“Interstate Farty-Far” (St. Louis English)

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Ben
St. Louis

wikimedia

It’s easy to prematurely assume that certain rare American dialect features have become extinct. Such is the case with St. Louis‘ “Interstate Farty-Far” quirk, whereby words like “for” and “born ” are pronounced more or less as “far” and “barn” would be in most other American accents.

This indicates that St. Louis has preserved the historical split between the vowel in “force” and the vowel in “north.” I suspect that most Americans make limited distinction between the two by this point, but St. Louis seems to be a hold out.  Why St. Louis specifically does (or did) this, I have no idea. Nor do I understand why the vowel for “north” words is unrounded ɑ; for other accents that preserve the distinction, the difference tends to be between more open and more closed rounded vowels such as ɔ and o.

It should be noted that the city is a typical example of what might be called an “urban dialect microclimate.” Just as cities often have weather patterns strikingly different than the surrounding countryside, so too their accents can sometimes be strikingly discontiguous. St. Louis is located in the American Midland, meaning that its local accent should predicably be similar to the surrounding area, in between an Ozark Twang and the General American-ish accent of Nebraska.

Instead, St. Louis has an accent somewhat closer to cities like Chicago or Cleveland, probably owing to shared migration patterns. However, as other Great Lakes cities don’t have the “Farty-Far” feature (at least not to my knowledge), it’s unclear why it’s prevalent in this particular location.

(By the way, those with some knowledge of English Lexical Sets will note that “Interstate Farty Far” is likely not a real pronunciation; “four” is part of the “force” set, not the “north” set. This is perhaps an exaggeration similar to “New Joysey” or “N’Awlins,” although I cannot say for sure.)

Like many regional shibboleths, I long suspected that this one receded after World War II, perhaps still preserved by some elderly speakers. But I have heard at least one post-war-born St. Louisian use such pronunciations: Phyllis Smith, from the American version of The Office. (Although I find that this feature is less present in interviews, so it’s possible she plays it up somewhat for her character on the show.)

But I’ve never heard a St. Louis native born after 1970 use this term. So as entertaining a piece of local color as it is, “Interstate Farty-Far” probably doesn’t have much of a future.

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What Rhymes Tell Us About Changing English

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Ben
Sonnet

Shakespeare’s 1st Sonnet

One of the incidental pleasures of reading Shakespeare’s sonnets is finding rhymes that give us clues about Elizabethan English. One of these occurs in the first four lines of the entire collection:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:

“Die” and “memory” are clearly not “eye rhymes.” In Shakespeare’s day, these two vowels would have been pronounced with a somewhat closer pair of vowels, probably something like ɘi for “die” and i: “memory.” So this would have been a more plausible oblique rhyme than it is today (for most American and British accents).

Such wordplay has been an excellent tool for historical linguists, validating important hypotheses about the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciation of Middle English and other developments. So I sometimes wonder if, hypothetically speaking, historical linguists hundreds of years from now could deduce anything important from rhymes in our era.

Of course, it’s likely that such scholars will have far, far more written and recorded evidence of how their ancestors spoke than we do. But if, tragically, the entire internet were wiped clean and some future prescriptivist dictator were to destroy all writing about linguistics, would rhymes reveal anything about 21st-Century English speakers?

It likely depends, of course, on how much the language changes. One would also have to rely mostly on song lyrics, since rhyming poetry is not exactly the dominant literary form of the 2000’s. And although I can’t say what kind of pronunciations 25th-Century English speakers would find unusual, I can think of a few examples of lyrics that say something interesting about particular dialects of English.

Take, for instance, this snippet from Kanye West’s “Gold Digger:”

Eighteen years, eighteen years
And on her 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his

West here rhymes “years” and “his,” because in some varieties of African-American English, the two vowels in these words are nearly neutralized in phrase-final or emphatic positions. The vowel in “his” is tensed and becomes something of a centering diphthong along the lines of iɪ, making it sound quite close to the vowel in “years.”

