The Southern Stress on the First Syllable in Words like Cement and Police

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Marla. Hi, Grant. This is Jeremy from Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Hey, Jeremy. Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

What’s up?

I have a question about a word. It’s cement or cement.

My wife’s from Canada. You can imagine the pronunciation debates we get into.

And this was one that she brought up with me pretty early on.

And I admit that cement, I don’t see how it’s pronounced that way, so I changed it.

But I was kind of curious on how or where that pronunciation even came from.

So, Jeremy, you grew up in Arkansas?

Yes, my whole life.

All right.

Okay.

Can I ask you a couple other questions?

I want to see if you’ve got a pattern of pronunciation that matches the pronunciation of cement, okay?

Sure.

What’s the name of the American holiday where we eat turkey in November?

Thanksgiving.

And what do State Farm and GEICO sell?

Car insurance.

And what do rock musicians use that has six strings and a wooden body and they plug it into an amp?

A guitar.

And the guys who drive the black and white cars with the lights flashing on top?

Police.

Police. Okay.

What I was looking for here is there’s this whole category of words that people in the American South, more often than people in the American North, pronounce with the stress on the initial syllable.

And so they are more likely to say words like police, guitar, Thanksgiving.

Somebody didn’t ask you about like umbrella, July, TV, Detroit, and a really well-known one, insurance instead of insurance.

Hell yeah.

Yeah, you have that one too.

You say insurance.

Yeah.

What you find in the American South, particularly among older speakers, these pronunciations are really common.

But over the years, they’ve become stigmatized, and those pronunciations are slowly disappearing.

And the younger generations don’t tend to say things like police or insurance or Thanksgiving.

They’re more likely to say police or insurance or Thanksgiving.

Interesting.

And see, my best friend doesn’t say it, but my whole family does.

Yeah, my father was born in southeast Missouri, which isn’t all that far from Fort Smith, Arkansas.

So he has a lot of those pronunciations, too.

And he was a police officer.

So for him, there’s a double emphasis there.

But that cement pronunciation goes right in the category.

It fits perfectly with the other list of words.

And it’s really well known.

Sociolinguists have studied it and tracked it.

And it’s the kind of thing that comes up again and again in surveys that they do when they’re doing field work.

And they’re keeping an eye on it.

More common in the American South than it is the American North.

Certainly isn’t heard in Canada or the UK.

I don’t think there should be any shame in pronouncing it that way, but I can certainly understand how your Canadian spouse might have difficulties with going, why do you say cement instead of cement?

Yeah.

So it’s nice to know that you’re just part of a larger pattern of speech.

It’s a dialect feature.

It’s about who you are and where you’re from.

Yeah, so it’s not necessarily incorrect.

It’s just a way of saying it.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, I keep picturing the Beverly Hillbillies.

Did you watch that as a kid?

Yeah, yeah, I did watch that.

You remember Ellie Mae Clampett?

Every time she would go out by their pool in Beverly Hills, she would say, I’m going out to the cement pond.

Yeah.

The cement pond.

And they would have that music.

Do-do-do-do-do-do-do.

Yep.

But I have a, because through my father and because I spent some of my youth in southeast Missouri, which has got a very southern sound to some of its speech, I do say things like TV.

You say vehicle.

I say vehicle.

Yeah, that’s another one.

And I do say Thanksgiving.

I don’t say Thanksgiving.

Yeah, I do.

Obviously, as we often talk about on the show, Martha and I aren’t really good examples of where we’re from.

Oh, we’re terrible examples.

Because we’ve spent so much time trying things out as we study.

Much many influences.

Yeah, exactly, studying language.

But some of those come out.

And some of them I know, like umbrella is one that I know that I say.

So I kind of like overdo it every time I say umbrella because I know that it’s a goofy thing that a lot of people don’t say.

How about that?

That was so neat.

I’ll have to let her know that it’s just part of the South.

Jeremy, thanks for calling.

Appreciate it.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Jeremy.

Well, we’d love to hear your stories of disputes at home with somebody who speaks maybe a little bit differently from you.

You can send those stories to words@waywordradio.org or call us, 877-929-9673.