This video has been kindly sponsored by the browser Opera. You can download Opera for FREE from my link: opr.as/Opera-browser-Dr-Geoff-Lindsey

@catmacopter8545

3 ай бұрын

For any of y'all wondering, opera is based on chromium so google still tracks you. Also search "opera predatory loans"

@sigil5772

3 ай бұрын

Surely "Operer"

@Seapatico

3 ай бұрын

I wonder if you could do a video on how the pronunciation of the word "women" is being, rather quickly, changed to "woman"? I have started to hear it a lot in the last few years, and I'm assuming it has something to do with the pronunciation of the O in "women" being rather odd, and with words being written into AI and speaking programs, maybe that strange pronunciation is being worn away? Curious your thoughts

@mrkiplingreallywasanexceed8311

3 ай бұрын

OMG Geoff - the BBC spelling Gibraltar without the final "r" is absolutely mortifying. I know that's not really the point of today's video, but there is now virtually no day at all - from 365 in a year - in which I don't see a spelling error. I don't refer to, say, others' Comments on various KZread channels - or messages sent by friends/colleagues via SMS/Wattsapp and the like. I'm talking about the places where once it would have been inconceivable to have found one - the so-called "reputable" sources like the BBC website for starters - but during the past few weeks alone I also recall being very surprised to find them variously on those of the Royal Family, the Government, Audi UK, Sainsbury's, Omega, Tate&Lyle, Wedgewood, The Telegraph and Farrow&Ball - and this is merely what I can recall off the bat as I write this, otherwise there would be many others. Even someone like yourself, an expert whose stock in trade is words, I could easily imagine shrugging and suggesting it'd prolly be better to calm tf down 😏 Yet I implore, if not you, then the Universe, to hear my pain at what I feel is a symptom of an insidious - but pernicious - phenomenon. What started as an outbreak about 25 years ago progressed, slowly at first, to an epidemic, ballooned to a pandemic - and is now endemic to the extent that leads me to make the above assumption (ie what am I worrying about?) even of a language professor! I have found as the years go by, greater and greater wisdom in every single one of the various proverbs, sayings and epithets with which we were all brought up.... Buy cheap, buy twice Look after the pennies and the pounds look.. Treat people how you wish to be treated.../leave the place how you'd want to find it... Once bitten, twice shy Neither a borrower, nor a lender, be. You get the drift. Thus I find no reason to doubt "the devil's in the detail" Well, quite. If the above mentioned organisation s are either unable to get those things right - or can't even be bothered to check - or have checked - what appears in their respective Corporate shop windows, what HOPE is there that one might reasonably expect to procure well-made stuff and/or good service from the staff? It genuinely offends me; puts me off dealing with the institutions/companies involved and causes me real concern that the basic forces which glue complex societies (like cities - or countries) together, are disintegrating and that, by the year 2124, it'll have all just reverted to a "Mad Max-" or "Brazil"-esque dystopia where the very last doctors have all been dead for 20 years, no one's running the government, so you can ride around drunk, at 11 years old, in a fire-breathing jalopy with no MOT (or brakes - I have developed an actual allergy to seeing "breaks") doing drive-by shootings with total impunity. The flat earthers, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists will have won. If you think I am catastrophising - or even merely exaggerating - well I don't think I am, entirely. Phoning Barclaycard - or EDF Energy or the Post Office - these days it really doesn't matter who it is, it is a nightmare. The (almost inevitably south east Asian) customer service (ha!) representative has been SOOOO highly inculcated to be so overweeningly polite, they're now too busy grovelling a thousand times how they can help you to begin even listening to you. They parrot what you've just said to them - except their training manager has just taught them to do that with no understanding of why : to check comprehension and to empathise. I find myself having to raise my voice over and above their apologies when, for the fifth time, I have asked them to please stop being so excruciatingly polite for long enough so they can hear what I'm asking. What used to be merely a somewhat workaday, slightly tedious call, is more than half the time, a disturbing ordeal where you start to doubt your own sanity. Having formerly and for a long time, been in retail management myself, I am aware of what it's like to be on the receiving end and therefore go at it from that perspective: quietly, patiently, respectfully and with the understanding of precisely what it's like to be understaffed, underpaid and overworked. You won't find me railing at some hapless worker if you input "Karen" on KZread. Yet the other day, someone in Tesco actually walked away while I was talking to them! These are all examples of the same, overarching factor - erosion of standards - of which spelling, surely, is the most fundamental? Yes, I am aware language - including spelling - isn't ossified. However, I think it's also a bit of a cop out just to cite that. Indeed Chaucer and Shakespeare, through Dafoe, via Dr Johnson, to Austen and Dickens - to HG Wells - right up to EM Forster and PG Wodehouse (both of whom, despite living till the 1970s, easily had memories of Queen Victoria) were all writing at a time when strictly standard spelling didn't exist. Salman Rushdie and even JK Rowling are comfortably old enough to have been through childhood, completed their education and got careers underway before anyone had heard about computers let alone the internet. Of course there was going to be a lot of development with so many people going at it from so many angles, for so long. That's all gone now however - no one (at least not in the developed world) could countenance life before 24 hour interconnectivity - any more than you or I could really imagine writing on clay tablets - or having to cut our own quills. Dictionaries are on-line and anyway, there's spell check. Yes, we'll get new words, undoubtedly - I'm still acclimatising to "bling". As for pre-existing words though, I just can't see how they can change nowadays? In short, any variation from standard, is wrong. I heard something interesting the other day - that there's no such thing as human error. Only people inadequately prioritising. If you REALLY think hard about that, it's right, isn't it? Spinning those final two points - one micro (spelling) and one macro (prioritising) - and all wrapped in "woke", where everyone's opinions are equally valid, where valuing self is king, where no one's stupid, thick or just wrong, you get terminal decay. No, I'm not advocating for bringing back class humiliation, corporal punishment and staying behind after school - and yes, I know every generation bemoans the lowering of standards - yet I truly feel this is different and that society already feels like Alice in Wonderland, except we're having the Mad Hatter's tea party ON the tablecloth, UNDERNEATH the table, and that the March Hare just has to swipe it away and we're all doomed to fall into an even trippier dimension than we're in now!!😂 My tongue is half in my cheek of course - but for the part that isn't, I'd be fascinated to understand any slivers of simple sagacity which may have occurred to you in the course of your travels that you might be willing to pass on and, hopefully, reassure!😏

@sunyavadin

3 ай бұрын

Watching the whole video in bafflement as literally every example that comes up, my local English dialect uses a glottal stop for, just sitting here like, "Yes, the Germans get it!" XD

The funny thing is that, as an American, if a non-American actor gets something "wrong" with their American accent, I hardly ever notice it, because I just assume there's some regional American accent that has that quirk. I've heard a lot of weird accent idiosyncrasies from actual fellow Americans, so almost nothing would surprise me.

@riz94107

3 ай бұрын

This, and me too. I always thought of Gary Oldman as having pretty good American chops (the first movie I saw him in the 80s, I assumed he WAS American), but I've been noticing his slips more and more.

@7poppiesist

3 ай бұрын

I've always thought that gives British actors doing an American accent a bit of an advantage over the reverse scenario. If an American actor is doing a style of speech that doesn't have ALL the features of a specific regional variety of British English, or has a mix of features from different varieties that wouldn't mix, it seems to become immediately apparent to most British viewers/listeners. However, a British actor doing something VAGUELY North American can sometimes have it come across slightly odd, but I usually can't put my finger on it and generally assume it's one of the many very rare N.A. varieties I'm unfamiliar with, or even that it's just an individual quirk of the character, and don't think too much about it.

@phtown

3 ай бұрын

It never bothered me that Oldman's Jim Gordan says "carm down" because I just assumed there must be some neighborhood in Queens or something where people say that.

@LeighMerrydayPorch

3 ай бұрын

Agreed. Other than obviously bad attempts, I don't hear the mistakes English actors make. I'm often shocked when an actor is interviewed, and I realize they're English. I'd guess most Americans are the same. But even I can usually hear a bad attempt by an American to speak with an English accent. We fail harder. lol

@JeffreyGroves

3 ай бұрын

Americans are very used to hearing linking Rs because many of the big news and media companies are based in New York, so during national broadcasts we hear linking Rs all the time. An example: Many of the MTV VJs in the 80s were from New York where MTV was broadcast from. As a result, everyone nationwide heard the linking Rs regularly while watching MTV. Most of us didn't know why they sounded like that, but we accepted it as just another quirky North American accent.

How to sound British: Take out some of the R’s and then put them back, but not where you found them.

@rojax_thevoicetm2385

2 ай бұрын

That’s pretty much it lol

@skinnyyoungjiggy4471

Ай бұрын

you mean English lol. we don't do the R thing in Scotland

@GippyHappy

Ай бұрын

I just want you to now, and I say this in the most sincere way possible, no American has ever said "Britain" and been referring to Scotland. It's like when I said "American" you knew I wasn't talking about Mexico.@@skinnyyoungjiggy4471

@AnonymousSam

Ай бұрын

That's a great idear!

