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“Um” in Different Accents
All dialects of English have “filler” words. Just to name a few: er, ah, um, eh, or the increasingly common like* and you know. We humans are a hesitant bunch, and these words offer brief moments of...
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The Elusive English Schwa
An old trick question: what is the most common vowel in spoken English? Is it the a in cat? The o in top? The ee in keep? In fact, the answer is the puzzling little sound known as schwa. Schwa was...
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Jamaican Patois (And English Schwa)
Jamaican Coat of Arms I’ve recently become fascinated with Jamaican Patois, the creole language spoken on the island of the same name. The language derives from African languages and various dialects...
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That’s the Idear: Intrusive ‘R’
Generations of Americans have puzzled over the British tendency to add ‘r’s where (it seems to us) ‘r’s don’t belong. This can be found in such phrases as “an idear of it,” “pastar and sauce,” and...
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Circumstances – Circumstnses
Forgive the trivial nature of today’s post, but I’m curious about a minute detail of British pronunciation. That would be the word ‘circumstance.’ To clarify, when I say ‘British pronunciation’ here,...
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American Offglide
The English language is notorious for its diphthongs. A diphthong, as many of you know, is two vowels combined into a single sound, as in the ‘i‘ in ‘kite’ or the ‘ou‘ in ‘mouth.’ Nearly every vowel...
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Fella, Winder, Tomorrah: ‘-Ow’ Reduction
Back in my musical theatre days, I couldn’t get enough of Rogers and Hammerstein’s classic melodrama Carousel. I’m still a fan, but wish somebody would retool the libretto; many of the show’s lyrics...
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“Prime Ministaw:” Jamaican Rounded Schwa
Portia Simpson-Miller (wikimedia) Most Anglophone Caribbean nations have dialect continua, with an English Creole at one end and some variety of Standard English at the other. I find Jamaica’s...
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