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Comment by adamrezich | Hacker News Reader

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late?

I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since noticed this in other younger Americans as well, and for other words I cannot recall right now but with the same general pattern.

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Glotalization of T https://linguistics.byu.edu/faculty/deddingt/t-glottalizatio...

My anecdata says we covered this dialect in intro linguistics back in the 80s. I have been hearing it from New Jersey natives for a long time.

That sounds like the glottal stop you hear quite a bit in England. Bu'hu for "butter", wa'hu for "water" and so on. I've been in heated discussions with Englishmen arguing my pronouncing the Ts in the middle of words is incorrect. I personally hold to the notion that at the very least if you go to the length of putting the letter T *twice* in the same spot, it really wants to be pronounced.

That is the rule for RP. Lots of English are afraid of sounding posh and avoid it. Estuary English is what the elite kids speak these days so they can blend in with working class.

I tend to associate this with Brits. I have definitely noticed a rise in young Americans doing this in the last year or two though.

The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing tends to be more of a flapped /ɾ/, by the way. <d> is often the same.

> The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing tends to be more of a flapped /ɾ/, by the way. <d> is often the same.

yes, exactly! also out here in South Dakota we specifically pronounce the "t" in "Dakota" as a "d," I've noticed.

Is that the same thing as "D-Troit" verses "Duh-Troit" for Detroit? That's one of my favorites.

The pronunciation "dee-troit" is just local slang meant to sound folksy. It's used by sports announcers and singers, and for comedic value. Most of the time people in the area pronounce it the same way as the rest of the country pronounces it.

I think you're right there. But also going back, there was a more 'neutral' pronunciation of "deh-troit". I believe from there, we started getting "duh-troit" as a type of Schwa[1]. Again, I agree that there's a newer "DEE-troit" which is kind of like if you drew a line from "duh-troit" through "deh-troit" and kept going, then you'd get "DEE-troit".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa

Voiceless phonemes(?) tend to become voiced when they're between two vowels. Boise natives hypercorrect to say Boy-see, when most folks from outside the area say Boy-zee.

Historic shifts like that are loafes -> loaves.

Midwesterner here but if I try to say Dakota with a t sound, I feel like I'm doing a British accent or something.

Also originally a midwestern. I've noticed that I and others with the accent also put a compensatory breathy h on the end of words like Dakota, and hence pronounce it "Dakodah". Often this results in a devoicing of that second "a". I've never seen any studies on that though.

American young person here: I do the glottal stop thing with "button" but a flapped r with "butter." I think it has to do with the "n" - I would also do the glottal stop for "bitten" but not for "bitter." For me the second syllable is a pure syllabic /n/ - no preceding vowel or consonant.

Funny enough, this has almost become the common British pronunciation of most "hard t" words. It's quite common for people to say "a bottle of water" like "a boh-ell of wah-er", or "butter" like "buh-ah. The sound comes from the back of the throat instead of the tip of the tongue.

I had the impression such is considered "lower class" talk, for lack of a PC way to describe it. Please hear me out before giving me negative points.

If you are "educated", then you are "supposed to" pronounce the middle constantans, as skipping them is considered "lazy". I'm not making a value judgement, but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private. All things being equal, parents want their children to sound wealthy and well educated. Similar for certain rural or "redneck" talk in the US. Example: "Murica" instead of "America". My mother used to lecture me against certain verbal shortcuts so that I didn't "sound ignorant". Her words, not mine.

It is (or was) considered "lower-class" to drop your Ts in the UK. But these days, it's not fashionable to talk like Boris Johnson, even if you went to Eton, so many upper-middle class people emulate aspects of "lower-class" speech, including the glottalization of "t" when it's followed by an unstressed syllable (like water). Even someone as indisputably posh as Prince Harry will T-glottalize on occasion.