@SeanWinters

Ай бұрын

​​@@skinnyyoungjiggy4471No the Scottish just do whatever the hell you want to, whenever you want to, pretend it's a "regional thing", and then complain about the English while doing it. "Agh tuljuz negta kep theh durr opin when yeh gowws outseed!"

I was told by my grandfather: New Yorkers & Bostonians do not have an “r” at the end of the words like car; “Hey! Get off my ca’h!” -that missing “r” floats up in the air, flys around in the stratosphere over some states before coming down on states like Mississippi & get words like “Warsh your hands”…

@AnimeSunglasses

2 күн бұрын

Southern California as well, unless that was just my family.

@LouisNothing

2 күн бұрын

😂😂😂 so true

In a New Hampshire elementary school, I had a classmate with a very strong Boston accent. There was a line in our science textbook that mentioned "tigers, cheetahs, and pumas", which with my general accent I would have pronounced "tie-gurrs, chee-tuhs, and poo-muhs", but she pronounced "tie-guhs, chee-turs, and poo-murs". That memory still cracks me up to this day. The existing R in tiger was removed, and the words that didn't have them got free R's.

@rmrmlcy8906

Ай бұрын

when i was very young my mother and i (appalachian) would visit relatives in NYC and were always amused how they’d say “docta” and “lawya” and “teacha” removing the Rs but would ADD an R to words that didnt have them like “Brenderrr” for “Brenda” !

@alloradora

Ай бұрын

Rhode Island is the same way! (And fairly different in other ways! I've seen the Rhode Island accent imitated in accent videos but it's usually Boston and not right at all)

@dickottel

27 күн бұрын

tie girls cheaters and boomers

@GhostWatcher2024

26 күн бұрын

And let's not ferget words like "warsh"

@lucienskinner-savallisch5399

17 күн бұрын

Khakis≠ Khakis= car keys ≠ car keys

Vanilla Rice will never not be funny to me

@kcsupermom51

3 ай бұрын

😅🤣😅

@tookitogo

3 ай бұрын

So the song is actually “Rice, Rice, Baby” by Rice Pudding? 😂

@kittycatcrunchie

3 ай бұрын

Its not exactly this rip lmao vanillar ice, its added to liase the words, like in french with dans une becoming danzune

@The-KP

3 ай бұрын

You might be happy to learn there is a product called 'Vanilla Rice Dream' !

@Sonny_McMacsson

3 ай бұрын

He took his dementor advisors' advice and became another soulless pop performer.

I don't know if you will see this, but there is an intrusive, unlinking R in southern US accents. It is rare and archaic, but my grandpa uses it in "Idea(r)" and "wa(r)sh". I don't know how mamy words he uses it in, but I'll hear him say "Time to wa(r)sh up" before a meal very regularly

@JenksAnro

3 ай бұрын

I have heard this actually

@zhazhagab0r

3 ай бұрын

It's also found in the Midwest

@eeekityeeekeeek1778

3 ай бұрын

Older, or rural (background) people in the Midwest use it as well. Have never heard it from anyone middle aged or younger. Growing up with TV maybe stopped that up here?

@crookedspin

3 ай бұрын

'draw' is another example of this I think. As in draw(r)ing

@JoshBlasy

3 ай бұрын

Indeed, I was surprised it was never brought up. Yellow belly, pronounced as yeller belly, which both isn't one of the par, pa, or paPa vowels, but belly doesn't start with a vowel. And this is all over the southern accent mostly from older folks (although I find myself code switching into it when interacting with the older generation)

One giveaway word when English or Aussie actors speak in American accents is the word "anything" which slips out as "ennathin" instead of "enny thing." Related is is the "nothing" which some Brits say as "NOTH-ing" vs the American "nuth-ing".

@tomothythimas

Ай бұрын

I don't know if I just have some weird Chicago influence or something, but I often pronounce "anything" as inny-thing, instead of "eh" in front, I'm from the midwest. American accents are incredibly varied though so no surprise if I pronounce it differently 🤷‍♂️

@onlyang_el

Ай бұрын

It was quite fun reading this in an amerivan accent haha

@musa2775

Ай бұрын

Yes! And "anybody". Americans say "ENNY buh-dee" instead of "Annie boddy" or "Annie b-dee".

@carelessdreamer

Ай бұрын

I pronounce it more like “inna-thang” sometimes, but that’s probably just the southeastern dialect slipping in and out.

@kalafalas246

Ай бұрын

@@tomothythimasa lot of people when talking about American accents (including this video) really mean a Californian accent, what they are exposed to from Hollywood.

As a Scotsman, I would like to extend my deepest sympathies to all those who still can't help making an arse of their /R/s.

Years ago, a woman who worked for me asked me to review her resume. She was from Queens, a location in New York that has a non-rhotic accent. She had worked in an office in Rockefeller Center at one time and had written the address as "Rockefella Center," which, no doubt, made perfect sense to her ears.

@gameratortylerstein5636

3 ай бұрын

I have seen the Cuyahoga river spelt Cayahaga, by Germans i think.

@maggiem.5904

3 ай бұрын

@@gameratortylerstein5636 “Cayahoga” is how I’ve always heard it pronounced, so I can understand why someone would spell it that way.

@appletree6898

3 ай бұрын

Rockefella Centa 😂

@gameratortylerstein5636

3 ай бұрын

@@maggiem.5904 Yeah. It's not exactly the same as whatis being talked about in the video but it reminded me of that. It's not pronounced Cayerhoger, I know. I think they have some similarkty to discuss about, ghough.

@stuchly1

3 ай бұрын

Just imagining a bloke with a stack of rockets behind him. 😊

The first time I watched Oppenheimer, during the Truman scene I thought "is that Gary Oldman?" Then he used an intrusive r while doing the southern accent, and I was certain it was him 😆

@user-qm2li8zx2d

3 ай бұрын

You caught that 😂😂😂

@AdmiralStoicRum

3 ай бұрын

Warsh is my grandmother word

@Envy_May

3 ай бұрын

it's funny that you have to recognise him by voice because you can't just recognise him by face like most actors hhh

@user-qm2li8zx2d

3 ай бұрын

@@Envy_May Gary Oldman is a chameleon.

@FLPhotoCatcher

3 ай бұрын

@@Envy_May Carm down.

Funniest example of the invisible R imo, comes from the band, Oasis. "In a champagne supahno-vah, a champagne supahno-vurr in the skyyy"

@sparksparkle

2 ай бұрын

"Supahnovurr" will never not be funny 😂😂

@TN-rf7nt

2 ай бұрын

Trained singer here. We are trained to use an intrusive r to help transition vowel sounds because you can't do a glottal stop in singing as easily. Trust me, Charlotte Church's decisions are intentional.

@Mikelaxo

2 ай бұрын

I have an American accent and I love this song, that was one of my first times noticing this feature of brutish English

@ytmndan

2 ай бұрын

@@TN-rf7nt It doesn't make in not funny though. Just like we all laugh at JT's "It's gonna be May" meme every April, even if we know that long Es should be avoided when singing.

@aerobolt256

Ай бұрын

@@TN-rf7ntas an american musician i cannot relate to sung glottal stops being more difficult than spoken

One I just came across recently and was shocked I'd never noticed before, is from seeing Americans online talk about "Looney Toons" as a Mandela effect, insisting it was never "Looney Tunes", it was always "Loony Toons". I didn't get it because it was 100% obviously Looney Tunes, but then realised that "Tunes" and "Toons" are perfect homonyms in North American English, so they could get confused. No you're not from an alternate universe. You just say "tune" and "toon" identically. This extends to YouToob, Toona steak, Toozeday etc.

@newp0rt

23 күн бұрын

the issue about toons and tunes for looney tunes is that they are cartoons or literally "toons". disneys "toontown" or the toon cards in yugioh. plenty of people referred to cartoony things as toons. so if you are watching a loony cartoon.. it would quite literally be a "loony toon". the fact that its looney tunes makes little sense without seeing the name before and memorizing it. it has nothing to do with the tune toon phonetics really. just the obvious assumption that a cartoon is a toon and that tune makes no sense.

@tubzinkswithus942

22 күн бұрын

I think the cause of this is due to the popularity of the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures and not the two words being homophones.

@Minotaur-ey2lg

19 күн бұрын

Damn dude. I was positive it was ‘toons. Mandela effect strikes again.

@b43xoit

18 күн бұрын

They're not homonyms in *my* North-American English.

@RaphiSpoerri-cq4rm

18 күн бұрын

And you say YouChube, Choona steak, Chooseday.

My mother has a non-rhotic Down East Maine accent and so uses intrusive "r". The most striking example of this was when she was trying to refer to the character Nala from The Lion King and repeatedly said Narler and none of us could understand what she was talking about - until she clarified that she meant "Simber's girlfriend Narler!"

