I fink it's anover blog entry; TH-fronting in English

Hello, and thanks for keeping up with my blog so far.

TH-fronting is a common feature of working-class dialects in some areas of the UK, where the <th> sound in 'think' is replaced by the <f> in 'fort', and the <th> sound in 'other' is replaced by the <v> in 'over'. A result of TH-fronting is that a number of new pairs of homophones are created, such as 'three' and 'free', both of which are pronounced like 'free'.

The <th> sounds in 'think' and 'other' are known as dental fricatives, and are represented as /θ/ and /ð/ in the IPA. The symbols /f/ and /v/ represent the first sounds in 'fine' and 'vine' respectively. These are the labiodental fricatives.

TH-fronting has long been considered a feature of Cockney speech, but it is spreading and increasing across urban areas in the UK, especially in working-class accents. Notably, men are more likely than women to use TH-fronting. However, it is rare elsewhere in the English speaking world, except in Newfoundland, Liberian English and in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), where it is also common (Wells, 1982).

Although the main wave of TH-fronting does appear to have spread from the London area, it is likely that TH-fronting originated independently in a number of different places. It has been long-established in Bristol and Glasgow, for example.

Also, TH-fronting was noted in Yorkshire speech as long ago as 1876 (Upton, 2012) and it is in fact more common among working-class boys in Hull than in any other British city. We can safely put to bed the idea that TH-fronting is a side-effect of watching too much EastEnders! Watching this soap opera does cause a number of adverse health effects, but TH-fronting is not one of them.

Although TH-fronting is occasionally found in middle and upper-class English accents, there is still a marked social boundary between working and middle-class speakers, in terms of the frequency of TH-fronting. It has not made as many inroads into middle-class English accents as other traditionally working-class features, such as t-glottaling or l-vocalisation. However, there is evidence that TH-fronting is finding its way into the variety of Standard English spoken in South-East England, i.e. the so-called 'Estuary English' (Altendorf, 1999).

A T-shirt...as it's pronounced by Norf Londoners!

In the past fifty or so years, TH-fronting has spread rapidly across urban centres in the UK (Trudgill, 1988). Not only will you find TH-fronting in London, Hull and Bristol, but also in Manchester, Newcastle and Aberdeen, to give some examples. It does not seem to have taken hold in rural areas, except in the areas where it has been long established.

Why, then, is TH-fronting spreading so rapidly across the UK? It is probable that there is covert prestige involved. That is, working-class men front their TH's to show solidarity towards their social group. Their friends in nearby towns pick this feature up from them in order to emulate their speech patterns, probably unconsciously. So essentially, this stigmatised feature becomes a secret source of pride. Now that it is well-established among the working class, some middle-class people are beginning to front their dental fricatives in order to stand out less from their working-class mates.

Another question is, why would TH-fronting arise independently in several different places?

Tellingly, the dental fricatives are rare sounds across the world's languages. Among the more than 60 languages with over 10 million speakers, only five of them have /θ/. These are English (of course), Standard Arabic, Castilian Spanish (as spoken in Spain, but not in Latin America), Burmese and Greek. In addition, Catalan and some dialects of Portuguese have [ð] as an allophone of /d/.

Clearly, the dental fricatives are not favoured in the sound systems of the world’s languages, and they are not very stable. All of the modern-day Germanic languages have lost the ancestral /θ/ sound except English and Icelandic. C.f. three with German drei, Dutch drie and Swedish tre, but Icelandic þrír (pronounced three-r). Most Germanic languages have replaced the original /θ/ phoneme with an alveolar stop, /t/ or /d/.

The crux of the matter seems to be that [θ] and [ð] are quite difficult to pronounce. The dental fricatives tend to be among the last sounds that English-speaking children learn to master. In fact, young children commonly substitute the dental fricatives for the similar-sounding labiodental fricatives [f] and [v]. Second-language learners of English often replace the dental fricatives with [s] and [z], or [t] and [d], which are also similar to the dental fricatives.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the exact same phenomenon has cropped up in several places. Perhaps one day, the dental fricatives will be completely lost in British English, but there is still a long way to go before they disappear for good.

Sources: 

Altendorf, Ulrike (1999) 'Estuary English: Is English going Cockney?' In Moderna Språk, XCIII, 1, 1-11 (PDF available here)

Trudgill, Peter (1988) ‘Norwich Revisited: Recent linguistic changes in an English urban dialect’. English World-Wide 9 (33-49)

Upton, Clive (2012) ‘Modern Regional English in the British Isles’. In Mugglestone, Lynda. The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 395

Wells, John (1982) Accents of English. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (vol. 2)

Are you listenin'? The phenomenon of 'G-dropping' in English

G-dropping is a popular name for the substitution of the 'ng' sound (represented as /ŋ/ in IPA) for the 'n' sound (represented as /n/) at the end of a word. The multifunctional -ing verb ending is subject to G-dropping, most commonly when it's being used as a present participle, or as part of the present progressive verb form.

Below are some well-known examples of G-droppin':

- Sittin' on the dock of the bay

- What are you waitin' for?

- Livin' on a prayer

- I've got a bad case of lovin' you

You'll also find G-dropping in gerunds (verbal nouns):

- Huntin', shootin' and fishin'

Notably in the above example, G-dropping was used by the educated upper class, so it is by no means restricted to the lower class.

Actually, G-dropping is a misnomer because no sound is actually dropped. The velar nasal (the last sound in the word 'sung') is replaced by the alveolar nasal (the last sound in the word 'sun'). The name 'G-dropping' derives from the replacement, in writing, of the sound written <ng> with the sound normally written <n>. Although a letter is lost, the sound is replaced. For the sake of simplicity, though, I will continue to call the phenomenon G-dropping in this article.

