Pronouncing Street as Shtreet and Straight as Shtraight

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is Paul Hummel from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Paul. What can we do for you? Hi, Paul. Welcome.

I have a quandary. Something is mystifying me. It has to do with pronunciation, or I would suggest a mispronunciation. I occasionally hear people put an H between an S and a T in words. So,

So, for example, they’d say instead of start, they would say start.

What’s behind that?

Why do people do that?

Where do you hear it?

I don’t hear it very often, but most recently there is a talk show host on a Chicago radio station, and I listen to him often enough that it’s starting to, well, almost annoy me.

I read someplace online, somebody said that even Michelle Obama does this.

I don’t hear it often, but I just occasionally hear it.

So it’s words like street, sounds like street?

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah, this is, I guess, well chronicled. And certainly we get a fair amount of email every year about this. And it’s something that has come up in language circles for at least 30 years, if you can believe that.

It’s one of those things that Americans do that isn’t regional. It’s not a particular part of the country. And it doesn’t seem to be particularly attached to a certain generation or age of speaker.

So what’s happening here is the R in the word is doing something to the consonants in front of it.

All right?

Okay.

So, for example, TR, just TR alone without the S will often sound like ch, C-H, right? So a word like true, T-R-U-E, sounds like true, C-H-R-U-E.

This is called palatalization. What’s happening is the tongue is moving forward on the palate. The tongue is involved in changing this sound.

So it happens in words like straight or destruction or strip, straw, string, instruct, and other S-T-R words. They start to sound like strip and straw and string and instruct.

Right. Exactly. What’s interesting to me is it doesn’t seem to be attached, like I said, to region or age or level of education. It just simply looks like it’s one of those things that happens in the mouths of some speakers without it being a major phenomenal change that we’re all going to be doing someday.

So right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a pronunciation wave that is going to sweep over so that in a couple hundred years we’re all saying street and straight.

I did read on one website, someone suggested that it was actually the start of that, the start of a morphine into a change in pronunciation, but I had trouble buying that.

Yeah, it’s possible. We’re going to need more data, and we’re going to need it over the coming 50 to 100 years, and we’ll all be taking dirt naps by then before it’s finally resolved.

But it is happening, and a lot of people do notice it, and I wouldn’t call it a mispronunciation. I would call it a variant pronunciation, and I have a reputation maybe as being a little permissive on this stuff.

It is interesting, and I will do my best to be much more tolerant.

Yeah.

That’s a good plan.

But the cool thing is that what you’ve done is you’ve gathered evidence, you sought information about it, and now you’re going to sit back and probably accumulate more evidence.

And you can say, oh, yeah, it’s not just this one guy in Chicago. I’m hearing it at the post office. I’m hearing it in line at the grocery store. I’ve got a cousin who says it.

And then you start to realize, oh, it’s a broad swath of people from all different backgrounds at a variety of different educational levels. And some of these people are very conscientious about their speech.

This can’t just be laziness.

It can’t be.

Paul, thank you so much for calling.

Well, thank you for taking my call. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. My wife and I just love your program.

Thank you, Paul.

Wonderful.

Have her call us sometime.

Take care.

Okay.

Will do.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

What pronunciation feature have you noticed where you live?

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.