Without doubt one of my most-requested
video topics is something the requesters call T-dropping. I think what most of them
are referring to isn’t really T-dropping at all. T-dropping does occur in English, but
only under very restricted circumstances, as in nex’ month, firs’ person and
historically Chris’mas. Mos’ native speakers aren't even aware that they do this. No, I think the viewers who want me to discuss
T-dropping are referring to something else. T, which is one of the most commonly
occurring sounds of English, is also one of its most mercurial. People
may think of it as sounding like [t], but often it doesn’t at all. For example,
especially in American English, T at the end of a word is often formed by the tongue tip
but you don't hear any [t] release at all. That’s right North Americans are also well known for their
T-flapping, also known as tapping. Inside a word, this happens between vowels, as in city. Here the
T is manifested not as [t] as it is in my accent, city, but as a voiced flick of the tongue tip
known as a flap or, more accurately, as a tap. For this to happen the following vowel
has to be weak, with no stress at all, which is why it can't happen to the first T
in appetite, because that vowel ‘i’ isn't weak. It's not appeDite. And the preceding
vowel can be followed by an r sound, so you get flapping in thirty, forty
and artist. Cases with N like center and international are a bit more complicated
and we don't need to talk about them today. Americans can also flap T on the end
of a word, when the next word starts with a vowel. For example not only,
turn it off, right angle, dot org. British accents, on the other hand, are famous
for transforming T even more drastically. I'm referring to glottaling, which means pronouncing
the T as a glottal stop, where the vibrating vocal cords or folds slow right down into
vibrations with lots of contact, otherwise known as vocal fry, and can even be held tightly
together, briefly stopping the breath altogether. Interestingly, British glottaling can happen
exactly where American flapping can happen. So not only, turn it off, right angle,
dot org. And also city, thirty, artist. Now for many viewers, those pronunciations
will be setting off alarm bells from their social radar. This is because, unlike
American flapping, which everyone does, British glottaling is, surprise
surprise, woven into the class system. Doing it before a vowel inside a
word is associated with certain broad urban accents like those
of Glasgow and of course London. And when I was younger, the same low
class associations were also attached to glottaling word final T before
a following vowel. Not any more. And there's another phonetic context
where glottaling has long flown under the social radar without setting off any
alarms. This is before many consonants, as in my pronunciations of Great Britain, at
first, get back, dot com, atmosphere, football. This kind of glottaling not only
gets a free pass in Britain, it's also found in other parts of the world.
Including North America. dot com, atmosphere, football, these are all possible there. Speakers
can make a tongue or lip closure at the same time as the glottal stop, but often it's just
the glottal stop. Brits and Americans also happily use
glottal T before syllabic N. That’s where the consonant N forms an entire syllable
without any vowel, as in Britain and certain. It's the absence of the explosive [t]
release that makes people think of this T-glottaling as T-dropping, but we crucially
preserve that brief period of silence as the T. If it wasn't there at all, then we'd
have Grey Brin, amosphere, and docom. So American English does have some T glottaling,
although it's more noticeable in British accents. Conversely, by the way, you can hear some
flapping or T-voicing in British accents. But in the rest of this video I'm going to be
looking at ways in which the Londonish type of T glottaling has been spreading in the speech
of many younger Americans. Spreading to places where American English traditionally
does flapping, namely before a vowel. In fact I'm going to be looking at
two strategies by which American flaps are being displaced by these
un-American pre-vowel glottal stops. Now what's curious is that these two
strategies are totally different, in fact virtually the opposite of each other,
but they produce the same Londonish result. And in linguistics, when changes take place
that are structurally quite unrelated but which bring about the same results,
it's technically termed a conspiracy. I’ll describe these two apparently
conspiring phenomena and you can make up your own mind as to
whether it's just a coincidence, or if you think something coordinated is
going on, or that I've got the facts wrong. In general usage the term conspiracy refers
to actions coordinated to violate the status quo in some way. For example, in a slightly
bigger American conspiracy story, the former President has been charged with actually
conspiring with unnamed co-conspirators to defraud the United States through actions
including the January 6 Capitol attack. Whether you believe various events were
part of some grander design hinges on the evidence that’s presented and how it’s
presented. And with no expertise in this area, for the past year I’ve been relying on the
sponsor of the video, Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that gathers thousands
of news stories from around the world and classifies them according to their political
leanings, so you can build a fuller picture. For each story you can see the number of sources,
factuality and ownership, and quickly compare headlines,
like these in the ongoing Trump conspiracy story. This left-leaning source refers to the
prosecution's wide range of evidence and to Donald Trump’s history of false claims.
