“Ayuh”: America’s Oddest “Yes”

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Ben
Bar Harbor

Bar Harbor, Maine, ca. 1912

Growing up in Southern New England, I heard tell of a near-mythical dialect feature from Maine and other places further north: ayuh.

This word is the informal version of “yes” in Maine, and, unusually for semi-archaic dialect words, it has more of a standardized spelling than it does a pronunciation. I’ve usually heard it as eh-YUH (IPA eɪˈjʌ), but there’s also a pronunciation that puts more weight on the first syllable (EY-yuh), as well as EE-yuh or eye-yuh.

It probably goes without mentioning that Ayuh is rapidly disappearing. The word is mostly associated with the old-fashioned Down East Accent, an accent heard in Eastern Maine that, while still in existence, is pretty scarce among people under-40. While I’ve known countless New Englanders in my lifetime, I’ve never heard one utter “Ayuh.”

What I find unique and intriguing about ayuh is that it looks like the only real American relative of the aye heard in various parts of the British Isles. Most of America uses yeah, yup, yep or the African American-derived uh huh. But only in remote parts of New England does it seem a relative of aye is used.

Of course, I’d like to get out of the realm of “it appears to,” so I decided to look for some evidence of ayuh‘s etymology. Of which there is very, very … little.

In fact after going through twenty pages of Google Books results, I could only find one source remotely resembling a linguistics text that so much as mentions ayuh. That would be the awkwardly titled Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms by Robert Hendrickson. Quoth Mr. Hendrickson (emphasis his):

Chiefly heard in Maine, ayuh is found throughout New England … A touch stone of New England speech, it possibly derives from the nautical aye (yes), which in turn probably comes from the early English yie (yes). Another theory has ayuh coming from the old Scots-American aye-yes meaning the same.

Now, right off the bat, I am skeptical of a book which classifies aye as a “nautical” word. Isn’t the fact that the word is widespread across large tracts of the UK and Ireland more important to mention? However, I might be willing to buy the Scottish explanation for a few reasons:

1.) Maine was one of the areas where the Scots-Irish initially settled. In fact, you can see in this map that a large percentage of people of Scots-Irish descent is found in precisely the area where the “Down East” accent is heard.

2.) In most varieties of ayuh the “ay” rhymes with “day.” This more closely resembles the modern Scottish pronunciation of Aye than in other areas where Aye is heard.

3.) The aye yes that Hendrickson mentions appear to be a feature of some Scottish English dialects to this day. Although be aware that I am deducing this from some very circumstancial evidence (such as this message board). So take this last bit with a huge grain of salt.

To be clear, I’m not 100% sure this is the only aye variant in America. Can anyone think of another? Or any type of aye outside the British Isles?

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged , | 40 Comments

Swallowed ‘r’ in Glasgow

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Ben

I have a very quick request, for you budding amateur phoneticians out there.

After yesterday’s conversation touched on Glasgow English, I looked for a few samples of this accent on YouTube. Glasgow is perhaps the only city in the English-speaking world whose accent I haven’t researched at least a little bit, so I was curious to see what makes it unique.

I found a rather interesting sample in this young man discussing crime in Glasgow:

There’s something unusual that happens with this speaker when ‘r’ occurs after a vowel (in words like “car,” “father,” etc). At first listen, the accent sounds non-rhotic (the r is dropped). But listening closer, I think ‘r’ in this position is “swallowed” in some way.  And this only seems to occur after vowels.

Anybody have any thoughts as to what’s going on here? Or know of some relevant research?

Share

Posted in British English | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Dem and Dose: “Th” in City Accents

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Ben
The Strand, London

The Strand, London, in the 19th Century

I’ve lived in New York City for thirteen years.  In that time, I’ve learned that living in such an intense urban area has a palpable effect on how one communicates.  You have to talk faster, talk louder, talk more frequently, and communicate with a incredible variety of humankind.

It would be natural to assume, therefore, that certain features are common to all urban accents and dialects.  Now I personally think that’s a bit of a leap (I don’t see a lot of overlap between the Big Apple and Toronto).  However, there is one sound in the English language that, in city after city, seems to undergo some kind of noticeable change:  the th sound in words like mouth and this.

In Standard English, th is pronounced as a voiceless or voiced dental fricative (IPA θ or ð), meaning it is made with the tip of the tongue touching the top row of teeth.  But in many cities, typically very large ones, there is a noticeable tendency for this sound to go a bit off the rails:

–In the accents of New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia, among many other American cities, this becomes a dentalized ‘d‘ or ‘t‘ sound.  Hence the famous (albeit inaccurate) caricature of New Yorker’s pronouncing 33rd Street as ‘toydy toyd shtreet.’