@rosiefay7283

3 ай бұрын

"My mother has a non-rhotic Down East Maine accent ... she was trying to refer to the character Nala from The Lion King and repeatedly said Narler and none of us could understand what she was talking about" Hard to believe. If her accent was non-rhotic why do you use the spelling Narler to represent how she said Nala? And I don't believe you really couldn't understand what she was talking about.

@vladimir520

3 ай бұрын

@@rosiefay7283 I think they're saying that their mother was trying to speak in the accent of the others around her, but since she doesn't have a native rhotic accent, she hypercorrects and adds intrusive Rs, pronouncing Nala as Narler to try to sound rhotic, but I could be wrong

@DevinDTV

3 ай бұрын

​@@rosiefay7283non-rhotic speakers insert r's where they don't appear in the spelling. that's the whole point. also your ability to read when someone is lying is really lacking. think about the context. why would they lie about this? there's literally no reason to at all. it's far more likely either they made a mistake when telling the story, or you're misunderstanding something use some common sense

@rosemarybarron4256

3 ай бұрын

⁠​⁠@@rosiefay7283A lot of people in New England who drop the R in words like “river” or “car” or even “park,” add in the intrusive R that Dr. Lindsey was talking about. I am also from New England and we also spoke this way. We’d say “rivah” instead of “river” but “Idear” instead of “idea.” It’s just the regional accent there. I think it’s dying out among younger people, which is probably why her mother has the accent (as my parents did, as my husband and I both do) but her children don’t (as my children don’t). I think a difference from what Dr. Lindsey said about his own accent, is we add in the intrusive R before a vowel, but also if there is no vowel following. For instance, we’d say, “I have a great idear.” The Maine regional accent also has a very particular intonation, a kind of sing-song quality, that you don’t hear elsewhere in New England. When my mother moved from Maine to just outside of Boston, people there thought she was from the US South, because they noticed her accent was different, but couldn’t place it. (It sounds nothing like a Southern accent.) My parents spoke this way until they died not too long ago, and some of their still-living siblings still speak this way. My cousins who are only a little older than me still have this sing-song quality to their accent, which my sisters and I never had.

@wardsdotnet

3 ай бұрын

Down easters might also add an r in words like warsh

American accents are so varied that I don’t worry about it too much when I hear fake accents during performances. For example, my late Southern grandmother sounded like she called me “Samanther”. Though, one of the best on-screen fake American accents I’ve seen was done by Lee Byung-hun in the Korean drama _Mr. Sunshine_. His character was a naturalized American immigrant who returned to Korea for diplomatic reasons. He immigrated as a child, so the adult character’s accent when he spoke English was in a flawless American dialect. I could hear the actor’s native Korean accent slip in every once in a while, but I didn’t mind it because I’ve heard similar accent slips from friends who have also immigrated as children. Even more impressive was the actor didn’t speak English before he took the part.

@goma3088

3 ай бұрын

Now I have to watch that show just for this. I wasn't too interested in watching Mr. Sunshine before, but now I am.

@SirSaladAss

3 ай бұрын

Kinda like the Southern (broadly speaking) version of fellow is feller.

@samanthac.349

3 ай бұрын

@@goma3088 Honestly, it’s one of the best drama television series I have ever seen in my life. Be forewarned, it is set at the beginning of a terrible era in Korea’s history, so have some tissues at the ready for the last 2-3 episodes.

@samanthac.349

3 ай бұрын

@@SirSaladAss That’s exactly how my grandmother pronounced “fellow”.

@nothanks6549

3 ай бұрын

My dad and I speak pretty similar, except for some reason he doesn't say "wash" he says "warsh." "We need to warsh the dishes. Where's the warshcloth?" So any time I hear something weird in an American accent I think it must be some weird thing they picked up somewhere like my dad with wash.

Fascinating video. Also the Australian kids’ videos teaching “al” is sometimes pronounced “ar” is a hilarious touch at the end. Subscribed. Will watch more from America.

My mind is always bllown by the effort that goes into these videos, so many great clips of examples. Amazing.

@DrGeoffLindsey

Ай бұрын

Glad you like them! I really appreciate it.

Colonel [kʰɝnəl] is an interesting example, the rhotic pronunciation is loaned from 16th century French 'coronnel', which gained the 'r' by dissimilation of the two laterals of the Italian original 'colonnello'. Then, in grand old English style, our spelling directly imitates the Italian source, hence the mismatch.

@runscopeable

3 ай бұрын

Colonel is not written nor pronounced with an R in French

@elwinowen5469

3 ай бұрын

@@runscopeable "Colonel" in Modern French is descended from "coronel" in Middle French. The French dropped the 'r' from both the spelling and the pronunciation while the English retained the rhotic pronunciation but not the spelling.

@francescomartella144

3 ай бұрын

Given that we are between language nerds, I point out that it is "Colonnello" with 2 n's and not with one :-)

@lilylou4693

3 ай бұрын

As a French native, this word is one of those who bugs me the most. In writing doesn't make sens to me and is a nightmare to pronounce. 😅

@TJ-vh2ps

3 ай бұрын

I’d love to see an episode on why lieutenant is pronounced “left-tenant” in the UK. Is it a simple anglicization substituting English words that sound similar or is there some deeper reason related to changing speech patterns?

When I was learning Arabic, my teacher pointed out that Americans use glottal stop in between vowels without thinking about it, because we don't have a letter to write it. It seems that the linking unwritten R is just the same thing, but where there *is* a letter to talk about it.

@puellanivis

3 ай бұрын

I’ve had a significant benefit in my German accent by being an English speaker with hard attack. 😂 Learning Romance languages has been fun though.

@DrunkenHotei

3 ай бұрын

I think this is more of a substitution than a "linking r," but upon reflecting on my own pronunciation, I find it fascinating how often I notice myself using a glottal stop in places I'd never noticed. For example, the other day I just noticed how I tend to substitute the "d" in "and" with a glottal stop in phrases like "and I..." when speaking casually.

@TillyOrifice

3 ай бұрын

@@DrunkenHotei Well, that'll teach you to say "and me" like a normal person.

@DrunkenHotei

3 ай бұрын

@@TillyOrifice Sorry? I don't think I follow. My example is with subject pronouns, like, "My friend and I dance." But now that I try it, even with object pronouns, when I say, "Come with my friend and me," I seem to omit the /d/ entirely on the word "and." The /d/ on "friend" in my pronunciation seems to be a bit harder to pin down, but I feel it oscillates between a plosive and a glottal stop depending on how quickly I'm speaking. I guess I still don't know how I tend to pronounce things until someone gives me a reason to pay attention to it lol. Thanks for that :)

@EebstertheGreat

3 ай бұрын

I think it's not just that. The glottal stop is more difficult to hear than an r anyway, and it's used less consistently (it's not the only way Americans can break a hiatus). We also almost always use it when starting a sentence with a vowel, so we tend to just think of it as the only way to start a vowel. (Singers are an exception, I assume.)

I grew up in the midwest, and have been told I don’t have much of an accent save for some words and thats because my mum is from Boston, and the intrusive r was just part of my life growing up, so, for instance, Gary Oldman's in Oppenheimer didn't even phase me, it sounded correct to me. I do not use the intrusive r myself, and any "accent" I may get from my mum is mostly in my vocabulary. Soft drink/soda= tonic, shopping cart= carriage, basement=cellar, jeans= dungarees, remote controll= clicker, living room= palor, purse= pockabook. That being said, a lot of these phrases she and I use, I think, are only really used by older generations.

At 17:20, I felt that the Raymond Chandler acting was spot on. As an American, I would have thought that they were non-rhotic, northeastern native speakers.

@graywing521

Ай бұрын

I had exactly the same reaction: As a Seattleite, I placed the speaker as a NY detective.

20:46 this part kinda blew me away. to me it's so obvious that rhotic vowels are indicated by the letter r that it seems crazy that non-rhotic speakers wouldn't notice the pattern when hearing us speak.

@jhonbus

3 ай бұрын

I agree! I'm a non-rhotic speaker but this has always been pretty obvious to me as well. I've always been puzzled as to why so many British actors seem to have a hard time getting this right and it has always been pretty obvious and jarring when they get it wrong, even when I was a kid. Best example I can think of from back then is Red Dwarf. Robert Llewellyn (playing Kryten) got this so _consistently_ wrong I thought he must be doing it on purpose!

@artmarkham3205

3 ай бұрын

It's just because most of the time when "translating" and accent (or whatever the word is), you are doing it your head based on sounds rather than thinking of the spelling. So if you are trying an American accent and add an "r" when you say "bigger", "painter" etc., it seems easy to think on the fly that you should add it to "Jehovah" or whatever as well - it's the same sound (to non-rhotic speakers) being translated, so it's easy to just track it in the same way.

