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You missed one of the least discussed but most important features of NA English: non-lambdicism. L's at the end of syllables, for the most part disappear. Folk, talk, walk, always, alright, for example, are pronounced without an L sound. Instead, the vowel changes to one that you might not expect it to be. Foke, Tawk, Wauk, O-ways, aw-right.
Dr Lindsey, the questionnaire doesn't show certain vowel font stylings they show up as boxes with ? Also would you consider changing the background from a blistering white to something easier on the eyes in the wee hours of the morn?
@@CP-rg5minot only is it not specific to American English but I’d say that the opposite phenomenon (lambdacism?) is a sign of a speaker being American in certain words, though it doesn’t happen in all varieties. For example, I’m British and I don’t say the ‘l’ in ‘folk’ but I know someone living here who’s originally from Oregon who does say it and even uses an odd vowel before the ‘l’ (he says ‘fah-l-k’ rather than ‘foh-l-k’).
If completing the survey, do it on a laptop rather than on a cellphone/mobile. On a cellphone, some of the answer choices will appear as "s□d" instead of "said."
@@michaelbednarski4601I had this same issue. Chrome browser on Android. I think it was section 8 of the survey, all the vowels in the selectable options appeared as [?].
There's one tricky question in the survey, on the last page, asking how the "o" in "combine" is pronounced. And it depends, whether it's the verb, meaning to put together, or the noun, meaning a farming vehicle. Also, I think I was thinking too hard on some of them, and after pronouncing them over and over in my head, they didn't even sound like real words anymore. So I finally just started saying them once or twice, then going with my first impression.
Agreed. Combine as in put together is stressed in the second syllable. Sounds a bit like “come-BYEn.” Whereas the farm instrument has the stress in the first syllable, and a clear short o sound. Very different vowel sound.
@@toomanymarys7355 They both have the same stress for me (on the second syllable), but the first syllable is pronounced differently ("come" versus "comm" = uh versus ah).
That last page with /ɪ/ - /ə/ distinctions was _painful._ The "tricky questions" were a relief after that. They certainly weren't _easy,_ but they were _much_ easier than the torture that preceded them.
I struggled so much with this too. Ended up with a lot of 'neither' even though that didn't seem quite right. Feel like a gave a lot of 'wrong' answers.
@ The "tricky questions" concerned the FLEECE and GOOSE vowels, usually transcribed as /iː/ and /uː/, but that Dr Lindsey transcribes as /ɪj/ and /ʉw/. Essentially asking if the two are monophongs or diphthongs.
Really? That page went super fast for me. I guess my local accent has a very strong distinction between those two sounds. I'd be curious to hear where y'all are from.
The survey was fascinating. I found as a Canadian that I have a bunch of subtle phonemes (mostly dipthongs) that I didn't really realize existed and kind of break the survey by making half the questions "none of the above"
Yep, the quiz was almost difficult to complete and I think I made some "mistakes" (different answers for the same sound) a couple times because I kept really trying to shoehorn myself into one instead of just going "nope none of the above".
Yeah. Michigander going to support that one. Linguistically, I think we're closer to Canadian than American English. Which is hilarious, because based on an old survey done in the '70s or '80s that I used when I was writing a paper on my dialect, other Americans pinpointed us as the most American sounding people.
A lot of words for me (including “words”) just sound like /wrd/, with “r” essentially being its own vowel (like Dr Lindsey mentions; similar to stereotypical American “err”)
I was finding that I pronounce them very, very similarly but still had some subtle differences in mouth shape... mainly between grouping or/ur together at one sound and then all the rest as a second.
Brilliant! And I love your throw-away comment debunking the supposed psychological reality of phonemes. RIP Professor Labov. I love the story of him checking rhoticity in New York department stores by asking where to find ladies’ gloves.
The rhotic section was so weird. I answered “neither” for almost all of them as the r-colored vowels are so incredibly different from their non-r-colored counterparts that it was hard to pick. Also, with the word “lure”, as a verb I pronounce it the same as “fur” with a basic /ɚ/ (which I usually prefer to transcribe as syllabic /ɹ̩̈/) but when used as a noun I pronounce the same as “tour” or “sewer” with the vowel /ʉ͡ɚ ~ ʉ˞/.
Same here. Answered neither for all of them but the words that rhymed with here, seer, etc. I pronounce them with a dipthong but not necessarily two syllables (though you can for emphasis, HEE-ER for here)
Yes--"lure" and similar words are difficult for me to describe and I chose "neither" for most of them. For common words like dURing, I do what you are describing as rhyming with fur, but some words like "tour" might get the "sewer" treatment, sometimes. I grew up in Missouri and sometimes noticed people pronounced "Missouri" weird on TV, and I couldn't figure out what was weird about it for a while, realizing in my adult like that they were putting an "oor" sound instead of an "er" sound. The fact that I couldn't figure it out suggests to me that "oor" is barely even a sound in my dialect, with words going to "er" or "ore" (and maybe "ewer"?) instead.
yeah the rhotics are so weird. For stuff like "carry" or "story" I would transcribe my own speech with high-mid vowels [eɻ] [oɻ], which isn't quite the same as the diphthongs in "paid" and "load" /eɪ oʊ/
For most of the vowels I only pronounce them slightly r-coloured, But the NEAR vowel is strongly r-coloured for me (Though not as much as actual syllabic /r/ AKA the NURSE vowel), And the FORCE and SQUARE vowels have vowels almost identical to those in "Fold" and "Sail", Respectively, But never appear when not followed by /r/ or /l/. I marked them as the GOAT and FACE vowels though because they're in complimentary distribution so I think it's reasonable to consider them the same phoneme.
28:55 “The problem is built into phonemicization. It isn’t simply the discovery of reality. It’s the imposition of an alphabetic ideal on speech, which is often not alphabetic.” This concept fascinates me. There is utility in imposing an alphabetic ideal on speech, but at the edges, it gets complicated. To me, this implies not that the endeavor should be abandoned, but rather a fascinating aspect of the complex nature of reality. Love it.
The thing with abandoning phonemics is, what do you replace it with? If you go with just phonetics, then everything is different and you can't show the relationships between things, except to the extent they're phonetically close. But phonetically close is not always identical to phonemic category. For instance, Polish (ł) has evolved for most speakers from dark l to w, but in Polish they're one phoneme and in English two. Yet English also has some l-vocalizing tendency: "mall" is at least a weakened l, and in "alm" it's gone for some speakers. The weakening is at least toward w even if it doesn't go all the way. And w and h can also slip into each other. Still, it's useful to say light l and dark l have a closer relationship than w has to l and h, and that's what the /l/ phoneme in English gives you. Lindsey raises an important point that doesn't get talked about enough, that native speakers don't speak in phoneme units or word units, they speak in longer phrase units. Much of non-academic language learning seems to be memorizing phrases (along with their intonations) you hear, and then repeating them. Words and phonemes are just tools to analyze what they're doing, compare it to other people's speech, and teach spelling to children and English to foreigners.
On American T-flapping: to my midwestern US ear, there's nothing to indicate that The Doors' Jim Morrison is not singing about ""Writers On The Storm". On the other hand, it's quite clear in "Paperback Writer" that the Beatles are not trying to conjure up someone being literally transported (hah!) by a dimestore novel.
Based on some examples from other videos, I think you'd find that if you chopped up that audio to remove context clues they'd suddenly be a lot less distinct.
The way the Doors sing it sounds ominous so it connotes the Black Riders in the Lord of the Rings, or maybe the Huns, so that pushes it toward "riders". You don't talk ominously about "writers on the storm". T-flapping is identical to D in my dialect, so if there isn't those contextual clues we often have to repeat the word with a full T to clarify which word it is.
Interesting, I'm also from the Midwest, But to me it definitively sounds like "Riders on the Storm" as "Writer" has a different vowel for me (Canadian Raising for the win!). On the other hand, In Weird Al's classic "White & Nerdy", You could easily convince me that he's actually singing "Widen Nerdy", as it has the vowel of "Wide" rather than "White".
In elementary we were taught about "bossy R" that influences the sound before it in er, ar, and or. None of the resulting vowels exist without R in my (cot-caught merged) accent, and it's always been obvious to me (and baffling to ignore) that the sound "er" is a single rhotic sound, not a vowel and a consonant. It'd be lovely to see a dictionary finally get it right.
I haven't heard "bossy R" for a long time. Thanks for that! I don't even remember what exactly they said in the early 70s. I assume it was how ER and OR aren't exactly E+R or O+R, but I don't remember how they said it.
Interesting, I also have the cot-caught merger, But the 'ar' sound sounds almost identical to the 'a' sound in words like "Spa" or "Father" to me, Just with an 'r' sound after it. 'or' meanwhile has a vowel that only appears before 'r' and 'l', And 'air' is the same as that.
@rateeightx You know what, I got to thinking that, and I did have something mixed up-at least the part where it actually makes sense. I'm pretty positive "bossy R" was taught for _ar_ but it definitely affects _air_ more. Edit: when the hell did RUclips stop tagging anyone correctly
Perhaps this will be addressed in the survey, but I audibly said "What? No" to the idea that the merged vowel in marry-merry-Mary is the DRESS vowel. To me, it's clearly [ɛə], identical to the SQUARE vowel, and nearly or fully identical to the broken /æ/ in "man".
i am a confusion... would you agree that "square" rhymes with "where"? or are you perhaps claiming that "square" rhymes with "dare"? or maybe they all rhyme, i don't know you
I love this. These are *so different* in Aus English, and we slap a few extra vowels into the "a" in "Mary" just for good measure. The different directions English-speakers' accents have gone charging off are just wonderful. 😊
@@AD_AP_T It's definitely interesting stuff. Unless I put on an accent, I would never even think about pronouncing them differently, and I'm struggling to come up with any NA accent that does (I imagine one or more exist, but I can't think of them for the life of me).
That's the merry-marry-Mary merger, which most of the US has. A few regions in the northeast or maybe more generally the east coast don't. There's a video "Demonstration of American Dialects Accents 1958" on Nathan Prescott's channel that has a linguist and three women panelists, and they each say the trio differently, one all the same, another with two the same, another with another two the same, and another all differently.
@@jasonpatterson8091 another one I find quite fun is that I have almost no distinction between "mare" and "mayor", (both sound like "hair", noting I have that Australian non-rhotic "yuh" on the end there), but in at least some N. Am. accents, "mayor" (my "mare" ) has more in common with "mayonnaise" (my "may-naze"). I've legit had trouble communicating with people in the States because of words like these... Though I'm hoping youse's kids apparently all watching Bluey now might help that! 😂
Putting a "ch" sound at the beginning of the word "train" explains why calling the sound made by a steam engine, and therefore one name given to all trains is "Choo-choo train", giving us a satisfying tripple alliteration.
Choo-choo started at least a century before chrain. It must have been onomatopeic because people said "choo-choo" by itself for the sound. That was probably before they combined it into "choo-choo train".
As someone from a virtually unstudied accent enclave of the US (San Gabriel Valley English, an orphaned Californian variety of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift), I'm excited to see the results!
I would be interested in this too, as my early childhood (age 3-11) was spent in the San Gabriel Valley (Pasadena), where I attended public schools. I didn't realize we had our own accent...
It's funny to me how saying American English is hard could be understood as an insult. Cantonese speakers love bragging about how hard the language is, so there's a bit of a cultural disconnect for me there
Id say that there is a difference between complexity and inconsistency. When a language is hard because it is complex, we look at that in a positive way. When it's hard because it's inconsistent, we look at that negatively. English is not hard because it's rules are hard. It's hard because you really can't actually learn the rules in an objective way.
Some British people believe that they "own" English and that their version of English is "right" while American English is "wrong." Thus, given that Geoff Lindsey is British, he probably wanted to avoid that sterotype by clarifying that he's not trying to criticize American English, just analyze it. If he had an American accent, I'm guessing he would not have needed to make that disclaimer at the start.
Did not realize how many of these words I habitually pronounce with two different vowels. Both sound right and feel natural in my mouth. "Minute" for example genuinely seems to depend on how fast I want to say the word. "Just a minute" has the "i" and "u" as the same vowel every single time, but "I want to take a minute" has different vowels depending on how fast I say it and in what tone of voice. Wild. Maybe I just can't hear myself properly. I use the big vowel more often for "open", but "open up" wants "above."
To me. Minute and Minute... Minute for me is open and low like bet, but raised in quality, but for quantities . Minute is very closed and uses German ü.
After taking that survey, I realized that sometimes vowel + r makes a diphthong, so r is acting like a vowel just as Dr. Lindsey suggested. Like in "merely", which I pronounce "meeuhr-lee". Other times, the vowel just completely disappears and you just get the r sound, once again acting like a vowel. Like the word "fur". There's nothing but rrr sound after the f, so it seems like it's acting like a vowel. Thanks for the insight!!
