaps a film for which the screenwriter had an unusually nuanced understanding of Hiberno-English. The Quiet Man might be a candidate, as it was co-written by an actual Irishman, Maurice Walsh. That being said, I haven’t seen the film in years and can’t say if the phrase is even anywhere in the script.

Does anyone know how “top o’ the morning” entered the lexicon of semi-mythical dialect phrases?

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Posted in Irish English | Tagged , | 15 Comments

Michelle Collins’ Accent on Coronation Street

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Ben
Michelle Collins

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There has been a recent to-do over British actress Michelle Collins, who joined the Manchester-based soap opera Coronation Street. Collins was best known for her role in EastEnders (a soap set in East London), so her Manchester accent must come as a bit of a shock.  Still, I can’t quite wrap my head around the 34 articles about the “controversy” (as per Google News) that this accent has inspired.

For reference, here is a brief clip of Collins’ first appearance on the show.

Given the bad press, one might expect some serious mangling. But really, Collins’ accent isn’t that bad.  I suppose she sounds more generally Northern than specifically Manchester (for example, she uses a monophthongal “o” sound for words like “know” where Mancunians would probably use a diphthong.)  But at worst, she overdoes the accent more than she completely botches it.

So why all the hatchet jobs?  Well, Collins is a celebrity, and one whose fame came about from a specific role with a very specific accent (Cockney).  A similar situation might arise in America if, say, Fran Drescher starred in a TV show as a Tennessee housewife or (conversely) Jeff Foxworthy played a Brooklyn construction worker.  No matter how accurate the accent might be, the effect would be jarring.

Sometimes the problem extends to celebrities we associate with certain personas rather than accents.  On those grounds, I am one of those who half-defends Brad Pitt’s Belfast accent in The Devil’s Own.  Would I term it “good?”  Noooo.  But in the annals of bad accents in cinema, it doesn’t even belong in the top 20 for me.  In the mid-1990s, however, Pitt was seen as a kind of handsome, all-American Ken Doll, and it’s likely this perception tainted viewers expectations going in.

In a very weird way, such prejudices remind me of certain socio-phonetics studies about dialects and race (stay with me here).  Researchers have commonly found that when someone of a certain ethnic group speaks with an accent perceived as atypical of said ethnic group, the accent may be deemed wrong, unintelligible, or “fake.”*  Since we associate celebrities with very specific voices (and in the case of Collins, a specific accent**), there may be a similar phenomenon when famous faces are accompanied by unfamiliar speech patterns.

As someone who has been an actor himself, though, I admit some sensitivity to such criticisms.  At the very least, I have a problem with articles that deem an actor’s accent unworthy without giving any details as to what’s wrong with it. So if you have a problem with Collins’ Mancunian, here’s your chance to speak up.  What is specifically un-Manchester about the accent she uses?

*One example: a 1992 study paired the same recording of a General American accent with pictures of Caucasian and Asian faces. The researcher found that when the recording accompanied Asian faces, the study participants described the accent to be less comprehensible (Rubin, D. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33 (4), pp. 511-531.)

**Ironically, although Collins is from East London, her real accent is not particularly Cockney. This radio interview with the actress reveals an accent that lies closer to the Near-RP/Estuary border.  I’m not sure if she altered her accent later in life or if this is how she has always spoken.

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Posted in British English | Tagged | 21 Comments