Of course, you would need more evidence to actually deduce this. Technically, this rhyme might also work for certain British accents, but for the opposite reason: the vowel in “years” can become a long monopthong with a similar quality to “his” (i.e. ɪ:). Which points out the main caveat of relying on rhymes: they can never serve as the sole piece of evidence in detective work like this.

Can anyone think of other contemporary lyric rhymes that suggest salient things about English today?

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Goombye

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Ben

A reader recently wrote me a question concerning the word “goombye,” which appears in this up-tempo Ivie Anderson song (penned by Duke Ellington) from 1939:

At first glance, I figured “goombye” might be an awkward attempt to transcribe African-American English (what the “m” would indicate, I have no idea). However, it seems clear that “goombye” is treated as a separate word from “goodbye;” it is here pronounced gumbaɪ, with the “goom” rhyming with “doom.”

Although “goom-bye” may have been African-American in origin, it seems to have used broadly in mid-20th-Century texts. A quick Google NGram search makes it clear that the word was always extremely infrequent, however. I get the hazy impression that it had a kind of jazzy/beatnicky connotation, although to be fair, most slang from that era sounds like that to my contemporary ears. (It does seem to have appeared once or twice in Kerouac’s writing, though).

In his book on slang, Flappers 2 Rappers, Tom Dalzell cites the word as being part of a trend toward puns and word-play in greetings and farewells around the time of the 1940s:

…good-byes could be handled with any number of puns, false borrowings, and slang ceremonial expressions such as “Alcohol you; Au Reservoir; Be Seein’ Ya; Be seein’ you in the funnies; Bye-Bye buy bonds; Good-bye gate, I must evaporate; Goom bye …

To be honest, though, I have not the faintest idea what “goombye” could be a pun on. “Kumbabaya” wasn’t sung under that title until the 1940s (apparently), and “goombah” strikes me as entering the national consciousness somewhat later (although Tony Romano apparently released a song called “Goombye Goomba” in the 1950s). Is it supposed to be a play on “go on by?”

Another possibility is that the word started off as some kind of “faux-netic” transcription. Since “Goodbye” is such a common word, we often “slur” it a bit, most notably by dropping the /d/; I often pronounce it gʊbaɪ (“goo’bye”). I could see “goombye” being an awkward attempt to indicate this, but it’s hard to say if this is the case or not.

So I must acknowledge the possibility that this was merely a quirky attempt at spelling which was then “misinterpreted” by Ivie Anderson and other singers as constituting an entirely different word. But unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate another recording of “goombye” to confirm this. Has anybody heard an old recording of this word?

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“Button” vs. “Butter”

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Ben

Apropos of a recent conversation in the comments, it’s worth noting that Americans generally pronounce /t/ in words like “button” and “Manhattan” in a different manner than one might expect.

To take one contrasting example, Americans pronounce the word “butter” with an alveolar tap (bʌɾɹ̩ or “budder”), while folks like myself pronounce the /t/ in “button” with a glottal stop (bʌʔn̩ or “buh’n”). In other words, American speech exhibits an exception when it comes to /t/ when it occurs before a syllabic /n/.

In fact, I’d say the glottal stop (or at the very least glottal release–bʌtʔn̩) is the unmarked American pronunciation for such words [Ed-and/or via a nasal release; see comments]. Why is this? As with a lot of situations of exceptional pronunciations, ease of articulation is partially the culprit.

In the case of the glottal stop, we start with something of a glottal-reinforced /t/. Because /t/ and /n/ involve the tongue being in the same position (the alveolar ridge), the only way we really know there is a /t/ is the sound of the glottis quickly closing then opening in a transition from /ʌ/ to /t/ to /n/. This ends up rendering the /t/ itself somewhat redundant, so many Americans simply hold off on moving their tongue into position until it’s time to make the /n/ sound.*

If you didn’t follow that unwiedly description, don’t worry; it’s besides the point. The more pertinent question is why we don’t use the alveolar tap here; that is, why don’t Americans pronounce “button” as “buddin?”

