Karina from Maryville, Missouri, disagrees with her mom about whether bowl and bull sound the same. Karina hears them as the same sound, while her mom hears a clear difference. It’s an example of a vowel merger, or sound shift, that occurs in younger speakers in pockets of the country, including Missouri. For them, the vowels in bull and bowl now sound alike. During language acquisition, categorical perception tunes the brain to ignore acoustic differences that older generations still notice. The dark L at the end of such words also raises the back of the tongue and pulls the preceding vowel, helping nudge the shift along. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “For Some Younger Speakers in Missouri, “Bowl” and “Bull” Sound the Same”
Hello, you have A Way with Words!
Hello, yes.
I’m Karina, and I’m calling from Maryville, Missouri.
Hey, Karina.
We’re glad to have you on the show.
What’s on your mind today?
So, I am having a debate with my mom about if bowl as in a bowl of ice cream and bowl as in a a male cow sound the same.
And I think the more important part of this is that we think differently on it because she thinks that it’s they’re two different words, and I think they’re one word.
Oh.
However, we want to know why we hear the same sound differently.
Oh, this is so good.
Let’s here.
So we’re talking about two words.
One is B O W L, and the other one is B U L L.
And for you, they sound the same.
But to your mom, they sound different.
Yeah.
Okay.
I got answers for you.
We have answers for you.
Karina, this is something that’s happening in several parts of the country.
It’s called a vowel shift, where vowels just kind of get nudged in one direction.
And when one vowel moves, another vowel moves.
So you usually end up with pairs of words that start to sound like each other.
Sometimes they start to sound different.
But when the vowel merger happens, it’s known it’s because they start to sound alike.
So we also have PULL and POOL that sound alike.
Do those sound alike to you?
Yeah.
Pool and pull.
Funny I hear They sound similar, but not quite the same.
Not quite.
But, yeah, but they’re different.
And I hear the difference when you say it.
What about H U L L and H O L E?
Hole and whole.
I don’t hear them exactly the same.
Yeah.
Okay.
That’s good.
So there’s a couple other things.
So this vowel merger is happening in parts of the country.
It tends to be the younger generation because that’s where language change always happens, almost always happens.
It’s become a fixture of the dialect.
So this is a part of the country that includes Northeastern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, parts of Texas, parts of the Pacific Northwest, parts of Utah, and other places.
So these pockets around the country, not necessarily a contiguous blob on the map.
But the other thing that’s happening here is, and this sounded what you were most interested in, is the fact that you can’t hear the difference, your mom can.
Yeah.
And so there’s something that linguists call categorical perception.
It’s where during early childhood, during your language acquisition, your brain maps the acoustic boundaries of these phonemes.
And now phonemes are basically the sound building blocks of spoken language.
They’re more than letters, kind of less than words, and just the essential building units of language.
And so because of this categorical perception, if you grow up as you did, Karina, in an environment where the vowels in B U L L and B O W L sound the same, they’re the same functional sound, then your brain learns to ignore slight differences.
You just won’t hear the acoustic variations.
Your mom, on the other hand, grew up in an environment where they were substantially different, and so her brain does hear the difference.
She does notice the acoustic variations.
That’s interesting.
Yeah.
And it’s so pronounced, this categorical reception, that it is incredibly common for people to not only hear the difference between certain words or certain sounds, but they believe there’s no way they could possibly miss the difference.
And they get a little upset when you point it out.
They get really worked up about it.
You can even show them like the sound waveforms where you record them and turn them into a visual graph that shows the sound and show visually how they’re different.
And they will still stubbornly deny it.
You know, I’m thinking about how some people pronounce the word B O T H.
Oh, yeah.
We’ve talked about that.
Do you say b o t h with an l sound in it?
Like both, Karina?
I say both.
Okay.
You say both.
And your mom says both as well?
Yeah, she says both.
Okay.
Yeah, because I know a lot of people who will say both, and they will swear that there’s no L in the sound that they’re making.