Yeah, I'd say 'r' and also 'l' are in an interesting position in most American dialects where they can act as either a vowel or a consonant, depending on position. To me words like "Fail" or "Fall" sound like they have a diphthong as well, With the 'l' acting as the second component of it.
For me and I suspect for many, the pronunciation of the first vowel in "combine" differs depending on whether it's a noun or a verb (from the survey.) You may want to specify this to avoid muddled results. (In case this isn't commonly known in the UK, a "combine" in the US and Canada is a type of large farm tractor. In my accent it rhymes with "bomb".)
Same here (U.S. English). I first read it as a piece of farm equipment as well. Accent on the first syllable. This isn't a super common word, but maybe floating in space my brain tried it as a noun first.
I think that’s true everywhere tbh, I’m English and I say “COM-bine harvester” not “cum-BINE harvester”. The weird thing is in the North of England where many people say “com-BINE” for the verb instead of “cum-BINE”
I'm American and consider the 'ur' in 'turn' to be essentially one sound, with no division between a vowel and consonantal sound. This sound forms the nucleus of many syllables for me, like 'bird', 'skirt', or 'sure'. If you consider it a syllabic consonant, then my pronunciation of the word 'comfortable' ends with essentially a 6-consonant cluster. -mftrbl with the 'r' and 'l' being syllabic with no discernible "vowel" preceding them.
Yeah, Fellow American, I'd definitely agree with this. Honestly I feel like it makes most sense to consider those the same phonemes as /r/ and /l/, But at the same time I feel that they act more like vowels than like consonants.
@ yeah agreed. The 'r' sound above I would classify as a vowel with a strange quality. The 'l' sound I could be convinced is a true syllabic consonant though. The airstream seems significantly more closed off. I would compare the syllabic /n/ at the end of my word 'button' to the /l/ at the end of 'trouble'. They're certainly not the same in terms of their ability to carry the syllable, but similar I think
@ Honestly the main reason I feel it's more reasonable to consider syllabic /l/ as a vowel is how it affects the /t/ and /d/ sounds, I usually pronounce both as a flap when followed by a vowel, But not when followed by a consonant (Where /d/ is a "true 'd'" sound, and /t/ is a glottal stop.), And in both "Water" and "Bottle" I get a flap, but in "Button" it becomes a glottal stop. Interestingly, "Bottle" for me has a flap but "Butler" has a glottal stop, Implying that the /l/ is acting as a vowel in one word and a consonant in the other. Another reason is, Idk, Words like "All" or "Ale" just sound like diphthongs to me, Despite consisting of a pure vowel and an 'l' sound, To me they seem to flow smoothly from one to the other, Rather than have a clear divide between the consonant and the vowel, like in "At" or "An" or "Adage"
Literally two weeks ago I checked to make sure that Penny Exkert was still alive. Didn’t think to check if Bill Labov was as well. What a loss to the sociolinguistics community. He was such an amazing scientist.
I recently watched an American RUclipsr who focuses on problems in the Catholic Church. He kept talking about the "Lady". The Lady this and the Lady that. I was puzzled, wondering, "which lady?" Was he talking about Mary? But that didn't fit the context at all. I suddenly realised that this was his pronunciation of "Laity". (In the Catholic Church, the Laity are church members who are not ordained. This word is pronounced lay-it-y in my Southern English accent.)
As a foreingner I always like these videos because they show that there isn't a singular and perfect way to say a word, so to me knowing that I say a word at least in one of the ways a native person would say it means that my English speaking skills are great
I find it interesting this insistence that one word should have only one pronunciation. And no I am not talking about dialect differences, but I think that if we are honest with ourselves, particularly for native speakers a singular word can have many simultaneous correct pronunciations in our active speech even within the same thought or handful of sentences. For myself I have caught the sounds of "father" varying through four or five iterations seamlessly. This I think goes a long way to explain why so many comments are talking about how difficult the survey is to accurately answer, because we Do Not Have an singular way which we pronounce something.
Yes! As I watch these videos and sound out words to see which pronunciation I use, I often find at least 2 (if not more) that come naturally. I think the single biggest factors are how quickly I’m speaking at the moment and how carefully I’m enunciating. For example, in rapid casual speech I might pronounce “latter” with a tap, but if teaching a class or delivering a speech I would use a clear, non-tapped “t”.
EDIT: Okay everybody needs to actually watch the video all the way through, because I thought I'd take the survey first to not spoil my natural pronunciation first, but man I messed up the entire R section now that I see the whole video and I think I get what he was going for. ***** I'm not sure I quite understood what you meant by "pronounced as two sounds, a vowel followed by -r". I pronounce all the Rs, but I don't separate any of those sounds into two separate sounds, just modify the vowel with the R. I can't imagine anyone actually pronouncing "sorry" like "so-R-y," so I assumed what I do is what you meant, and I just don't know linguistics well enough to get your meaning, and so I answered all those questions as two sounds. Also I should have watched your video all the way through first, because I absolutely do the voiceless-flap double T when I try to enunciate.
I pronounce "sorry" like the sa- from "saw" plus "re", but with the r modifying the proceeding "a" sound. As I think about it, the first syllable of "sorry" is like the versions of "saw" where an "r" gets inserted between the a and w. This "inserted" r sound then gets merged with the r sound at the beginning of the following syllable.
I think I did the 'r' section incorrectly, too, and for the same reason, not wanting to let the video influence my natural inclinations. I was interpreting "one sound" as dropping 'r in a lot of cases, and so said I pronounce those syllables as 2 sounds when that's not really accurate a lot of the time as it should have been interpreted. If it had said "syllables" instead of "sounds" I would have done it just fine.
I don't think the survey questions were necessarily all "do you pronounce the 'R' as its own independent syllable?" but instead "are these sounds part of two different syllables?" because the "R" might be part of the following syllable instead. In some of them, such as your "sorry" example, the survey question underlined the whole "orr" portion of the word. In my pronunciation, it isn't "sor-y", but "so-ry" (or more like "sah-ree"). Same for stuff like "staring" as "sta-ring" and the "arr" in "starring" becomes "star-ring" for me. So at least in my pronunciation the "r" can attach to the following syllable pretty easily for "ing" and some other suffixes.
I switched on CBC radio a week or two ago. They were saying to "google mediaright", they said it twice quite emphatically. I was convinced that was what they said even thought made little sense. It took me a few minutes and a few searches until I realised it was "meteorite" - a Scot
When I'm reading to my kid, I enunciate the hell out of everything to help them learn to spell, but when talking I probably slack off like this. (Central Canadian)
@RealGrouchy When I teach or read to young students in the Toronto area, I will enunciate words carefully. For example, "winter" and "Toronto" get the full T-sound instead of "win(n)er" and "Toronno."
It's a good day when a new Geoff Lindsey video comes out. Just yesterday, I was noticing that it's been a while since I've seen a new linguistics video come out. How come the good linguistics channels I know about all post so infrequently? Aiya I'm also happy to hear CUBE is coming out with American transcriptions! Been waiting for a long time for that!
I'm Torontonian, and 50. Everybody here my age has the stereotypically "Canadian" pronunciation of "sorry", "tomorrow", etc. My daughter is Torontonian, and 15. Neither she nor any of her friends pronounce those words that way. To her, "sorry" is "sari". She still pronounces "orange" and "foreign" the same as me, though.
Orange & foreign have “or” in US accents too except for New York City (all subvarieties). But it’s interesting that you say Canadians are now saying sarry & tomarrow because I (moved to Vancouver a couple years ago after several years in North Carolina) still hear the o-versions all the time. Having said that I have never tried consciously keeping track of the age distribution. I do hear, however, that mum is getting replaced mom in the younger generation of Canadians.
@@samapriyabasu7887_Orange,_ _foreign_ and _Florida,_ with the “starry” vowel, are _real_ New York City markers. New Yorkers will really notice if someone says them the majority US way.
As someone from Toronto, I do notice that younger students with whom I work (I work with) have some different pronunciations. Sometimes, there is a slight vowel shift like "I will sleep in my bad." Some students have "corrected" me on "ə-gayn." To them, it's "ə-gin" with a short-I sound. Thankfully, the students don't have to deal with my former teachers who hwistled at me hwen I said "hwere" incorrectly.
@@samapriyabasu7887As a New Yorker, I'm more likely to refer to the color orange with an "or" especially if it is important to the topic. But the fruit is always more of an ar-ange. Especially in the plural form I have a very hard time saying "or-anges" without feeling very weird.
This has all been very interesting as someone born in Montana, whose parents were texan. Thinking about the ways i say things, but also having heard distinctions i lack in others speech. Something that springs to mind for me, is realizing my speech isnt completely natural. Like, I've been interested in language my whole life, which has led to me making decisions about the way im going to speak. Sometime in highschool, i decided i was going to use the word "soda" even though everyone around me said "pop." And now "soda" is the more natural word for me. Like, affectations have made their way into my speech, some to the point where they are no longer affectations. I think thats probably true for a lot of people with a lifelong interest in language (like many of your viewers probably are.) Its just interesting thinking about the sources of "noise" that will exist in your data. In this case, the people taking your test are biased, in that its more likely they are people interested in languabe, and that has likely affected their speech. Cheers (see! "Cheers" is another thing i affected, until now, where its my natural "goodbye.") Love what you do. Thanks for it.
its really amazing that humans can understand each other at all, considering how mashed and butchered our phonemic flowages are in everyday speech. I was just thinking today about the word i use everday when i am finished in the shower but someone else in my household is using the bathroom: "mmreddagidowp', and somehow no one has had any issue whatsoever understanding that this indicates the sentence: "i'm ready to get out"
Definitely took me more than 20 minutes too (closer to 2 hours as well haha), Likely because I wanted to add notes explaining quirks of my dialect (Like how I pronounce words like "Thing" or "Strength", Or the specific word "Tour") on every page lol.
Thank you for making this video. This video addressed the fact that I wasn’t the only one with questions like these. Also, and I say this someone who considers their accent to fall within the GenAm continuum, that, rest assured, using the term “General American” is just fine.
One thing I found that caught my ear (US, north central) was our kind host's pronunciation of "dictionary" and "inventory". To my ear, he elided a full syllable in a few words. I say dick shun air ee. Our kind host says dick shun ree. In ven toe ree vs. In ven tree. I once remarked in a YT comment about the host's pronunciation of "territory" as teh rih tree. I was fascinated. There is a good sample of words ending with "...ory" (sometimes "...ary") where both sides of the pond ended up with entirely different results, both in pronunciation and syllable count. The cliche example is fascinating - "laboratory". In both pronunciation and syllable stress. lah BOR a tree. LAH bra toh ree.
As a l2 speaker, words like "vegetable" and "refrigerator" were hard to wrap my head around. Where did the part in the middle go? lol Doesn't help when a native speaker tries to explain it, they usually slow down and pronounce each letter as it's written. Refrigerator is still unpronounceable to me, vegetable is easier.
Growing up in the upper Midwest, I got the habit of pronouncing "-tory" and "-tary" as two syllables. In my area, people pronounced "creek" as "crick" and it took me a while to adapt when we moved to the West Coast as a teenager. Another oddity is that I thought that "albeit" was two syllables "all-bite". I still sometimes inadvertently go back to that.
Hi Dr Lindsey - Took the survey, had my mother take it as well - we are separated by 4 decades. Her pronunciations on the final page of the survey were significantly skewed towards the KIT sound, while my younger dialect skewed strongly toward Schwa sounds instead. It was very interesting - she had no idea she was pronouncing words with the KIT sound
FWIW, growing up in Texas as part of gen X, I was actually taught in school there are 44 phonemes in american english and that the word "sure" should rhyme with "sewer" which is absolutely *not* how my peer group spoke growing up.
thank you Dr. Lindsey, Super mega informative, as always. To non-native English speakers, to grasp the notion of a phoneme easier: say, you're a native French, Italian, German, or a Slavic language speaker. And say, there are three people speaking your language: one pronounces the "R" as in Italian or Slavic languages (vibrating the tip of the tongue), the other pronounces it as a uvular R ("throaty", or "guttural" R), and the third one pronounces it as the English "R". You will immediately understand that all three of them are pronouncing an "R", in spite of the fact that they are hugely different in audible sound. This is a phoneme.
I took the survey. Page, I think 7, with the vowel sounds with words with "r" in them almost drove me to tears. I actually cannot tell what vowel sound a word with "r" makes given the two comparative choices lol.
You are not the only one. Most of those were taught to me in school as separate sounds, and I've retained that. There were a lot of "neither" answers for me in that section.
