Both vs. Bolth Pronunciation

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Benjamin calling from beautiful Rainey, Seattle, Washington.

Well, hello, Benjamin. Welcome.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

My awesome partner, Erin, noticed what she sees as an irregularity in my pronunciation of a particular word.

And I’d never noticed this about myself, but it’s the word bull.

I literally had never noticed this about myself.

I’m originally from Northern California, but apparently I say it as though it had an L in it, like bold.

And I guess she’s been tracking this since her friend moved.

She’s from the Midwest, and her friend moved to Michigan and came back saying it that way.

And she’s had trouble sort of tracking down geographically where that pronunciation is from.

And I’ve been trying to help with this project.

I have the difficulty that I still sometimes think that I hear people saying it that way just because that’s the way I kind of expect them to say it.

Because to me, that’s just normal pronunciation of the word.

Yeah, and you didn’t notice it until she pointed it out, correct?

No, literally.

And now I notice that my mom says it, and even after me pointing it out to her, she can’t hear it.

Really?

Yeah, that’s very typical.

A lot of things that we do with our speech, we just don’t know it.

Partly it comes from an awareness of how the word is written, and we feel like we’re properly representing the written language.

Right, yeah.

So it’s interesting that you and your mother both say it, and you’re from Northern California.

There’s not a strong regionality to this.

It does approximately appear to be a little more common in the northeast, not all the way up in New England, but a little south of there.

You do find it scattered throughout the country.

And the reason that I know this is besides a study that was done by the linguist Brian Gick,

I also have had a survey up about this pronunciation since 2010.

And so we have collected eight years of data.

2,300 people have replied to our survey about both with an L versus both without the L sound to it.

And by far and away, most people think that they say both without an L sound.

But as we just discovered, self-reported data can be wrong.

10% of people or so do admit that they say it with an L sound.

Another 1% say they say it more than one way.

And like I said, you can find people who say this everywhere.

What’s happening is something with the tongue is a little different.

So you can try it.

Make an O sound.

Then you’ll feel your tongue at the bottom of your mouth.

So O, right?

Your tongue is kind of resting between your lower teeth.

The tip is probably touching your bottom teeth.

Now say bow, B-O-W-L, and hold the sound, bow.

And your tongue is up a little bit, kind of exaggerated.

And so the tip of your tongue now is probably up and away from your bottom teeth,

Just kind of hovering there in the middle of your mouth, giving you the shape of that L sound.

So bow, right, versus bow.

You can hear the difference there.

So it’s your tongue on the way to touching your top teeth to make that th sound, that unvoiced th,

Is stopping in the middle of your mouth for a moment while the voice is still happening and creating that L sound there.

So it’s a natural physical thing that is happening in your mouth because your tongue is moving a little early

Before the voicing of the previous vowel has stopped.

Huh. That’s really interesting.

Is there any connection between that and like B-O, like both?

Like people who say it like with an F at the end?

No, that’s a different phenomenon as well.

Totally different phenomenon.

But the T-H sounding like a B-F, or sounding like an F,

Is common in a variety of different dialects both in the U.S. and the U.K.

Huh. Well, that’s really interesting.

Well, thank you so much.

It was great to talk to you, and thanks for helping to clear up some things around that.

Sure. Glad to do it.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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