@Envy_May

3 ай бұрын

right ??? then again for me personally i tend to see the spellings of words in my head when i think or speak in general and on top of that i grew up learning a european second language, so i wonder how many little factors like that contribute for y'all or other people who notice these things without first studying linguistics

@SomeYouTubeTraveler

3 ай бұрын

@@artmarkham3205 Yeah, you have to literally know how every word you're saying is spelled.

@AaronLitz

3 ай бұрын

@@SomeKZreadTraveler Well, for actors that shouldn't really be that much of a problem, unless they only ever have their scripts _read_ to them. 😁

I remember actively noticing the "intrusive R" in the British accent when I became a fan of the musical Les Misérables and noticed that, even though I find it harder to hear accents in singing than in speech, you could always tell whether the actor playing Javert was British because he has a song where he repeats the line "It is the law!" And if it was the London cast recording, it's always "laaawr" !

@premanadi

3 ай бұрын

The phrase "law and order" is a great illustration of the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic. Americans mostly pronounce the Rs and use a glottal stop between the first two words (or sort of run them together); non-rhotic speakers often say "Laura Nawduh." About as different as can be.

@fromchomleystreet

3 ай бұрын

A non-rhotic Brit would only put an intrusive R into “It is the law” if the phrase was immediately followed by a vowel with no pause, so it’s whatever word immediately follows “law” that is the key factor. For example, “it is the law and you must obey it” might have an intrusive r in it. “It is the law that you broke”, on the other hand, wouldn’t. Neither would “it is the law”, as an isolated phrase with any kind of pause at the end of it (such as that typically placed between sentences)

@electrictroy2010

3 ай бұрын

@premanadi YA KNOW British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

@Amy_Dunn

3 ай бұрын

@@fromchomleystreet did you not see the the part where they said the actor **Repeats** the phrase?

@fromchomleystreet

3 ай бұрын

@@Amy_Dunn Ah. No.

You have broken something in my brain. I had never once even considered that trailing consonants function as diacriticals in British English, rather than unpronounced consonants. I can't even put the words together to express how far a step back my thought process has taken in approaching accents. I feel like an entire chunk of my understanding of language just got unlocked! Thank you, genuinely! :D

Love the way you break things down and how precise you are with your terminology, it's so refreshing. As an American one thing you can continue to work on (and I've left similar comments before) is realizing how many American dialects/accents we have, from the UK perspective our variety seems to get flattened into too few bins, but I respect that you're referring to common accents that have worldly distribution through media. Keep rocking the edutaining language videos, you're so good at them!!

The spelling and pronunciation of "colonel" has an interesting history - apparently it was originally spelled as "coronel" when imported from French, but later the spelling was changed.

@DrGeoffLindsey

3 ай бұрын

Pilgrim is an interesting one too. We don't like words with repeated L or R.

@christophervollick4634

3 ай бұрын

​@@DrGeoffLindseynow I'm confused... How do you say pilgrim? In my North American accent, there's nothing incongruous between how I say and read pilgrim. Pill, grim. Maybe pill grem or pill grum if speaking quickly. Is there a tricky history to it or something?

@ericsmith5919

3 ай бұрын

@@christophervollick4634 It didn't use to have an "L" in it. Latin "peregrīnus" -> Old French "peregrin/pelegrin" -> Middle English "pilegrim" -> Modern English "pilgrim". The double "R" was preserved in the word Peregrine, as in Peregrine Falcon.

@christophervollick4634

3 ай бұрын

@@ericsmith5919 Oh! I see. That makes sense. Thanks!

@ftumschk

3 ай бұрын

Weirdly, the French "coronel" was itself a corruption of an original Latinate word meaning the leader of a military "column" - hence the equivalent "colonello" in Italian ("colonna" being Italian for "column").

A child of a friend of mine failed a spelling test when the southern teacher said "bath" they spelt "barth" cause they figured it was a new word they'd not heard before

@EvincarOfAutumn

3 ай бұрын

Oh boy does this give me spelling bee flashbacks. I narrowly avoided missing a word by catching that the judge reading it had a different accent from mine-only to get eliminated because he misheard how I spelled the next one. Rude!

@julilla1

3 ай бұрын

My great grandmother from Arkansas did this. My great aunt picked it up, despite nobody else in the family using it but her mother. She's always going to warsh something.

@purelightapologetics4930

3 ай бұрын

@@julilla1In my best friend’s family, her mother (and only her mother) pronounces it “warshcloth” and gets teased for it.😂

@StormyDay

3 ай бұрын

That’s a totally different type of intrusive R! More like when my grandmother pronounced oil as “erl” and toilet as “terlet.” I believe it’s brought over from Ireland.

@technoman9000

3 ай бұрын

Get in the barth, boy! lol

You are terrific, and your videos are terrific. Simply terrific. I've been teaching EFL in China for nearly a decade, and your content on pronunciation is some of the best to be found anywhere. You don't leave out important details or oversimplify, yet you still manage to elucidate difficult concepts beautifully. That's a rarity and makes your content invaluable. Even though I'm an American and generally focus on American English when I teach pronunciation (most of my colleagues that I train have mostly American accents, with some British and other varieties mixed in to a lesser degree), you do a wonderful job of talking about 'both' (to oversimplify). Your videos have really helped me fill in gaps in my own understanding, and I look forward to using some of your videos with my classes.

Just want to thank you for including so many great examples. Really helped me understand the topic.

Inevitably after Mr L puts out a video, I look at the title in my queue and think "well maybe somebody else cares about such a thing". Yet I know that I have to click on it, just to confirm he can't possibly be as interesting this time. And by the end, somehow I have come out laughing at the language, my use of it, their use of it and most of all his use of it. Dammit Jeff you win again.

@DrGeoffLindsey

3 ай бұрын

Thanks! Can I quote you?

@proudtitanicdenier4300

3 ай бұрын

​@@DrGeoffLindseysorry i got locked out of my account, im on my alt right now, yes you can quote me. Thank you.

@twistysnacks

3 ай бұрын

Lol you're like "why the hell would I watch half an hour video about hard Rs" and suddenly 2 hours later you're an expert on the English language

@Mentally_Will

3 ай бұрын

That's Dr. L to you lol

I came into a high school class and saw “Goethe” written on the board, and I was like, oh /gøtə/, and the teacher was like, “no, not /gɚte/” and I was like, “I speak German, I didn’t say ‘gortte’, I said /gøtə/.” But then, she had just been around so many English speakers she just heard the difference in vowel as a mistake for the rhotic, rather than the rounded /ɜ/.

@hbowman108

3 ай бұрын

In Chicago, some people actually call the street "Go-EEth-y".

@christopherellis2663

3 ай бұрын

3 is not the vowel that you are taking about e/ø, vs 3/(3

@hbowman108

3 ай бұрын

@@christopherellis2663 The British version of the NURSE vowel, which is just a syllabic R in rhotic American accents, is /ɜː/. /œ/ in Goethe, the short ö, is different from the NURSE vowel in being higher, fronted, and lax.

@Robostate

3 ай бұрын

I watched a PBS show about Hitler with a British narrator and I thought his propaganda minister was "Gerbles" (Göbbels).

@notwithouttext

3 ай бұрын

the british NURSE vowel is actually /əː/: /ɜ/ used to be a variant symbol for schwa, but it was changed to a different sound.

Never a boring video from Dr Geoff! I learnt about linking r a couple of years ago and ever since then I'm very proud of myself everytime I hear myself use it automatically as a non-native speaker

Superb explanations. As a native Rhotic speaker who frequently narrates non-rhotic and Rhotic characters right next to each other in a book, this is delightful.

As someone who moved from Northern Ireland to England at the age of 6, I moved from a rhotic accent to a non-rhotic accent so I never had this problem. I remember finding it very weird when kids made spelling mistakes like 'farther' for 'father'. It made no sense to me. Maybe this is where my love of phonetics and phonology stems from!

@OtakuNoShitpost

3 ай бұрын

Reminds me of a guy online who insisted that Americans said "Parsta"

@ruthbryce2667

3 ай бұрын

@@OtakuNoShitpost yep, I can see an English person thinking this. Not me though 😃

@revealview

3 ай бұрын

But what explains why people write "loose" when they mean to say "lose"? I see this constantly and can never understand how that happens. What accent could that possibly derive from??

@ruthbryce2667

3 ай бұрын

​@@revealviewthat's just a spelling error because 'oo' is more likely to be used for that vowel sound than the o..e configuration. I don't think it's accent dependent.

@revealview

3 ай бұрын

@@ruthbryce2667 I don't see anyone writing "moove" though!

New Zealander here. There's a running joke in my family about asking "is a mandarin?" instead of "is Amanda in?" which obviously hinges on this linking r. Similarly, my family name is Upton and my wife, whose first name ends with a schwa, jokes she didn't take my name because she didn't want to have to constantly explain she's not a Rupton.

