General american English

A sampling of modern American pronunciation trends includes:

The Low-Back Merger

A “merger” describes what happens when a distinction between two (or more) sounds is lost. The sounds essentially merge into a single sound. The Low-Back Merger blends two vowel sounds that are pronounced with the tongue positioned low and back in the mouth. The vowels are the “o” sound of cot (box, lot, job, Don, etc.) and the “au” sound of caught (fought, bought, off, dawn, etc.). Many Americans use the same vowel in all of these words, so for them cot and caught as well as Don and dawn, stock and stalk, and other pairs are homophones.

This merger is well established in western Pennsylvania and in eastern New England (and also interestingly, across most of Canada and Scotland) and has been in evidence for several generations. More recently, the merger has come to characterize the speech of the West; researchers identified it as a linguistic trend among young Californians some 30 years ago. Since then it has spread well beyond the Golden State and is heard almost everywhere west of the Mississippi in the speech of people under the age of 35. This suggests that the trend will continue — and that maintaining distinct vowel sounds in cot and caught, Don and dawn, etc. will eventually become a rarity in many parts of the U.S.

A merger describes what happens when a distinction between two (or more) sounds is lost

The Northern Cities Shift

When a vowel sound moves into another vowel’s territory, the result may be a merger —as when the sound of caught comes to be pronounced with the tongue in the same region of the mouth as for cot. In a different pattern, the movement of one vowel spurs a reactive movement in a neighboring vowel. As with strangers in an elevator, one vowel shifts to keep its distance when another enters the space.

These coordinated movements are heard in the Northern Cities Shift, which affects six different vowels, those appearing in caught, cot, cat, bit, bet and but. In this change, caught takes on a vowel similar to that originally used for cot. The cot vowel also shifts, becoming more like the vowel of cat. The vowel of cat takes a position closer to that ordinarily heard with bit and sometimes sounds like the “ea” in idea. Words like bit are pronounced with a vowel nearer to bet or even but whereas bet words have a vowel similar to that in cat or but, and the vowel but words comes to sound more like that of caught. When these changes are plotted according to the positioning of the tongue, the connections among them are clear and the shift resembles a clockwise rotation of the vowels in the mouth.

The Northern Cities Shift: These guide words are positioned to represent where in the mouth the tongue is placed for those vowel sounds. The arrows indicate the directions of change affecting the sounds.

The Northern Cities Shift gets its name from its association with the urban centers around the Great Lakes including Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Buffalo. But pronunciations related to the shift are by no means restricted to city dwellers. The shift can be heard across a broad swath of the North from Upstate New York throughout the Great Lakes region and westward into Minnesota and the Dakotas. It’s not clear when the shift got its start.

While it did not begin to attract the attention of linguists until the late 1960s, it seems to have been active at least since the 1930s, possibly spreading westward from New York. Whatever its origins, the shift today seems to be actively spreading and should continue to add a distinctive flavor to the speech of the region.

The Southern Shift

A very different but equally complicated pattern of vowel changes is found in the South. Dubbed the Southern Shift, these changes affect seven vowels. Probably the best known is the pronunciation of the “long i” sound as “ah,” so that sighed sounds like sod, time like Tom, etc. Another element of the Southern Shift affects the vowel of tame, which comes to sound like that of time, and the apparently related change of the team vowel to resemble that of tame. The vowels of sit and set are also affected, becoming more like see it and say it. The other pieces in the Southern shift change the vowels of boot and boat. These vowels are traditionally pronounced with the tongue placed in the back of the mouth, but here they are made with the tongue more toward the front.

Elements of the Southern Shift can be heard in an area stretching from Virginia to northern Florida, westward across much of Texas, and northward to roughly the Ohio River. The evidence suggests the changes arose in the decades after the Civil War and became widespread during the 20th century. The shift now appears to be stable and may even be receding in use in some areas, especially in large cities. The shift’s future is unclear: It may eventually be lost from Southern speech although it seems more likely to survive especially if it comes to be more broadly associated with “true” Southern identity.

The California Shift

California is the home base of another vowel shift that bears some resemblance to both the Southern Shift and the Northern Cities Shift. In California, as in the South, the vowels of boot and boat are shifting forward in their articulation. This trend is extremely widespread in American English and is heard throughout the Midwest and West as well as the South. The California Shift resembles the Northern Cities Shift in the way that the vowel of bit comes to sound like bet while the vowel of bet sounds like bat. Not to be outdone, the vowel of bat takes on a “broad a” quality and sounds like the “a” of father.

