For Some Younger Speakers, “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.

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