Transcript of “Glottal Stops and Looking Down on Other Dialects”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha.
This is Joan calling from Dallas.
My question relates to the glottal stop.
It’s a sound that happens like if a word has two T’s in it usually. Instead of pronouncing water with the T’s, you would say water. Or cattle would be cattle. And even you can do that with glottal stop.
Good point.
I follow on TikTok a woman named Miss Moneypenny, and she posts the Scots Word of the Day and other things about Scotland and language and culture. And she got a comment on one of her posts asking her why did she pronounce W-A-T-E-R as water. So she responded that it was part of her accent, and it was an accepted pronunciation in the Scots language. And she actually showed the dictionary page where it said that you could pronounce it as water. And she commented that when people hear you using a glottal stop, they think you’re ignorant or poorly educated or lazy or you’re not speaking the language properly.
And that resonated with me because my mom went to elementary school in Brooklyn, and this was about the early 1930s. And they had a speech teacher come in to get rid of the kids’ Brooklyn accents. The reasons were all together now because people would think you were ignorant, poorly educated, lazy, and can’t speak the language properly. And the word that would always trip my mom up was the word bottle. She would pronounce it bottle, and they’d be all over her.
So my question, finally, is what is it about the glottal stop that gets people so judgmental? I mean, 1930s Brooklyn to 2022 Scotland, why do people hate on the glottal stop?
Oh, wow. You’ve laid this out very well, Joan. And Martha and I are so ready for this topic because we, as you know, as a listener to the show, we have strong feelings about people judging the language of other people. And particularly when they just automatically default to calling different dialects lazy or stupid or uneducated. Those aren’t the right words for that because there’s no one English and never has been. Now, there are Englishes that have prestige, usually because they’re associated with, let’s say, newscasters or the educated people that you hear on TV. But those aren’t necessarily better. They’re just simply given prestige because of power or authority or influence or politics or economics. And those aren’t reasons that have anything at all to do with the quality of their language, because it just as easily could have been another dialect that was raised up and called the prestige dialect.
So anyway, sorry, I’m getting excited here. Let’s go back to water for a second. Martha and I have talked about this before, and I don’t want to get into it too much because you can search on our website at waywordradio.org and find that segment. But we’ve talked about that in the U.S. alone, there are 15 different pronunciations of the word water, W-A-T-E-R.
Wow. And there are quite a few as well in the United Kingdom across the different dialects. It’s just one of those words that lends itself to pronunciations. And the glottal stop occurs naturally in many dialects of English. In North American English, in the U.S. and Canada, it occurs in words like, oh, you know, when you make a mistake. And you go, oh, between those two syllables is a glottal stop. The beginning of the word apple for many people is a glottal stop. In the phonetic inventory of Hawaiian, the Hawaiian language, a glottal stop is a part of it. The traditional pronunciation of the state is Hawaii, with a glottal stop in there. So these occur.
Now, in New York City, it’s interesting. It’s far back, we know it was at least 100 years ago, and your 1930s story about your mother is so perfect for this. The glottal stop was recognized as a part of it. It was not just New York City, but Boston and peppered throughout North America because there was an influence in New York City and Boston and these big East Coast cities to speak a bit more like the people in the UK. There’s a lot of trade back and forth, a lot of travel back and forth, a lot of influence back and forth.
So I’m not surprised. And Joan, your story is one we’ve heard before from people who’ve called this show or wrote to us. And sometimes they write to us and say, I don’t want to talk about this on the air, but I wanted you to know this is what happened to me. And they tell these horrific stories about being in schools and being forced not to speak their own language because they’re not from the United States. They’re from somewhere else. Or being told that they sound stupid and to sit in the back of the class. And this is not the way that it should be done. Diversity of language is normal. Diversity of dialect is normal. People do speak differently, and we have to learn to accept that. There is more than one way to speak.
And it’s so interesting to me that when people talk about the language of other people as being wrong, they often and usually do not apply that same analysis to their own speech. They are not critics of the way they talk themselves. So to get back to Joan’s original question, which is why is the glottal stop in particular so looked down on, I suppose it’s because it’s associated with a dialect that doesn’t have that kind of prestige of various dialects. And that’s interesting, too, because more and more I’m hearing younger people use a glottal stop just casually, you know, press the button. Button, mutton, kitten. Yeah, so people who think that it’s nonstandard may be hearing it more and more.
So, Joan, thank you so much for the opportunity. We really appreciate the question. It’s a great one.
You’re welcome. Thank you for letting me be on the show, and I really enjoy the podcast. I’ve been listening to it forever.
All right. Fantastic. Take care of yourself. Be well.
You too. Bye.
Bye, Joan. Thanks.
Martha and I are preparing to do some road shows, and you can always find out more at our website at waywordradio.org/events. And when we go on the road, we love to take questions from the audience and we’d love to hear your experiences there or on our voicemail. Call us and let us know about your experience with dialect and how people have treated you, how fairly or unfairly, because you spoke differently.
Or tell your story in email, words@waywordradio.org.