Yeah, it's possible some of those have vowels that aren't a clear match for any of the "normal" vowels that occur in places other than before "r". I just gave whichever of the normal vowels was closer (and in some cases I know the one I chose directly contradicts what dictionary pronunciation guides say, but I think that's because they're wrong, at least about my accent).
You're not alone. That page made me doubt my own sanity. Some of the questions are tough, but that page just made me so miserable trying to complete it and hear reality, and then not seeing any kind of good match for the sound when the same thing felt like it was being asked again and again and again.
Yeah, In a lot of cases for me it was definitely a different vowel from both options phonetically, I picked which one I thought it was phonemically only because I've spent a weirdly large amount of time trying to self-analyse my own idiolect, So I'd already come to the conclusion that the vowel in words like "For" or "Fair" is an allophone of the vowel in words like "Foe" and "Fair", even if it sounds fairly distinct, Because they're in complementary distribution, And more similar to those than to any other vowel.
It's definitely to be appreciated, especially considering that even some linguists still apply those value judgements despite ostensibly knowing better 😅
The P in "speech" is a /p/ sound (not /b/), just like it always is after an S in the English language. /p/ is an allophone of /pʰ/. The reason it sounds like "beach" when you remove the S is simply because /p/ only occurs after an S in the English language, so we naturally interpret it as sounding like a /b/. Ask someone who speaks a language that does contrast /p/ and /b/ (like French), and they should be able to tell you what sound it is. Take the S off of "spa", and they should be able to tell you the sound is /pa/, not /ba/. I speak Mandarin, where there is no voicing, and the distinction is only between /p/ and /pʰ/. And taking the S off of "spa" results in something that sounds the same as Mandarin /pa/, which means dad. It would be even more interesting to ask a speaker of Hindi, where they distinguish aspirated voiced, unaspirated voiced, aspirated unvoiced, and unaspirated unvoiced.
You should actually watch his video on the subject; he actually plays the recordings of the words with their s's taken off and it's remarkable how close unaspirated p t k sound to "voiced" b d g in english, to the point that it could be argued we don't have a voicing distinction at all, instead an aspiration distinction, like Icelandic. English's voicing onset is so late that it might as well not even be there.
@@HubrisInc I have watched that video several times. That's exactly my point! There is no voicing distinction for plosives in English. There are no minimal pairs with /p/ and /b/. They are allophones. You can pronounce "speech" or "beach" with either a /p/ or /b/, and nobody would even notice. It's just that the voiced version would sound more emphatic. Sometimes, some speakers might pronounce a /b/ in the word "speech", but I think the majority of the time it's /p/, unless someone is really emphasizing the word. But like I said, which one you use makes no difference, and nobody would even notice, since English never distinguishes between these two sounds.
My native language is French and I was absolutely blown way by that video. I totally hear beach and door and so on. Though I agree I hear all topia in the dystopia example, no dopia for me. I would not disagree with you though if you claimed that I am just too used to English and that a French person who never heard English would react differently.
The idea that there's a well-defined difference between /b/ and /p/ is a bit of an artifice. The only difference between them is voice-onset time, and the difference in time can differ between languages and is not strictly defined. /b/ and unaspirated /p/ are only differentiated meaningfully if there's a phonemic distinction between them, which there isn't in English. /b/ = /p/
Remember that the "sbeech" sound is based on informal, casual pronunciation. In a different example, I may casually say, "winner" instead of a more formal "winter." "This win[n]er, I will shovel the snow."
In my speech, there are two very distinct r sounds--a light r, formed at the front of the mouth, which is at the beginning of words, and a dark r formed deep in the throat, which is in the middle and at the end of words. In the sentence, "Are you ready?" the first is a dark r, and the second is a light r. I've lived in Texas for 45 years, but I grew up near Memphis, Tennessee. Also, the e in pretty is a different sound from the i in persist. In every instance where that was a choice, I pronounced the vowel like the i in persist.
Love to see the shoutout to pin/pen. It drives me crazy because I cannot understand if you're asking for something to write with or something to fasten fabric with 😂 Once I was on a scratchy landline and someone said a name but I couldn't tell if they were saying Ken, Kim, or Tim. It's a problem!
A couple things to note about the survey: - I know that language is complex, but if it wasn't a uneventful Friday night then I might not have completed it due to how long it is and how carefully I have to listen since my ears just aren't trained for this. Is it possible to break it up into smaller surveys accompanying shorter videos or something? It might help with getting responses. - T's and D's are pronounced the same for me, but I was surprised that there was one exception: center and sender. - I had never noticed how intertwined an R is mixed with its preceding vowel. I was having trouble separating and pronouncing the vowel sound.
This is going to be fun! Love a dialect survey! For some reason, although I have the schwa/kit contrast in unstressed vowels, my accent apparently reverses them in a LOT of words compared to say a Californian. (Or at least, when my phonetics professor (Californian) taught the different weak vowels to us, his examples of kit and schwa were the opposite of mine, but the same as a lot of the Texans in the room. For example, I have circus with a kit vowel but that was his example of one that actually is a schwa.)
I asked Lindsey about schwa/kit earlier, and he said there's a sharp distinction between which words have which in his dialect, and brought up rabbit/abbot. I thought I had a sharp distinction too, but after practicing those words for a couple days I realized that even though "rabbit" has a tendency toward "kit" and "abbott" toward schwa, I say them both ways in both words, and if I heard either one I wouldn't think it was wrong or uncommon. Your dialect may have the opposite of Lindsey's, but more likely I'd guess you interchange them to some extent, but maybe less than I or people in Seattle do.
@@sluggo206 I feel like there's a sharp distinction between the two in my dialect, But which specific words have which is different from standard, Lots of words that dictionaries will tell you have Schwa I pronounce with Kit, However there are a number where I still have Schwa (Which is actually lower than a true schwa, And pronounced the same as the Strut vowel), And some words where both occur in different syllables, Or even distinguished by just the two. To make it even more interesting, Lots of words listed with Kit in the dictionary I actually pronounce with either Dress or Fleece.
@ I may have misunderstood your situation. I thought you were from California, which I'd expect to be close to my dialect. (I lived in San Jose until I was 6, then moved to Seattle in 1972, and one of my parents is from California and the other from Washington.) But maybe you just meant your teacher was from California. Then you may have a non-GA dialect with the distinction. But which vowels you have in which words may be different than in Lindsey's Liverpool background.
@ Oh, I'm not the original guy you were responding to, They might be from California I do not know haha. I myself am from the Midwest. Yeah the vowels in the words definitely are different for me than in a Liverpool accent, I'd describe my dialect as having a "Schwa Split", where the schwa in all positions was either raised and merged with the kit vowel, or was lowered and merged with the strut vowel, though it's not always regular, and because the kit and strut vowel already existed in certain positions (including some unstressed ones) the two remain different phonemes.
@@rateeightx I’m also from the Midwest. I just went to school in Texas and my professor was Californian, so I was the only one in the room with my accent 😅
r mergers in a nutshell: rhotic vowels replace all lax vowels that can precede /r/ "marry" and "merry" change to have the vowel of "mare" "borrow" changes to have the vowel of "bar" "moral" changes to have the vowel of "more" "courier" changes to have either the vowel of "curd" or "tour" "mirror" changes to have the vowel of "mere" "hurry" changes to have the vowel of "her"
Yes but there's more to it too. Some of them map to a non-r-colored vowel: marry/merry/Mary to "bed", "borrow" to "father". But "nurse/hurry" has no non-r-colored counterpart (it sounds like just 'r' alone), and "more/moral" doesn't seem to have one in my dialect: it's not exactly "goat" or "palm", and I can't pronounce it without the r without feeling it's the wrong vowel.
In elementary school we were told -er/ir/ur is pronounced "r" as in "nurse", "-ar" is pronounced a+r, and "-or" is pronounced o+r. They forgot about the i sound in "near", or the e sound in "bear". I only realized that decades later, when I realized they hadn't mentioned an r-rule for them.
Borrow & Moral is interesting, Because I believe they have the same vowel as eachother in British English, And in New York English it generally merged with the 'a' as in "Bar" in all positions, In Canadian English it generally merged with the 'o' as in "More" in all positions, but in most other American dialects it weirdly merged with one in some cases and the other in others, So for example "Sorry" and "Quarry" which rhyme in Britain, New York, and Canada don't rhyme in most of the U.S.
@@sluggo206 As someone who pronounces them all the same, I would _definitely not_ say marry/merry/mary maps to the vowel in "bed", It's the same vowel as "mare", which is itself the same vowel as in "mail" but quite distinct from that in "bed" (which of course is distinct from that in "mail" because "fell" and "fail" sound different.)
I know my time in the Army forever changed the way I speak. I've got chunks of accents I picked up from other Americans, from all over the place, lodged in my mouth.
I missed the last survey, so I'm excited to contribute now! During the survey, I had to double check myself and use words in a sentence to hear my real accent, because I was definitely over-enunciating when I read the word on it's own 😅
Oh, and there's not a specific "educated" dialect like RP, but Americans, back when we only had 4 television channels, had this thing called Newscaster Standard. It's what the news was read in because the majority of people could understand it clearly. Mostly it's Midwestern. You can find old clips of Dan Rather, a Texan, speaking in his native dialect and then compare it to his newscaster voice.
"Newscaster" definitely started as Southern Californian / Hollywood. They're identical. And most Southern Californians are transplants from the Midwest.
I grew up in California from the age of 2 until I was 22, returning to England in 1973. I definitely didn't differentiate between 'cot' and 'caught' as a child/teen/early 20s, but most definitely do pronounce them differently now. I also no longer use the 'flap' in words like 'letter' or 'water', but I still retain the American final 'r' in most single-syllable words like 'bear' and 'war'. In all likelihood, my accent was probably never fully Californian, as my parents are both Londoners, as were my maternal grandparents who also emigrated with us. It will probably never be fully English either LOL. ETA: I once did one of those online tests to determine where you are from based on word usage; I completed the test based on the words I grew up with, rather than the words I now use; the test determined I was from Long Beach, California - about 30 miles from Fullerton, where I lived during those 20 years.
I'm always impressed by how well you do a US accent, so it's notable how wrong your pronunciation of murmur sounds to me. I can somehow hear you saying vowels alongside those Rs, not just R-as-vowel on its own. Such an interesting tiny difference. The survey was a lot of fun! I can tell already that I'm going to spend the next few days or maybe weeks conscious of the subset of my vowels that are Rs.
and it's funny the video has hugh laurie. i watched him in house (great show) and never imagined he wasn't american. but i did notice there was something just a little off about his R's. then i found out he's british and it all made sense.
Trying to pronounce murmur without vowels makes it sound really weird. Like the alien character from Futurama called Lrrrrrr (leader of OMICRON PERSIAE EIGHT!!!).
Er, his US accent is not perfect. He overexaggerates the r's in certain or color. I'm not sure if that's because he doesn't do it often, or if he's intentionally exaggerating it to show a sharp contrast with the non-rhotic version for non-native viewers.
@@sluggo206 I've also noticed his pronunciation of the GOAT vowel isn't quite right, I've heard him pronounce it like [ɔw] or [ow], As it's written in dictionaries, But almost every American I've ever spoken to (As an American myself) says it with a more central vowel like [öw] or [ɵw], Using the fully back vowel sounds like something from Minnesota specifically, Definitely not a general feature.
As someone raised in Arizona, every time I watch one of your videos about I realize that I am not pronouncing anything like I thought I was. It is disconcerting.
The fact that the pin/pen distinction is noted among linguists is so funny to me. My partner and I are both US Americans, but I grew up in the Midwest and he grew up in the South. Once, he was telling me a story involving someone he knew in college who had the nickname "Pen." When I asked him if the name was "pen" or "pin" because I genuinely couldn't tell what he was saying, he insisted that he pronounces the words differently, but I think that he says them exactly the same way. Discovering that the pin/pen merger is a Thing is deeply gratifying
The other pronunciation is like "see-er" but with one syllable. Like how "been" is pronounced "bin" in the US but "bean" in the UK and (parts of?) Canada. I think I've heard some Canadians say the seer pronunciation but I'm not sure.
"Thou shalt not put shwa in a stressed syllable" 😅😂 I cannot speak for other Canadians, but the Montreal anglosphere and Newfinese, the two accents I inherited my accent from, are quite distinct and neither can agree on whether cherub and hubbub sound the same. Story and sorry on the other hand... *gapes in Southern Ontario
18:44 Fun Fact, Canadian Raising isn't the only phenomenon that allows historic /t/ and /d/ to remain distinct between vowels, While it is the most common, Some speakers from New York or Baltimore will also pronounce the /æ/ vowel different in these positions, So "Matter" vs "Madder" or "Latter" vs "Ladder" have the exact same consonants, But are distinguished by the vowels.