–In London, voiced th often becomes ‘d‘ at the beginning of a word: this becomes ‘dis.’  Meanwhile voiceless th becomes ‘f;’ mouth therefore is pronounced ‘mouf.’

–In Dublin, th simply becomes plain old ‘t‘ and ‘d:’ ‘ting,’ ‘dis,’ etc.*

Obviously, not all cities have this funny business with th.  But there are enough instances of this happening that I see a slight correlation between urban areas and accents with non-standard th pronunciations.

What accounts for this?  The most obvious explanation is that all of these cities have been subject to quite a bit of immigration.  Since standard English th (θ or ð) exists in few languages, many people who speak English as a second language use alternate pronunciations.  And this may have filtered down into the speech of native English speakers.

An even simpler explanation may be at play, though: th is frankly a cumbersome sound.  I’ve been speaking English for my entire life, and I still occasionally stumble over this consonant.  There is a reason young children have no problem pronouncing ‘m‘ in mama, but tend to say ‘mouf’ when they mean mouth. Linguists will send me hate mail for saying this, but I find something inherently unnatural and awkward about English th.

Now introduce this phoneme to a fast-paced urban environment, where you need to get a lot of information across quickly, and it’s not surprising that many ‘city accents’ skew this fricative a bit.

Since this sound can be easily replaced in many accents of English, then, I wonder what the future is for English th.  As we can see with the urban dialects above, other pronunciations can easily compete with (and beat) little old th. Will this sound survive another hundred years?  Or will non-standard pronunciations make it one more victim of English’s millenia-long process of simplification?

*This is different from the dentalized t and d that you hear for ‘th’ in other Irish accents.  In local Dublin speech, ‘math’ and ‘mat’ are pronounced almost identically.

Share

Posted in English Phonetics | Tagged , , , | 52 Comments

Supraregional Irish English

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Ben
Dublin under construction

Dublin under construction during the economic boom (Wikimedia)

I spent Friday night at a gala for the organization my girlfriend works for, a community center created for (and largely run by) Irish immigrants.  As always, it was an accent tour of the Emerald Isle, as folks from Dublin, Belfast, Galway, Donegal and countless other regions gathered under one roof.

At one point of the evening I struck up a conversation with a young woman from Cork, a part of the country noted for its unusual accent.  This woman, however, had nothing resembling this dialect.  Rather, she spoke with what linguist Raymond Hickey terms Supraregional Irish English.  It’s definitely an Irish brogue, but greatly softens the more pronounced regionalisms.

You can hear something of this dialect in this video, in the interviews with RTE personalities Grainne Seoige and Ryan Tubridy (he starts speaking at 1:10):

You can also find quite a few samples of this accent in this trailer for the Irish romantic comedy, Speed Dating (particularly listen to the speech of the young protagonist):

Another prominent “SIE” speaker, I would argue, is actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (also from Cork):

All these people are clearly Irish, of course.  And yet there are some things are a bit different.  The “ar” in start isn’t as fronted or raised as in more pronounced accents (in working-class Dublin accents, star sounds very much like “stair”).  The dipthongs in kite and mouth are much closer to how they are pronounced in standard British or American accents.  And there is no hint of the “Irish r” you find in stronger accents (IPA ɾʷ).

This “neutral accent” seems to be a younger phenomenon.  As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve heard a number of older people who have been surprised, aghast even, at how quickly SIE has replaced local dialects among people under 40.  As such, it’s natural to wonder how much the Celtic Tiger, Ireland’s massive economic expansion in the 90s and 00s has played a part in this.

As the world now surveys the damage that Ireland’s economic exuberance wreaked upon the country, I can’t help but wonder how much this damage extended to Ireland’s linguistic diversity.  Was the island where “each village has its own voice” homogenized by the era of cell phones and Galway summer homes?

Share

Posted in Irish English | Tagged | 18 Comments

Mom, Mum, Mam: Different words?

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Ben
Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

I’m reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women right now. Throughout the book, the March sisters refer to their mother as “marmee.” This looks like an odd term of endearment until you remember that Alcott grew up (and set her book in) Eastern Massachusetts. Given that her accent was probably non-rhotic (i.e. she dropped her r’s), “marmee” is essentially a different way of writing modern-day mommy.

This got me thinking. We have several informal words for “mother” in English: mum (heard in much of England), mom (heard in much of America), and mam (heard in Ireland and Northern England). But are these actually different words, or are they just, in some sense, the same word?

