Rachel's English, words with 't' and t-glottalization

Rachel's English tells us not to pronounce the 't' near the end of such words as "twenty" and "wanted."

https://youtu.be/5svtIgYDJDI

I think her basic observation is correct.  People in England do pronounce the 't' in an audible way, but it is harder to hear a 't' sound in these words in casual speech by Americans.

One reason why we might not be able to hear the 't' sound is because the speakers are closing their vocal cords, shutting off all sound for a split second.  This is called t-glottalization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-glottalization

The British phonetician John Wells points out that it is quite common for both British and Americans to switch 't' for a glottal stop at the end of a syllable in some phonetic environments.

certain /sǝɹʔn/

winter /wɪnʔr/

http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/07/jarek-weckwerth-commenting-on-fridays.html

Checking on the website Forvo, we do find some speakers uploading these pronunciations even in quite careful readings.

https://forvo.com/

Some of the commenters below Rachel's video say that they can hear the 't' or pronounce it themselves, so maybe this glottal stop is what they hear or are saying.

Another possibility is that the speakers are making a 't' closure, but there are not releasing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release

Canadian Raising or US and UK Lowering

In 15th century England, the words "like," "child," "fly" and "pie" were pronounced with a long vowel /i:/ as in the modern word "see."  By the time of the mid-16th century as part of the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciation of this group of words had changed to have a vowel diphthong /əi/ starting with a mid central vowel as in the way Canadians pronounce the word "like" .

Similarly in 15th century England, words on the pattern of "out," "house" and "how" were pronounced with a long vowel /u:/ as in the modern word "food."  By the mid-16th century this had changed to /əu/ starting with a central vowel as in the way Canadians pronounce the word "out" now.

In the 17th century as the Great Vowel Shift progressed, the pronunciation of these words shifted in England and the urban parts of the United States to /laik/ and /aut/ starting with an open vowel rather than a mid one.

Canadians by and large continue to use the 16th century pronunciation /ləik/ and /eut/ starting with a mid vowel right up to the present day.  Some parts of Ireland and Scotland use a mid vowel in these words, and in the U.S. isolated communities on islands such as Martha's Vineyard continued to have speakers using the older pronunciation on into the 20th century.

In 1942, Martin Joos, a linguist from Wisconsin noted that if he said the word "like" /lə:i:/ with a drawn out vowel sound to people in Toronto, Canada, no one thought that was strange, but if he pronounced it as /laik/ with an open vowel in the American style, people accused him of drawling.  He also noted that Canadians pronounced the word "typewriter" as either /təipɹəidəɹ/ or as >/təipɹaidəɹ/.  The reason for this was that /əi/ was usually used before voiceless consonants such as "p," "t," "k," "f," "s" "th"/θ/ and "sh"/ʃ/, but "write" is written with a "t" but pronounced as a /d/.  The people who say /təipɹəidəɹ/ are using the mid-vowel to indicate the "t" in the spelling not the /d/ sound they actually pronounce.

I think Canadian linguist J.K. Chambers was the first to coin the term "Canadian Raising" in his 1973 article.  He notes that usually the diphthong is not raised at the end of a word, but some Canadians say "high school" as /həi sku:l/ keeping the mid vowel, perhaps because of the following "s".

Further Reading

Barber, Charles.  1997.  Early Modern English.

Chambers, J. K. 1973. "Canadian Raising". Canadian Journal of Linguistics. 18 (2): 113–135.

Joos, Martin. 1942. "A Phonological Dilemma in Canadian English." Language. April: 141-144.

Vocal Fry

Everyone's voice changes over the course of a day, depending on how you are feeling and what message you are trying to convey.  If you are happy, you may have a cheerful upbeat bounce to your voice.  If you are angry, you may almost growl.  If you get emotional, you may get all choked up, your voice catching as you try to speak.  That voice catching (breaking, cracking) is called 'vocal fry.'

Professional singers and actors train very hard to master vocal fry. If a singer is singing an emotional ballad, they want to convey that emotion, so they may devote considerable effort to learning how to add a raspy husky sound to their voice.

Your voice comes from your vocal cords.  If you vibrate your vocal cords smoothly, you get a nice clear sound coming out.  If you almost close your vocal cords, and breathe out just a little bit, the cords may vibrate, and you get this creaky sound coming out, vocal fry.  If you lower the the pitch of your voice at the end of a sentence, your voice might accidentally catch without your even intending it.

Here is Sean Connery playing James Bond in the movie Dr. No.  Notice how his voice catches as he introduces himself "Bond, James Bond":

https://youtu.be/b15-P12gIf0?t=75

There has been some debate about whether vocal fry indicates wealth or a rural country accent.  In Canada, comedian Steve Smith used a gravelly voice to create the down home character Red Green:

https://youtu.be/OKWoITk7GLo

By contrast, the character Loudermilk claims that fry indicates wealth:

https://youtu.be/WDfJn1kcQuU

Once you become aware of vocal fry, you start hearing it everywhere.  Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has a bit of fry in his voice at times, and countless singers use fry in their songs: Willie Nelson, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, etc.  Some people probably have naturally raspy voices.