A few of the words in the survey threw me off because in my dialect they don't have a vowel sound (or any sound for that matter) in the underlined portion 😂
I recently tried making a chart of minimal pairs of my r coloured vowels in words inspired by a Starkey comic and I ended up with a tangled mess of some words that have variable pronunciation, some that don't, and was able to identify different phones but not able to map which ones are which phonemes. It's a MESS. Sometimes I say "shure" with the same vowel as "poor", which is different from "pour" or "pore", but sometimes I say "shure" with the same vowel as "shirt", but I would always distinguish "poor" from "purr". I, unlike some people, pronounce "gourd" differently from "gored", but it itself might be pronounced with the same vowel as "tour", or the same vowel as "poor", but I don't pronounce those two with the same vowel. There's no consistency.
@@vboyz21 Do realize the language being spoken is Japanese - a language from a country that overwhelmingly uses American English spelling conventions? I'd never correct a Brit for spelling it with an s, but going out of your way to correct someone spelling it with a z is just goofy, especially considering _it's a z noise._
I did the whole survey, but it was a nightmare. Hopefully some technology will be developed so that people can just record themselves saying a list of words, and a computer can automatically figure out what phonemes they used. Or, get a recording and just let a professional linguist (underpaid grad student) do the coding, since they know what they're listening for.
I agree. That said, if they'd started using IPA en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet , I would've ended the survey tout suite! Ain't nobody got time for that!
If for clarity we need to make a minimal pair of latter and ladder, it’s not through phonemes. (Unless you are talking on the phone in a wind tunnel.). But we can use stress. Latter can have a heavy stress on the first syllable. Ladder still has an initial stress, but the contrast is much less prominent.
I took your survey. It actually taught me a lot about my own accent (NYC). One question I always have when hearing of intrusive r is the intrusion of other consonants. My aunts and other women their age (born around the '20s or '30s) would say "I'm gonna go listen to my staw-vrees. (stories, with sto sounding like awe). When I saw the dumb cult movie The Warriors, about gangs in NY, it made me laugh to hear one of the actors, who sounded like he was from Michigan or somewhere, saying "It wasn't us. It was the Warrriorrrs!", when he should have said "It wuzzn' us. It wuz de Waw-vree-izz!" I would love to know about other intrusions in other accents. Again, thanks for the survey and good luck with the dictionary.
Both are flaps for me too (western Pennsylvania.) The vowels differ in that "rider" has more of a dipthong (ah-ee) and thus takes longer to say than "writer" , which for me has the unadorned "i" of "try" or "wry". The difference in vowel quality is quite subtle-it's the differing lengths of time needed to say these words that I notice most.
A fun illustration of the idea that T-flapping is a largely American phenomenon: is there anything in Jim Morrison's vocal delivery to indicate that the Doors' classic tune is not "Writers On the Storm"? On the other hand, when the Beatles sing "Paperback Writer ", it's clear they're not talking about someone going around with a dimestore novel between their legs.
24:12 Wait, wait wait: is the band name 'Linkin Park' supposed to be a play on 'Lincoln Park'? I never realised this! Haha, that's wonderful, the joy of hearing a pun in an accent where it would never even cross my mind!
I think that Lindsey is very right about General American--it is a very real phenomenon. I had the occasion to talk to people from California, Boston, New York, Tennessee, and Louisiana and what struck the Californian and me was the similarity of our accents relative to the people from the other regions. Bostonians had a thick Boston accent, Texans had a thick Texan accent, those from the Gulf area had a thick Southern accent but the Californian and I spoke pretty much alike. I think General American dominates the triangle defined by California, western Pennsylvania, and Washington State and is becoming very influential in the Northeast and South as well. In fact, I once talked to someone from Connecticut who told me that her family spoke General American rather than a New England or New York accent.
I'm taking the survey and comparing with my British partner (who has the slightest th/f lisp), and found a big difference at fought / fort. It sounded like he was saying thought so I made a new sentence with three separate sounds, and lost my mind hearing him say "I thought about how they thought at the thought"
It is interesting. When British people say words like "Taught" or "Saw" it always sounds like "Tort" or "Soar" to me, and it takes a moment to figure out what word they're actually saying. Because of course those examples have the same vowel in most British accents, but toally different ones in most American accents.
This video took me on a journey. But after all that, I think I've definitely arrived at transcribing American phonemes is way harder than general British ones (to my surprise!)
Have you looked at how North Americans have been re-syllabifying some words? I just watched a video where the word "irrational" is emphasized as "ee-rational" instead of "ir-rational", and I've heard "divide" come out as "dee-vide" instead of "div-vide"
I'm in the category of general American English. A few thoughts on the survey. First, it definitely took more than 20 minutes! More like 40 for me. It was so difficult to tell what vowels were in many of them that I had to repeat them many times and practice shifting between the questioned vowel and the answer vowel options, since I can't immediately tell the answer. The pre-R vowels and the million schwas on page 7 were the hardest. Almost all of them were "neither" answers for me. I still don't know what words I would say with the same sound as those vowels, even after all the examples. I would describe the most common one as between tunA and drEss. On many of the pre-R vowels, I wanted an option for "there is no vowel here'"! This reminds me of when my stepson was in first grade, learning phonics. His 3 parents had 3 different accents, and we all pronounced "egg" differently. That was a fun conversation.
22:44 I am very confident that those words are different in my dialect, The 2nd syllable of "Cherub" has the same vowel as the 2nd syllable of "Arid" or "Wanted", while the 2nd syllable of "Hubbub" has the same vowel as its 1st syllable, Which is the same as in words like "Strut", "Comma", or "Up". And I'd say these are different phonemes too, As there are minimal pairs like "Installation" vs "Instillation", or "Roses" vs "Rosa's", not to mention it's not always predictable, For example in both "Cherub" and "Hubbub" the 2nd syllable is unstressed but they're pronounced differently (and no, It's not due to the consonants, As both appear before a /b/ there, And both can appear after an /r/ or a /b/.) And for the following section, About the weak vowel merger, I would generally analyse my dialect as entirely lacking the phoneme /ə/, which has in all positions split and merged with either the vowel in words like "rosEs" (Which is probably itself just an unstressed form of the KIT vowel when not followed by /ŋ), Or with the vowel in words like "strUt" (Which I'd posit as its own phoneme, Usually called /ʌ/, Though /ɐ/ or /ɜ/ is more accurate to how I and most Americans pronounce it.)
It can be difficult to intentionally speak "normally" and to listen to what I am saying. I hope my survey response was somewhere in the vicinity of accurate.
I like that some AE teachers have tried to establish rules like "it is a d between vowels". The resulting pronounciation is good enough to fit easily into conversations. When I have new team members from India (computer cloud services), I like to sit down with them telling them the English stressed vowels should be all rounded. It does not need to perfect but when they pick it up it makes it much easier for the local guys (mostly German and French) to understand them in compound speech. The digitized sound may still be very very different but that doesnt matter - it falls in the same class of a phoneme.
Of course, some California speakers are shifting FLEECE toward Ü, and it's still perceived as the phoneme in "machine". It has been speculated that front-rounded i could fully replace unrounded i in standard English in a hundred years if this trend spreads. It seems to be spreading slowly.
@ speak beer not as /bɪ:ɹ/ but as /biəɹ/ .... and in general i teach them to shift the i to short y sound before the next consonant. E gets mutated to h in the back. Again, it does not need to be perfect or really close to English pronouncation as long as the guys stop simply lengething a flat unstressed vowel.
@@guidodraheim7123 /biəɹ/ may be helpful for L2 education, but I as native GA speaker have always thought of it since childhood as /bɪɹ/. (To use your r; I would write it as /bɪr/.) And no, we don't think of length distinctions. "Short i" and "long i" are the BIT/BITE distinction, not clipped and lengthened.
Quick thoughts: Yep, spelling definitely influences how I perceive the sounds, but /also/, pretty much every word has at least two valid forms: one that you use when speaking quickly or with less care, because you assume other speakers can infer the correct word(s), and one that you use if you're asked to slow down, or are speaking with emphasis (for clarity, emotional impact, persuasion, etc). Both are valid and "correct" forms, just more useful in different contexts. Also re:spelling, it seems like there should be a connection to the importance of phonics in reading instruction (which has more recently come back to public awareness in the U.S., after a somewhat anti-phonics program was pretty widely adopted--see Sold a Story, etc). I can't quite pinpoint what's pinging my brain here, but basically if spelling correctly is important for being able to read, then it makes sense that spelling affects how speakers "hear" different words.
I teach my students to think of flap t/d as a kind of /d/, because if they think of it as a flap, they pronounce it like /r/, which inflects the previous vowel, which totally wrecks their pronunciation.
For the latter-ladder distinction, Ive understood some Americans distinguish them by vowel length. A similar distinction exists for "wedding" (long e, as in "wed") and "wetting" (short e, as in "wet")
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You missed one of the least discussed but most important features of NA English: non-lambdicism. L's at the end of syllables, for the most part disappear. Folk, talk, walk, always, alright, for example, are pronounced without an L sound. Instead, the vowel changes to one that you might not expect it to be. Foke, Tawk, Wauk, O-ways, aw-right.
@ChefSalad This is not specific to AmE though.
Dr Lindsey, the questionnaire doesn't show certain vowel font stylings they show up as boxes with ?
Also would you consider changing the background from a blistering white to something easier on the eyes in the wee hours of the morn?
@@CP-rg5minot only is it not specific to American English but I’d say that the opposite phenomenon (lambdacism?) is a sign of a speaker being American in certain words, though it doesn’t happen in all varieties. For example, I’m British and I don’t say the ‘l’ in ‘folk’ but I know someone living here who’s originally from Oregon who does say it and even uses an odd vowel before the ‘l’ (he says ‘fah-l-k’ rather than ‘foh-l-k’).
Opera is not private and secure please use other browsers
my mouth hurts from sounding everything out in that survey
same
Feel you man
If completing the survey, do it on a laptop rather than on a cellphone/mobile. On a cellphone, some of the answer choices will appear as "s□d" instead of "said."
@michaelbednarski4601 my phone didn't have this issue for whatever reason
@@michaelbednarski4601I had this same issue. Chrome browser on Android. I think it was section 8 of the survey, all the vowels in the selectable options appeared as [?].
There's one tricky question in the survey, on the last page, asking how the "o" in "combine" is pronounced. And it depends, whether it's the verb, meaning to put together, or the noun, meaning a farming vehicle.
Also, I think I was thinking too hard on some of them, and after pronouncing them over and over in my head, they didn't even sound like real words anymore. So I finally just started saying them once or twice, then going with my first impression.
Agreed. Combine as in put together is stressed in the second syllable. Sounds a bit like “come-BYEn.” Whereas the farm instrument has the stress in the first syllable, and a clear short o sound. Very different vowel sound.
They meant the verb. They were asking about unaccented syllables.
@@toomanymarys7355 They both have the same stress for me (on the second syllable), but the first syllable is pronounced differently ("come" versus "comm" = uh versus ah).
@busimagen A combine, the vehicle, has the stress on the first syllable.
@ For me it is on the second.
That last page with /ɪ/ - /ə/ distinctions was _painful._ The "tricky questions" were a relief after that. They certainly weren't _easy,_ but they were _much_ easier than the torture that preceded them.
That was indeed painful. I’ve never had a survey make me question my own native tongue so much.
I struggled so much with this too. Ended up with a lot of 'neither' even though that didn't seem quite right. Feel like a gave a lot of 'wrong' answers.
What did the tricky questions mean? It felt like 2 of the groups were the same group.
@ The "tricky questions" concerned the FLEECE and GOOSE vowels, usually transcribed as /iː/ and /uː/, but that Dr Lindsey transcribes as /ɪj/ and /ʉw/. Essentially asking if the two are monophongs or diphthongs.
Really? That page went super fast for me. I guess my local accent has a very strong distinction between those two sounds. I'd be curious to hear where y'all are from.
The survey was fascinating. I found as a Canadian that I have a bunch of subtle phonemes (mostly dipthongs) that I didn't really realize existed and kind of break the survey by making half the questions "none of the above"
Michigan here, same 😭
Yep, the quiz was almost difficult to complete and I think I made some "mistakes" (different answers for the same sound) a couple times because I kept really trying to shoehorn myself into one instead of just going "nope none of the above".
@@thespanishinquisiton8306 Minnesotan; none of the above was indeed quite common.
US Southerner and also same
Yeah. Michigander going to support that one. Linguistically, I think we're closer to Canadian than American English. Which is hilarious, because based on an old survey done in the '70s or '80s that I used when I was writing a paper on my dialect, other Americans pinpointed us as the most American sounding people.