@davorzmaj753

3 ай бұрын

"not a Rupton" I.e. not eruptin'? 🙂

@jetjaguar3000

3 ай бұрын

@@davorzmaj753 haha nice!

@sarag1158

3 ай бұрын

Amander Rupton has a nice ring to it.

@cggc9510

3 ай бұрын

To a US person, those are 2 completely different sounding phrases. I had to slow them both way down to hear how they could be the same.

@NicolaiCzempin

2 ай бұрын

there's got to be a joke about "inter-Upton" in there somewhere 😉

Fascinating stuff. Keep up the good work!

So well-done. Thank you, Dr. Lindsey.

I'm American, and talking about the rhotic Rs reminded me of when I was in highschool and I was in theater. I was also in a play, and during our first rehearsal we got to a point where each person would stand up and shout "OURS!" but the way we say the word "ours" is like you're saying the plural of the (rhotic) letter R (Rs) and our theater teach had to stop us and tell us to say it like the word "hours" because we sounded like a bunch of pirates shouting at each other.😆

@jmchez

3 ай бұрын

Thae "pirate" accent did not exist as a term until Robert Newton from Cornwall played Long John Silver in the movie, "Treasure Island". Newton was from Cornwall and decided to really push the accent that he had heard from rough seamen back in his youth. It is doubtful that an Englishman like Blackbeard would have talked like a Cornish seaman.

@Amy_Dunn

3 ай бұрын

@@jmchez I'm fully aware of that, it was said as a joke.

@elsiestormont1366

3 ай бұрын

😂 thanks for the laugh.

@matthewhenderson7701

3 ай бұрын

That's pronounced "Ahhhhs"

@ea42455

3 ай бұрын

"Rs = ours"? Just as we say it here in my old Kentucky home. Gotta' ask... are you from the south, or maybe the Appalachian region?

As an upper Midwest American I often could spot a British actor playing an American by their "R"s. I didn't know the rule but it just stuck out to me as wrong. Many do get it right -- I was shocked to find out Hugh Laurie and Damien Lewis are not American!

@wootentottle6570

3 ай бұрын

Same. Southern Midwest American here, and I can tell when the actor is not American doing an "American" accent because they hit the Rs too hard. They sound almost like a pirate, Arrrrrr there matey.

@electrictroy2010

3 ай бұрын

Watch Shakespeare in original pronunciation. He sounded like a pirate too (with rolling Rs). British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

@karinanemica5973

2 ай бұрын

​@@wootentottle6570British actors are naturally rhotic if they're Irish or Welsh or Scottish. Listen to some interviews with Welshmen Michael Sheen and Matthew Rhys. Their Rs are not as strong as in Scottish accents but they're definitely there.

@BeeWhistler

2 ай бұрын

@@karinanemica5973I found it interesting when I noticed Maureen O’Hara’s accent kept slipping in Miracle on 34th Street. If anything, she put more R into it than an American would.

@neuroseptember1020

2 ай бұрын

@@karinanemica5973depends on the person. My Welsh friend has a non rhotic accent

You go so deep with the examples! Its impressive.

This was really quite interesting to watch, thank you for putting this together! As someone who lives in the western US, and speaks in what people are now calling a "professional accent" but is really just a "Hollywood accent", I have been amazed to find out that actor's natural accents are actually British, like in the case of Hugh Laurie, other times you can hear it every time. Not only in the R as you have described, but in the over-pronunciation or harder pronunciation of certain consonants and vowels. In the end, I find accent work to be incredibly difficult because you are having to retain your brain and mouth muscles to do something completely unnatural to you - and I am always impressed when someone is able to do it convincingly to the point that even if little tidbits slip in, it sounds like a quirk and not a mistake.

In the song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, Billy Joel (who has a Long Island, New York accent) sings a section about a couple named Brenda and Eddie. It of course comes off as “Brenda Renetti” to the rest of us North Americans who don’t use intrusive R (but do turn inter-vowel Ts into taps) and leads to a great deal of confusion. 😆

@user-ii4vn8hw7z

3 ай бұрын

It’s pronounced Lawn Guyland.

@user-ii4vn8hw7z

3 ай бұрын

It’s pronounced Lawn Guyland.

@kellyalves756

3 ай бұрын

Yeah, when I sing along with that song I feel very wrong about calling her anything but “Brender.”

@Jones4Leather

3 ай бұрын

My Grandma was small village from south of Boston. It always made us laugh as little kids that she called my aunt Brenda "Brender" and a granddaughter Barbara was "Baabrer" and my dad Arthur was "Aathaa" After living in Cleveland and Chicago for decades, her Boston area relatives thought she sounded very Midwestern while us Midwesterners heard her as clearly from Boston .

@Peleski

2 ай бұрын

It's a good example of when Americans use Intrusive R. And now I'm a bit confused because I don't know how others connect the two workds if they don't insert an R.

*"ARMARDA"* reminded me of a similar situation: For many, many years, I wondered why *"BURMA"* - and later, *"MYANMAR"* - were spelled with R's. See, there's no /r/ sound in the way the native Burmese pronounce them! After learning about rhoticity in English, I finally figured out why: Some enterprising non-rhotic English speaker decided to put the "R" in "BURMA" to indicate to his fellow speakers that the "U" is to be pronounced as /ə/ (schwa). Without the "R", many would pronounce the "U" in "BUMA" as /ju/ or /u/. You've explained as much in this video. The "R" in "MYANMAR" is also quite unnecessary, as your own example of "GOA" goes to show. Presumably, the military junta that carried out the renaming was merely following precedence. The real problem arises because now *rhotic* English speakers are _pronouncing_ the /r/ sound in both words, even in non-linking contexts. And that's wrong! It even trips up ESL/EFL learners like me-whose native languages are rhotic. We end up pronouncing /r/ sounds when we see an "R" in the English spelling (unless we know the proper pronunciations beforehand, as in the aforementioned names).

@thespanishinquisiton8306

3 ай бұрын

I live in Canada among rhotic speakers, many of whom are very interested in history and geography and some of whom have taken linguistics courses, and I've never heard anyone not pronounce the R in Burma or Myanmar. I'd never even considered that it could be pronounced any other way because the spelling is the spelling, of course that's how it's pronounced.

@sluggo206

3 ай бұрын

Parcheesi got the r the same way.

@AtomikNY

3 ай бұрын

Compare also the common use of "Park" as a Romanization of the Korean surname 박 [pak̚].

@Asidders

3 ай бұрын

That's really interesting!

@RandomNonsense1985

3 ай бұрын

@@AtomikNYSo it should really be “Pahk”?

Hey Dr. Geoff, great video. I just wanted to add that my late grandmother (who was born and raised in eastern Kentucky) pronounced the word 'washed' as 'worshed'. One syllable. I always found that so jarring to hear!

This was great, as someone from from New York (city) growing up in the 1980s, it was the older folks that dropped their Rs, and not just linking: idear, strawr, etc, and some relatives still do, especially my cousins who live in Bayonne, NJ and on Long Island. For me, it’s only dropping the R in words like Drawer (which I was in college until I realized it wasn’t spelled “draw”) and place names like where my mom lives, the town is called Hawrthorne, but there’s no R in it.

@giantgeoff

2 ай бұрын

Yeah that's what I grew up with and at age 10 in 1968 we moved within broadcast range of Schenectady where a lot of TV was developed an my pronunciation very much developed following the restricted Midwestern accent that many of the News broadcasters followed. When my company was developing early speech recognition software I was asked to participate so that a "proper"; accent could be obtained as a baseline from which to work from. (Their words not mine)

@Virishking

Ай бұрын

Being from Long Island I hear a lot of people do this, including my grandmother who grew up in Brooklyn in the 40’s. It varies by an individual’s personal and ethnic background, though the latter is losing importance and it can even vary within families or context. My brothers and I say drawer, but my sisters say draw. I usually speak rhotically, but when I’m talking faster, agitated, or even very at ease my r’s tend to disappear, though I haven’t notice myself do linking r’s.

might be worth a deep dive into American southern accents, including the appalachian accent. my grandmother used to say things like "wash" as "warsh" and i think "intrusive" 'R' is highly present in the appalachian accents*. pretty much everything you described about linking 'R' is present at the end of vowel sounds, even when they're not linking. saying the word "idea" alone might always sound like "idear" depending on where in the country you are. *as an appalachian i should not generalize accents lol

@khaunleper

3 ай бұрын

I still use warsh sometimes and my kids think its the funniest thing in the world.

@mintteacups8069

3 ай бұрын

yeah several of the examples of it as a mistake just sounded southeastern to me, as a northwesterner. carm is right out though lmao thats bad it also does exist in old Noir mystery radio plays set in LA. so i don't think the BBC example is a mistake at all!

@kpaukeaho6180

3 ай бұрын

“Warsh” is also found in mid-Atlantic accents like in Pennsylvania.

@TigerDude333

3 ай бұрын

traditional southern ("suthuhn") is more likely to be non-rhotic: Vuh-ginia, suh.