Although “mum,” “mam,” and “mom” read differently, they’re often pronounced in a very similar way. Here’s a comparison of three different dialects, and their “mom” pronunciations (don’t worry if you aren’t proficient in IPA — I’ll explain after):

London: “mum” — [mɐm]
General American: “mom” — [mɑm]
Manchester, UK: “mam” — [mam]

Whether you understand the IPA symbols above or not, the point is that in these three dialects, the words are quite close in pronunciation. To be fair, there are some regions where this is not the case. In the Western US, for example, mom is often more clearly “mawm.” Still, is it possible that mom and mum and mam began as different spellings rather than different words?

I suspect this may be the case because written usage of them seems fairly recent. Mom and mum appear to only date back to the 19th Century in written form. I’m curious if perhaps mam is the earliest of these, and mom and mum were just different ways of rendering this.

But that’s all I can say for now. I’ve been able to find little information as to whether these words have some common derivation. Google searches of “mom vs. mum” or “mom mum mam” don’t yield anything substantial. I haven’t found much info about their etymologies either. Any thoughts?

Share

Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged | 69 Comments

“Rod” or “Ride?” Glide Deletion in the American South

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Ben
The American South

Wikimedia

When my mother was a teenager, she spent a summer in Scotland. Since she was staying as a guest in a family’s home, she shared a telephone with the other residents. In jest, a Scottish friend of hers often answered the phone and, imitating my mother’s accent, said“Hah! This is Nancy!“

The “hah” in that exclamation is not a laugh, but rather the word “Hi!” rendered in American Southern English. My mother is from Kentucky, you see. Kentucky, like much of American South, is glide deletion country.*

If you’re confused as to what I mean by glide deletion, here are several videos of speakers from the American South. You only need to watch about a minute or so of each. The important thing is to listen to words like time, ride and kite.

An interview with country music star Charlie Daniels (interview begins :22).

This inaugural speech from Alabama Governor Robert Bentley.

A speech from late historian Shelby Foote.

As you can see, time, ride and kite tend to sound like “tahm,” “rahd” and “kaht” (IPA ta:m, ra:d, ka:t). This vowel sound, which is more typically a diphthong in other dialects (a combination of two vowels) is instead a monophthong (one vowel).

In the United States, this feature mostly occurs in the South.  However, it strays a bit further to the north or the west in some cases, and can be heard in pockets of (from West to East) Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Colorado, Southern Kansas, Oklahoma, Southern Missouri, Southern Illinois, and western Maryland.

I recently got into a conversation with commenter ‘enry ‘iggins about where some of the features of American Southern English may have come from. We briefly touched on the topic of glide deletion and what its origins may be. I see there being three possible explanations for how “glide deletion” arose:

1.) It came from Northern England. My history is a bit shaky, but I’ve read that there was a decent amount of immigration to the South from this region of England in the colonial era. Northern England, to this day, features glide deletion as a feature in many dialects (although it’s less pronounced in some areas).

2.) The Scots-Irish. This was probably the most important group to immigrate to the south. They were, generally speaking, Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland. Notably, there is a similar tendency to lengthen the diphthong in words like “ride” in some modern Northern Irish Accents that is slightly reminiscent of the US Southern pronunciation.

3.) The Southern Vowel Shift. It’s also possible that glide deletion is the product of something called the Southern Vowel Shift (You can find details about what this means here). Basically, most of the vowels in Southern English seem to have shifted into different positions than most American accents, and this may have indirectly forced the “ride” diphthong to become a monopthong (I’m not clear on the details of how).

Or it may be a bit of all three explanations. These different factors may have reinforced each other in some way and led to the current pronunciation of ride as “rahd.” Since we don’t have recordings of Scots-Irish farmers from the 17th-Century, however, we’ll never know for sure.

What I wonder is why this feature is so widespread in the American South. Outside of a few areas with a lot of Northern transplants (Florida, Atlanta, the major Texas cities), glide deletion is virtually everywhere South of the Mason-Dixon line. Yet it’s fairly rare elsewhere, outside of pockets of Northern England and in South African Accents. Why does this one accent feature seem to be concentrated so heavily in one large region?

*My mother has lived in New England for nearly thiry years at this point, so she really doesn’t have this feature anymore.

 

 

 

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged , | 23 Comments

“Dude:” Thoughts on an American Word

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Ben
Surfer

Photographer: Mila Zinkova

I am skeptical about claims that American English is “colonizing” the other Englishes. But I will concede one point: the word dude is entirely our doing.