In fact, it seems to me that some accents that use the alveolar tap for /t/ actually do use it in “button” as well. I once had an Australian coworker from Brisbane who very clearly pronounced this word “buddin’.” (Although I should preface this observation once again by say that given the relative rarity of “button” in speech, I would need to hear many more Australians say it to come any conclusions.) It’s not entirely clear to me why many Americans have not gone this same route.

What’s also interesting here is that it suggests the neutralization of /t/ and /d/ in between vowels (or before syllabic consonants) is not entirely complete. That is to say, we Americans still do make some kind of distinction between /t/ and /d/, even if it’s mostly just in our heads.

*This is really a fairly common thing in English (and other languages). Similarly, we often drop the actual /n/ in the word “went,” leaving only a nasal consonant (wɛ̃t); and people will often drop the actual coronal movement in words like “belt,” leaving only a velar approximant (bɛɰt), even those who don’t normally have l-vocalization as a feature of their accent. 

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On “Local” Place Pronunciations: “Manhattan”

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Ben
Manhattan

Geographicus

While on a train to New York, I overheard the following from a young man speaking Nuyorican English (i.e. the Latino-American New York dialect): “I’m on a train in Jersey to visit my cousin in Manhattan.” This would be an unnoteworthy sentence except for the last word, for which he markedly elided several consonants: mæ̃.æʔn (“Ma’a’uhn”).

This ia a strange sequence of sounds for English, but given “Manhattan’s” tricky juxtaposition of /n/ and /h/, it’s a common type of variant*. It occurred to me, however, that I’ve never found any consensus on the “local” pronunciation of this word, or even if there is anything like a local pronunciation. (And given similar discussions of this type, I doubt there’s just one!)

If there is anything I have noticed that New Yorkers tend to do more than others, it is to reduce the word’s first syllable; hence where my middle-American-bred parents would speak of “man-hattin” (mænhætn̩), New Yorkers will sometimes truncate this entirely, so it’s more or less “mnn-hattin” (mn̩hætn̩).

New Yorkers don’t always knock off that first /a/, though. So there is also the question of where “-anh” falls in terms of New York’s tense-lax split (that is, /a/ before /n/ can be pronounced in two slightly different ways depending on several factors). My impression is that when New Yorkers do not reduce the first syllable, it falls into the lax category, so that it contrasts slightly with the raised/nasal General American pronunciation–mænhætn̩ vs. meənhætn̩. But I admit that I’ve heard this so seldomly in my lifetime that my memory might be faulty.

And as the opening anecdote suggests, there are probably all kinds of other quirky pronunciations that occur in rapid or informal speech. I would not be at all surprised to hear a dropped /n/, /h/ or /t/, not to mention combinations of such elisions.

This is yet another example of how variable local pronunciations of place names can be. This one, I suspect, may exhibit a particularly large number of variants because of the inexactitude (and hence infrequence) of “Manhattan” as a place marker for New Yorkers. You’re more likely to hear someone say, “I live in the East Village” than “I live in Manhattan,” just as a Brooklynite is more likely to say she is “going into the city” than identifying the borough of her destination.

*Although more common if a morpheme or word boundary separates them, as in “unhappy” or “in hot water.”

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Regional African-American Accents

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Ben
Painting: Jacob Lawrence (National Archives)

Painting: Jacob Lawrence (National Archives)

Annie Minoff has written a fascinating, in-depth piece on African American English over at WBEZ in Chicago. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but the main thrust of the article is that within African-American English one can find numerous regional accents that are recognizably distinctive.

This is something that anyone who has lived in a Northern or Western American city probably understands intuitively. New York City African-Americans, after all, often raise the THOUGHT/CLOTH vowel just as other New Yorkers do (i.e. the legendary “aw” in “cawfee”); Philadelphia African-Americans, meanwhile, often front the vowels in GOAT and GOOSE much like their Irish-American, Jewish-American and Italian-American counterparts. It would be fairly improbable for a single ethnolect to remain monolithic across hundreds of American cities.