Not being posh has been fashionable before. A fashion for dropping terminal g existed the upper classes in the 1920's UK. Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey did this, and it was fascinating to hear this affectation in the 1970's BBC adaptations with Ian Carmichael. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/no-g-men-frank-mcnally-on... Also, there is a backlash against Received Pronunciation as inauthentic. Now I enjoy BBC announcers with regional accents, unlike the voices I heard on BBC in the seventies and eighties.

> Now I enjoy BBC announcers with regional accents, unlike the voices I heard on BBC in the seventies and eighties.

I agree. The downside of the loosening of the old standard is heard in the number of actors who mumble through their lines. I wouldn't want to go back to a time when RADA enforced a kind of RP but I would like them to focus just as hard on diction.

Famously in "huntin', shootin', and fishin'." But I'm not sure it's the upper classes emulating the lower. It seems to be parallel evolution from different forms of Old English [0]. Which makes sense; it's unlikely an upper-class English person of the 1920s would be motivated to copy lower-class speech patterns. Bertie Wooster wouldn't want to sound like his scullery maid.

[0]: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YMS3AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT26&lpg...

It's no big secret that different social groups exhibit language variation, and that while there's nothing inherently lesser about certain dialects, they are nonetheless coded as e.g low or high status.

You might feel a lot more comfortable talking about this subject and find useful alternatives to your scare-quoted words if you skim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics

Also due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection ,I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English is a fascinating and accessible example. A terrible summary: dropping the R is lazy (dropping anything is "lazy"), but at the same time sounds British and therefore fancy to some American ears. But other people, to avoid laziness, add Rs. But then their speech can sound low-status in some cases too.

>but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private //

I correct my childrens' pronunciations. I've honestly never thought of it as a class thing. In part it's "inherited", so it could have consciously been a class thing for one of my ancestors. But really to me it just seems necessary for preliterate speakers to understand the proper way to say a word based on its spelling, which they don't know. I find myself correcting USA-ian word use ("garbage") and pronunciation far more with my youngest than I had to at that age with my oldest ... we probably let him watch too much TV (several shows, like Paw Patrol have shifted to USA versions from British English versions).

It's hard to discern every phoneme from a new word, and hard to say some of them.

I do shift my accent, and vocabulary, to mark myself as a local I guess (when I'm back in that area of the country). If I get to use certain words in their localised (to about a 20mi long area) meaning it makes me happy for some reason. But I've never consciously worked on my accent to sound more/less posh; but have modified it to be more understood.

My wife is what I call a 'sympathetic speaker', she very quickly adopts the accent of those she's speaking with. An interesting phenomenon.

Re: My wife is what I call a 'sympathetic speaker', she very quickly adopts the accent of those she's speaking with.

Politicians are often known to do the same. It's usually painted as "pandering", but I'm not making a value judgement here. There's arguments both for and against.

it's called a glottal stop, it's also pretty common in Irish accents to substitute this for a T

I've noticed this recently among some of my American colleagues, and it's so obvious to me that at first I thought they were imitating an English accent. To my English ears, standard American pronounces the "t"s in butter and water as "d", and hadn't realised that some accents do have the glottal "t". I think it is mostly in people from the East coast.

spot-on in your analysis & as is mentioned elsewhere in the replies, I think it might be a definite east-coast influence on the rest of the US population as a result of video-based social media. at least, that's my running theory!

I don’t think it is a new phenomenon in the language. I associate this with Northeast US accents and many British accents. It may be that regional accents which use a glottal stop for this pattern are leaking into younger people’s accents around you simply because YouTube and TikTok are making less common accents heard more widely.

I'm 46, also grew up in midwest, and I say "BUH 'in".

Lexicon Valley covers these sorts of things regularly. And I think he takes ideas from listeners too!

I think I've always said with a stop. I'm from the East Coast, though.

I notice s being pronounced sh. It shtrikes me as more frequent now.

while we're on the topic, my younger-than-me girlfriend from Idaho says "warsh" for "wash," which until now I fully associated with only people the age of my late grandmother. truly, the wide gamut of American accents is something to behold!

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