A few years ago, I read a book by Bill Bryson entitled The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. It is an interesting story about how English has developed over the years and changed as it jumped continents. As a writer, I have always loved words and how they "play" together.
Not too long ago, I was on the telephone with a young man who said his last name was (let us say) Hutton. But he did not say the name in a way that was recognizable. He said /HUH-uhn/. No hint of a /t in there anywhere. I had him spell it out for me just to remove all doubt. It was a distinctly American accent, so I was curious about how he might have adopted this one Cockney/Scottish speech trait.
"Where are you?" I asked.
/Man-HA-uhn/, came the reply - again without even a scintilla of a /t/ sound.
Hmm. Mr. /HUH-uhn/ from /man-HA-uhn/.
Linguists call this speech characteristic the glottal stop. It is common in British urban dialects, especially in Scotland and among Cockney speakers. Think of Eliza Doolittle's father: "With a /LI-uhl bi/o'luck,"
David Crystal, a leading British linguist, notes that the glottal stop is common in words such as butter /BUH-uhr/. In the new third edition of his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2019), he says that it is spreading throughout the United Kingdom, "especially in the speech of younger people."
The trend is occurring on this side of the Atlantic, as well. A friend of mine, a retired university music professor, is monitoring the spread on television shows he records and plays each night. At 91, he derives great pleasure from sending me what he regards as degradations of American speech and writing - mostly solecistic departures from standard English. In his daily updates, he will often give me an account of glottal stops: "They are common among young people, not news announcers," he tells me. He hears didn't as /DI-uhn/, important as /im-POR-uhn/, and little as /LI-uhl/.
So, if David Crystal and my friend are right, the spread of the glottal stop is a generational phenomenon in both British English and American English. Their conclusion aligns with a 2006 study finding that its prevalence was highest among adolescents.
By definition, a glottal stop is the result of a stop - or complete closure in the airway - by the glottis. When a "t" is replaced by a glottal stop, linguists call it "t-glottaling." As a trait of youthful British English, it was first widely discussed among British linguists in the 1990s, when it was stigmatized. One linguist wrote in 1993: "Using a glottal stop between vowels" - as in pronouncing button as /BUH-uhn/ - "is a bit like wearing a tattoo; whether you realize it or not, certain doors will be closed on you. It is a statement about you and about where you belong in the world, or where you think you belong, in British society." A year later, another British linguist called t-glottaling "one of the most stigmatized features of British English."
If the phrase denoting the trait were pronounced with a glottal stop, it would be something like /tee GLO-uh-ling/.
But overt social stratification has broken down in all sorts of ways and citing tattoos as carrying a stigma is itself much less resonant today than it was in the 1990s. Today, tattooing is widely considered body art, and no commentator on the Olympics would react negatively to the athletes' heavily decorated bodies. And if an athlete pronounced important as /im-POR-uhnt/, as several did in interviews during the recent games, no network commentator would dare raise an eyebrow.
By 2018, British linguists had noticed the glottal stop in the speech of Prince William, heir to the throne. He uses it in what is called the "word-final position," for example by saying a lot as /uh LO/, with an abrupt guttural stop at the end in place of a /t/. The conclusion was that a working-class feature had permeated the speech of the upper class.
But what explains its unlikely adoption in American English - and not just in the word-final position but between vowels - or "intervocalically," as the phoneticians quaintly put it? What explains how, in the speech of many people under the age of, say, 40, the word bottle has become /BOH-uhl/ without any hint of a /t/ sound?
In 2008, some British linguists noted that t-glottaling was a feature of the music known as British indie rock. It had become a "cool feature of young people's speech," according to one commentator.
Popular music may have influenced young Americans. But, as with so many things, the cause is difficult to pinpoint. Effects are easier to trace. An influential 2009 study conducted of American speakers by David Eddington and Michael Taylor and published in the Fall 2009 issue of American Speech found that (1) younger female speakers were more likely to use glottal stops and (2) speakers from the Western United States glottalized more than speakers from other parts of the country.
What is remarkable is that a basic component of American speech seems to be changing right before us for no discernible reason. Although accents are known to shift subtly, rarely does the basic pronunciation of a consonant sound. The precise cause may never be known. In fact, it is doubtless a confluence of causes - none of them attributable to the character Peppa Pig, who does not use glottal stops.
For those of you unfamiliar with the "Peppa Pig" effect: It is the tendency of American preschoolers to use British English as a result of watching the tremendously popular television show "Peppa Pig," which started airing in 2004, a lot like adults who begin to form speech patterns based on popular British dramas aired on PBS. The tendency has been exaggerated in pandemic times when the show became the second most in-demand cartoon. As a result of its ubiquity, American children are starting to say things like telly, Father Christmas, give it a go and on holiday. A five-year-old in Rhode Island is said to have asked her mother, "Mummy, are you going to the optician?"
So maybe the Americans and the British are not two nations separated by a common language. Maybe we are hardly separated /SEP-uh-RAY-id/ at all.
Maybe if you have not yet noticed the glottal stop in American English, start listening for it. It will stop you right in your tracks, if not in your glottis.
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