There are actually many different ways to create this raspy effect.  Danish voice researcher Cathrine Sadolin has written books and websites on how singers can create different 'rough' vocal effects.  In her framework, vocal fry is called creaking.

https://cvtresearch.com/description-and-sound-of-creak-creaking/

Brendan Houdek of New York Voice Coaching explains how to use fry and other effects to recreate the voices of famous characters from movies and tv:

https://youtu.be/J9K74QEzntA

Valley Girls, Surfers and the Canadian Vowel Shift

In general, a lot of Canadians speak a variety of English that is fairly similar to General or Standard American English.  There are a few areas where the pronunciation of specific speakers is a bit different.  In this entry I'll look at the the Canadian vowel shift.  In future entries, I'll take a look at topics such as Canadian raising,  the cot caught merger (or low back merger), monophthong /e:/ and /o:/,  rhotic r, words with /or/, low vowel merger differences from British and American and vocal fry.

Valley Girls, Surfers and the Canadian Vowel Shift

Here is a chart showing the International Phonetic Alphabet chart symbols for the vowel sounds used in Canadian and California English.  Front vowels are pronounced with your tongue near the front of your mouth.  In close vowels, your mouth is fairly closed, while in open vowel you lower your jaw and open your mouth keeping your tongue low.  You can either round or unround your lips to create those two types of sounds.

	front unround			central unround	central round	back unround	back round
close	i beat				ʉ		u boot
near-close		ɪ bit					ʊ book
close-mid		e bait		ɘ	ɵ		o boat
mid				ǝ about
open-mid		Ɛ bet				ʌ	ɔ bored
near-open			æ bat	ɜ
open			a	ä		ɑ	ɒ bot, bought

Wikipedia has a vowel chart with audio that you can click on.

In 1979, Harold Woods completed a Ph.D. on Ottawa English (A socio-dialectology survey of the English spoken in Ottawa).  He noted that young Ottawa women were more likely to pronounce the words "that," "last," "glass" and "grass" with a lowered vowel compared to their older male counterparts.  He also noted that people tended to pronounce the word "milk" as /mɪlk/ in careful speech, but some speakers would say /mƐlk/ in less careful speech, a lowering of the vowel.  This seems to be the first report of people in the English speaking world moving towards lower front short/lax vowels.

In May, 1982, the American musician Frank Zappa released an album with the song "Valley Girl."  In it, Frank's daughter Moon Unit tried to imitate the accent of the young women she had met in the San Fernando valley of Los Angeles, California.  Just as seen in Ottawa, we hear lowering/backing of the front vowels, eg. "Andrea" gets pronounced /ändriǝ/, "really" becomes /ɹɪlɪ/, bitchin' becomes /bƐtʃɪn/.  Also, she moves the back rounded vowels forward, so "you know" becomes /jʉ nɵʉ/, "totally" becomes /tɵʉtǝli/, "spoon" becomes /spʉ:n/.  One thing that made this interesting was linguists at the time had been writing that Californians spoke General American without any special dialectal features.

Close on the heels of this song came movies and TV shows highlighting California valley girl, surfer or metalhead accents.  In August, the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High actor Sean Penn played Jeff Spicoli, a surfer, who pronounces "dude" as /dʉ:d/.  The TV series Square Pegs from September 1982 saw actress Tracy Nelson channeling a valley girl accent.  1983 saw the release of a Valley Girl movie starring the young Nicolas Cage.  When Cage began appearing in interviews in 1985-6, it turned out that even when not acting, he continued to use what sounds to be a surfer accent.

In 1986, the UC Berkeley linguist Leanne Hinton and her colleagues began studying the phenomenon.  They found that young Californians were fronting their back vowels in large numbers except in front of the consonants /ɹ/ and /l/.  They got conflicting results re. front vowels, but the urban Californians who fronted their back vowels did seem to be lowering their front vowels.  They mention that other researchers had found a similar lowering in Philadelphia and Detroit in the northeast U.S.

It's Not Just the Valley Girls: a Study of California English.

Back in Canada, in 1987, comedian Mike Myers born and raised in Toronto, began appearing on a CBC show It's Only Rock & Roll portraying Wayne Campbell a metalhead from the suburbs.  One of Wayne's catchphrases was "excellent" pronounced as /ɜksǝlɜnt/ lowering the front vowel.  In 1989, Keanu Reeves also raised in Toronto starred in the movie Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure using the same /ɜksǝlɜnt/ pronunciation.

In 1995, Canadian linguist Sandra Clarke and her colleagues suggested that a Canadian shift was under way (The Third Dialect of English: some Canadian evidence).  As Canadians merged the pronunciation of the words "cot" and "caught," this opened up space for the vowel in words such as "that" to move back, and for the vowels in words such as "milk" or "get" to move down.  They note the similarity of this trend to what was being described in California, and wonder if women newcasters in the two countries were involved in the change.

In 2007, the reality TV show Keeping up with Kardashians started airing on the E! network.  It is perhaps notable that the sisters who are the focus all seem to speak in the same Californian accent, pronouncing Kendall's name as /kændäl/ lowering both vowels.

In 2018, an Irish linguist based in Germany, Raymond Hickey suggested that young women all over the English speaking world were now engaging in Short Front Vowel Lowering (Yes, that's the best: Short Front Vowel Lowering in English Today).  Hickey suggests that the word "trap" was pronounced with quite a high vowel /trƐp/ in Received Pronunciation (RP i.e. Standard southern British) in the early 20th century, and in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.  Over the course of the 20th century, the vowel lowered until now it is pronounced /træp/ in RP.  In Dublin, Ireland, some young women who are working to speak a supra-regional form of English rather than a local dialect, are adopting the lower vowels for words such as "kit" and "dress."  He wonders if young Irish women travel to Canada or California, and bring back the lowered vowels.  Also, in the Irish English of these speakers, the fronting of the vowel in "goose," "boat" and "house" and the raising of "thought" and "choice" has created room at the bottom of the vowel space for the short front vowels to move into.