@michelleb7399

3 ай бұрын

My grandma had very unusual pronunciations for someone born and raised on the west coast. She would also often comment on some of her values and mannerisms being the “Scotch” in her. She comes from what we call a “Scots-Irish” or “Scotch-Irish” heritage. The Appalachian speech sounds very much like my grandma and also has a healthy percent of people claiming to be of Scots-Irish decent. Having been born and raised in rural areas often without even a radio, her family was very much isolated from other speech patterns until she started first grade at nearly age 7. It’s interesting to hear her speech patterns very much in the accent of rural Appalachians.

Very interesting. I've seen Gary Oldman's American accent go in and out in the Batman movies too when he played Commissioner Gordon. With English actors doing American accents in general, I find it's easy to pick them out sometimes because 1.) they tend to overcompensate the rhotic nature of the accent by hitting the R's too hard or sitting on them, making their speech sound heavy or choppy and 2.) in order to "not sound English" they strip all the melody out of their voice, making their American accent sound flat and lifeless when in reality, the American accent has plenty of inflection and melody, so the telltale signs for an English actor "doing" an American accent for me are harsh R's and a flat tone.

@electrictroy2010

3 ай бұрын

YA KNOW British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

@L1623VP

3 ай бұрын

@@electrictroy2010 I wonder what influence was causing the R's to fade out of the accent.

@kpanyc

2 ай бұрын

Yes, Cumberbatch in the first Dr. Strange went waay overboard with the hard Rs and flat tone, even tho I thought his accent was perfect in August Osage County.

@SeasideDetective2

2 ай бұрын

I can forgive the mistake when Gordon does it because the very first actor I (and many other people) ever saw in the role of Commissioner Gordon was Neil Hamilton, on the 1960s TV series. Hamilton was from Massachusetts, and had a discernible non-rhotic accent. What especially amuses me is that English people sometimes give the impression they think we Americans can't pronounce the open back unrounded vowel (the "a" in "father"). They seem to think we move it toward the front of the mouth and make it slightly less open, so that it sounds like the "a" in "cat." We never do this, at least not if we've gotten an elementary school education. It used to bother me that when John Lennon was trying to do an American accent on the Beatles' "Rock and Roll Music," he sings, "I'm in the mood to take a maambo." [sic] We Americans, who generally understand Spanish pronunciation rules better than the English, know to pronounce "mambo" as "mombo." We never say "maambo," unless it's to mock the stereotypical "hick" pronunciation. On the other hand, I was surprised to learn that the English can easily pronounce the near-open front unrounded vowel. I had never thought about it before, but it's a bit counterintuitive that an English person would say "I'm too fat to wear these pants" exactly the way an American would (aside from the fact that "pants" means "briefs" and not "trousers" in British English, of course). I would have guessed that the words would be pronounced "fot" and "ponts," since "chance" is "chonce" and "bath" is "bawth." But they're exactly the same in both dialects. It's tricky.

@mottom2657

2 ай бұрын

@@electrictroy2010 Doesn't make you superior. Yo mama's just anatha ho in the end. 😉😉😉

This was really an excellent and most interesting video! Thank you.

Great video, Dr. Lindsey!

I'm from Iowa and had a friend who always said "warsh" instead of "wash."

@emilywagner6354

3 ай бұрын

I have Missouri relatives who did the same thing.

@muskadobbit

3 ай бұрын

I used to say “warsh” and “wartch” until I moved away. My sister still says it. We are from Vancouver, BC, and our mother lived with her Scottish aunts for many years. She also pronounced the h in whether.

@user-om2ti8jj1f

3 ай бұрын

Hmm... That's weird because in this case "r" is not between two vowels. In "draw-r-ing" (the way non-rhotic speakers pronounce "drawing") /r/ is put to separate two vowels. But "warsh" for "wash"? Interesting where it comes from.

@DrGeoffLindsey

3 ай бұрын

I didn't include warsh(ington) as it isn't considered General American, same reason I excluded feller, yeller etc., and the pronunciation of 'oil' like 'earl'.

@SilentTristerosEmpire

3 ай бұрын

Same in neighboring Illinois.

I had a friend in the US Air Force who was from Boston. He told a story about his accent from Basic Training at Lackland Air Force Base. In one of the classes there was a multiple choice question that had letters indicating each answer. The instructor asked for the answer and called on him to tell the class. He answered "ah" (R). The instructor understood him to say "ah" like he didn't know the answer and was filling time thinking about it. He said the answer a couple of times more before he finally went full on rhotic and said AhRRRRa.

@DrGeoffLindsey

3 ай бұрын

Fantastic

@electrictroy2010

3 ай бұрын

“I’m from Boston” is not excuse to sound uneducated. It’s pronounced “car” or “door” not “cah” or “daah”

@franciscodanconia4324

3 ай бұрын

@@electrictroy2010nah. A Baahstan accent is like wicket ahsum.

@Grey_Ocean2023

3 ай бұрын

Well, no, those words are in fact *not* pronounced in this manner by speakers of traditional non-rhotic Boston/New England English, or similar non-rhotic forms of English. What sounds uneducated to me is implying that certain pronunciation systems are correct (presumably yours) and other are incorrect.

@deleted01

3 ай бұрын

@@electrictroy2010 сяу

Where have you been all this time, I love this!

Thank you for this video! Very interesting! And the little Aussie teaching clip was delightful!! As an American, there are two big giveaways that an English actor is trying to do an American accent that I notice most often. The most common is when an actor is technically pronouncing everything correctly but, their voice is "sitting" (or resonating) in the wrong place. Most American accents (other than Southern) are spoken with most of the emphasis sitting towards the back of the throat. Meanwhile, most English accents are spoken with the emphasis pushed more towards the mouth and nose. When an English actor doesn't adjust the "placement" of their voice when doing an American accent, even when everything is pronounced correctly, it just sounds slightly off even when you can't pinpoint why. It often creates a slightly nasal quality to their voice that shouldn't be there because their voice is resonating further forwards than it normally would be for that accent. Of course the other giveaway is when an English actor is just leaning into the American pronunciations a little too hard (i.e. overcorrecting). Usually, this shows up with too much emphasis on the "r"s (as you mentioned) or when they slightly mispronounce a word that, even in an American accent, uses a pronunciation that leans slightly closer to English or French than they expect. For example, the phrase Alma Mater seems to trip Englishmen up quite a bit . . . they'll often overthink it and try to make the term more "American sounding" than it necessarily is really supposed to sound: mispronouncing it as AL-MA MATE-ER. . . instead of the correct pronunciation . . . ALL-MA MAHT-ER.

I (a rhotic speaker) always thought the infamous Dr Who enemies were Darleks. It wasn't until I saw it in print, that there is no /r/!!! I still sometimes subconsciously say it with a truly intrusive /r/.

@GohTakeshita

3 ай бұрын

As a child, I thought they were saying, "dialects"...

@GeoffO856

3 ай бұрын

I used to think the same thing when I heard the Top Gear trio pronounce Peugeot - I was tempted to say "Purr-zhou" in my own, rhotic accent.

@HOUROFPOW3R

3 ай бұрын

@@GohTakeshita You from appalachia perchance? That's a straight up homonym for some daleks. I mean--dialects.

@GohTakeshita

3 ай бұрын

@@HOUROFPOW3R No, I live in Texas.

@brokenursa9986

3 ай бұрын

I didn't watch Dr. Who until I was a teenager, but I had a book about famous sci-fi robots as a kid, so I encountered the name written first, and I assumed it was pronounced "daylek" until I heard it said in the show.

My favorite use of linking R in an American context is the Billy Joel song "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" where the Long Island Native Joel sings of "Brenda-r-and Eddie"

@TigerDude333

3 ай бұрын

yeah, Brenda Renetti!

@artomatt

3 ай бұрын

Exactly what I was thinking of!

@lornacy

3 ай бұрын

My boyfriend from New York literally doesn't hear the "r" sound. I gave up arguing with him about it.

@magnusengeseth5060

3 ай бұрын

Another Long Islander - comedian Jon Gabrus - started pronouncing "ninja" as "ninjer" on his podcast when the movie discussion got intense enough for the islander accent to return.

@jimmyharrington3655

3 ай бұрын

That's a great example! You know what's funny about that example? It sounds odd to me because Joel is American, but when I hear a Brit do intrusive r, it doesn't sound unusual at all because I'm used to it in their accent.

Thanks for this. I have been questioning this for years.

Love this video. I'm a Scots actor who grew up on a diet of English and American TV and have a good grasp of both rhotic/non-rhotic. I've got that BBC production of Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely on CD and their errors made me wince 😂 It was great to learn that tip about the Boston accent.

this is exactly what happens to Italian students, after a lifetime of ignoring the letter H in writing they struggle to pronounce it, and when they do they start putting it everywhere H-year, H-I H-am, H-all H-over

@lakrids-pibe

3 ай бұрын

Many years ago I visited the Palace of Versailles and got a guided tour by an English-speaking French guide. She took great care to pronounce "18th century" with a distinct "h" in (H)eighteenth. Very charming. hehe!

