American Glottalization

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ann.

Hi, Ann. Where are you calling us from?

Carmel, Indiana.

Carmel. Okay, a Hoosier.

Yeah, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Thanks.

I work in a grade school,

And this is my 10th year,

And I’ve just noticed

A few words this year

From some teachers that

I’ve never noticed them pronounced

The way they pronounce them.

A good example would be

The word spelled K-I-T-T-E-N.

And being a Hoosier, and I don’t know, I haven’t talked to a lot of people from all over,

But being a Hoosier, I pronounced it kitten or mitten.

Now, this year, a few teachers, I’ve been in classrooms, and I’ve noticed they say kitten,

Like k-i with a mark and break u-n they or n-n so not only do they leave out the

The t sound but it’s just really obvious and this is the first time I’ve ever noticed this.

These are teachers yes teachers and I work with mostly women and I mean I would say the age

Range is, you know, 25 to 50, but I would say a lot of them are younger. And do your students

Say it as well that way, kitten? Yes. So I don’t know if it’s a lazy pronunciation. I never even

Thought about it because I guess, like I said, most people say kitten, but at least in this area,

But when someone, you know, when you’re hearing someone teach and they say, you know, they put on

The mitts and you’re like, what? What word? All right. We’ve got some information for you. We can

Help you with this. And first, anytime you think that it might be a lazy pronunciation that you

Hear people say, it probably isn’t. So we’re just going to discard that idea for now. Almost always,

Especially when a lot of people are doing it, we can look at it like a scientist or a sociolinguist

And say, all right, I’ve got data here that I can analyze and I can come up with a conclusion.

And as a matter of fact, that’s what sociolinguists have done for this particular thing, which is called glottalization, G-L-O-T-T-A-L-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N, glottalization.

And I win the spelling.

Wow.

And there’s a fellow by the name of David Eddington at Brigham Young University who, with some of his colleagues, has published a few papers on this phenomenon.

And what he’s discovered is that generally it happens for people in their 20s or early 30s and young women, but particularly from the western part of the United States.

Now, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen in Indiana or Rhode Island, but in the data that he gathered, which admittedly was a smaller sample size, that’s what he found.

What’s happening here is, as in other dialects of English, such as Cockney, which everyone knows, his bottle, right, instead of his bottle or bottle, his bottle.

Right.

We have increasing glottalization where there’s a place where we’ve got a T sound surrounded by vowels.

And so it’s not just in words like mitten and kitten, but you might also have it in words like Netflix, where most people don’t say the T.

Try it.

Netflix.

If you’re consciously saying it, if you’re self-conscious about it, you’ll probably say it.

But the number of people who pronounce the T in Netflix approaches zero.

Most Americans, at least, or North Americans who speak English, say Netflix.

Try it. It’s pretty cool, right? But we do it in other things like Bill Clinton. A lot of people, the T doesn’t appear. It’s a glottalized, right? And the glottis is this little thingy in the back of your throat. And so what happened is you’re having a sharp kind of of air instead of doing the T sound with your tongue on your mouth.

So it’s way back instead of up at the front.

That’s right, way back instead of in the front.

And those double T words kind of are prone to that, but they’re not the only place that it happens.

It happens in short words, too, like the words like bat, B-A-T.

If you hear people who are speaking unselfconsciously and using the word B-A-T, they’re very likely to say bat.

Without a T, bat.

It just kind of stops.

There’s a gust of air in the back of their throat, bat.

And there’s no T in it.

But in any case, yeah, so what you’ve found is a change in some of the American ways of speaking.

It is a growing dialect feature of American English.

So it’s not lazy.

No.

Wow.

No, it’s not lazy.

It’s just something they’ve learned from their cohort, from their peer group.

We speak mostly like the people around us.

We speak mostly like the people that we go to school with and we work with, and a little bit like our parents and family.

Okay, yeah, I can see that, absolutely.

So in 100 years, it could be that whoever takes over the show from me and Martha takes a phone call or a vid call or whatever they call it at the time from somebody who says, yeah, all these people aren’t glottalizing the word mitten and couldn’t like they’re supposed to.

What’s happening with that?

It’s going to be unusual.

Isn’t it interesting?

Absolutely.

Because, you know, even at my age, you learn something new every day.

You do.

You sure do.

Anne, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for the field research.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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