Vowel Mergers

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

So at the top of the show, Martha, you quizzed me.

Yes.

I want to quiz you.

Oh.

It’s a little easier, though. You just have to say what I spell.

Oh, okay.

Okay?

All right.

C-O-T.

C-O-T.

Cot.

C-A-U-G-H-T.

Cot.

D-O-N.

D-O-N. Don.

D-A-W-N.

Don.

P-E-N.

P-E-N. Pen.

P-I-N.

P-I-N, pin.

So, it’s interesting.

You have a vowel merger in two out of the three of those pairs.

I beg your pardon?

You should see your doctor.

Hi, I’m Dr. Grant.

You have a vowel merger.

A vowel merger is when you pronounce two different vowels the same in two different words.

In large parts of the country, D-O-N and D-A-W-N are pronounced the same.

Usually, Don and Don.

Right.

But in other parts of the country, they pronounce differently, don and don.

Same for cot and caught and pen and pin.

The last, you did separate them.

And a lot of times people do intentionally separate those if they know what I’m up to.

This is the kind of thing that, as you well know,

And we talk about this in public and speeches and we give presentations or even at parties,

You can soon have a cluster of people gathered around you all trying it out for themselves.

Yes.

And it’s one of the ways that sociolinguists study language change.

Where in the country are the younger people pronouncing these vowels the same?

And you can map it and create these new maps.

For example, around the Great Lakes, you’ll find new things are happening with these vowel mergers.

I went to the American Dialect Society Conference in Portland in January, as I do every January,

And I saw some great papers about vowel mergers, including in Vermont,

Where the vowel mergers are moving eastward toward New Hampshire.

They’re crossing the Connecticut River.

So this area of these sounds, cot and cot, sounding the same, cot and cot, they’re starting, it’s growing larger.

And yet there’s also this pushback because they don’t want to sound like they’re from Boston or from Massachusetts.

So the idea that we’re all starting to speak a standard homogenized English with similar pronunciations everywhere is just bunk, right?

Well, there’s a little bit to that.

We do learn new vocabulary through the popular media, but it’s funny.

We tend to learn our pronunciation from our family and our neighbors.

And so in one way, we’re growing more like each other.

We’re picking up new words.

And the other way, we’re growing more different from each other.

We’re picking up the sounds of our neighbors.

And some of it’s psychological, the pushback.

I’m from Vermont.

I don’t want to sound like I’m from Massachusetts.

So I’m not going to use my R in a particular way.

I’m not going to say some of my words like they do in Boston.

I want to sound like my people, not like those people from over there, those people from away.

Yeah.

Anyway, if you want to try the vowel mergers, we’ll put a list of them, the more common ones, on the website.

You can try them out.

Maybe I’ll even do a quiz, and we can see if we can map where some of this stuff is going on across the country.

Find us at waywordradio.org.

Drop us a line if you want to share your vowel merger story, because I know you’ve got it, 877-929-9673.

And any general linguistics question can go right to email, words@waywordradio.org.