American accents - t sound in water and others

[mincepiepie]

I'm really intrigued by accents.

I'm from the north of England and have a generic northern accent.

I know there are a wide range of accents in the United States, and but also that typically the T is pronounced as D? for example, water I would say war- tah Americans would pronounce war-Der And duty, I would day dyou-tee and US accent doo-Dee.

Is this typical of an most American accents? I was listing to a true crime podcast and a witness was call Soptic. Fairly odd name in English but I'd pronounce it sop-tick but the presenters mad a big thing of calling her soap-dick. (It was the room 1046 Murder of you are interested she was a cleaner hence the hilarity )

Also the Boston accent drops the r in car, bar so on but I think I do this too, baa and caa. But don't most typical British accent say it this was, except rural West Country type accents ( i think the dropping the r is non -rhotic?).

Can any one enlighten me?

Bill Bryson wrote a book on this that is fascinating (called Made in America). He says that American English and pronunciation, particularly further West is closer to Elizabethan English than British English is today (he, for example, compares written Elizabethan English for guides on how they would have pronounced words).

I know that there is an old North Eastern dialect / accent that my American friend thought was too strong for me to understand (we were watching a video in a museum), but to me it sounded like pure Norfolk (which I do understand 😂).

I think Connery did have slight speech impediment which coupled with the accent comes out that way as Scottish accents do ‘ssh’ but much more subtlety usually than he would. . I’ve noticed that the R speech impediment in Scots will often sound more like Vross rather than Woss (for Ross)

There is a drawl to speech in Texas - Howy’alldoin? ….jess faaen
Also so many men have v deep voices. Don’t know why this is but possibly goes with a drawl.

NY quite different (gangster style)

Should add not every member of the population has a notable accent.

One annoying thing I notice now is the pronunciation of book as buck - In US and also London -always hear it on chat shows - I’m Scottish so it’s boook.

as an American I can generally tell the difference between a ‘d’ and ‘t’ sound when spoken by another American.

That's fascinating - I can't at all! I also assumed that Americans can't hear it, because I often see misspellings where an unstressed t or d is swapped - the most common being "Kindergarden". I live in Germany, but I'm sure that Kindergarten is spelled with a T in American English too.

The other time it really threw me was watching the series Parenthood. One family has a daughter called Hattie. Throughout 4 seasons I thought that was her name and then is season 4 she had a birthday party with banners up: "Happy Birthday Haddie" Whaat?! It completely and utterly confused me!

There were some very funny scenes in 30 Rock, deliberately mocking US pronunciations, when Jenna Moroney got a part in a movie called The Rural Juror.

No we spell it Kindergarden which actually yes is weird!

I watched Elf yesterday - Will Ferrel spends a lot of time shouting ‘Sennnnaaaa’. Can Americans really hear the ‘t’ in there?

Emily Blunt talks about this, with those exact words, as her kids have American accents, which for change slightly when they were in London, but slipped back when they were back in the US.

She illustrates the differences well as she is good at both accents (one being her natural accent, obviously).

I'm another who struggled to order water in the US - in Boston. Because the waiter didn't understand, I modified my Dorset accent towards RP, which was probably even less helpful. Eventually, he clicked, and said, "oh, you mean waddah!"

I still don't believe that a waiter in a touristy area of Boston had never before heard water in British accents.

That's so interesting. I wonder what sorts of American accents are very difficult for Brits to understand?

I still think it's hilarious that when Trainspotting came out in the US a lot of theatres showed it with subtitles :)

That's so interesting. I wonder what sorts of American accents are very difficult for Brits to understand?

I worked for the US air force for a period as a civilian. Some of the black airmen from the Deep South were virtually unintelligible to me.

Pretty sure it was! Made me smile

Two things I find funny.
-I’ve seen many things from Americans saying that Brits don’t pronounce our ts.
-That even though we hear their water as waddah we know what they’re talking about but many do them can’t work out what we mean when we say water.

Also the American accents being closest to Shakespeare’s English thing isn’t true. Black Country accents are thought to be closer. And Geordie is said to have some of the oldest words still in use.

if you really want a rabbit hole to
go down. Search up the Crystals, Father and son. I’ll start you with this beauty m.youtube.com/watch?v=iqmgeth4tFY

I've just looked it up and it is definitely, 100% spelt "Kindergarten" in US English, but apparently it's a commonly misspelled word.