That latter feature (u-fronting), by the way, seems true of Baltimore AAE as well, as linguist Cara Shousterman discussed in this excellent article on the Black English of that city (also worth a read):

Probably one of the most noticeable features of Baltimore African American English is what linguists call u-fronting, where the sound in a word like “do” gets pronounced as “dew”.

So why, you might ask, do people still think of AAE as being “uniform.” Minoff quotes the great American linguist Walt Wolfram, who suggests that some of the limitations and biases of early AAE studies may have played a role on this perception:

“In a sense,” [Wolfram] explains, “it was sort of an exotic other. Most early researchers who did research on AAE, like Labov and myself, were white. And so we came into these communities as people who had grown up in segregated situations. I would say that that was reflected in some of the things [we noticed] … I think we overlooked our own biases in terms of seeing regionality”

This is probably true to some degree. But I wonder if Wolfram is being a bit too hard on himself here. It is logical to think AAE may have actually been somewhat more uniform forty years ago than it is now.

Some of the anecdotes from Isabel Wilkerson’s brilliant The Warmth of Other Suns imply that the Southern-inflected dialect we think of as “African-American English” was part and parcel of the “great migration” of African-Americans from the South between World War I and the 1970s. After all, African-Americans who had lived in the North for generations before this tended to be just as distrustful of this new dialect as Northern whites were:

It turned out that the old-timers were harder on the new people than most anyone else. “Well, their English was pretty bad,” a colored businessman said of the migrants who flooded Oakland and San Francisco in the forties, as if from a foreign country. To his way of looking at it, they needed eight or nine years “before they seemed to get Americanized.”

Point being, speakers of AAE in the early 1970s would have usually been at most a generation away from the South. It’s unsurprising that several decades down the road the surrounding linguistic environment has encroached somewhat more upon this ethnolect (while older forms of Northern/Western African-American English have perhaps merged with it).

So it’s worth wondering how much further this unique dialect will be eroded. Will AAE survive another hundred years in the Northern Cities? Or will it be subsumed by older local dialects? Conversely, will some older local dialects lose out to AAE?

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David Beckham’s “Poshification”

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Ben

Researchers from  University of Manchester recently announced that David Beckham has “poshed up” his accent since moving the the United States (pun probably intended). Given that Beckham is one of the biggest sports stars in the world, it’s fairly easy to independently confirm or refute the validity such impressions. For reference, here is an interview with a young Beckham in 1994:

And here is a video of Beckham discussing the end of his L.A. Galaxy career:

Obviously, a number of things seem to have changed about Beckham’s speech in the intervening years. In the first minute or so of the 1994 interview, he pronounces the word “like” with a glottal-stop for /k/, a very Cockney feature which he would probably avoid in the U.S. In 1994, he likewise pronounces the word “about” with a vowel that is close to a monophthong (“abaht“), while in America, he pronounces similar words like “proud” and “around” with a diphthong (əɹæʊnd or əɹaʊnd). Connoisseurs of Cockney will find other changes, I’m sure.

General American English is a rather conservative accent, to the extent that GenAm vowels arguably resemble early-to-mid-20th-Century Received Pronunciation vowels somewhat more closely than, say, Cockney’s do. So I think what the researchers may be getting at here is that by accommodating slightly to American speech patterns, Beckham is in some sense bringing his accent more in line with RP.

But I’m not so sure this always equates to “poshness.” For example, one of the markers the researchers studied was the rate at which Beckham drops his h’s:

The research revealed that David dropped the H in words such as “him” and “has” 80% of the time before the move to the US, but only 20% of the time afterwards.

Mr Boorman said it was “clear that Becks, once a broader Cockney, nowadays speaks with more of a standard English accent”.

“In fact, he’s even hyper-correcting himself, because he puts Hs into words when it’s not really required – in America, they use the H sound more, which explains how he acquired it.