Yeah.
That’s interesting.
The L is particularly problematic.
For example, in the pairs that we talked about earlier, bowl and bowl, hole and pool, hole and hole, they all end in that L sound.
And that L at the end of the syllable is known as what is known as a dark L.
So the physical act of pronouncing that dark L kind of requires the back of the tongue to raise toward your soft palate.
That movement of the tongue pulls the vowel that comes before the L in a new direction.
And that’s kind of how the vowel shift begins.
That’s very interesting.
This makes me think of, I learn Ukrainian and there’s a little bit of a soft sign, it has a little bit of an l in it.
Like, it’s like, if I’m gonna say, if I’m gonna say, like, the sound I, but I have a soft sound at the end, it’ll be l.
Yeah.
Perfect.
That is such a great example because Ukrainian and Polish both share phonemes that are very similar to what we’re talking about here.
You’ll find that same kind of soft L in Polish as well.
Cool.
Yeah.
That’s so cool.
Karina, you stumbled upon something that many linguists have researched and studied.
So that’s the cool thing is you’ve, like, kind of plugged into this large data set of information.
But also, you notice these generational differences, you start to feel like, wait, it’s like being in a hot tub and feeling the water temperature heat up.
You’re like, I’m in the middle of something going on.
I’m in the middle of this kind of carnival of language.
Well, Corina, we hope you’ll call us again sometime.
Yeah.
And good luck with your Ukrainian studies.
I only know one word – vaselka.
It means rainbow.
Cool.
All right, you take care, Karina.
You too.
– All right.
Bye bye.
– Bye.
Well, maybe you’ve been having a conversation with a family member back and forth, back and forth, talking about some aspect of language.
We would love to talk with you about it.
I realize that you are consistently in a mode of exploring how our language changes and that you avoid making “corrections” because everybody’s experience is valid. But honestly, could you not have told Karina that she likely would encounter many, many people who do, in fact, hear a very distinct difference between “bull” and “bowl”?
I think it’s important because important information can get “lost in translation”. We tend to think that a queer pronunciation is an accident, and gloss over it. But it’s best to be sensitive to it and learn.
I am reminded of confusion within my family, where my Dad never did pronounce a clear distinction between “V” and “B”. We gave him a geode as a gift (which can also be called a “vug”). So he said “Oh, it’s a vug” but to my ear it sounded like he said “Oh, it’s a bug”.
In the Washington DC area, I once knew a woman from the Eastern Shore who was talking about a “hice”; it took me a long time to figure out that she was saying her version of “house”.
When we had a Spanish exchange student girl in our house for a semester, she wanted to tell us a joke. In her typical Spanish pronunciation she was telling us about “sheeps”. To our American ears, we mentally translated or mapped her Spanish accent into “ships” (the mapping was also confirmed to our ears by the plural “s”). But the joke really was about the woolly animals, and her passable but not completely fluent English accounted for the plural “s” added.
Perhaps the worst example happened to me when I was working for a French company, and I was on a business trip there. We were having a discussion about whether it was better to use “molding” or “grinding” for a particular process. In French, the former is “Moulage” and the latter is “Meulage”. To my ears, the vowel sound at the beginning of both words “mapped” to an “oo” sound. So in an important staff meeting (conducted in French) with a dozen people around the room, I objected (in English) to one person’s statement that we should be doing molding rather than grinding. None of the French had the slightest idea what my problem was, but another American who was much more fluent in French came to my rescue and explained to the team that I was mistaking one word for the other. The vowel sound in “meulage” simply does not exist in English, so it’s very hard for us to hear or use it properly – even though it’s very very common in French, e.g. in “tu” and “rue”. I finally learned how to pronounce the sound by hearing Edith Piaf singing “Mon Coeur est au coin de la rue”, where she sing that particular line at 2:20 and holds out the “rue” for a long time. That convinced me that the odd sound was no accident, but totally intentional.