Wahder / water is interesting - if you say them together I think the pronunciation of the w is also longer and more drawn out in British English, as well as the vowel sound being totally different and the d/t sound and the non-rhotic er. I've never thought about how different it sounds before. I have noticed that John Oliver pronounces some words differently for his US audience - Yoh-gurt, Proh-doos. (Rather than yog-urt or prod-yoos) so perhaps some words are just so different that they get misunderstood.

The t is often replaced with a glottal stop in some unstressed forms - more noticeable in certain accents than others. Like in "Alright?" (awrigh') or British (Bri'ish) - maybe that's what they mean by us not pronouncing Ts? In most examples I think we pronounce it more than they do.

That's so interesting. I wonder what sorts of American accents are very difficult for Brits to understand?

An American teenager told me recently that he really enjoyed watching Peaky Blinders but the last season had no captions so was very hard to understand.

No, I am toadally serious.

I got chatting to some Americans waiting to get on a plane in Argentina. One said, "I think I've completely lost my accent". My response was, "No you haven't, even I can tell you are from the south"

For anyone interested in this David Crystals books are great, The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language.

He also did some work with his son putting Shakespeare plays on in the original pronunciation.

Yogurt is yoh-gurt in Ireland too (not yoggurt) and the Hiberno English T in water is a fricative /t/ or slit T.

There are several ways to skin a cat...

The misspelling of kindergarten is down to a phenomenon where you replace something unfamiliar with a word that's familiar, iirc. There's a name from psychology for the process.

Think 'chester draws'... (which also involves the disappearing and reappearing R that I noted on Blue Peter as a child).

In the case of kindergarten / kindergarden the speaker may have never noticed the spelling and went with what made most sense - garden is familiar, garten is not.

@BeanieTeen

Can you hear the R in drawers / scores / snores? And how can you tell there's no R in 'applause'?

'

Can you hear the R in drawers / scores / snores? And how can you tell there's no R in 'applause'?

No that’s my point @mathanxiety Or, aw, au, oar etc are all the same sound in many English accents, hence it’s taught as one sound in phonics. There is no spoken ‘r’ - you don’t have to say or hear a sound just because the represent letter is there. But some people have said that American’s can actually hear the ‘missing’ t when English people somehow can’t - they don’t see it as dropped.
I know applause is spelled without an r because I’ve been taught to spell and read - a young child could easily spell it in a variety of ways, that doesn’t change how it is said. And I know that ‘or’ ‘aw’ ‘au’ etc can be represented in many different ways. I know I don’t need to pronounce or accentuate the r in ‘scores’ in my accent because I learned to speak and understand language before writing it.
Spelling and speaking are two entirely different things - writing is a representation of language, not the other way around.

Yes, there's ex post facto knowledge that the T is there, or the R.

You can tell when people here don't read much. You see posts featuring 'palava' for palaver, and the notorious chester draws, etc.

Some clarification of how Americans can hear the T in Santa. The A sound is modified by the N that follows it. Thinking of several examples of words with NT in them, I lean toward a theory that preceding vowels are all slightly modified by the following NT combo.

No I can't hear the R. But I imagine it because to me or / er / ar make the sound that they make in my accent, even though that sound does not contain a rhotic R. That's why people will write things like "Southern people say barth" because "ar" is the first spelling that comes to mind for the sound "aah"

It's funny sometimes when English non-rhotic speakers do an American accent there are misplaced R sounds all over the place, I am trying to think of an example, but basically instead of replacing the English /aw/ with the American /aaah/ they replace it with /ar/ - paws may incorrectly become poors, rather than paaaas.

Apologies to Scottish people as they tend to get really annoyed when we conflate paw / poor / pour because they sound totally different to them (to me these are all exact homonyms).

Interestingly I always felt irritated when I saw young-child-speak written down in American English and people write things like "ovew" (over - anything with the -er ending converted to -ew) because it didn't make sense to me, reads as complete nonsense - ew is a different sound - and I wondered why they had simply replaced every r without thinking about how small children speak. Until I heard some young American kids speaking and they actually DO include a w-for-r sound at the end of words like that! Blew my mind. And it sounds exactly like short e (as in peg) and then w as in wet or word. It's not a sound combination that exists in the English language, except for tiny children speaking rhotic English, apparently!

Thecrackineverything

No, I am toadally serious.

Have you got a frog in your throat?