But this right-leaning source assesses the evidence as seeking to create only a dubious
link between Trump and the Capitol violence. One thing I especially like in
the Vantage plan is the Blindspot feature, showing stories drastically
underreported by the left or the right. When I research my videos I seek out above
all sources that take the opposite view from mine. In an age where some commenters
criticise my channel for too many clips of Democrats and another got so mad at my including
a Steve Bannon clip that he unsubscribed, I think Ground News is one way to stay sane.
Their Holiday Sale gives 40% off the Vantage plan. Just use the link in the description,
ground.news/drgeofflindsey. So the T-glottaling conspiracy that
I’m alleging is about glottal stops increasingly turning up in American speech
before vowels. This kind of thing has been previously described as occurring in New
York City and African American English, but here we’ll be looking at younger
speakers who seem otherwise General American. So what are these two counts of glottal conspiracy? The first involves
the undermining of syllabic N. I referred before to the way that both Brits and
Americans can use glottal T in words like Britain and certain, that is immediately before syllabic
N. Now for some years, younger speakers on both sides of the Atlantic have been unpacking
syllabic consonants, in other words putting back in the vowel indicated by the spelling
and which presumably used to be pronounced. So I hear lots of speakers younger than me, and lots of speakers are younger than
me, saying cert[ən] and import[ənt]. Compare my pronunciation of this
word with the pronunciations of the young teachers from England that
I interviewed in my last video. Would you say it's got better or it's gotten better?
–It's gotten better I've gotten a bit of a cold I think it's important We get this unpacking of syllabic N
not only after T but also after D, for example in words that I
would pronounce gardn and didn't. I love sound changes like this because they
show such changes aren’t about young people being lazy. As I discuss in my book, a lot of the
pronunciations in modern SSB are strengthenings of what was weak in old RP. More importantly for
this video, the same unpacking of syllabic N can be heard in America, giving for example not gardn
but gardin. Now the exact identity of the inserted vowel is open to discussion. Some may identify
it as schwa, some as the vowel [ɪ] as in KIT, and some as a so-called barred i. For simplicity
in this video I’ll just stick to the KIT symbol. In one of those clips we heard the speaker
unpack the syllabic nasal in threatened, so it became threatened with a flapped T. But
here’s the fun part. When younger Americans unpack syllabic N after T, they can keep the
T in its glottal form, threa’ened. And hey
presto, we have glottal T before a vowel. On a trip to New Mexico, I heard
from the same young guy cottonwood, off the beaten track and of course
George R R Martin. And for anyone who wants to complain about younger
speakers lazily dropping their T’s, remember that the glottal T isn’t what’s new
here at all, that’s well established in certain and important. What’s new is the vowel that
younger speakers are putting back in after it. And now to the other part of the conspiracy. As I described in detail in another video,
for some time younger speakers of English, especially but not exclusively Americans,
seem to have been using more ‘hard attack’ in their speech. This means using a glottal
stop to ‘attack’ a word-initial vowel. It's a basic property of German, which is why heavily
German-accented English can produce utterances like I always arrive early in the afternoon. I have very little hard attack in my speech, so I would say
I always arrive early in the afternoon. Now notice that hard attack prevents,
or as we say in phonology blocks, regular American flapping. Think back to
those examples like right angle, not only, turn it off, dot org. If the second word in each
case is pronounced with hard attack on its initial vowel, we can’t get a regular flap or tap:
right angle, not only, turn it off, dot org. So it’s inevitably the case that
the more a speaker uses hard attack, the less flapping they use. Take our rapping
YouTuber. He uses quite a lot of hard attack: And here he uses hard attack after a final T If we look closely, we can see
that on the end of the word get, his tongue makes the T closure. We could say that this is a kind of tap, but it’s practically inaudible and this isn’t
the classic American flapping that would give get a teleprompter. The hard attack on the
indefinite article has blocked flapping. Now here’s the thing. Given that
that tongue gesture is practically inaudible before hard attack, and so
communicatively more or less pointless, it’s hardly surprising that he often
doesn’t bother to make it at all. So now look what’s happened. That glottal stop which in ‘get a teleprompter’ was
a hard attack following a final T, is now essentially functioning as the
T. Just like in broad London speech. Here's another speaker who uses
quite a bit of hard attack. And sometimes his glottal stops seem to be hard