@erichamilton3373

3 ай бұрын

Also a stereotypical Cockney mistake: fresh Heggs!

@MrScorpianwarrior

3 ай бұрын

@@lakrids-pibe I was speaking to a French speaker from France the other day (who's English is not great), and they asked me "How old are you?". I swear, every time I asked them to repeat it, I heard "How hard are you?". They pronounced 'old' with an H at the beginning, and struggled a bit with the 'ld' pronouncing it like an American r. An odd misunderstanding, to be sure.

@AbiSaysThings

3 ай бұрын

French people too!

@Arkylie

3 ай бұрын

Once had a French teacher try to ask me if I'd seen a recent movie. Her vowel for it was so weird that I had no clue what she was talking about (notably, I hadn't seen or cared about the movie, though I had heard of it), and then she tried to clarify by, with great effort, making an H sound at the front. Me: Oh! The Hours? 😂 I also can't stand Esperanto turning key Silent H words into having H sounds. I vaguely recall getting annoyed with "honoro" or something. Borrow words by sound, not spelling, and adapt to your system as needed -- don't utterly butcher the sound to keep the spelling!

Great choices of real-life examples (as usual), for me it happens that “I sawr a film today, oh boy” was the first time I encountered this phenomenon as an American and still the canonical example to me, so it was neat to see you chose that one, too.

@Asidders

3 ай бұрын

I'm happy he included James Bond in here. I remember watching the "making of" documentaries of James Bond and having all these people with posh British accents saying stuff like "sawR it" and I was like, what? Why do they put an extra R in there? 😄

@PasCorrect

3 ай бұрын

Speaking of songs, hearing Oasis rhyme "saw" with "door" wrinkled my 14-year-old brain.

@21katieus71

3 ай бұрын

help i think that was the first time i noticed it too 😭😭 i wonder how many ppl had that same experience…..

Thanks for the Hamtramck shoutout, love from Detroit

Thank you for this video, so interesting 😊

I had a math teacher in high school who came from Northern Vermont and would say the Greek letters α, β, and θ "alfer, bayter, thayter." One classmate of mine had had him for algebra 2 and actually thought alpha was pronounced alpher until someone with different experience pointed it out. It wasn't just limited to Greek letters; pretty much any word that ended with a schwa got an "r" appended. I called him Mr. Schaffa, of course, since his name was Schaffer. It's weird, though, because I have a lot of family in the Northeast Kingdom, and while their accent is distinctive, none of them sound like that. It's amazing how such a tiny area can have such distinctive accents.

@stevetalkstoomuch

3 ай бұрын

Same in New Hampshire. Mother's side up there always talked like that. But add "lawnd" for lawn, "gararge", Ty-yota (Toyota)

@leagarner3675

3 ай бұрын

Lol

@Neogeddon

3 ай бұрын

Heyyy I'm from northern VT too! The accent is sort of dying off but my grandparents still have it : ]

@michaels4340

3 ай бұрын

@@stevetalkstoomuch interesting parallel between the spellings of Toyota and coyote...

@icarusi

3 ай бұрын

My head teacher used to say 'singin' and 'playin', yet complained about our pronunciation!

Matt Damon’s Bostonian rendition of “is Ma upstairs?”, complete with intrusive R after “ma” and the absence of one in “stairs”, sounds pretty much indistinguishable from someone asking the same question in my own Australian accent. I’ve often been struck by particular sentences spoken by TV and movie characters with old-school New England accents who, for a moment now and again, suddenly sound completely and utterly Australian to me. It’s very discombobulating when it happens.

@Jones4Leather

3 ай бұрын

I'm from Chicago where the local dialect has been particularly influenced by the Irish. I have that same discombobulation when I discover a character in a BBC program is Irish while I thought for a long while they were American. I thought Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock series was American with a couple of oddities in his speech. I only learned the truth when the actor was interviewed on a talk show. Say whaaat?!

As a non native American speaker, I've been looking for this particular answer for ages. I thought I misheard phantom "R"s here and there. Thank you for answering this conundrum for me.

That Mr Spelling calm/carm clip at the end was anything but calming... ;) Also, if you haven't already, can you explain why people in the UK pronounce Los Angeles as Los Angeleeze?

It wasn't until the part with Gary Oldman turning "calm" to "carm" and the Mr Spelling song showing how we Aussies use the same "ar" sound in place of the "al" in "calm" that I realised why it's so easy for me to recognise and do R-L slides when going from my Native East Aussie English to pronouncing things in Japanese (where "R" & "L" are the same sound). It gets to the point where sometimes I have to catch myself making a "R" instead of a "L" or vice-versa when talking in English.

my friends and I have been reading the word "erm" incorrectly for several years because of the split between rhotic and non-rhotic accents. We're American so we've been reading it like /ur/ in purr followed by an m, while speakers with non-rhotic accents just pronounce it as "um"

@d4r4butler74

3 ай бұрын

You just blew my mind. I would never have put that together erm = um.

@johnindigo5477

3 ай бұрын

I used to notice this is british set novels. I thought they were muttering err under thier breath every sentence. Like a low growl

@electrictroy2010

3 ай бұрын

Depends when the book or play you’re reading was created. “erm” had an R sound in most accents pre-1750. Even British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

@joruha

2 ай бұрын

I remember seeing the Andy Capp comic in the Sunday newspaper when I was young. He was British (Cockney maybe) and when stammering he would say "er". It never occurred to me until fairly recently that in his accent it would have been pronounced "uh".

@crackerjackheart

2 ай бұрын

What. WHAT.

Really good explanation, without wallowing in professional-linguist minutiae.

Some very acute observations there. Of course, as soon as you mentioned American areas where the unwritten Rs are pronounced, I immediately thought of Boston and New York. After a bit more consideration, however, I realized that the most distinct and consistent use of such pronunciation comes from people in the northeastern Odowidaho region -- most notably older citizens from the Badiddlyboing area...

I just realized why the song Karma Chameleon sounds like it says "comma comma comma comma comma chameleon"

@pXnTilde

3 ай бұрын

Maybe this whole time it's actually charmeleon

@nineteenfortyeight6762

3 ай бұрын

😂😂😂😂that one messed me up as a kid

I remember getting so much grief from my kindergarten teacher; I was born in Southern California and lived there till shortly before I started school. I found myself in Boston, Not having experienced my first real winter yet, the only places I'd seen snow were in the mountains. Big X against when I was asked what season it snowed. I replied "in the mountains" seasons not really being much of a thing in SoCal. The second part, was having my kindergarten teacher telling me that "You don't pwonounce youa 'Aahs' cowwectly". That, right there, lowered my opinion of the teacher immensely for failing to take into account the regional differences in accent. To this day, I can trace much of my own linguistic history to those words I'd learned before Kindergarten, and those I learned afterwards; where the Boaston suddenly comes out, words like Coaffe

@Salsuero

3 ай бұрын

My parents being from the Boston area and me being first-born in Southern California, I could never understand when the hell they were dropping certain R's or why. My mom hated her accent and worked hard to change it to sound more like the one I was born in, but it would inevitably slip out and we'd just laugh at her because we knew it made her miserable. Kids.

@thefaboo

3 ай бұрын

I was born and raised in central Mass, and had several heated arguments over the pronunciation of words like "idea". I was *shocked* when my third grade teacher declared the regional "idea(r)" the correct one 😂

@nunkatsu

3 ай бұрын

So your teacher reprimended you for pronouncing the r in the same way that 99% of non-black Americans do? Doesn't she know that Boston is the exception to the rule?

@davidconner-shover51

3 ай бұрын

@@thefaboo It is a correct one IMO, but not a singular "the". My mother had words with her at the next PTA conference, I never got grief about my 'foreign' accent again

I'd love to hear you talk more about intrusive R in some regional American accents. I had a teacher from Texas who said "warsh" and my grandfather from Pennsylvania apparently said it that way too. My dad is from NYC and will drop R in some words and add R in others. Thanks!

These videos are always worth watching for a few minutes.

9:00 - Regarding something like "The idea", we often simply change the pronunciation of "the" from the schwa to a long E when preceding a word that starts with a vowel: "Thə pear" "Thē apple" "Thə music" "Thē organ" But it's true that many people use glottal stops and keep the shwa: "Thə 'organ."

@matthewhenderson7701

3 ай бұрын

I never fully realized this until you articulated such. Now I'm going through countless nouns in my head just to see how they sound with "the" before them.

@MegaFonebone

2 ай бұрын

I thought exactly this while watching the video because that's what I do. Thanks for articulating it so well. I'd noticed that sometimes I pronounced it "thee" and sometimes "thuh" but couldn't put my finger on why until I watched this video.