After taking the survey, I realised how much I often pronounce a combination of vowels followed an r as a single vowel. Great video
A lot of words for me (including “words”) just sound like /wrd/, with “r” essentially being its own vowel (like Dr Lindsey mentions; similar to stereotypical American “err”)
I was finding that I pronounce them very, very similarly but still had some subtle differences in mouth shape... mainly between grouping or/ur together at one sound and then all the rest as a second.
Brilliant! And I love your throw-away comment debunking the supposed psychological reality of phonemes.
RIP Professor Labov. I love the story of him checking rhoticity in New York department stores by asking where to find ladies’ gloves.
I knew I'd find you here! haha
The rhotic section was so weird. I answered “neither” for almost all of them as the r-colored vowels are so incredibly different from their non-r-colored counterparts that it was hard to pick. Also, with the word “lure”, as a verb I pronounce it the same as “fur” with a basic /ɚ/ (which I usually prefer to transcribe as syllabic /ɹ̩̈/) but when used as a noun I pronounce the same as “tour” or “sewer” with the vowel /ʉ͡ɚ ~ ʉ˞/.
Same here. Answered neither for all of them but the words that rhymed with here, seer, etc. I pronounce them with a dipthong but not necessarily two syllables (though you can for emphasis, HEE-ER for here)
Yes--"lure" and similar words are difficult for me to describe and I chose "neither" for most of them. For common words like dURing, I do what you are describing as rhyming with fur, but some words like "tour" might get the "sewer" treatment, sometimes.
I grew up in Missouri and sometimes noticed people pronounced "Missouri" weird on TV, and I couldn't figure out what was weird about it for a while, realizing in my adult like that they were putting an "oor" sound instead of an "er" sound. The fact that I couldn't figure it out suggests to me that "oor" is barely even a sound in my dialect, with words going to "er" or "ore" (and maybe "ewer"?) instead.
yeah the rhotics are so weird. For stuff like "carry" or "story" I would transcribe my own speech with high-mid vowels [eɻ] [oɻ], which isn't quite the same as the diphthongs in "paid" and "load" /eɪ oʊ/
For most of the vowels I only pronounce them slightly r-coloured, But the NEAR vowel is strongly r-coloured for me (Though not as much as actual syllabic /r/ AKA the NURSE vowel), And the FORCE and SQUARE vowels have vowels almost identical to those in "Fold" and "Sail", Respectively, But never appear when not followed by /r/ or /l/. I marked them as the GOAT and FACE vowels though because they're in complimentary distribution so I think it's reasonable to consider them the same phoneme.
AGREED THAT SECTION WAS HORRIBLY WRITTEN IMO
28:55 “The problem is built into phonemicization. It isn’t simply the discovery of reality. It’s the imposition of an alphabetic ideal on speech, which is often not alphabetic.”
This concept fascinates me. There is utility in imposing an alphabetic ideal on speech, but at the edges, it gets complicated. To me, this implies not that the endeavor should be abandoned, but rather a fascinating aspect of the complex nature of reality.
Love it.
The thing with abandoning phonemics is, what do you replace it with? If you go with just phonetics, then everything is different and you can't show the relationships between things, except to the extent they're phonetically close. But phonetically close is not always identical to phonemic category. For instance, Polish (ł) has evolved for most speakers from dark l to w, but in Polish they're one phoneme and in English two. Yet English also has some l-vocalizing tendency: "mall" is at least a weakened l, and in "alm" it's gone for some speakers. The weakening is at least toward w even if it doesn't go all the way. And w and h can also slip into each other. Still, it's useful to say light l and dark l have a closer relationship than w has to l and h, and that's what the /l/ phoneme in English gives you.
Lindsey raises an important point that doesn't get talked about enough, that native speakers don't speak in phoneme units or word units, they speak in longer phrase units. Much of non-academic language learning seems to be memorizing phrases (along with their intonations) you hear, and then repeating them. Words and phonemes are just tools to analyze what they're doing, compare it to other people's speech, and teach spelling to children and English to foreigners.
On American T-flapping: to my midwestern US ear, there's nothing to indicate that The Doors' Jim Morrison is not singing about ""Writers On The Storm". On the other hand, it's quite clear in "Paperback Writer" that the Beatles are not trying to conjure up someone being literally transported (hah!) by a dimestore novel.
Based on some examples from other videos, I think you'd find that if you chopped up that audio to remove context clues they'd suddenly be a lot less distinct.
Really? I think Paul and the other lads' "t" is quite clear. Also , what a great guitar riff! Take a listen:
ruclips.net/video/yYvkICbTZIQ/видео.html
The way the Doors sing it sounds ominous so it connotes the Black Riders in the Lord of the Rings, or maybe the Huns, so that pushes it toward "riders". You don't talk ominously about "writers on the storm". T-flapping is identical to D in my dialect, so if there isn't those contextual clues we often have to repeat the word with a full T to clarify which word it is.
An old movie called Riders on the Range led to people saying Writers on the Range.
Interesting, I'm also from the Midwest, But to me it definitively sounds like "Riders on the Storm" as "Writer" has a different vowel for me (Canadian Raising for the win!). On the other hand, In Weird Al's classic "White & Nerdy", You could easily convince me that he's actually singing "Widen Nerdy", as it has the vowel of "Wide" rather than "White".
In elementary we were taught about "bossy R" that influences the sound before it in er, ar, and or. None of the resulting vowels exist without R in my (cot-caught merged) accent, and it's always been obvious to me (and baffling to ignore) that the sound "er" is a single rhotic sound, not a vowel and a consonant. It'd be lovely to see a dictionary finally get it right.
I haven't heard "bossy R" for a long time. Thanks for that! I don't even remember what exactly they said in the early 70s. I assume it was how ER and OR aren't exactly E+R or O+R, but I don't remember how they said it.
The modern term for those are r-colored vowels (or rhotic vowels).
@Bobbias There's nothing inherently rhotic about /ɔ/, you just won't hear it in a midwest accent without /ɹ/.
Interesting, I also have the cot-caught merger, But the 'ar' sound sounds almost identical to the 'a' sound in words like "Spa" or "Father" to me, Just with an 'r' sound after it. 'or' meanwhile has a vowel that only appears before 'r' and 'l', And 'air' is the same as that.
@rateeightx You know what, I got to thinking that, and I did have something mixed up-at least the part where it actually makes sense. I'm pretty positive "bossy R" was taught for _ar_ but it definitely affects _air_ more.
Edit: when the hell did RUclips stop tagging anyone correctly
Perhaps this will be addressed in the survey, but I audibly said "What? No" to the idea that the merged vowel in marry-merry-Mary is the DRESS vowel. To me, it's clearly [ɛə], identical to the SQUARE vowel, and nearly or fully identical to the broken /æ/ in "man".
Exactly what I was thinking
Yeah, you could really tell the survey was put together by an English person.
i am a confusion... would you agree that "square" rhymes with "where"? or are you perhaps claiming that "square" rhymes with "dare"? or maybe they all rhyme, i don't know you
@@rho-botThey all rhyme
@@rho-bot Square rhymes with dare and where for me, but I wouldn't write it at all as [ɛə]. Square is something like "skwɛjr" for me.
The vowels in marry, merry, Mary, and mare all sound exactly the same when I say them, and none of them has the same vowel as dress.
I love this. These are *so different* in Aus English, and we slap a few extra vowels into the "a" in "Mary" just for good measure. The different directions English-speakers' accents have gone charging off are just wonderful. 😊
@@AD_AP_T It's definitely interesting stuff. Unless I put on an accent, I would never even think about pronouncing them differently, and I'm struggling to come up with any NA accent that does (I imagine one or more exist, but I can't think of them for the life of me).
I believe some accents in northern Maine still maintain the mary-marry-merry differences, but that's about it
That's the merry-marry-Mary merger, which most of the US has. A few regions in the northeast or maybe more generally the east coast don't. There's a video "Demonstration of American Dialects Accents 1958" on Nathan Prescott's channel that has a linguist and three women panelists, and they each say the trio differently, one all the same, another with two the same, another with another two the same, and another all differently.
@@jasonpatterson8091 another one I find quite fun is that I have almost no distinction between "mare" and "mayor", (both sound like "hair", noting I have that Australian non-rhotic "yuh" on the end there), but in at least some N. Am. accents, "mayor" (my "mare" ) has more in common with "mayonnaise" (my "may-naze"). I've legit had trouble communicating with people in the States because of words like these... Though I'm hoping youse's kids apparently all watching Bluey now might help that! 😂
Putting a "ch" sound at the beginning of the word "train" explains why calling the sound made by a steam engine, and therefore one name given to all trains is "Choo-choo train", giving us a satisfying tripple alliteration.
That makes me want to set my teeth on fire...yikes.
I don't say chrain, not even in choo-choo train.
@@Zzyzzyxus Brits do, which is also why we realise the t in "tube" as a "ch"
Choo-choo started at least a century before chrain. It must have been onomatopeic because people said "choo-choo" by itself for the sound. That was probably before they combined it into "choo-choo train".
As someone from a virtually unstudied accent enclave of the US (San Gabriel Valley English, an orphaned Californian variety of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift), I'm excited to see the results!
Sgv has its own accent? Do you have references to this you can cite?
I would be interested in this too, as my early childhood (age 3-11) was spent in the San Gabriel Valley (Pasadena), where I attended public schools. I didn't realize we had our own accent...
@@Jessica_P_Fields i've never noticed an accent with ppl from SGV... i'm from SF bay area...
It's funny to me how saying American English is hard could be understood as an insult. Cantonese speakers love bragging about how hard the language is, so there's a bit of a cultural disconnect for me there
Basically anything could be considered as an insult and "offensive" in the English language, you know, many have been over-sensitive these days...
Id say that there is a difference between complexity and inconsistency. When a language is hard because it is complex, we look at that in a positive way. When it's hard because it's inconsistent, we look at that negatively. English is not hard because it's rules are hard. It's hard because you really can't actually learn the rules in an objective way.
@@alessbritish228 like what you've done just now, or does it not count for some reason?
@jackdaw7792 Huh? I'm just describing, nothing to do with your comment.
Some British people believe that they "own" English and that their version of English is "right" while American English is "wrong." Thus, given that Geoff Lindsey is British, he probably wanted to avoid that sterotype by clarifying that he's not trying to criticize American English, just analyze it. If he had an American accent, I'm guessing he would not have needed to make that disclaimer at the start.
Did not realize how many of these words I habitually pronounce with two different vowels. Both sound right and feel natural in my mouth. "Minute" for example genuinely seems to depend on how fast I want to say the word. "Just a minute" has the "i" and "u" as the same vowel every single time, but "I want to take a minute" has different vowels depending on how fast I say it and in what tone of voice. Wild. Maybe I just can't hear myself properly.
I use the big vowel more often for "open", but "open up" wants "above."
To me. Minute and Minute... Minute for me is open and low like bet, but raised in quality, but for quantities . Minute is very closed and uses German ü.
After taking that survey, I realized that sometimes vowel + r makes a diphthong, so r is acting like a vowel just as Dr. Lindsey suggested. Like in "merely", which I pronounce "meeuhr-lee". Other times, the vowel just completely disappears and you just get the r sound, once again acting like a vowel. Like the word "fur". There's nothing but rrr sound after the f, so it seems like it's acting like a vowel. Thanks for the insight!!
@@MrMont-ue8kh What I thought of is how when you announce "I'M HERE," here often becomes two syllables: he-er
Are you saying you pronounce fur like the beginning of fret or friend? I've never heard anyone say it like fruh.
Yeah, I'd say 'r' and also 'l' are in an interesting position in most American dialects where they can act as either a vowel or a consonant, depending on position. To me words like "Fail" or "Fall" sound like they have a diphthong as well, With the 'l' acting as the second component of it.
For me and I suspect for many, the pronunciation of the first vowel in "combine" differs depending on whether it's a noun or a verb (from the survey.) You may want to specify this to avoid muddled results. (In case this isn't commonly known in the UK, a "combine" in the US and Canada is a type of large farm tractor. In my accent it rhymes with "bomb".)
Same for me (NZ English).
Yeah. It's the difference between cum-bine and com-bine for me.
It's practically a syllabic resonant for me - k'mbaijn.
Same here (U.S. English). I first read it as a piece of farm equipment as well. Accent on the first syllable. This isn't a super common word, but maybe floating in space my brain tried it as a noun first.
I think that’s true everywhere tbh, I’m English and I say “COM-bine harvester” not “cum-BINE harvester”. The weird thing is in the North of England where many people say “com-BINE” for the verb instead of “cum-BINE”
I'm American and consider the 'ur' in 'turn' to be essentially one sound, with no division between a vowel and consonantal sound. This sound forms the nucleus of many syllables for me, like 'bird', 'skirt', or 'sure'.
