Dialect Fail in the NYT

Today's NYT includes a genuinely dismal article on faking a British accent. First off, there are approximately a zillion British accents; the article is about a particular flavor of English accent, known as Received Pronunciation or RP. Except it's NOT about RP. Americans do not need to exercise their tongue tips, folks. Your tongue tip is not lazy. I suspect that the dialect coach they're quoting is the lazy one, because she was not paying attention in whatever phonetics classes she took before she hung out her shingle.

It's true that an American who says "butter" in England will immediately identify herself as American. This has nothing to do with a lazy tongue tip, however. In the US and Canada we turn /t/ and /d/ into a related but distinct sound, called an alveolar flap, in predictable contexts. We don't interrupt the flow of air for as long a time, and we keep the vocal folds vibrating. This is why "writing" and "riding" are practically homonymous in American English, except for a tiny difference in the duration of the vowel.

This is a quirky thing to do. To speakers of other English dialects, it's as weird as pronouncing nickel and niggle in the same way. If you want to sound like an RP speaker, you must eradicate all of your alveolar flaps. But you are never going to learn to do that by practicing the sentences in the NYT article, where you're drilling /t/ in initial position. I am willing to wager that your initial /t/ is 100% fine -- indistinguishable, in fact, from the Queen's own initial /t/. Instead you need to practice intervocalic /t/: hotter, bitter, batted.

That's only half of the reason why an American's "butter" is conspicuous to English ears; the "er" is equally important. In RP, that "er" turns into "uh" -- unless the next word starts with a vowel. If I say "What should I do with your toast?" and you say "butter it," you'll want to say "butter" and not "buttuh." Sometimes this pattern means that you insert an "er" where American English speakers wouldn't dream of doing so. In US English we say "grandma and grandpa"; many British English speakers say "grammar and grandpa."

After you fix your alveolar flaps and your "er," you could spend a long time investigating vowel differences between the two dialects. (Note to my fellow Midwesterners: your short a is a dead giveaway, especially when you nasalize it in a word like "man." Move your tongue back and lift your soft palate up.) For my money, though, the most bang for your buck (or punch for your pound) would come from another consonant change. In the US we do something called yod-dropping, in which we drop the "y" sound from words that have it in British English: stoopid instead of styoopid for stupid; toona instead of tyuna for tuna. We only do this after alveolar (tongue tip) consonants -- as in newspaper, duty, etc. It would be extremely conspicuous if you heard someone say "moosic" instead of "music," yes? Or "coot" instead of "cute"? It's a little weird that we hardly notice the absence of that same sound after an alveolar consonant.

My 15yo asked if he could read the draft version of this post, and he sighed afterward. "Well, this post is going to be wildly popular," he intoned drily. This is the same kid who told me this morning, when I attempted to explain the phonetic similarities between his name and his sister's name (adjacent checked vowels! followed by alveolar sonorants!), that I should refrain from phonetics talk until after breakfast. But if the NYT fact-checkers find this post, perhaps they'll shoot me an email. Next time, guys, you can interview me instead. :-)

Comments

[L - Mama(e) in Translation]

AWESOME AWESOME!! I have already started practicing my British English. And I should have consulted you on how to teach my students to speak better Portuguese -- from phonetics a sound production point of view!!

Why shouldn't your post be wildly popular?! (is it just that for your son, who knows better than the NYT, this is all pretty obvious?). I hope it'll be a popular post!!!

P.S. I actually started learning English with a somewhat British accent since my first private teacher had lived in England & used the very effective Berlitz method. (that was back in 1988, sigh...) Now that I have the potential to become an English prof. I need to go back to perfecting my English, my accent, etc. I think that five years teaching Portuguese and not speaking much English in the classroom may have "worsened" my accent. Sigh...

[bearing]

Tell your 15yo that I liked your post just fine. Some of your readers are also language nerds.

[Beth]

Yeah, language nerds are people too!

[swimmermom]

Language nerds represent!

[entropy]

I was just hoping you would write a whole series of posts like this one. Really cool.

[Angela]

I love this post and it makes me want to take classes and learn more!

A few years ago I was trying to learn Hindi. People seemed to think it was strange for me to ask where their tongue was when making certain sounds.

I remember my friends trying to get me to pronouce "mutter" (peas). "It's just like 'butter'," they would say and then become frustrated when I said it wrong yet again. We finally made progress when they had me say "mutt" first.

[Debs]

I found it a very interesting post to read, as a Brit :)

[Pigwotflies]

"British speech requires a dropped jaw and vertically open lips."

Er, what? If you say so! I've been speaking British English* all my life and I can't say I've noticed.

*I sound fairly BBC, having grown up in London, heavily influenced by BBC Radio 4 and a snobbish decision not to drop my ts** and hs but with the odd short vowel that's crept in from my Midlands born husband and Northern friends.

**A dropped t is actually one that's been replaced by a glottal stop.

[bearing]

Never paid attention to the yod dropping pattern before. I wonder if I could save just a little time and trouble teaching reading if I only taught my kids one "long u sound" (u says yoo) instead of teaching two (sometimes u says yoo, and sometimes u says oo). They maybe wouldn't struggle with pronouncing cute as if it were coot, and they'd probably still recognize words like tyune, dyuty, and nyude when they heard themselves sound it out.

[Jeanie]

There's an in-depth discussion of the pronunciation of Cockney in an appendix to Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth which might be of interest to you - glottal stops, grammar, syntax, idiom, slang. Quite interesting.

[Melanie]

Oh I love this post. It makes me ask myself, though, why I let myself be dissuaded from taking that linguistics class in college. Someone told me it was boring, why I why did I listen? Why was I so stupid? I mean the philosophy of language course I took in its place was ok, but I think the linguistics would have been more useful in the long run.