“But my guess is that his dropping of those Cockney vowels was linked to his ambassadorial role for the Olympics and his subsequent high social status.”

It’s worth pointing out that h-dropping is not quite the working-class shibboleth in London that it once was. The great Paul Kerswill pointed this out in a lecture two years ago, in reference to Multicultural British English. In 21st-Century London, in fact, one could argue that h-dropping is becoming more passé than “lower-class.”

Regardless, it’s interesting to note the points in which “Americanizing” one’s speech equates to “poshing it up.” Has anyone followed Beckham’s speech enough over the years to comment?

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Why D.A.R.E. Is Important

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Ben

Martha's VineyardIn the 1960s, an enterprising young linguist named William Labov travelled to Martha’s Vineyard to study a curious feature of the island’s local vernacular. Vineyard natives tended to centralize the diphthongs in words like “house” and “kite” (həʊs and kəɪt), a pattern otherwise confined to Southern Atlantic Coast and Canada (hence the apochryphal Canadian pronunciation of “about” as “aboot”).

Labov found fascinating correlations between “Vineyard Raising” and how positively or negatively particular residents felt about their island. To briefly summarize Labov’s complex data, Vineyarders who loved the Vineyard centralized the vowel in “house” frequently, while Vineyarders who disliked the island did this infrequently. In other words, how you feel about your region has a huge impact on how closely you linguistically “associate” with said region.

Labov’s Martha’s Vineyard study also posed a serious challenge to the centuries-old Neogrammarian Hypothesis (the notion that all phonological change is regular), and helped establish the nascent field of sociolinguistics. What might seem like a quirky chapter in the history of dialectology has had tremendous consequences for the fields of linguistics, sociology and education.

So why do I bring this up? Because this study, on its face, appears so inconsequential. A linguist studying two vowels on a small island off Massachusetts? It sounds like a parody of the entire profession. And yet this seemingly trivial project ended up being one of the most important studies in the history of linguistics, and (in my opinion) 20th-Century American thought.

Apropos of this, I am incredibly saddened by the recent announcement that DARE (the Dictionary of American Regional English) has lost much of its funding. I feel I can say quite confidently that DARE is one of the greatest works of lexicography in the history of American letters, and that it is nothing short of a tragedy to see it fall on hard times.

I bring up Labov’s early work because it is likewise easy for outsiders to dismiss DARE’s decades-long project as a lark (does it really matter where people use “pop” for “soda?”) But seemingly superficial works of dialectology and lexicography can have profound consequences. Labov’s work itself relied on data provided by a work much along the lines of DARE–the Linguistic Atlas of New England. What may seem, therefore, to be eccentric pieces of scholarship can have serious consequences for how we think about language.

Enthusiastic non-linguists like myself can sometimes create the impression that sociolinguistics is akin to bird-watching; a kind of hobby or “collection.” But DARE and works like it, despite outward appearances, can tell us invaluable things about human nature, history and the mind. When linguists study dialects, they’re doing much more than describing how a particular group talks: they’re giving us vital information about how language changes, why it changes, and what it says about our larger society.

I sincerely hope such projects don’t lose out in the future.

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“Every Man Thinks He’s a Tenor In Cork”

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Ben

In my college “dialects” class, our instructor played a recording of a talented Irish actor imitating various Irish regional accents. When he got to Cork, he wryly observed, “In Cork, the voice always seems to be higher–every man thinks he’s a tenor in Cork.”

Well, at least that’s what I remember; it’s been years and I’ve never located that recording, nor do I know the actor responsible for it*. But after listening to Irish accents for a good decade, I have found this stray observation to be bear some truth. Consider, for instance, this clip of Cork native, hurler Seán Óg Ó hAilpín:

I picked Ó hAilpín because he is likely not a tenor–he sounds like a baritone to me. Yet his speech has a tendency, at emphatic moments, to ascend to the upper resonators of his vocal tract (head, nasal, mouth). This strikes me as a holdover from Irish, the language which has a marked impact on Western and Southern Hiberno-English. I suspect there are some articulatory factors at play, perhaps related to Irish’s contrast of velarized and palatized consonants (although I’m not sure how).