If you consider it a syllabic consonant, then my pronunciation of the word 'comfortable' ends with essentially a 6-consonant cluster. -mftrbl with the 'r' and 'l' being syllabic with no discernible "vowel" preceding them.
Yeah, Fellow American, I'd definitely agree with this. Honestly I feel like it makes most sense to consider those the same phonemes as /r/ and /l/, But at the same time I feel that they act more like vowels than like consonants.
@ yeah agreed. The 'r' sound above I would classify as a vowel with a strange quality. The 'l' sound I could be convinced is a true syllabic consonant though. The airstream seems significantly more closed off. I would compare the syllabic /n/ at the end of my word 'button' to the /l/ at the end of 'trouble'. They're certainly not the same in terms of their ability to carry the syllable, but similar I think
@ Honestly the main reason I feel it's more reasonable to consider syllabic /l/ as a vowel is how it affects the /t/ and /d/ sounds, I usually pronounce both as a flap when followed by a vowel, But not when followed by a consonant (Where /d/ is a "true 'd'" sound, and /t/ is a glottal stop.), And in both "Water" and "Bottle" I get a flap, but in "Button" it becomes a glottal stop. Interestingly, "Bottle" for me has a flap but "Butler" has a glottal stop, Implying that the /l/ is acting as a vowel in one word and a consonant in the other. Another reason is, Idk, Words like "All" or "Ale" just sound like diphthongs to me, Despite consisting of a pure vowel and an 'l' sound, To me they seem to flow smoothly from one to the other, Rather than have a clear divide between the consonant and the vowel, like in "At" or "An" or "Adage"
Literally two weeks ago I checked to make sure that Penny Exkert was still alive. Didn’t think to check if Bill Labov was as well. What a loss to the sociolinguistics community. He was such an amazing scientist.
I recently watched an American RUclipsr who focuses on problems in the Catholic Church. He kept talking about the "Lady". The Lady this and the Lady that. I was puzzled, wondering, "which lady?" Was he talking about Mary? But that didn't fit the context at all. I suddenly realised that this was his pronunciation of "Laity". (In the Catholic Church, the Laity are church members who are not ordained. This word is pronounced lay-it-y in my Southern English accent.)
As a foreingner I always like these videos because they show that there isn't a singular and perfect way to say a word, so to me knowing that I say a word at least in one of the ways a native person would say it means that my English speaking skills are great
I find it interesting this insistence that one word should have only one pronunciation.
And no I am not talking about dialect differences, but I think that if we are honest with ourselves, particularly for native speakers a singular word can have many simultaneous correct pronunciations in our active speech even within the same thought or handful of sentences. For myself I have caught the sounds of "father" varying through four or five iterations seamlessly.
This I think goes a long way to explain why so many comments are talking about how difficult the survey is to accurately answer, because we Do Not Have an singular way which we pronounce something.
Yes! As I watch these videos and sound out words to see which pronunciation I use, I often find at least 2 (if not more) that come naturally. I think the single biggest factors are how quickly I’m speaking at the moment and how carefully I’m enunciating. For example, in rapid casual speech I might pronounce “latter” with a tap, but if teaching a class or delivering a speech I would use a clear, non-tapped “t”.
EDIT: Okay everybody needs to actually watch the video all the way through, because I thought I'd take the survey first to not spoil my natural pronunciation first, but man I messed up the entire R section now that I see the whole video and I think I get what he was going for.
*****
I'm not sure I quite understood what you meant by "pronounced as two sounds, a vowel followed by -r". I pronounce all the Rs, but I don't separate any of those sounds into two separate sounds, just modify the vowel with the R. I can't imagine anyone actually pronouncing "sorry" like "so-R-y," so I assumed what I do is what you meant, and I just don't know linguistics well enough to get your meaning, and so I answered all those questions as two sounds.
Also I should have watched your video all the way through first, because I absolutely do the voiceless-flap double T when I try to enunciate.
Oh my god I also do a voiceless flap in words like “better” in careful speech too! I didn’t know other people did that!
I pronounce "sorry" like the sa- from "saw" plus "re", but with the r modifying the proceeding "a" sound.
As I think about it, the first syllable of "sorry" is like the versions of "saw" where an "r" gets inserted between the a and w. This "inserted" r sound then gets merged with the r sound at the beginning of the following syllable.
I think I did the 'r' section incorrectly, too, and for the same reason, not wanting to let the video influence my natural inclinations. I was interpreting "one sound" as dropping 'r in a lot of cases, and so said I pronounce those syllables as 2 sounds when that's not really accurate a lot of the time as it should have been interpreted. If it had said "syllables" instead of "sounds" I would have done it just fine.
I don't think the survey questions were necessarily all "do you pronounce the 'R' as its own independent syllable?" but instead "are these sounds part of two different syllables?" because the "R" might be part of the following syllable instead. In some of them, such as your "sorry" example, the survey question underlined the whole "orr" portion of the word. In my pronunciation, it isn't "sor-y", but "so-ry" (or more like "sah-ree"). Same for stuff like "staring" as "sta-ring" and the "arr" in "starring" becomes "star-ring" for me. So at least in my pronunciation the "r" can attach to the following syllable pretty easily for "ing" and some other suffixes.
In this section, I explained at the end that a lot of these words only have the “r” sound without a vowel. These are what I marked as one sound.
I switched on CBC radio a week or two ago. They were saying to "google mediaright", they said it twice quite emphatically. I was convinced that was what they said even thought made little sense. It took me a few minutes and a few searches until I realised it was "meteorite" - a Scot
When I'm reading to my kid, I enunciate the hell out of everything to help them learn to spell, but when talking I probably slack off like this. (Central Canadian)
@RealGrouchy When I teach or read to young students in the Toronto area, I will enunciate words carefully. For example, "winter" and "Toronto" get the full T-sound instead of "win(n)er" and "Toronno."
@@michaelbednarski4601or T’ronna, even.
@@chrisdaignault9845 Some people say Toronto as chraw no
It's a good day when a new Geoff Lindsey video comes out. Just yesterday, I was noticing that it's been a while since I've seen a new linguistics video come out. How come the good linguistics channels I know about all post so infrequently? Aiya
I'm also happy to hear CUBE is coming out with American transcriptions! Been waiting for a long time for that!
I'm Torontonian, and 50. Everybody here my age has the stereotypically "Canadian" pronunciation of "sorry", "tomorrow", etc. My daughter is Torontonian, and 15. Neither she nor any of her friends pronounce those words that way. To her, "sorry" is "sari".
She still pronounces "orange" and "foreign" the same as me, though.
Orange & foreign have “or” in US accents too except for New York City (all subvarieties). But it’s interesting that you say Canadians are now saying sarry & tomarrow because I (moved to Vancouver a couple years ago after several years in North Carolina) still hear the o-versions all the time. Having said that I have never tried consciously keeping track of the age distribution. I do hear, however, that mum is getting replaced mom in the younger generation of Canadians.
@@samapriyabasu7887_Orange,_ _foreign_ and _Florida,_ with the “starry” vowel, are _real_ New York City markers. New Yorkers will really notice if someone says them the majority US way.
@@samapriyabasu7887 I bet he doesn't know that some US accents say oreej. Lol
As someone from Toronto, I do notice that younger students with whom I work (I work with) have some different pronunciations. Sometimes, there is a slight vowel shift like "I will sleep in my bad." Some students have "corrected" me on "ə-gayn." To them, it's "ə-gin" with a short-I sound. Thankfully, the students don't have to deal with my former teachers who hwistled at me hwen I said "hwere" incorrectly.
@@samapriyabasu7887As a New Yorker, I'm more likely to refer to the color orange with an "or" especially if it is important to the topic. But the fruit is always more of an ar-ange. Especially in the plural form I have a very hard time saying "or-anges" without feeling very weird.
This has all been very interesting as someone born in Montana, whose parents were texan. Thinking about the ways i say things, but also having heard distinctions i lack in others speech.
Something that springs to mind for me, is realizing my speech isnt completely natural. Like, I've been interested in language my whole life, which has led to me making decisions about the way im going to speak. Sometime in highschool, i decided i was going to use the word "soda" even though everyone around me said "pop." And now "soda" is the more natural word for me. Like, affectations have made their way into my speech, some to the point where they are no longer affectations. I think thats probably true for a lot of people with a lifelong interest in language (like many of your viewers probably are.) Its just interesting thinking about the sources of "noise" that will exist in your data. In this case, the people taking your test are biased, in that its more likely they are people interested in languabe, and that has likely affected their speech.
Cheers (see! "Cheers" is another thing i affected, until now, where its my natural "goodbye.") Love what you do. Thanks for it.
Great video once more. I loved how you used Superman to give an example for complementary distribution.
its really amazing that humans can understand each other at all, considering how mashed and butchered our phonemic flowages are in everyday speech. I was just thinking today about the word i use everday when i am finished in the shower but someone else in my household is using the bathroom: "mmreddagidowp', and somehow no one has had any issue whatsoever understanding that this indicates the sentence: "i'm ready to get out"
That survey was not 20 minutes... I probably put too much effort into it but that took me 2 hours
😮 thank you. I am forewarned!
Definitely took me more than 20 minutes too (closer to 2 hours as well haha), Likely because I wanted to add notes explaining quirks of my dialect (Like how I pronounce words like "Thing" or "Strength", Or the specific word "Tour") on every page lol.
Thank you for making this video. This video addressed the fact that I wasn’t the only one with questions like these. Also, and I say this someone who considers their accent to fall within the GenAm continuum, that, rest assured, using the term “General American” is just fine.
One thing I found that caught my ear (US, north central) was our kind host's pronunciation of "dictionary" and "inventory".
To my ear, he elided a full syllable in a few words. I say dick shun air ee. Our kind host says dick shun ree. In ven toe ree vs. In ven tree.
I once remarked in a YT comment about the host's pronunciation of "territory" as teh rih tree. I was fascinated.
There is a good sample of words ending with "...ory" (sometimes "...ary") where both sides of the pond ended up with entirely different results, both in pronunciation and syllable count.
The cliche example is fascinating - "laboratory". In both pronunciation and syllable stress. lah BOR a tree. LAH bra toh ree.
If carpentry is what carpenters do, is dictionry what people who study diction do? And is inventry the chief occupation of inventors?
As a l2 speaker, words like "vegetable" and "refrigerator" were hard to wrap my head around. Where did the part in the middle go? lol Doesn't help when a native speaker tries to explain it, they usually slow down and pronounce each letter as it's written. Refrigerator is still unpronounceable to me, vegetable is easier.
I pronounce those words the same as you, but I'd move the r to the prior syllable or add a new r.
Growing up in the upper Midwest, I got the habit of pronouncing "-tory" and "-tary" as two syllables. In my area, people pronounced "creek" as "crick" and it took me a while to adapt when we moved to the West Coast as a teenager. Another oddity is that I thought that "albeit" was two syllables "all-bite". I still sometimes inadvertently go back to that.
huh... I'm more used to LAB-ruh-tor-ee or at least la-BOR-a-tor-ee.
Hi Dr Lindsey - Took the survey, had my mother take it as well - we are separated by 4 decades. Her pronunciations on the final page of the survey were significantly skewed towards the KIT sound, while my younger dialect skewed strongly toward Schwa sounds instead. It was very interesting - she had no idea she was pronouncing words with the KIT sound
FWIW, growing up in Texas as part of gen X, I was actually taught in school there are 44 phonemes in american english and that the word "sure" should rhyme with "sewer" which is absolutely *not* how my peer group spoke growing up.
thank you Dr. Lindsey, Super mega informative, as always.
To non-native English speakers, to grasp the notion of a phoneme easier: say, you're a native French, Italian, German, or a Slavic language speaker. And say, there are three people speaking your language: one pronounces the "R" as in Italian or Slavic languages (vibrating the tip of the tongue), the other pronounces it as a uvular R ("throaty", or "guttural" R), and the third one pronounces it as the English "R". You will immediately understand that all three of them are pronouncing an "R", in spite of the fact that they are hugely different in audible sound. This is a phoneme.
So much fun to think about! The survey was fun too.
I took the survey.
Page, I think 7, with the vowel sounds with words with "r" in them almost drove me to tears. I actually cannot tell what vowel sound a word with "r" makes given the two comparative choices lol.
You are not the only one. Most of those were taught to me in school as separate sounds, and I've retained that. There were a lot of "neither" answers for me in that section.
Yeah, it's possible some of those have vowels that aren't a clear match for any of the "normal" vowels that occur in places other than before "r". I just gave whichever of the normal vowels was closer (and in some cases I know the one I chose directly contradicts what dictionary pronunciation guides say, but I think that's because they're wrong, at least about my accent).