Dude, in America, is a word that lies somewhere between British mate and bloke. Like mate, it can be used in a vaguely affectionate second-person: “Don’t worry about it, dude.” And as in bloke, it can be used in descriptive third-person sentences: “That dude is stressed out.”

In America, when we think of dude we tend to associate it with the dialects of California. In particular, the word seems ubiquitous in several sub-cultures: the California drug culture (“Far out, dude.”), the California surfer culture (“That was a gnarly wave, dude!”), and the crunchy/environmentalist set (“The earth is a living thing, dude.”).  All stereotypes, but with a certain amount of truth to them.

Nowadays, of course, dude is heard throughout America. And I’ve heard enough younger Brits, Canadians and Australians use it that I’m guessing it is starting to plant itself elsewhere.

Like a lot of words in American English dialects, though, dude apparently derives from African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the dialect spoken by African Americans throughout the United States. As per the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary:

dude: 1883, “fastidious man,” New York City slang of unknown origin. The vogue word of 1883, originally used in reference to the devotees of the “aesthetic” craze, later applied to city slickers, especially Easterners vacationing in the West (dude ranch first recorded 1921). Application to any male is recorded by 1966, U.S., originally in Black English.

It seems, then, that dude entered the lexicon of Black English sometime in the early-to-mid 20th Century, where it morphed into a general term for “man.” Then, like many African American terms, it slowly filtered into the broader spectrum of American English dialects.

Here is what’s interesting, though. Dude is currently used in both African American Vernacular English and “white” dialects like General American. But it’s used somewhat differently in these two contexts.

Among AAVE speakers, I have noticed that “dude” is used far more commonly in the third person. For example, an AAVE speaker might say:

“What’s wrong with that dude?”

But the sentence …

“What’s wrong with you, dude?”

… doesn’t sound right in AAVE. In California or other kinds of Englishes, on the other hand, this question would sound perfectly normal.  This is my own perception, of course, but I’ve noticed that African Americans (who speak AAVE) rarely refer to the people they are directly speaking to as “dude.”

Of course, AAVE has long been known to “disassociate” itself from certain words when they enter “white” English. Terms like hip, jive, and cat (referring to “man”) are all African Americanisms that were completely rejected by the AAVE-speaking community after they found popularity in other American Englishes.  So it appears that the “affectionate” usage of dude may have gone the same route.

Opening this discussion up to the floor, I’m curious if anybody can give me more info about the spread of dude to international dialects. When a Brit or Australian or Irishmen uses dude while talking to an American, is that because the word has actually spread to those countries? Or are these people just trying to “fit in?”

Share

Posted in American English | Tagged , | 32 Comments

Singing in Dialect

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Ben

I was taught early on that listening to singers is a terrible way of getting a sense of their particular accent. This makes sense to some degree, since singing will distorts important distinctions such as vowel length and prosody. But I’ve encountered a few recordings over the years of people singing in pitch-perfect local dialects. Here are a few of them.

Damien Dempsey sings in his own working-class Dublin brogue (a choice that was, from what I’ve been told, a bit controversial). Here is a good clip:

Most Scottish singers blunt the edges of their accents, but not the Proclaimers, who famously maintain the burr:

Despite Northern England producing the greatest rock bands in human history (The Beatles, The Smiths, and Joy Division, to name three colossi), the actual accents of the region don’t get much airplay. Not until Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys came along, that is:

Or, if you want a true-blue Cockney accent that isn’t being screamed by a late-70s punk rocker, there is this bizarre novelty song from the 1950s performed by Stepney’s own Bernard Bresslaw:

But wait, you may be asking? Where are the North American accents?

Well, over here in the New World, we have a long history of “dialect singing” in music. Country music, the blues, hip-hop, and reggae are all genres that are inextricably bound to the accents and dialects in which they were originally performed. As such, it’s a little hard to separate authentic accents from convention, even when these genres are performed by artists with the accent in question.

For you see, we live in a peculiar world, one where a young man from Caboolture, Australia sings as if he grew up in Tennessee:

Share

Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Is the glottal stop bad for you?

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Ben
The Glottis

The larynx, with the glottis labelled (NCI)

You may not know what a glottal stop is, but you’ve probably heard one.

Already baffled? Let me explain. Ever talk to someone from London who pronounced butter something like “bu’uh?” With the t becoming a kind of “grunt?” The t sound for said Londoner was a glottal stop, a sound created by closing the glottis (a small opening in the larynx), then releasing it in a burst of air. This glottal t can be found in Cockney and many other UK accents such as those in Scotland, Manchester, and Bristol.