These changes appear to be recent innovations in California speech; they came to the attention of researchers in the 1980s and today are heard primarily from younger speakers. It’s hard to know whether they will have staying power, but the linguistic facts suggest that they will spread in and beyond California. The changes affecting bit, bet, and bat appear to be a coordinated shift among vowel neighbors: bat moves out and bet moves into the position vacated by bat which leads bit to move into the position vacated by bet. The initiating step, the moving of bat, is made possible by a change discussed above, the Low-Back Merger. That merger opens some space next door to bat by collapsing the vowels of cot and caught.

It seems likely, then, that the bat-bet-bit chain reaction will eventually take place wherever the Low-Back Merger is found. Some support for this prediction is found in the fact that the bat-bet-bit changes are also heard in Canadian English, another dialect that has undergone the Low-Back Merger.

Betting/Batting/Bitting on the Future

Predicting whether a particular pronunciation change will endure is risky because these trends may be influenced by a wide range of social and linguistic factors. Nevertheless, the vowel shifts seem to have important factors working in their favor. First, they involve general categories of sound rather than individual words. All words with the same vowel as cot (box, lot, job, Don) are pronounced with a vowel closer to that of cat in the Northern Cities Shift, and all words with the vowel of tame (bake, late, Jane, day) take on a pronunciation closer to the vowel of time in the Southern Shift. In this sense these changes differ from cases limited to particular words such as the replacement of “Missour-uh” with “Missour-ee.”

It also bodes well for the future that for the most part these changes operate without attracting any special regional attention. The people whose speech is affected typically are unaware of the peculiarities in their pronunciation. Also, whereas pronunciations that deviate from national norms often acquire social stigma, as with “warsh” and “crick,” it’s not so for these vowel shifts. Many of them, especially the Low Back Merger and the Northern Cities Shift, can be heard in the broadcast media. The acceptability, or at least lack of stigma, related to these new pronunciation trends suggests that they will continue to spread.

Most of the action in the changing sound of American English is heard with vowels

As these examples reveal, most of the action in the changing sound of American English is heard with vowels. This reflects a general pattern in the history of the language: the consonants have been relatively stable, while the vowels have undergone great changes. One of the few major consonant changes affecting American English relates to r. American dialects have long differed over this consonant. In parts of the Northeast and the South, the r has traditionally been not fully articulated in words like art and door. This tendency is being reversed as some areas appear to be joining with the rest of r-pronouncing America. (New York City and the South seem to be moving in an{link dysa foughtj_rful_essay}Rful{/link}direction, while Boston seems to want to hold onto its traditional Rless style).

Over the last few decades, technical innovations such computerized spectrographic analysis (see box) have greatly aided the study of changes in pronunciation.

Studying ongoing changes can help us learn more about how English developed in the past and predict how it is likely to evolve in the future. Throughout its history, English has undergone changes similar to those heard today, but until recently linguists have been limited to the evidence of the written record in trying to understand the dynamics of the process. The methods used now expand our perspective on how and why English changes.

The detailed examination of differences in speech also has applications outside the field of linguistics. The ability of computers to recognize and understand natural human speech can be greatly enhanced by a fuller account of the rich variety of accents across the country.

Interpersonal connections that promote new pronunciations also influence other social behaviors

The study of pronunciation changes also can provide insight into how innovations of various types are spread. The networks of influence involved in the diffusion of, say, the Northern Cities Shift may also serve as conduits for other innovations such as new technology. Similarly, the interpersonal connections that promote new pronunciations also influence other social behaviors. An improved understanding of these connections might be useful to, for example, public health officials in disseminating information about disease, child safety, etc.

Changes such as those described here have had and will continue to have a significant impact on the sound of American English. For linguists studying such changes, this is an exciting time. Research into these developments brings a greater understanding of how language functions and the vital role it plays in our dynamic and diverse society

Matthew J. Gordon is assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri - Columbia. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan. His research specializes in sociolinguistics and American dialectology. His book Small-Town Values, Big-City Vowels (Duke University Press, 2001) is a study of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. He is also co-author with Lesley

Milroy of Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation (Blackwell, 2003), a book that presents an overview of current practices in the field of sociolinguistics. He is currently studying sound changes in the state of Missouri.

Are Americans Ruining English?

For more than 200 years, right up through Prince Charles, people have complained that Americans trash the English language. But is it corruption — or simply normal change? John Algeo investigates how both American and British English’s have evolved. (The research in this essay was first published in 1999.)

America is ruining the English language – everyone knows that. We have heard it from early days right up to the present. We have heard it from English men and English women, of course, but from Americans as well – self-confessed linguistic vandals. We have heard it from the famous and the obscure. So it must be true. But in what does the ruination lie? How are Americans ruining English?

In the early days, British travelers in the American colonies often commented on the ‘purity’ of the English spoken in the new world. It wasn’t until the American impertinence of 1776 that Americans seem to have begun ruining English. Yet, as early as 1735, a British traveler in Georgia, Francis Moore, described the town of Savannah: ‘It is about a mile and a quarter in circumference; it stands upon the flat of a hill, the bank of the river (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep.’ The Americans had taken an adjective of nautical and perhaps Dutch origin, meaning ‘broad, flat and steep’, to use as a noun for the sort of river bank that hardly existed in England and for which, consequently, earlier English had no name.

American English is ‘very corrupting’

In 1995, in much the same vein as the comment of 260 years earlier, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was reported by The Times as complaining to a British Council audience that American English is ‘very corrupting.’ Particularly, he bemoaned the fact that ‘people tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be.’ By this time the barbarous use of bluff for a steep bank had been civilized by being adopted into the usage of the motherland, but doubtless if the Prince had lived about nine generations earlier, he would have agreed with Francis Moore that bluff was a word that shouldn’t be.

The Prince concluded: ‘We must act now to insure that English – and that, to my way of thinking, means English – maintains its position as the world language well into the next century." His concern seems to be as much commercial as merely ethnocentrically aesthetic, the English language being one of England’s most popular exports, along with gossip about the escapades of the Royals. The Prince, after all, was only doing his bit to keep the English pecker up.

One way Americans are ruining English is by changing it. Many of us, like Francis Moore and Prince Charles, regard what is foreign to us as barbarous and corrupt. We owe the term barbarous to the Greeks; they pitied the poor foreigner who could only stammer ‘bar-bar’ and hence was a ‘barbaros’. Barbarians are simply those who do not talk as we do, whether they are outsiders, Yanks or fellow countrymen and countrywomen whose style we do not admire.

The journalist Edwin Newman is a linguistic prophet who sees the language style of his fellow Americans as deadly. In 1974 he vaticinator in a book called Strictly Speaking, which was subtitled Will America be the Death of English? In it, he too objected to the invention of all sorts of nouns and verbs and words that shouldn’t be. In particular he objected to verbosity and euphemism as bad style. A number of Americans bemoan the baleful influence of their fellow citizens on the health or integrity of the language, but only a few, like Edwin Newman, have been able to make a career of it.

In England, on the other hand, a perception that America is ruining the language pervades the discourse of the chattering classes. Indeed, a fair number of British intellectuals regard ‘new’, ‘distasteful’, and ‘American’ as synonymous. A knowledgeable British author complained about the supposedly American pronunciation controversy and was surprised to hear that the antepenult accent is unknown in the States, being a recent British innovation. The assumption is that anything new is American and thus objectionable on double grounds.

Change in language is, however, inevitable, just as it is in all other aspects of reality. Particular changes will be, in the eyes of one observer or another, improvements or degenerations. But judgements of what is beautiful or ugly, valuable or useless, barbarous or elegant, corrupting or improving are highly personal idiosyncratic ones.

There are no objective criteria for judging worth in language, no linguistic Tables of the Law, no archetypical authority called ‘The Dictionary’, though there are wannabe authoritarians aplenty.

A language - or anything else that does not change - is dead

On the other hand, no one is required to like all or any particular changes. It is, in the great Anglo-American tradition, our God-given right to have our own opinions and to take it or leave it when it come to style in couture, diet, entertainment, religion and language. We need not be equally enthusiastic about catsuits and muu-muus, macrobiotics, and haute cuisine, grunge rock and Philip Glass, the World Wide Web and MTV, bank and bluff or controversy and controversy. We don’t have to like particular changes, or even the fact of change itself. But a language or anything else that does not change is dead.

The eighteenth-century hope that language could be ‘fixed’ – that is, improved, or changed in a way some self-appointed linguistic judge would approve of until it reached a state of perfection and then preserved so that it would not thereafter degenerate or change in a way the judge disliked – was a chimera. It was an illusion based on misunderstandings about the nature of language, values and human nature.

The earliest English we can catch sight of in manuscripts of the seventh century was the product of millennia of change. We can only reconstruct its earlier history back through stages we call Anglo-Frisian, Germanic, Indo-European, and maybe even Nostratic and Proto-World. During the recorded history of English, the language has changed from something quite incomprehensible to a present-day English speaker, which we call Old English (Hwaet! We Gar-dena in geordagum the odcyninge thrym gehyrdon) to something equally incomprehensible to many of us, computer speak (Some memory resident programs steal too much of the CPU to work with an asynchronous download).

During its roughly thirteen centuries of recorded history, English has diversified in many ways. Any two varieties of a language become increasingly different from each other when their speakers do not communicate with one other but more alike as those who use them talk among themselves. That is the way language works.

British and American started to become different when English speakers first set foot on American soil because the colonists found new things to talk about and also because they ceased to talk regularly with the people back home. The colonists changed English in their own unique way, but at the same time speakers in England were changing the language too, only in a different way from that of the colonists. As a result, over time the two varieties became increasingly different, not so radically different that they amounted to different languages, as Italian and French had become a millennium earlier, but different enough to notice.

The differences between American and British are not due to Americans changing from a British standard. American is not corrupt British plus barbarisms. Rather, both American and British evolved in different ways from a common sixteenth-century ancestral standard. Present-day British is no closer to that earlier form than present-day American is. Indeed, in some ways present-day American is more conservative, that is, closer to the common original standard than is present-day British.

Americans generally retain the r-sound in words like more and mother, whereas the British have lost it

Some examples of American conservatives versus British innovation are these: Americans generally retain the r-sound in words like more and mother, whereas the British have lost it. Americans generally retain the ‘flat a’ of cat in path, calf, class,whereas the British have replaced it with the ‘broad a’ of father. Americans retain a secondary stress on the second syllable from the end of words like secretary and dictionary, whereas the British have lost both the stress and often the vowel, reducing the words to three syllables, ‘secret’ry’. Americans retain an old use of the verb guess to mean ‘think’ or ‘suppose’ (as in Geoffrey Chaucer’s catch-phrase ‘I gesse’). Americans have retained the past participle form gotten beside got, whereas the British have lost the former. (The British often suppose that Americans use only gotten, in fact they use both, but with different meanings: ‘I’ve got a cold’ = ‘I have a cold’ and ‘I’ve gotten a cold’ = ‘I’ve caught a cold’). Americans retain use of the subjunctivein what grammarians call ‘mandative’ expressions: ‘They insisted that he leave,’ whereas the British substituted for it other forms, such as ‘that he should leave’ or ‘that he left’.

On the other hand, the British are more conservative than Americans in other ways. Thus, they continue to distinguish atom (with a t-sound) and Adam (with a d-sound), whereas Americans typically pronounce the two words alike, with a flap sound that is more d- than t-like. Similarly, in standard British callous and Alice do not rhyme, whereas they usually do in standard American, both having a schwa. So too, the British have different stressed vowels in father and fodder, whereas Americans pronounce those words with the same first vowel. The British have retained an old use of reckon in the sense ‘think’ or ‘suppose’in serious discourse, whereas that use in America is old-fashioned or rural, a comic marker of ‘hick’ talk. The British have retained the term fortnight, whereas Americans have lost it. The British have retained the primary meaning of corn as ‘grain’, whereas Americans have changed it to ‘maize’ (the image many Americans have of ‘Ruth amid the alien corn’ being both anachronistic and ectopic). The British have retained the inversion of have with its subject in questions: ‘Have you the time?’ whereas Americans use the auxiliary verb do with it: ‘Do you have the time?’

On balance, it is hard to say which variety of English, American or British, is the more conservative and which the more innovative. A lot depends on how you look at the question. It is clear that the British are keen on (Americans would say ‘fond of’) the pluperfect, whereas Americans prefer the simple past: British ‘He had left before they arrived’ versus typical American ‘He left before they arrived.’ But it is less clear which usage should be regarded as older. Is the American preference a degeneration of the tense system? Or a preservation of the English of the Anglo-Saxons, who had little truck with complex tenses?

Both American and British have changed and go on changing

Both American and British have changed and go on changing today. Among recent innovations in British English, in addition to the pronunciation of controversy already cited, are such vocabulary novelties as gazumping and gazundering, Essex man and Estuary English, toy boy, and redundancy for ‘sacking’ or ‘firing’ (a bureaucratic euphemism fit to exercise the spleen of a British Edwin Newman). Paralleling the American retention of the mandative subjunctive (‘They insisted that he leave’) is a British innovative use of the indicative in such expressions: ‘They insisted that he left,’ which in American use could only be a statement of fact (‘They insisted it was a fact that he had left’).

British speakers have also been extraordinary fertile in expanding the range of use for tag questions. Tag questions are little bobs at the end of sentences that can turn them into questions, or sometimes into something else. The basic tag questions are general English, shared by British and American:

informational: ‘You don’t wear glasses, do you?’ (I’m not sure, but think you don’t. Am I right?)

inclusive: ‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it?’(It obviously is – I’m not really asking, but just making polite remarks so you can join in the conversation).

emphasizing: ‘I made a bad mistake, didn’t I?’ (This is a soliloquy. I’m not talking to anybody but myself and don’t expect an answer to the rhetorical question. It’s the verbal equivalent of underlining.)