attack and/or the final T on the preceding word. In fact we can hear this same speaker
varying between traditional flapping and the new hard attack slash glottal T. And I think these things often go together: using
a lot of hard attack and having these glottal stops that might be seen as hard attack but
are also, or instead, functioning as a final T. So let’s sum up the case. Glottal T’s before
vowels are absolutely not part of the classic description of General American. But now they’re
cropping up in two completely different ways. In count one, an American glottal T that was
safely tucked up before a syllabic N, certn, finds itself before an inserted,
or re-inserted vowel, cer'in. In count two, the hard attack on a vowel at
the start of a word like ‘angle’ blocks the flapping of a preceding final T as in ‘right’,
and can find itself functioning as the final T, right angle. In one case a glottal T is suddenly
before a vowel, in the other case hard attack on a vowel is suddenly a T. Pre-vowel glottal
stops by two entirely different paths. So what do you think is going on here? Are
the two kinds of glottal Ts a conspiracy or a coincidence? Are speakers in some sense
producing them on purpose? Linguists tend to see linguistic form as massively arbitrary:
things just emerge, like fashions. But non-linguists often blame speakers for their
linguistic behaviour as if it’s premeditated, whether saying shtrong, or aks, or lingerie
or droring, or using hard attack or vocal fry. You choose to talk like this. It’s an
affectation that annoying teenagers and rich people use to sound
like they don’t give a s___. Now in my video on Hard Attack, I mentioned
how much easier it is to find in the speech of young American women, who are often in
the vanguard of new speech developments, like Uptalk and Vocal Fry. So I’d expect to
find the morphing of initial hard attack into final glottal T especially common in the
speech of young American women. Indeed, you can find published work suggesting that
American glottal T is more of a female thing. However, the same article mentions a male bias
at least in Vermont. That was back in 2006, and I have to say that over the past decade, American glottal T is something that I
personally have noticed more in male speech. Here in Britain, as I mentioned earlier, the
heaviest use of glottal T is characteristic of broad accents, and a lot of people look
down on it in a way they don't on American flapping. Anyone in North
America can flap the T in ‘city’, but you won't hear many British
newsreaders using glottal T in city. My guess is that the nonstandard associations of
glottal T extend to one degree or another beyond the UK. As I said, it's been previously noted in
New York City and African American speech. The fact that Americans widely describe it as T dropping is
itself a probable indicator of disapproval, even though it isn’t actually dropping, and when T is dropped, as in
las’ Chris’mas, nobody gives a flying reindeer. Now sociolinguists make a distinction
between overt prestige, the usual kind, and covert prestige, to refer to the appeal that
nonstandard forms can have to some speakers. And it’s a truth universally acknowledged, well
more or less, that females tend on average to be relatively aspirational and males tend
on average to be relatively into street cred. So could this be the basis of the conspiracy?
Do glottal Ts have street cred for American guys? Do they sound so cool that speakers
will use multiple strategies to produce them? Is it a plot to overthrow the American
flap and make Americans sound more like Adele? Or have I just got the facts wrong?
James Orgill, the guy from Action Lab, is the speaker I associate with glottal T
more than anyone else, but he's not actually a heavy user of hard attack. Or maybe you don't
think it's that much of a guy thing anyway? I'd love it if you could help me
learn more about T glottaling in North America. I've made a
post in my blog, and it would be especially helpful if you could
post there links to any nice examples you hear, preferably with timings. In particular I'm
curious about where it happens inside words, especially the preceding sound. It's common after
R, as in certain, but I don't often hear examples like cotton and biting. Or cases from D like
prou’ of. And do you ever hear American ci’y? To end, I’d like to plead guilty to
one completely wrong prediction that I made in my blog over ten years ago.
Discussing the increase in hard attack, I tentatively suggested that, if this
continued, then T glottaling might start to recede. My rationale was that the
two phenomena potentially create ambiguity. Is this the definite article
followed by hard attack or the conjunction ‘that’ ending in a glottal T? In this case I'm fairly sure he means that, because he typically uses a different vowel in
the definite article, the ants. But in my kind of accent an ambiguity could certainly
arise. I know the/that others disagree. Clearly, however, I was way off. Potential
ambiguity has done nothing to prevent the spread in America of both hard attack and glottal
T. In fact, in examples like the following, we get in one short phrase hard
attack and both kinds of glottal T.
