“Princesses,” Reality TV and Disassociation

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Ben
tv

wikimedia

Much as I hate to admit it, I enjoy reality TV. (Although I can’t stomach the less savory Real Housewives offshoots). Many programs have a regional bent (“Divorcees of Des Moines!”), and I find them sociolinguistically fascinating for this reason. It’s not so much that these shows reveal a portrait of how people in certain regions speak, but rather, how people in those regions want to speak.

Take, for instance, Bravo’s recent Princesses: Long Island, a tawdry reality soap about 20-somethings in Nassau County, New York. You might expect exaggerated “cawfee tawk” type accents from the cast, but most of the young women seem to actively avoid stereotypical Long-Islandisms.

This was obvious during a scene in which a young woman bickers with her dad. Her father, with a strong New York accent, pronounces the word ball in classic Brooklyn fashion: bʊəɬ. When his daughter responds, however, she pronounces ball more along the lines of General American English: bɒɬ. A generational divide encapsulated by one word.

These young women seem to disassociate themselves strongly from New York English: Not only do most of them have strongly rhotic accents, but they also have a “hard” retroflex /r/ at the ends of words like car and pork. Nobody says Long Island as if it were “Long Goy Land;” in fact, words like “kite” seem to usually have the (again) more General American aɪ. The tense-lax split between words like “can” (of soup) and “can” (you do me a favor) is infrequent. The open “ay” (æɪ) which makes words like “day” sound like “die” (to other Americans) is often eschewed for the tighter diphthong eɪ.

Obviously, many younger New Yorkers have consciously or unconsciously moved away from the broad accents of lore. But what I wonder here is how much of this modification is a generational thing, and how much of it is due to the cameras. I noticed a telling moment in which one of the “Princesses” is spending time with her family, and we briefly hear her younger (maybe 12-year-old?) brother speak. He noticeably sports a stronger dialect, which suggests there may be some self-conscious modification going on for the benefit of America’s television viewers.

Nobody wants to seem like a stereotype, even when they bring cameras into their personal lives. So how much is affectation for the camera, and how much represents actual generational shifts?

*”Princesses” is likely a reference to “JAP,” a common Long Island acronym referring to “Jewish American Princesses.”

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Light Posting

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Ben

Hi, All!

I’ve been extremely swamped with work and a few other obligations recently, so posting has been pretty light around these parts. Although many blogs I admire post big, juicy posts every couple weeks, I find shorter pieces to be my strong suit. Hence, it’s my policy to give a heads up if I hit the ten-day mark.

I’ll most likely have my next post up by this weekend. As always, feel free to comment on anything I’ve written here recently or visit any of the excellent sites listed in my blogroll.

(As usual with “meta-posts,” I’ve disabled comments)

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The Language of “The Troubles”

Posted on July 21, 2013 by Ben
Derry Road Sign

SeanMack / Wikimedia / CC BY 3.0

When people discuss “accent discrimination,” they usually refer to everyday injustices: being passed up for promotions, denied loans, or scolded in school. Contemporary history, however, suggests more severe examples.

In the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, for instance, Graham Norton describes fraught childhood visits to his grandmother’s Belfast home:

I remember once my father got lost [in the Sandy Road area] and we were walking around, and I’d be gabbling on and my father was like, “shut up! Shut up!” Because if anyone heard our voices, you know, we spoke with a southern accent, it would have been trouble.

Of course, this shouldn’t suggest that Republican neighborhoods would have been more generous to, say, someone speaking Received Pronunciation than a Loyalist enclave would have been toward Dublinese. Furthermore, Norton quickly points out how remarkably things have changed since then. But the anecdote reminds us of how easily language becomes a touchstone in ethnic and political conflict.

Language, of course, often symbolizes sectarian strife. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian can intuitively be described as dialects of Serbo-Croatian, yet they’re treated as separate tongues largely due to the Balkans’ violent history. Language likewise demarcates schisms and separatist movements in Cyprus, Quebec, and Spain. So how did linguistic variation typify one of the most prominent sectarian conflict in the English speaking world?