The survey is very difficult. To say it plainly: It caused my brain to become transformed into mush.
You're not alone. That page made me doubt my own sanity. Some of the questions are tough, but that page just made me so miserable trying to complete it and hear reality, and then not seeing any kind of good match for the sound when the same thing felt like it was being asked again and again and again.
Yeah, In a lot of cases for me it was definitely a different vowel from both options phonetically, I picked which one I thought it was phonemically only because I've spent a weirdly large amount of time trying to self-analyse my own idiolect, So I'd already come to the conclusion that the vowel in words like "For" or "Fair" is an allophone of the vowel in words like "Foe" and "Fair", even if it sounds fairly distinct, Because they're in complementary distribution, And more similar to those than to any other vowel.
Your videos are always very interesting, and (as a non-linguist) I appreciate the fact that you don't apply value judgments to different accents.
It's definitely to be appreciated, especially considering that even some linguists still apply those value judgements despite ostensibly knowing better 😅
That survey was tough!
The P in "speech" is a /p/ sound (not /b/), just like it always is after an S in the English language. /p/ is an allophone of /pʰ/. The reason it sounds like "beach" when you remove the S is simply because /p/ only occurs after an S in the English language, so we naturally interpret it as sounding like a /b/. Ask someone who speaks a language that does contrast /p/ and /b/ (like French), and they should be able to tell you what sound it is. Take the S off of "spa", and they should be able to tell you the sound is /pa/, not /ba/. I speak Mandarin, where there is no voicing, and the distinction is only between /p/ and /pʰ/. And taking the S off of "spa" results in something that sounds the same as Mandarin /pa/, which means dad. It would be even more interesting to ask a speaker of Hindi, where they distinguish aspirated voiced, unaspirated voiced, aspirated unvoiced, and unaspirated unvoiced.
You should actually watch his video on the subject; he actually plays the recordings of the words with their s's taken off and it's remarkable how close unaspirated p t k sound to "voiced" b d g in english, to the point that it could be argued we don't have a voicing distinction at all, instead an aspiration distinction, like Icelandic. English's voicing onset is so late that it might as well not even be there.
@@HubrisInc I have watched that video several times. That's exactly my point! There is no voicing distinction for plosives in English. There are no minimal pairs with /p/ and /b/. They are allophones. You can pronounce "speech" or "beach" with either a /p/ or /b/, and nobody would even notice. It's just that the voiced version would sound more emphatic. Sometimes, some speakers might pronounce a /b/ in the word "speech", but I think the majority of the time it's /p/, unless someone is really emphasizing the word. But like I said, which one you use makes no difference, and nobody would even notice, since English never distinguishes between these two sounds.
My native language is French and I was absolutely blown way by that video. I totally hear beach and door and so on. Though I agree I hear all topia in the dystopia example, no dopia for me. I would not disagree with you though if you claimed that I am just too used to English and that a French person who never heard English would react differently.
The idea that there's a well-defined difference between /b/ and /p/ is a bit of an artifice. The only difference between them is voice-onset time, and the difference in time can differ between languages and is not strictly defined. /b/ and unaspirated /p/ are only differentiated meaningfully if there's a phonemic distinction between them, which there isn't in English. /b/ = /p/
Remember that the "sbeech" sound is based on informal, casual pronunciation. In a different example, I may casually say, "winner" instead of a more formal "winter."
"This win[n]er, I will shovel the snow."
I'm so glad you took the time to explain all that in 16:00
In my speech, there are two very distinct r sounds--a light r, formed at the front of the mouth, which is at the beginning of words, and a dark r formed deep in the throat, which is in the middle and at the end of words. In the sentence, "Are you ready?" the first is a dark r, and the second is a light r. I've lived in Texas for 45 years, but I grew up near Memphis, Tennessee.
Also, the e in pretty is a different sound from the i in persist. In every instance where that was a choice, I pronounced the vowel like the i in persist.
Always interesting videos, Dr Lindsey. I completed the survey prior to watching this video.
Labov is really gonna be missed. Such an amazing linguist and person.
Sax of course changed to ... Six... Who would have anticipated anything else? Certainly not me 😅
🤷🏻♂️
Love to see the shoutout to pin/pen. It drives me crazy because I cannot understand if you're asking for something to write with or something to fasten fabric with 😂
Once I was on a scratchy landline and someone said a name but I couldn't tell if they were saying Ken, Kim, or Tim. It's a problem!
Survey complete, sir! It's the least I could do, for all you've taught me.
A couple things to note about the survey:
- I know that language is complex, but if it wasn't a uneventful Friday night then I might not have completed it due to how long it is and how carefully I have to listen since my ears just aren't trained for this. Is it possible to break it up into smaller surveys accompanying shorter videos or something? It might help with getting responses.
- T's and D's are pronounced the same for me, but I was surprised that there was one exception: center and sender.
- I had never noticed how intertwined an R is mixed with its preceding vowel. I was having trouble separating and pronouncing the vowel sound.
This is going to be fun! Love a dialect survey!
For some reason, although I have the schwa/kit contrast in unstressed vowels, my accent apparently reverses them in a LOT of words compared to say a Californian. (Or at least, when my phonetics professor (Californian) taught the different weak vowels to us, his examples of kit and schwa were the opposite of mine, but the same as a lot of the Texans in the room. For example, I have circus with a kit vowel but that was his example of one that actually is a schwa.)
I asked Lindsey about schwa/kit earlier, and he said there's a sharp distinction between which words have which in his dialect, and brought up rabbit/abbot. I thought I had a sharp distinction too, but after practicing those words for a couple days I realized that even though "rabbit" has a tendency toward "kit" and "abbott" toward schwa, I say them both ways in both words, and if I heard either one I wouldn't think it was wrong or uncommon. Your dialect may have the opposite of Lindsey's, but more likely I'd guess you interchange them to some extent, but maybe less than I or people in Seattle do.
@@sluggo206 I feel like there's a sharp distinction between the two in my dialect, But which specific words have which is different from standard, Lots of words that dictionaries will tell you have Schwa I pronounce with Kit, However there are a number where I still have Schwa (Which is actually lower than a true schwa, And pronounced the same as the Strut vowel), And some words where both occur in different syllables, Or even distinguished by just the two. To make it even more interesting, Lots of words listed with Kit in the dictionary I actually pronounce with either Dress or Fleece.
@ I may have misunderstood your situation. I thought you were from California, which I'd expect to be close to my dialect. (I lived in San Jose until I was 6, then moved to Seattle in 1972, and one of my parents is from California and the other from Washington.) But maybe you just meant your teacher was from California. Then you may have a non-GA dialect with the distinction. But which vowels you have in which words may be different than in Lindsey's Liverpool background.
@ Oh, I'm not the original guy you were responding to, They might be from California I do not know haha. I myself am from the Midwest.
Yeah the vowels in the words definitely are different for me than in a Liverpool accent, I'd describe my dialect as having a "Schwa Split", where the schwa in all positions was either raised and merged with the kit vowel, or was lowered and merged with the strut vowel, though it's not always regular, and because the kit and strut vowel already existed in certain positions (including some unstressed ones) the two remain different phonemes.
@@rateeightx I’m also from the Midwest. I just went to school in Texas and my professor was Californian, so I was the only one in the room with my accent 😅
r mergers in a nutshell: rhotic vowels replace all lax vowels that can precede /r/
"marry" and "merry" change to have the vowel of "mare"
"borrow" changes to have the vowel of "bar"
"moral" changes to have the vowel of "more"
"courier" changes to have either the vowel of "curd" or "tour"
"mirror" changes to have the vowel of "mere"
"hurry" changes to have the vowel of "her"
Yes but there's more to it too. Some of them map to a non-r-colored vowel: marry/merry/Mary to "bed", "borrow" to "father". But "nurse/hurry" has no non-r-colored counterpart (it sounds like just 'r' alone), and "more/moral" doesn't seem to have one in my dialect: it's not exactly "goat" or "palm", and I can't pronounce it without the r without feeling it's the wrong vowel.
In elementary school we were told -er/ir/ur is pronounced "r" as in "nurse", "-ar" is pronounced a+r, and "-or" is pronounced o+r. They forgot about the i sound in "near", or the e sound in "bear". I only realized that decades later, when I realized they hadn't mentioned an r-rule for them.
Borrow & Moral is interesting, Because I believe they have the same vowel as eachother in British English, And in New York English it generally merged with the 'a' as in "Bar" in all positions, In Canadian English it generally merged with the 'o' as in "More" in all positions, but in most other American dialects it weirdly merged with one in some cases and the other in others, So for example "Sorry" and "Quarry" which rhyme in Britain, New York, and Canada don't rhyme in most of the U.S.
@@sluggo206 As someone who pronounces them all the same, I would _definitely not_ say marry/merry/mary maps to the vowel in "bed", It's the same vowel as "mare", which is itself the same vowel as in "mail" but quite distinct from that in "bed" (which of course is distinct from that in "mail" because "fell" and "fail" sound different.)
Just filled out the survey. Can't wait to see what you do with the data!
I love how much of this video is a plug for the reboot of CUBE. you should be proud of the work you put into it!!! cube kicks ass
Can you please post an analysis of the survey results at some point?
I'm pretty sure they'll publish a paper about it- that's what researchers do!
I know my time in the Army forever changed the way I speak. I've got chunks of accents I picked up from other Americans, from all over the place, lodged in my mouth.
I missed the last survey, so I'm excited to contribute now! During the survey, I had to double check myself and use words in a sentence to hear my real accent, because I was definitely over-enunciating when I read the word on it's own 😅
Oh, and there's not a specific "educated" dialect like RP, but Americans, back when we only had 4 television channels, had this thing called Newscaster Standard. It's what the news was read in because the majority of people could understand it clearly. Mostly it's Midwestern. You can find old clips of Dan Rather, a Texan, speaking in his native dialect and then compare it to his newscaster voice.
"Newscaster" definitely started as Southern Californian / Hollywood. They're identical. And most Southern Californians are transplants from the Midwest.
I grew up in California from the age of 2 until I was 22, returning to England in 1973. I definitely didn't differentiate between 'cot' and 'caught' as a child/teen/early 20s, but most definitely do pronounce them differently now. I also no longer use the 'flap' in words like 'letter' or 'water', but I still retain the American final 'r' in most single-syllable words like 'bear' and 'war'. In all likelihood, my accent was probably never fully Californian, as my parents are both Londoners, as were my maternal grandparents who also emigrated with us. It will probably never be fully English either LOL.
ETA: I once did one of those online tests to determine where you are from based on word usage; I completed the test based on the words I grew up with, rather than the words I now use; the test determined I was from Long Beach, California - about 30 miles from Fullerton, where I lived during those 20 years.
Another brilliant video from Geoff Lindsey! Thanks!
I'm happy I can distinguish between Lennon and Lenin :)
Even people who generally have the merger often distinguish Lennon and Lenin. John Lennon is "nun", while Vladimir Lenin is "nin".
@@sluggo206 A lot of people don't care and just say "in" for any word that that ends in a vowel and N.
ex. American, Regan, Lemon, Britain, Karen
I'm always impressed by how well you do a US accent, so it's notable how wrong your pronunciation of murmur sounds to me. I can somehow hear you saying vowels alongside those Rs, not just R-as-vowel on its own. Such an interesting tiny difference. The survey was a lot of fun! I can tell already that I'm going to spend the next few days or maybe weeks conscious of the subset of my vowels that are Rs.
and it's funny the video has hugh laurie. i watched him in house (great show) and never imagined he wasn't american. but i did notice there was something just a little off about his R's. then i found out he's british and it all made sense.
Trying to pronounce murmur without vowels makes it sound really weird. Like the alien character from Futurama called Lrrrrrr (leader of OMICRON PERSIAE EIGHT!!!).
Er, his US accent is not perfect. He overexaggerates the r's in certain or color. I'm not sure if that's because he doesn't do it often, or if he's intentionally exaggerating it to show a sharp contrast with the non-rhotic version for non-native viewers.
@@sluggo206 I've also noticed his pronunciation of the GOAT vowel isn't quite right, I've heard him pronounce it like [ɔw] or [ow], As it's written in dictionaries, But almost every American I've ever spoken to (As an American myself) says it with a more central vowel like [öw] or [ɵw], Using the fully back vowel sounds like something from Minnesota specifically, Definitely not a general feature.
As someone raised in Arizona, every time I watch one of your videos about I realize that I am not pronouncing anything like I thought I was. It is disconcerting.
The fact that the pin/pen distinction is noted among linguists is so funny to me. My partner and I are both US Americans, but I grew up in the Midwest and he grew up in the South. Once, he was telling me a story involving someone he knew in college who had the nickname "Pen." When I asked him if the name was "pen" or "pin" because I genuinely couldn't tell what he was saying, he insisted that he pronounces the words differently, but I think that he says them exactly the same way. Discovering that the pin/pen merger is a Thing is deeply gratifying
Western Canadian English speaker: I certainly pronounce "near" to rhyme with "ear".
