No You Di-int!

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Kim from Omaha.

Hi, Kim. Welcome.

Hi, Kim. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I’m an avid listener, and a couple of months ago, I noticed where you two were talking about the concept of consonant slapping.

Mm—

And you started something because I am so fascinated with that whole concept. And so I have noticed it a lot in my own speech, and I’ve been keeping track of those kinds of words when I do it.

And it made me wonder what it’s called if you don’t flap the consonant, if you don’t say the consonant at all.

And I think there’s some great examples in, like, hip-hop culture where sometimes you hear people say getting paid or representing.

One of my favorite examples is from the television show Martin Lawrence, where the theme song was Martin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it’s a catchy song, so you find yourself humming it while you’re doing the dishes, right?

Right.

So I was wondering, is that called something?

Well, let’s review what the consonant flap is.

Okay, yeah, we’ll just talk about it.

The word B-U-T-T-E-R, it’s written with T’s, but most Americans say butter as if it was written with D’s.

That is flapping.

Instead of saying butter, which sounds fake to almost every American, most of us say butter.

And it’s the same with words like better.

We say better, better butter, instead of better butter.

We are flapping those T’s so they turn into D’s.

This is a very normal dialect thing.

It happens across a number of different dialects of English in a variety of countries.

Kind of ordinary.

And it’s actually kind of one of those things that people who are learning English as a second language have a problem with.

They’re like, wait, it’s written with a T.

It’s sometimes pronounced as a T, but sometimes it’s a D.

How do I know?

So that’s flapping, consonant flapping.

But the other thing that you’re talking about, let’s just talk about didn’t.

D-I-D-N apostrophe T.

Yeah.

No, you just didn’t.

I mean, that’s almost the catchphrase where it’s like it’s now being used as a joke in a variety of different…

Everywhere.

I hear it everywhere.

Oh, no, you didn’t.

Yeah, I hear it on the radio in the morning when they’re doing the gossip section on the hip-hop stations and on the pop stations.

It comes from African-American culture.

And that particular thing, there’s two things happening in didn’t.

I’m going to teach them to you.

One is the second D in didn’t is becoming glottalized.

Wow.

Okay.

We don’t actually say it.

Now, we know glottalization from cockney, right?

People know but-all, right?

Instead of bottle, I’m drinking from my bottle.

Bottle.

So by glottal, I’m hearing the Greek word for tongue here.

That’s right.

It’s happening instead of the tongue touching the palate in the front of your mouth.

Your tongue is lightly, if at all, touching very far back in the roof of your mouth.

Okay, that’s glottalization.

The glottalization, yeah.

And the second thing that’s happening in the word like didn’t is that the T is dropping off.

And this is called a consonant reduction or a consonant cluster reduction where it’s just disappearing.

Martin instead of Martin is a glottalization as well.

And now what’s really interesting about American English, we glottalize words that we don’t even know.

And it’s hard to discern those differences in your own speech.

You know, that’s true.

And I’ve noticed a couple of times when I do it, if I say cotton or forgotten, I don’t pronounce the T.

Yeah, forgotten.

That’s a great example.

I hear a lot of young women say Manhattan.

Manhattan.

Yeah.

It’s interesting, right?

I love it.

I love it.

I’ve got to tell you something, Kim.

You mentioned hearing this in hip-hop and African-American television shows.

If you really want to get into how important this is to African-American English, there’s a great book to recommend to you by John Rickford, African-American Vernacular English, and I think you’ll find large parts of it are understandable to anybody, even if they don’t have an academic background.

Thank you so much.

I will look that up.

Okay, so glottalization and then consonant…

Cluster reduction.

After reduction.

Yeah.

Yes.

So I was talking about didn’t, but mostly we’re talking about clodalization here.

Okay, Kim, now you have names for it.

Thank you so much.

Drop us a line sometime when you find something new, all right?

Thank you, I will.

Our pleasure.

Thanks, Kim.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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