G-dropping is a very old substitution which derives from the merger of what were once two different morphemes in Old English: the present participle -ende and the gerund -inge. The orthography (writing) of the merged form, -ing, reflects a derivation from the Old English gerund, but the /ɪn/ pronunciation is a legacy from the present participle. 

G-dropping is currently a feature of colloquial and non-standard speech of all regions. Historically, it has also been used by members of the educated upper-class, as reflected by the phrase huntin', fishin' and shootin'. That this pronunciation was once regarded as standard can also be seen from old rhymes, as for example, in this couplet from John Gay's 1732 pastoral, Acis and Galatea, set to music by Handel:

Shepherd, what art thou pursuing,

Heedless running to thy ruin?

In order for this couplet to rhyme, pursuing must have been pronounced pursuin'. This would sound very odd in an opera today, and would most likely only be used for comic effect.

G-dropping is not an example of lazy pronunciation; you cannot simply replace every word final -ng with -n. If you did, you would sound very odd. For example, G-dropping is never found in imperative or infinitive verb forms. These examples of G-dropping do not sound natural:

*Sin'! (Sing!)

*Remember to brin' your charger (Remember to bring your charger)

*I'll rin' you tonight (I'll ring you tonight)

When the word is a noun, G-dropping is possible if the noun ending in -ng was derived from a participle or a gerund, though it is much rarer than G-dropping at the end of participles:

I've been in farmin' for thirty years now. 

I don't think you can G-drop nouns like 'gathering' (as in: a gathering of people) or 'hanging' (a public hanging). It sounds odd to my ears, at least.

If the noun ending in -ng was not derived from a participle, G-dropping is impossible:

*It was in the sprin' (It was in the spring)

Likewise, G-dropping is permitted in adjectives that are transparently derived from participles. Think of the slang words bangin(g) and mingin(g), or the phrase 'dirty rotten pig-stealin(g) great grandfather' (that quote is from the book Holes, in case you were wonderin'). But G-dropping is definitely not allowed in adjectives that aren't clearly derived from participles:

*A stron' man (A strong man)

There's also no G-dropping in adverbs or prepositions:

*All alon' the watchtower (All along the watchtower)

Clearly, G-dropping is not a scattergun attempt to make words shorter, nor is it a lazy way of speaking. It is a very persistent preservation of the Old English -ende present participle which, although now restricted to colloquial pronunciation, was once prevalent even in opera and poetry.

How to pronounce 'one'

I have noticed that the vowel sound in the word 'one' can be pronounced in a number of different ways.

Before I go into the details, I will give a quick overview of the vowel sounds that I will be talking about. The standard way to pronounce 'one' (that is, the pronunciation that dictionaries give) is [wʌn]. If you don't know what those funny symbols mean, don't worry! The 'wedge' /ʌ/ symbol in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) represents the vowel sound in CUP, as pronounced by those who are from Southern England.


Now, people from Northern England have a different vowel sound in CUP than most English speakers from Southern England, North America and the Southern Hemisphere. In Northern England, the vowel in CUP is identical to the vowel in PUT. Linguists represent this sound with the /ʊ/ symbol. Think about the stereotypical Corrie pronunciation of 'cuppa' for an idea of what the /ʊ/ vowel sounds like. For Northerners, PUT and PUTT sound exactly the same; they're homophones. But most other English speakers have a different vowel sound in these two words.


Many people from Northern England pronounce 'one' as [wʊn], just as you'd expect. But there is a third pronunciation, which seems to be restricted to the UK as far as I know. It is possible to make 'one' rhyme with 'gone'. The vowel sound in GONE is represented by the 'inverted-A' symbol /ɒ/, at least in British English, where the tongue is positioned far back in the mouth and the lips are slightly rounded.


The pronunciation of 'one' as [wɒn], rhyming with GONE rather than GUN, appears to be mainly a Midlands and Northern phenomenon. My basic research would suggest that Northerners and Midlanders who move south and begin to assimilate a Southern accent tend to hold on to [wɒn], and often fail to adopt the standard Southern pronunciation.


One person from Derby commented on a forum that people from his neck of the woods have /ɒ/ in 'one' and 'none', but also for 'among' and 'tongue'. I have heard some Northerners pronounce 'worry' and 'wonder' with an /ɒ/ vowel. This goes against the usual correspondence of /ʌ/ in Southern England with /ʊ/ in the North and Midlands. It seems like 'one', 'none', 'among' and 'tongue' belong to a special set of words that are pronounced with a /ɒ/ in the North of England and a /ʌ/ everywhere else.


Now, it so happens that my pronunciation of 'one' rhymes with GONE rather than GUN, yet I have never lived in the North of England. I make a distinction between 'one' [wɒn] and 'won' [wʌn], which for most people are homophones. I have heard other Southerners pronouncing 'one' and 'none' with the /ɒ/ vowel, so maybe this feature isn't as Northern as we might think. It's probably just under-documented. Wiktionary gives /wɒn/ as a possible pronunciation of 'one', without specifying anything about region:


(non RP, non-standard British) IPA: /wɒn/


How do you think you pronounce 'one' and 'none', and where are you from? Do you hear other people pronounce 'one' differently to you?

Introduction

Hi everyone!

I haven't written anything substantial for about half a year, so I've created this blog partly as a way to motivate myself to write, and partly to share my thoughts and opinions with other people!

I am a Linguistics graduate, so most of my posts will be centred on the subject of language. However, I don't want this to be a stuffy blog that only crusty academics will be able to understand. I want to make this blog accessible to everyone who is interested in the English language. Even if you don't know any Linguistics terminology, my aim is to make this blog readable and informative.

My first entry will be on the pronunciation of the word 'one'. Stay tuned!