Does anyone not?
@artugert Lindsey asked about it in the video.
The other pronunciation is like "see-er" but with one syllable. Like how "been" is pronounced "bin" in the US but "bean" in the UK and (parts of?) Canada. I think I've heard some Canadians say the seer pronunciation but I'm not sure.
Yep, and tear. But not tear, because that rhymes with fare, and fair. But not lair. That goes with layer. Prayer could go either way.
@@chrisdaignault9845 At least got me, prayer had two syllables, at least if I'm not speaking in a hurriedly.
I do love that something as subjective as accents must succumb to the power of the scientific method
"Thou shalt not put shwa in a stressed syllable" 😅😂 I cannot speak for other Canadians, but the Montreal anglosphere and Newfinese, the two accents I inherited my accent from, are quite distinct and neither can agree on whether cherub and hubbub sound the same. Story and sorry on the other hand... *gapes in Southern Ontario
18:44 Fun Fact, Canadian Raising isn't the only phenomenon that allows historic /t/ and /d/ to remain distinct between vowels, While it is the most common, Some speakers from New York or Baltimore will also pronounce the /æ/ vowel different in these positions, So "Matter" vs "Madder" or "Latter" vs "Ladder" have the exact same consonants, But are distinguished by the vowels.
Filling out that survey made me realize just how many syllabic resonants my accent has.
aww yeah, finally on time to do a survey!
A few of the words in the survey threw me off because in my dialect they don't have a vowel sound (or any sound for that matter) in the underlined portion 😂
I recently tried making a chart of minimal pairs of my r coloured vowels in words inspired by a Starkey comic and I ended up with a tangled mess of some words that have variable pronunciation, some that don't, and was able to identify different phones but not able to map which ones are which phonemes. It's a MESS. Sometimes I say "shure" with the same vowel as "poor", which is different from "pour" or "pore", but sometimes I say "shure" with the same vowel as "shirt", but I would always distinguish "poor" from "purr". I, unlike some people, pronounce "gourd" differently from "gored", but it itself might be pronounced with the same vowel as "tour", or the same vowel as "poor", but I don't pronounce those two with the same vowel. There's no consistency.
I did the survey! The last couple pages were really difficult though.
Thanks for addressing this! I was finally early to a video, so I got the chance to fill out the survey
音声合成ソフト（vocal synthesizer）を使用して英語の音声を作成する際、発音記号の仕様に悩まされることが多くあります。
英語の音声合成は一般米語（General American）を前提として発達してきたため、たとえばR性母音（r-coloured vowels）の記述に曖昧さがあって、意図しない発音になることがあるのです。
*synthesiser
@@vboyz21 No, synthesizer. It should be a z, not s.
@@smergthedargon8974 only in yank is it with a z, in English it's with an S always. Z isn't used as much in English as in yank.
@@vboyz21 Do realize the language being spoken is Japanese - a language from a country that overwhelmingly uses American English spelling conventions? I'd never correct a Brit for spelling it with an s, but going out of your way to correct someone spelling it with a z is just goofy, especially considering _it's a z noise._
@@vboyz21 synthesizer の英式綴りに synthesiser があること自体は把握していたので軽く下調べをしましたが、（日本で入手できる範囲では）イングランドやスコットランドで刊行された辞書でも「synthesizer, also synthesiser」というような記述があるのが精々なので、英式綴りでも synthesiser という綴りがそれほど支配的だとは思われません
I did the whole survey, but it was a nightmare. Hopefully some technology will be developed so that people can just record themselves saying a list of words, and a computer can automatically figure out what phonemes they used. Or, get a recording and just let a professional linguist (underpaid grad student) do the coding, since they know what they're listening for.
I agree. That said, if they'd started using IPA en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet , I would've ended the survey tout suite! Ain't nobody got time for that!
I realized while doing your survey that depending on the listener my accent and pronunciation changes.
If for clarity we need to make a minimal pair of latter and ladder, it’s not through phonemes. (Unless you are talking on the phone in a wind tunnel.). But we can use stress. Latter can have a heavy stress on the first syllable. Ladder still has an initial stress, but the contrast is much less prominent.
city list is missing San Jose, California (population ~1M)
Looked for it too, put Santa Clara instead
I took your survey. It actually taught me a lot about my own accent (NYC). One question I always have when hearing of intrusive r is the intrusion of other consonants. My aunts and other women their age (born around the '20s or '30s) would say "I'm gonna go listen to my staw-vrees. (stories, with sto sounding like awe). When I saw the dumb cult movie The Warriors, about gangs in NY, it made me laugh to hear one of the actors, who sounded like he was from Michigan or somewhere, saying "It wasn't us. It was the Warrriorrrs!", when he should have said "It wuzzn' us. It wuz de Waw-vree-izz!" I would love to know about other intrusions in other accents.
Again, thanks for the survey and good luck with the dictionary.
Rider and writer both have flaps.
But rider has a “pure” I diphthong: AH-EE. Writer has a lower one: schwa-EE
Exactly! The contrast is in the vowel.
This only happens if you have "Canadian raising" look it up
You mean for YOU it does. For me, those are pronounced exactly the same.
Both are flaps for me too (western Pennsylvania.) The vowels differ in that "rider" has more of a dipthong (ah-ee) and thus takes longer to say than "writer" , which for me has the unadorned "i" of "try" or "wry". The difference in vowel quality is quite subtle-it's the differing lengths of time needed to say these words that I notice most.
A fun illustration of the idea that T-flapping is a largely American phenomenon: is there anything in Jim Morrison's vocal delivery to indicate that the Doors' classic tune is not "Writers On the Storm"? On the other hand, when the Beatles sing "Paperback Writer ", it's clear they're not talking about someone going around with a dimestore novel between their legs.
24:12 Wait, wait wait: is the band name 'Linkin Park' supposed to be a play on 'Lincoln Park'? I never realised this! Haha, that's wonderful, the joy of hearing a pun in an accent where it would never even cross my mind!
Yes. Also, they often re-title remix tracks with deliberate misspellings of the titles of the source tracks.
I say "Lincoln" with schwa. (Pacific NW) "Linkin Park" is a different pronunciation in only that phrase.
I think that Lindsey is very right about General American--it is a very real phenomenon. I had the occasion to talk to people from California, Boston, New York, Tennessee, and Louisiana and what struck the Californian and me was the similarity of our accents relative to the people from the other regions. Bostonians had a thick Boston accent, Texans had a thick Texan accent, those from the Gulf area had a thick Southern accent but the Californian and I spoke pretty much alike. I think General American dominates the triangle defined by California, western Pennsylvania, and Washington State and is becoming very influential in the Northeast and South as well. In fact, I once talked to someone from Connecticut who told me that her family spoke General American rather than a New England or New York accent.
I'm taking the survey and comparing with my British partner (who has the slightest th/f lisp), and found a big difference at fought / fort. It sounded like he was saying thought so I made a new sentence with three separate sounds, and lost my mind hearing him say "I thought about how they thought at the thought"
It is interesting. When British people say words like "Taught" or "Saw" it always sounds like "Tort" or "Soar" to me, and it takes a moment to figure out what word they're actually saying. Because of course those examples have the same vowel in most British accents, but toally different ones in most American accents.
This video took me on a journey. But after all that, I think I've definitely arrived at transcribing American phonemes is way harder than general British ones (to my surprise!)
Mrrmrr is what murmuring sounds like
Dont forget to check your appearance in a myrrr before you go out 😂
I can't understand you because you're mrrmrring.
@@jgreen2015 A mere "er"!
Your videos are always perfect
It’s always bedazzling to know that Anglophones hear p^h as p, and p as b, and say things like backround for example
Have you looked at how North Americans have been re-syllabifying some words? I just watched a video where the word "irrational" is emphasized as "ee-rational" instead of "ir-rational", and I've heard "divide" come out as "dee-vide" instead of "div-vide"
I'm in the category of general American English. A few thoughts on the survey. First, it definitely took more than 20 minutes! More like 40 for me. It was so difficult to tell what vowels were in many of them that I had to repeat them many times and practice shifting between the questioned vowel and the answer vowel options, since I can't immediately tell the answer. The pre-R vowels and the million schwas on page 7 were the hardest. Almost all of them were "neither" answers for me. I still don't know what words I would say with the same sound as those vowels, even after all the examples. I would describe the most common one as between tunA and drEss. On many of the pre-R vowels, I wanted an option for "there is no vowel here'"! This reminds me of when my stepson was in first grade, learning phonics. His 3 parents had 3 different accents, and we all pronounced "egg" differently. That was a fun conversation.
22:44 I am very confident that those words are different in my dialect, The 2nd syllable of "Cherub" has the same vowel as the 2nd syllable of "Arid" or "Wanted", while the 2nd syllable of "Hubbub" has the same vowel as its 1st syllable, Which is the same as in words like "Strut", "Comma", or "Up". And I'd say these are different phonemes too, As there are minimal pairs like "Installation" vs "Instillation", or "Roses" vs "Rosa's", not to mention it's not always predictable, For example in both "Cherub" and "Hubbub" the 2nd syllable is unstressed but they're pronounced differently (and no, It's not due to the consonants, As both appear before a /b/ there, And both can appear after an /r/ or a /b/.)
And for the following section, About the weak vowel merger, I would generally analyse my dialect as entirely lacking the phoneme /ə/, which has in all positions split and merged with either the vowel in words like "rosEs" (Which is probably itself just an unstressed form of the KIT vowel when not followed by /ŋ), Or with the vowel in words like "strUt" (Which I'd posit as its own phoneme, Usually called /ʌ/, Though /ɐ/ or /ɜ/ is more accurate to how I and most Americans pronounce it.)
Is anyone else singing “I’ll always feel merry when I marry Mary Mac”?
(Search for Great Big Sea’s version, and I dare you to try and sing along 😂)
It can be difficult to intentionally speak "normally" and to listen to what I am saying. I hope my survey response was somewhere in the vicinity of accurate.
I like that some AE teachers have tried to establish rules like "it is a d between vowels". The resulting pronounciation is good enough to fit easily into conversations. When I have new team members from India (computer cloud services), I like to sit down with them telling them the English stressed vowels should be all rounded. It does not need to perfect but when they pick it up it makes it much easier for the local guys (mostly German and French) to understand them in compound speech. The digitized sound may still be very very different but that doesnt matter - it falls in the same class of a phoneme.
E and I can be rounded without sounding like German Ö or Ü?
Of course, some California speakers are shifting FLEECE toward Ü, and it's still perceived as the phoneme in "machine". It has been speculated that front-rounded i could fully replace unrounded i in standard English in a hundred years if this trend spreads. It seems to be spreading slowly.
@ speak beer not as /bɪ:ɹ/ but as /biəɹ/ .... and in general i teach them to shift the i to short y sound before the next consonant. E gets mutated to h in the back. Again, it does not need to be perfect or really close to English pronouncation as long as the guys stop simply lengething a flat unstressed vowel.
@@guidodraheim7123 /biəɹ/ may be helpful for L2 education, but I as native GA speaker have always thought of it since childhood as /bɪɹ/. (To use your r; I would write it as /bɪr/.) And no, we don't think of length distinctions. "Short i" and "long i" are the BIT/BITE distinction, not clipped and lengthened.
Quick thoughts:
Yep, spelling definitely influences how I perceive the sounds, but /also/, pretty much every word has at least two valid forms: one that you use when speaking quickly or with less care, because you assume other speakers can infer the correct word(s), and one that you use if you're asked to slow down, or are speaking with emphasis (for clarity, emotional impact, persuasion, etc). Both are valid and "correct" forms, just more useful in different contexts.
Also re:spelling, it seems like there should be a connection to the importance of phonics in reading instruction (which has more recently come back to public awareness in the U.S., after a somewhat anti-phonics program was pretty widely adopted--see Sold a Story, etc). I can't quite pinpoint what's pinging my brain here, but basically if spelling correctly is important for being able to read, then it makes sense that spelling affects how speakers "hear" different words.
How to get a crash course in English phonetics and phonology. Excellent work summarizing so much content in just half an hour. 😅😊
I teach my students to think of flap t/d as a kind of /d/, because if they think of it as a flap, they pronounce it like /r/, which inflects the previous vowel, which totally wrecks their pronunciation.
I'll do the surveys when I'm not so stoned.
XD
Great survey!
For the latter-ladder distinction, Ive understood some Americans distinguish them by vowel length. A similar distinction exists for "wedding" (long e, as in "wed") and "wetting" (short e, as in "wet")