I’ll get the most well-known differences out of the way. Whether one described the region as “Northern Ireland” or “The North of Ireland” separated those who aligned themselves with a unified Ireland and those who didn’t. (One might think “Northern Ireland,” which eschews “of’s” extra syntactic level, would be the more “inclusive” term, but “North of” is the preferred Republican phrase.) Along the same lines, one either speaks of Derry or Londonderry, depending on one’s viewpoint. (Although I’ve personally found the situation more complicated when I’ve spoken to people from that city.)

More prosaically, the letter /h/, either termed “haitch” or “aitch,” ostensibly serves as a border between Protestants (aitchers) and Catholics (haitchers). Well, maybe. Wikipedia articles, lexicographers and online forums have repeated this assertion for years, yet I know few substantive studies on the matter. If true, though, these pronunciations may align less with a sense of national identity than they once did: “haitch” has, according to some, become significantly more “British” in the past few decades.

These quirks are so repeated that they’ve taken on a mythological quality. But do the two factions speak differently? Do they have different dialects? I see no easy answer. To my American ears, the rather softened accents of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, Jr. sound closer to each other than either does to their working-class constituents. But Belfast is different; accents mix, level, and separate unpredictably in urban areas. Belfast, in particular, has so much accent variation that perhaps only locals can confidently pinpoint “Catholic” or “Protestant” speech qualities (if they exist).

Many (especially rural) areas have overwhelmingly Catholic or Protestant majorities, on the other hand, so one might logically find “Protestant” or “Catholic” dialects depending on where you’re listening. And in areas where Ulster Scots is spoken, that language no doubt creates a linguistic barrier. Furthermore, an article from 2008 suggested that in (London)Derry, Protestants are more likely to adopt new speech patterns coming from the region’s more Loyalist East.

However, Ireland as a whole exhibits complex webs of linguistic divisions: urban/suburban/rural, bilingual/monolingual, “local”/”non-local”, educated/uneducated, North/South, East/West. Religion may be a factor as well, but it’s no easy task untangling single threads in isolation.

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Regionally “Corrupted” Names

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Ben
Tobacco Farm near Clover, VA (Historic Am. Buildings Survey)

Tobacco Farm near Clover, VA (Historic Am. Buildings Survey)

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks details the real life of a poor woman from rural Virginia whose cancer cells became an important tool for medical innovation. The titular woman hailed from a tiny, impoverished Southern town, which prompts the author to explain the colorful name of Lacks’ father, Day:

[His] name was David Lacks, but everyone called him Day, because in the Lacks country drawl, house sounds like “hyse,” and David sounds like “Day.”

The Lacks were a poor African-American family from a remote corner of southern Virginia. Although I’m not certain, I believe “hyse” references the Canadian-raising-type pronunciation of that word common in older “Tidewater” accents. “Day” most likely arose due to the tendency in African-American English (probably shared by several other Southern drawls) to drop voiced fricatives (i.e. /v/ and /ð/) in between vowels. (This was also common in Shakespeare’s time, hence all the “o’ers” and “e’ens.”)

Spelling “corruptions” that become proper names don’t seem uncommon in the American South. I recall obituaries of the late actor Ossie Davis (a Georgia native) mentioning that his original name was “R.C.” The origin of “Ossie” is explained in the New York Times writeup:

He became Ossie when his mother told the courthouse clerk in Clinch River, Ga., who was filing his birth certificate that his name was “R. C. Davis.” The clerk thought she had said, “Ossie Davis,” and she was not about to argue with a white person.

In other words, his name became “Ossie” due to a miscommunication thanks to his mother’s drawl (which presumably would have rendered the name something like ɒ:si, or “aw-see”). It’s notable that, as was the case with David Lacks, the change was accepted as the name’s natural evolution.

The actress Ginnifer Goodwin, who hails from Memphis, also allegedly received her unique moniker from a feature of her (now softened) Tennessee twang. Because the vowels in “Jenn” and “Gin” are undistinguished in many Southern accents, her name is spelled with an “i” rather than an “e.”

I’ve found few such situations outside of the South, alas; we might otherwise expect to find New Yorkers named “Motha,” from “Martha”. As is the case with the rural Virginian described above, many people in Northern Ireland drop /ð/ (th) in between vowels, yet I’ve met no one from Belfast named, say, “Hare” (from “Heather”). Of course, two of the examples I use above hark to a time when parts of rural America had third-world characteristics, so education and literacy may inform such peculiar spellings.

Can anyone think of other names the spelling of which have been “corrupted” by regional accents?

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“Orphan Black’s” House of Dialect Mirrors

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Ben

I’ve recently been watching Orphan Black, BBC America’s sci-fi mystery about human clones. For reference, here is the guns-sex-and-intrigue-laden preview:

The show admittedly has its silly moments, but its lead actor makes up for these. Not only does one woman (Tatiana Maslany) play all the clones, but the clones themselves often play each other. We get to watch a Canadian actress (Maslany) play a British woman*, a “British” woman pretend to be Canadian, the same “British” woman play an entirely separate Canadian, a “Ukrainian” pretend to be Canadian, and a Canadian pretend to be British. Quite a tall order!

I especially love when “Sarah” (the British protagonist) pretends to be a Canadian clone, because Maslany deliberately chooses moments when Sarah slips up and misses North American speech nuances. For instance, she’ll “accidentally” distinguish the vowels in “cot” and “caught”, and will sometimes pronounce the vowel in “face” with a diphthong that’s slightly too open. It’s some of the most incisive vocal work I’ve seen from a TV actor.

Its this accent proficiency that makes the one moment I found Maslany’s dialect work unconvincing all the more fascinating. At one point, a North American clone named Allison must portray Sarah (the aforementioned British clone). Although Maslany makes the accent slightly “off,” I found Allison’s rendition of Sarah’s accent too deft for a dialect novice.

But I sympathize with Maslany. It’s hard to do an accent badly that you’ve spent countless hours mastering. For example, I once experimented by trying to speak British Received Pronunciation, with one difference: I pronounced the /r/ in words like “car” and “nurse.” Bizarrely, within seconds, I started unconsciously pronouncing /t/ with the Irish “slit t.” In other words, one altered phoneme made me slip into an entirely different accent (something like “genteel” Dublin English). My brain somehow unconsciously picked up on certain Irish “cues,” and shifted my entire phonological system in that direction.

So when I adopt an unfamiliar accent, I seem to adopt an entire package of phonological rules, rather than just changing a few pronunciations. In other words, it’s possible that when working within your own accent, it’s easier to switch out a phoneme or two. But when you’re working with imported “foreign” rules, it’s perhaps trickier to alter individual elements of that dialect.

I’ve said it before, but it’s for reasons like this that I would love for linguists to study actors. There aren’t many other professions in which people regularly overhaul their accents on purpose (except spies?). The fact that people can switch their phonological systems at will is, in itself, a pretty remarkable feature of the human mind.

*The main character, Sarah, is ostensibly from South London. She has spent most of her life in North America, however, so Maslany wisely adopts a conservatively modified Estuary accent. Hence, to her critics I would note that the accent she uses is almost certainly less muddled than it would be in real life.

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Dialectal “Bitch” (circa 1898)

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Ben
dog tea time

In Victorian uni slang, one word referred to both the above animal and caffeinated beverage.

I doubt one could pinpoint the moment English-speakers started using the derogatory sense of “bitch” (meaning, roughly, “ill-tempered woman”). Given our awful tendency toward misogynistic coinages, people probably called female humans “bitches” all of five minutes after they started using the word to reference female dogs. 

I’m being slightly facetious. But turning female animal words into pejorative slurs is an unfortunate universal throughout English’s history: just look at such contemptuous and/or overtly sexual reworkings as “sow,” “cow,” “dam” (quite the insult in Shakespeare), and “vixen.”

And yet “bitch” has often been used in curiously non-misogynistic ways. In my own lifetime, I’ve heard of “to bitch” (meaning to complain), “bitchin’” (surfer-ish term meaning “awesome”), and inanimate “bitch” (as in “up in this bitch,” meaning “in this club/bar etc.”).

Such creative disarmaments are nothing new. Note how varied the definitions were in Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary (published in 1898; format slightly altered for clarity):

BITCH, sb.1 Scottish, Northumberland, Yorkshire, Somerset. [bɪtʃ]

1. A term applied, with no disrespectful meaning, to a woman or female animal.
north Yorkshire: That lass ez a soci bitch. That od bitch, shəs oləs breckin thru t’hedge. (W.H.)

2. A term of contempt applied to a man.
Scotland: Ay, Davie, we’re a queer character, … a queer bitch after a’, STEVENSON Catriona (1892) xi. Somerset: I can tell you, landlord is a vast comical bitch, FIELDING, Tom Jones (1749) Bk. xvii. iii; Allworthy is a queer b___ch (Squire Western loq.) ib. Bk. vi, ii.3.

Compounds: (i) Bitch-daughter, nightmare; (2) bitch-fox, a vixen; (3) bitch-nail, a holding-down nail for tram-plates, &c., having the point faced in the same line as the head, as distinguished from the dog-nail or dog (q. v.); (4) bitch-and-pups, a mason’s hammer, having on chisel inserted at each end of its face.
(i) w. Yorkshire: We connate shoe’s ridden by the bitch-doughter, ii, 291. (a) w. Somerset: We always say dog-fox and bitch-fox.

BITCH, v and sb.2 Ireland, Northumberland, Cheshire, Nottingham. [bɪtʃ]

1. v. To spoil a piece of work.
Northumberland: Ye’ve bitched the hyel job. Cheshire: He was that stoopid he bitched the whole thing.

2. sb. Anything spoiled.
Northumberland: Ye’ve myed a bitch on’t.

BITCH, sb. University slang. [bɪtʃ]

1. sb. Tea.
Cambridge: Make me some bitch directly. (Footnote: ‘The word “tea” is never used at Cambridge. It is always called “bitch”.’), Confessions of a Cantab in Blackw. Mag. (1824) XVI. 575.

2. Compound: Bitch-party, tea-party.
Oxford: The studious freshman goeth to a small bitch-party, WHIBLEY Cap and Gown (1889) 176 (FARMER).

I can only imagine the absurdity of an effete young man asking his tea-time companion to “kindly pour us a spot of bitch.”

Joking aside, the first definition is particularly startling in that it implied “no disrespectful meaning.” Is it really possible that in certain rural English dialects a hundred years ago a man could call his wife a “bitch” the same way he might term her “kitten” or “pet?”

Now, obviously, some of the above terms are still derogatory in nature (I doubt Victorian Scotsmen took kindly to being called “bitch” in the local pub). But I can think of few other insults or curse words that have accrued so many diverse meanings. What is it about this particular slur that seems so especially versatile?

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Singapore English (Vs. “Singlish”)

Posted on June 23, 2013 by Ben

If I could nominate a “dialect of the 21st Century,” I would probably go with Singapore English, a native English dialect spectrum spoken in a region with few competitors (for nearly 1/3 of Singaporeans, English is the primary language spoken at home). This video, on a rather banal topic, incidentally provides a nice survey of different Singapore English speakers:

So what can we say here? For the most part, Singaporean accents seem non-rhotic, but this is not entirely consistent. Note, for example, that the announcer pronounces /r/ at the end of “more” at 2:07, but drops it in “important” a few seconds later. In this respect and several others, SE shares some similarities with Received Pronunciation or some type of international “Standard” English. It obviously differs in some ways, however: for instance, the diphthong in “goat” is fairly consistently pronounced as a monophthong.

As with London English, /l/ is sometimes vocalized at the end of syllables and ‘th’ occasionally becomes /f/. SE’s prosody has a vaguely Carribean flair, particularly in the way final, unstressed syllables get slightly more emphasis than many English speakers are used to. A few other surface-level resmemblances come to mind: Welsh, South African (particularly in the “pure” /i/ in words like ‘feet’), and sometimes Indian English (perhaps not coincidental since the country has drawn a large population from that sub-continent as well.

Given that Singapore is a small city-state, with many young people no doubt seeking education beyond its borders, it seems especially “vulnerable” to outside influences on its speech. For example, if you hear a hint of Australian English in the speech of pop star Dawn Wong (who speaks at 2:20), you probably aren’t imagining things; she was educated at the University of New South Wales.

It should be noted that much of the English heard in the above clip is not what is known as “Singlish” but rather a more “cultivated” dialect known as Standard Singapore English. Linguist Jakob Leimgruber notes the difference (emphasis mine):

In addition to Standard Singapore English (SSE), we have the vernacular, Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), often called ‘Singlish’ by speakers, government language planners, and, indeed, linguists. This is a variety of English that is very different from the standard, and the following sections set out to describe its pronunciation and grammar. Singlish co-exists with SSE in a relationship that has been termed ‘diglossia’ (Ferguson 1959, Richards 1983, Gupta 1989, 1994), which essentially means that SSE is restricted in use to situations that are characterised by a high level of formality, whereas Singlish is used in all other instances.

This statement doesn’t entirely gel with my (admittedly limited) experience with Singapore English. In the same YouTube Channel that produce the previous clip, for instance, one finds this interview with Singaporean rapper Shigga Shay:

It strikes me that this young man is speaking an informal variant of Standard English, rather than the more creole-like Singlish.  But the intricacies of Singaporeans’ relationship to English are rather new to me, and I’d love to hear from any Singaporeans willing to comment.

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Anglicized Spanish (British vs. American)

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Ben
Photo: Stan Shebs

Stan Shebs/Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

While watching an old episode of Absolutely Fabulous last night, I was struck by the way a British character pronounced the Spanish wine rioja. In Spanish orthography, the j represents a velar fricative (the guttural consonant in Scottish ‘Loch‘). The character on Ab Fab, however, pronounced the word as if it had a /k/: riˈɒkə (ree-OCK-uh).

Americans invariably Anglicize this sound as /h/. The inconsistency exemplifies English speakers’ confusion over whether /x/ (the velar fricative) is more properly closer to /k/ or /h/ (we pronounce “loch” with the former but “Hanukkah” with the latter). It’s likewise possible that the /k/ in “rioja” approximates Spanish dialect(s) nearer to the UK: /x/ (the velar fricative) is somewhat more common in Spain, while Caribbean Spanish-speaking countries tend more toward /h/.*

But riˈɒkə also suggests that the way that Britons Anglicize Spanish differs from the way Americans do. I’ve been similarly startled by British chefs pronouncing “paella” with a very English /l/ (paɪɛlə), and Gordon Ramsey’s pronunciation of “cojones” (“bollocks”) as if it nearly rhymed with “honest.” We’re not as accustomed to such broad Anglicizations of Spanish here in the States (unless we’re talking about place names like “Amarillo“).

Of course, Americans have no qualms about stripping foreign words of their phonetic origins (just listen to a local New Orleanian describing French-named suburbs). But we seem to make an exception for Spanish, America’s more or less de facto second language. On this side of the Atlantic, we pronounce “paella” with a /j/, use the vowel in “goat” for the second syllable of “cojones,” and pronounce “rioja” as if it rhymed with “aloha.”

A decade ago, I wondered if British Anglicization of Spanish language might not evolve due to many Britons emigrating to the Iberian’s sunnier climes. One of the interesting side-effects of such a cultural shift might be evident from my side-note about “rioja:” were Spanish to became a commonly spoken language in the UK, you would end up with a situation in which Britain and the US would be separated by two common languages, since each country would likely adopt a “standard” dialect typical of the nearest native-speaking country (Spain vs. Latin America).

Alas, this seems increasingly unlikely given Spain’s beggared economy. Still, with the British-born population of Spain in the hundreds of thousands, it will be intriguing to see if the language develops a stronger presence in the British consciousness.

*The /x/ vs. /h/ thing is fairly complex in the Spanish speaking world, though: Mexico, for instance, is split between the two.

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“You’re Causing a Row”

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Ben

[Update: I have added a few additional comments about “causing a row” at the end of this post]

While watching Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby the other day, I was struck by the climactic scene in which Tom Buchanan barks, “What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?” The uninitiated might assume this to be the result of Australian screenwriters “slipping up” and using the rather un-American-sounding “row” to mean “argument.”

Being a Gatsby afficianado, however, I immediately recognized this line as being lifted from the novel. Furthermore, a quick Google Books search reveals many examples of “row” being used this way in older American literature. So when did “row” become something that Americans don’t say? 

I’ve known that “row” can be used to mean “argument” since an early age, but probably only learned this word through literature, having only realized that this type of “row” rhymed with “cow” (i.e. ɹaʊ) as an adolescent. I can’t say I’ve encountered many Americans seriously using the term in spoken conversation since then.

So what happened? Upon putting “causing a row” into Google NGram Viewer along with similar terms like “causing an argument,” “causing a scene,” “causing a fight,” and “causing a disagreement,” an unexpected pattern emerged:

NGram

Startlingly, most such phrases stayed at roughly the same degree of frequency throughout the 20th Century, with the notable exception of “causing a scene,” which took off after the 1950s. This proves nothing, of course, especially given NGram Viewer’s many caveats. But it would be worthwhile to investigate the hypothesis that “scene” possibly replaced “row” in American English.

On the other hand, “scene” has a somewhat different meaning from “row.” One can “create a scene” entirely on their own (e.g. a child throwing a tantrum) while a “row” ostensibly requires at least two to tango. If two people are screaming at each other, we can say that they are “making a scene,” but we can’t really suggest they’re “having a scene.”

An alternative proposal, then, might be that “scene” exemplifies a particular class of words meaning “argument” that overtook “row.” Either way, you don’t hear many Americans “creating rows” these days.

Update: As a few commenters have rightly pointed out, “causing a row” is an unusual phrase. I plugged it into Google NGram Viewer because it is a rare construction when one is discussing the other meaning of “row” (i.e. a line of things). Using NGram’s Part-of-Speech Tagging function would not help disambiguate the two, because a “row” is a noun in both cases, and constructions like “[verb] + a row” would also make sense in both.

I had the same problem with the more commonly-used phrase “having a row.” Compare its first five (unique) Google Books results …

“…the combination with a depositing device having a row of nozzles…”
“…an intermediate section having a row of transverse slots…”
“…comprising a bar having a row of openings…”
“…composed of an upper section having a row of ducts…”
“…’We’re having a row.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘We’re having a row, an ordinary row,…”

…to the first five unique “causing a row” results…

“…You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-controll…”
“…but also of having actually been guilty of causing a row…”
“…Ain’t nothing you could say about it without causing a row about it…”
“…and in causing a row-galley to ply on the Ohio…”
“…flew into a temper with the sweep, causing a row on the front door-steps…”

“Causing a row” is used much more exclusively to mean “causing a spat” (although obviously not in that last example). All that being said, you’ll note another notable pattern when we compare “having a row” with “having an argument:”

having a row

Another contender, then, for what may have replaced “row” is simply “argument.” The word’s narrow sense meaning “quarrel” has been around since at least the early 1800s, but it seems to have increased in frequency thoughout the 20th Century. (As opposed to the logical, rhetorical, legal or linguistic senses of “argument”).

Of course, it’s still unclear why Brits have maintained “row” while Americans have largely eschewed it; to my knowledge, an Englishman can speak of “having an argument” just as an American can. And like “scene,” “argument” and “row” do not have the same meaning. An “argument” can be quite friendly, whereas a “row” is unmistakably a fight.

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“Fourth Person:” You, One, Y’All

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Ben

In most English speaker’s everyday language, “you” can represent an indefinite referent. That is, when I say “you never can tell” I don’t mean that you, the specific person I’m talking to, never can tell, but rather that “somebody never can tell.” In written language, however, “one” is common in such situations; I pepper my writing with “one is struck by …” or “one cannot deduce …” I might also utter such phrases if I were speaking in a very formal, scripted situation, such as while delivering a lecture.

Using this type of “one” in spoken conversation, however, probably sounds vaguely “British” to many Americans. Maybe that’s unfair. (Although I delight at the notion of a stuffy genre of British sarcasm which depends upon the interchangeability of “one” and “you,” as in “one really must learn to be more polite, mustn’t one?”) Seriously, though, it would be interesting to see a comparison of the two Englishes in this regard.

But even in Britain, I’d guess that this type of “one” feels formal and old-fashioned in everyday conversation. It is striking, then, that we haven’t come up with a suitable alternative to “you,” since that word introduces a precarious element of ambiguity. “You’re always such a jerk after a bad night’s sleep” is perfectly polite if you mean “poor sleep patterns lead to grumpiness.” But this can easily be misinterpreted.

So back to the topic at hand: As with many pronominal gaps, one would expect (there it is!) certain dialects to fill it in. And yet I’ve found few varieties of English which do this. Linguist Tom Roeper makes an interesting, if passing, suggestion that y’all in some Southern dialects is used to disambiguate between the two types of second-person pronouns. Hence for such speakers, “y’all can’t do it” would mean “you (the person I’m talking to) can’t do it” while “you can’t do it” would mean “one can’t do it.” However, I haven’t found any corroborating evidence of this.

Can anything think of a variety of English that fills this gap?

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