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)