Since different accents center vowels and consonants in different parts of the vocal tract, it’s unsurprising that humans configure their anatomy to adjust. Scouse (the Liverpool accent) is also frequently described as high-pitched (when it isn’t described in less flattering terms). One can find instances of this, as is apparent in this clip with thickly-accented Merseyside footballer Jamie Carragher:

I bring this up in part because of my post several days ago about the connection between “race” and “voice quality.” In my mind, the Cork and Scouse are good examples of how very different the “voice” of different dialects and ethnolects can be, without taking anatomy into account.

*Caveats being, therefore, that I’m possibly paraphrasing (it might have been “Everyone is a tenor down in Cork” or “In Cork they all think they’re tenors), and that there is a slight chance some important detail has escaped my memory.

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Race and “Voice Quality:” A Skeptic’s Viewpoint

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Ben
wikimedia

wikimedia

During an unrelated Google search the other day, I stumbled upon this Yahoo Answers query:

Can you tell someone’s race from the sound of their voice? I was wondering if you could tell if someone was white or black etc by hearing their voice?

This is obviously a controversial topic. Ethnolects are real phenomena, of course, but the notion that they evince genetic differences makes me uncomfortable. Such memes have spread through the internet for years, typified by this uninformed comment (on a different message board):

Black people’s voices have a definite “blackness” to them – I’m referring specifically to the timbre or sound, before grammar, inflection, diction, etc. even come into play. This rules out the sociocultural answers (“blacks are more likely to use slang,” or “blacks tend to be more relaxed with language”, etc.) that are often given.

Don’t get me wrong: one can sometimes deduce ethnicity by voice alone. In 2011, researchers from CUNY found that young New Yorkers could ascertain, from mere recordings, whether a speaker was East Asian, African-American, Latino or “White.” The study identified factors that “cue” a listener’s expectations, one of which you can hear in this clip of comedian Cheech Marin:

Marin’s speech, like that of many Chicano-Americans, is arguably more “syllable-timed” than that of General American English, meaning that (roughly speaking) each syllable is more equal in duration. Laypeople may associate this tendency with Latino or Hispanic speech, even if they’re unaware of the connection. To be clear, though, this has nothing to do with racial genetics, but rather the influence of Spanish.

I may have strayed from the Yahoo commenter’s question, however, since “voice quality” is arguably a different animal from intonation. Indeed, the CUNY researchers found other factors along those lines, such as a type of “breathiness” which people associate with Asian-American voices. A possible example might be cellist Yo-Yo Ma‘s soothing, professorial tenor:

But how are genetics involved? After all, many Americans with immigrant backgrounds exhibit vocal qualities indicative of their ancestry. It is hard to dismiss connections between the accent of Jewish New Yorkers and their forebears’ unique Germanic language, nor those between Irish-American speech and Hiberno-English. We know that the Jewish and Irish “races” are the stuff of Victorian pseudoscience, so why discard the impact of ancestral languages on broader ethnic categories?

To be fair, I have found at least one study suggesting possible ethnic differences in vocal tract anatomy.  But what about the genetic variation within “races?” For instance, latitude, diet, and random selection produce substantial height differences between sub-regions within East Asia, Europe, and Africa. Why would the human voice be any different? The burden of proof is upon those who seek interracial genetic explanations.

**An important note, in the form of a tongue-twister: the researchers are not suggesting  that all Asian-Americans speak with this quality, but rather that Asian-Americans who speak with this quality are more easily identified as Asian-American.

Reference: Newman, M., & Wu, A. (2011). “Do you sound Asian when you speak English? Racial identification and voice in Chinese and Korean Americans’ English. American Speech, 86(2), 152-178.

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Posted in Miscellaneous Accents and Dialects | Tagged , | 34 Comments