For a good example of this sound, take a look at the interview below, between Craig Ferguson (Scottish), and Russell Brand (from London).  Between the two of them, there’s a slew of glottal t‘s.

Or, really, you can search for any well known Cockney in YouTube and find many more.

Glottal stopping has even made inroads into America as well. In Central Connecticut, glottal t has become quite common. It seems to be spreading rapidly among younger people in that area. African American Vernacular English also features the glottal stop, albeit in a different set of environments.  So it’s a very common sound in various English accents.

In drama school, however, I was told that glottal stopping was bad bad bad. My voice and speech teacher warned of the dangers of glottal stopping. “It can shred your voice,” he said. “It’s the worst thing you can do to your vocal cords.” In fact, he rarely referred to it as a glottal stop, but rather applied the scarier-sounding term, Glottal Attack. Yikes!

And my voice and teach professor wasn’t alone among those in the voice and speech training community. Here is what renowned vocal coach Patsy Rodenburg has to say about the matter in her The Actor Speaks (emphasis mine):

A compromise is necessary if the accent has qualities in it that can damage the voice …  certain constrictions naturally present in some accents, could produce vocal abuse; glottal attack, for instance. You could speculate that native speakers of these accents have adapted sufficiently not to suffer this abuse.

Now I quite like Rodenburg, who I think is a brilliant teacher, but something is off about this statement. What is it about a glottal stop that is so “abusive?” And, frankly, begginning a sentence with “You could speculate…” is begging for some serious skepticism.

I think Rodenburg is trying to avoid an obvious objection, which is, if glottal stop is so bad for your voice, then how come so many languages and dialects have the glottal stop? The sound is constantly used in Arabic, yet you don’t hear of mass laryngitis sweeping across the Middle East. You don’t hear of a terrifying epidemic of hoarseness descending upon East London. What gives?

And this is where, methinks, the legacy of class rears its ugly head. Glottal stopping is associated with accents–Cockney, African American Vernacular English, the Bronx–that are stigmatized. I have no doubt that generations of diction coaches and voice professionals were taught that the sound was “ugly” for this very reason. And while few will admit as such, you can still find people, such as prescriptivist language blogger Benjamin Chew, who will openly state the thinking behind this:

If one wishes to be a speaker of elegant English, then one has to avoid glottal stops. The so-called language professionals may disagree and start waxing eloquent about linguistic diversity. I am all for healthy diversity, NOT unhealthy ones, not one that allows incorrect and poor English to run rampant.

One can almost smell the whiff of Twinings wafting from the Edwardian drawing room, can’t one?

But enough of this tangent. What I want to know is if there is any actual, scientific evidence that the glottal stop is bad for your voice. I won’t totally discount this theory, but I can’t help but feel like the evidence suggests the contrary. Does the glottal stop actually harm the voice? Or is this just a linguistic urban legend?

Share

Posted in English Phonetics | Tagged , , , , | 47 Comments

Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Ben
Guy Deutscher

Guy Deutscher (Wikimedia)

I had a whole post written today about a recent statement made by American actor David Hasselhoff (don’t ask), but it got very muddled, so I decided to scrap it.  In the meantime, I’d like to recommend a book I’m reading, Through the Language Glass, by Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher. The book deals with the impact of culture on language and vice versa.

The first half looks at the way different languages describe color. The important point? Aboriginal cultures have significantly fewer words for colors than modern Indo-European languages do. Many indigenous cultures, for example, have no word for blue.

In the Victorian era, of course, scientists concluded there was a biological deficiency among “primitives” that impacted their ability to identify different hues. It was the Victorian era, after all. It seemed impossible that a language could have fewer words for color than English.  In reality, this discrepancy is merely a product of some cultures valuing color discernment more than others.

I mention this because it has made me consider my own latent prejudices when it comes to accents. Or rather, people’s perception of accents. It seem inconceivable to me that someone could not identify the difference between a Dublin accent and a Belfast one, or understand how a rhotic accent is different from one that’s non-rhotic.*  But such people exist, and it certainly is no reflection of their intelligence. And it may be more a matter of not having the right labels than not being able to “hear” different accents.

Anyway, I may have more to say about this book in relation to accents and dialects when I’m done.   Until then, I recommend picking up a copy.  It’s a good, entertaining read.

*Ed. note:  Just to be clear, I’m implying my own ignorance here, not that of people who aren’t as preoccupied with accents as I am!

Share

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments