Vowel Mergers

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Charlie, and I’m from Dallas.

I noticed that my girlfriend uses a, she makes a strange vowel sound. I first noticed it when she said the word email. Now she says email, not email. She also says toenel, so it’s an E-L-L instead of an A-I-L. I especially thought it was funny the other day she was trying to say it was a telltale sign, but she said it’s a telltale sign. Telltale sign. I was wondering where that came from.

-huh.

Now, Charlie, you have to tell us where your girlfriend’s from. I bet she’s from Dallas also. No, I bet she’s from, like, Ohio or something. Let’s hear it.

-huh.

Well, no. She is from Azle, Texas, which is almost an hour away from Fort Worth. It’s a semi-rural area.

Okay. Does she say if she goes to McDonald’s and decides to order the Happy Meal, does she say the Happy Mill? Or would she go to McDonald’s? I might have to test her on that. We don’t go to McDonald’s that often.

That was my question. I’m just looking for what she’s got here, what’s called vowel mergers, and these are a standard part of language change across the world. And they’ve been well chronicled in North America. And the reason Martha and I had a differing opinion on whether or not she’d be from the south or from the Great Lakes region or, you know, Midwest, is because there are a couple really strong trends in vowel mergers that have really complicated patterns that aren’t altogether completely consistent, but they do generally belong to certain geographic groups.

And that is all to say that one of the things that she’s got going on is a vowel merger where her vowels are moving around. And it’s probably not just her. It’s probably maybe her family, her friends, the people like her. This is where, because of outside influences, she hears a vowel a certain way, and she adjusts all of her other vowels another way. So when one vowel moves, usually from social pressures or hearing it said a lot in a certain way, we naturally reform our other vowels or push them around.

There’s actually a really nice chart they use in sociolinguistics that shows the directions of the vowels. It’s kind of funny, but we are unconsciously all doing this all the time to adjust so that our vowels don’t collide. I loved the telltale example. I love that telltale sounds like telltale because it is a perfect illustration. She is eventually going to adjust those vowels even further so that doesn’t happen, probably.

Yeah, well, I’ve given her such a hard time about it that when she said telltale, she knew immediately.

Oh, that’s not nice. Don’t give people a hard time for their language.

What? It sounds like a bonding experience.

I know, I know. Right? You’re paying attention. What else does she say like that? So you said male. Sounds like mel. M-A-I-L sounds like M-E-L-L. What else?

Well, she says toenail. N-A-I-L. I know that that’s a lot like that. So N-A-I-L sounds like. She says pen and pin the same way, but that seems different.

Yes, that’s the classic. It is actually called the Pen-Pin merger. P-E-N sounds like P-I-N for this whole huge segment, which is basically the American South and most of Texas. It kind of fades away in West Texas. It kind of fades away in the middle of Missouri and Kentucky and Tennessee. It kind of fades away a little bit above the Carolinas. But basically, the whole South consistently has this Pen-Pin merger.

And is that why some people say Ink-Pin? Ink-Pin. To distinguish it from another kind of pen? I hear that a lot in the South. But it’s not just the one vowel, so this whole big panorama. And any individual person may not have all the features of this dialect change, but in the aggregate, if you survey enough people, you will consistently see this throughout the American South.

Yeah. Well, I always wondered where it came from because her first language is German, Swiss German. And she does have family from the Midwest. I think it’s one of those things that would be impossible to track down exactly.

Oh, that’s interesting. No, yeah, I bet this comes from her Texas influence and has nothing whatsoever to do with German roots at all.

Okay. There’s probably no chance of that. Anyway, it’s all really interesting. The phrase that you want to look for to find out more is vowel merger, V-O-W-E-L-M-E-R-G-E-R, vowel merger. And you’ll find a ton of really great stuff. A lot of it is very accessible. You’ll find a ton of newspaper articles where they’ve kind of done a decent job of digesting the sociolinguistic work.

Okay, thank you very much.

Yeah, I really appreciate your call. Thanks, Charlie. Have a good one. Bye-bye.

Well, it’s great to talk about dialects from all over the country. We’d love to talk with you about it. So call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.