@cailin5301

Ай бұрын

I thought I pronounced it "th' idea" but I tried it out and said "the idea" and "the apple" aloud; and I find you're right, I definitely say "thē idea" in that context, I just say it really fast so I don't even realize what I'm saying. I'm from Arkansas, if that matters.

@cathjj840

Ай бұрын

I was even taught to explain that pronunication difference to students learning English as a second language: thee before words beginning with vowels. But then again, I'm an old time Californian when they said we had thuh least accented English of all.

@rmrmlcy8906

Ай бұрын

i would love to find out if Dr Geoff has any videos that address the pronunciation of the word “to” in the regard you mentioned. Sometimes i’ll hear “to” pronounced with a strong shwa like “tuh” for emphasis (“tuh have and to hold”) and im wondering what circumstances or regional accents or word combinations this occurs in.

I have a rhotic dialect and I live in Australia, so my favourite word that comes up fairly frequently in my work is "drawer", pronounced seemingly identically to "draw", which sometimes leads to delightful *written* messages like "Please ensure that all draws are locked before leaving."

@anthonycotter1493

3 ай бұрын

Drawers is not the same word as draws In Australia, you can say 'in the draw' and refer to each drawer individually as a 'draw', so 'draws' is not wrong

@ainmeile

3 ай бұрын

@@anthonycotter1493 wait so they really are just calling this thing a draw? And in my bedroom is a chest of draws with a sock draw and an underwear draw? This explains a lot actually...

@freshfreenlovinit

3 ай бұрын

​@@anthonycotter1493 I'm Australian and the word 'draw' does not refer to a single 'drawer'. It is simply a spelling mistake to spell the word as 'draw', if referring to a single 'drawer'. Find me an Australian dictionary that says otherwise.

@CherylVogler

3 ай бұрын

I have discovered this as well. Quite a few fanfiction stories I have read have sentences with the word "draw", and at some point I realized that they meant "drawer", and since they pronounce drawer as "draw", they must have thought that was the way to spell it. 😄

@adamgreenspan4988

3 ай бұрын

With my Long Island (NY) accent, I might pronounce “After you’re done drawing, put the crayons in the top drawer” as “After you’re done drawring, put the crayons in the top draw.” But I’m beyond bewildered when I hear my Philly friends pronounce crayon as “crown”.

This was illuminating, thanks.

Just discovered your channel, love it and subbed. I have to say the intrusive R sounds quite unpleasant to me. Here in Southern Ontario, we pronounce Rs only when they are written.

This was the first video of yours that I have seen. I am writing to say how much I appreciate the graphics you employed to highlight your points, such as the words underscoring your point in the film clips. The red "r" inserted into the white lettering really highlighted the point that you were making. Well done, indeed!

The "calm down" example is particularly striking to me since I actually pronounce an /l/ in "calm".

In some regional dialects, an "r" is added without it being a linking "r," for example, in the pronunciation of the word "wash" as "warsh." Would that be an example of an intrusive, but not linking "r?" In a cursory Google search, I found this case being called an intrusive "r" and sources vary on what region of America it is found in with some saying the Midland region, and some saying the South Midland region. There also seems to be disagreement on exactly what states are included in these regions, but various sources include Kentucky, Tennessee, all or only the Southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and parts of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. One source states "Earlier studies have the region extending into western Pennsylvania, and the earliest ones have it covering all of Pennsylvania, plus some of Maryland and Virginia. Intrusive R can be found in all those areas. A “Washington Post” columnist in 2004 even wrote about hearing the pronunciation “Warshington” on a regular basis where he lived and worked. Even so, it may be dying out." A friend of mine grew up in Rockville, Maryland in the 1960s, and she says "warsh" and "Warshington."

has always bothered me when people said words like "idea" as "idear", but I never had a word for it. Thanks for making this video.

Since I have a rhotic dialect, I sometimes have trouble telling if someone meant the word spelled with an r or not. For example "law/lore" or "raw/roar". Context clears it up most of the time obviously, but it is a little bit of extra cognitive load that sometimes makes it more difficult to understand.

Out here on the US Midwest/Appalachia border you'll sometimes hear "wursh" or "warsh" for wash and "ideer" or "ideal" for idea. Also, people in my small town say "bart" instead of bought. I've never heard that anywhere else.

@SirFrogsley

3 ай бұрын

"Bart"? That's a new one for me!

@michaelmurdock4607

14 күн бұрын

Both my sets of grandparents used those!

@HebaruSan

11 күн бұрын

A star of the Hoarders TV program said, "It could be warshed," and my wife and I immediately added that as an affected alternative pronunciation. Though ironically we use it when we're actually going to warsh a thing, unlike the original speaker who had never warshed anything.

Finally I have an answer. As a non-native english speaker I noticed that years ago and always wondered where those ''Rs'' are coming from. I tried to google it but to no avail. Thank you for finally giving me the answer!

The sharing of knowledge is appreciated. ^_^

That BBC Raymond Chandler radio play 17:14 had me in stitches - the only person I've known who talked like that was my Massachusetts born grandmother, so I can't help but picture this very proper 90 year old woman talking about reaching for a gun and making threats 😂 Comparing someone to a tarantula on angel food cake is totally something she would have said though 😂

The actor that has fooled me the most with their accent is Hugh Dancy in Hannibal. I was absolutely shocked when I heard his actual voice in the bloopers reels

@ericmills9839

2 ай бұрын

The best and worst for me are from Eddie Marsan. He was in Hancock and had the most ridiculous, all over the place American accent. Years later he’s in Ray Donovan doing an excellent Boston accent. He definitely put in the work in the interim.

@calebgoodman8729

2 ай бұрын

​@@ericmills9839his role in Hancock is also broad and over the top, whereas he has to actually carry some dramatic weight in Ray Donavan

@ericmills9839

2 ай бұрын

@@calebgoodman8729 totally agree, but it was just bizarre. It was a mashup, like listening to a bunch of different folks trying to do a New York accent in succession, very inconsistent. Love the guy, but t was a bit cringe.

@vestraegir

Ай бұрын

he's REALLY incredible! if you listen when he says "anything" you can tell though. love hugh dancy and hannibal!

that explains why ive heard some english speaker pronounce "drawing" like "draw(r)ing". I was wondering what was the reason! Thank you for your videos, they're so interesting and useful! greetings from an italian who's learning english.

This is fascinating!

I remember watching Monty Python when I was a kid in NYC, wondering why Graham Chapman, playing a US military officer, was putting so many Rs into his words. It sounded so strange. 40+ years later, I now have an explanation. Thank you.

@stvitalkid7981

3 ай бұрын

And of course his masterfully hilarious portrayal of Hollywood film magnate, “Irving C. Salzburg”. Pencil droppers eh?

@BeeWhistler

2 ай бұрын

@@stvitalkid7981That’s the one I thought of! “It just so happens my idear isn’t lousy, so get out!” Splunge.

@christinescreativitycabine280

2 ай бұрын

The Pythons were terrible at American accents. The best American accents I've heard are from Peter Sellers as the U.S. President in "Dr. Strangelove", and Hugh Laurie in "House". I binge-watched the entire series before learning that Laurie is British. His accent is flawless.

Here in Maine I often hear people say the word "drawing" with intrusive r, even when they don't have intrusive r in other words.

@alittlebitgone

3 ай бұрын

Older people from Washington state calling it "WARSHington" always gets me.

I've noticed this specifically in Gary Oldman's accents. I could never put my finger on it but there were times I could just tell he wasn't doing our accent correctly. They say that British people are better at mimicking American accents than vice versa, and that may be true, but this rhotic r pops up quite a bit and you can always tell a little bit. I also grew up moving around America a lot, and my family on my dad's side is from the midwest and my family on my mom's side is mostly from the south, so I've had exposure to a lot of American accents (definitely not all, but a lot) and I can usually intuit what is a different American accent and what is an actor making a mistake. I'm excited to keep my ears open for this now I know what it is.

10:50 the, ahem, *intrusive* smile/chuckle was the real cherry on top for me.

someone I know calling his daughter 'Emmer' if a leading vowel follows her name 'Emma' thought I was gone wild

@julilla1

3 ай бұрын

When I began doing genealogy, I found an old census with my family on it from 1860 in Tennessee. It took me too long to realize the census taker was using the pronunciations of the names instead of the actual spellings. "Emer" was there, as were "Ainy" and "Poley".

Singing is a case unto itself. I'm a rhotic American speaker and a serious and well-trained amateur choral singer--trained to use "r" differently when singing than in speaking. The clip from the Welsh singer has a "flipped r", sort of like a soft "d", which doesn't feel as jarring to me as a fully pronounced intrusive "r" would. This flipped r isn't a feature of most of the spoken accents/dialects of English that you were talking about, but may be present among Scots and some other parts of the Commonwealth, like India and Africa. But in singing, especially in a choral context, we are trained to use a flipped r when a "partially rhotic" speaker would pronounce an r (immediately before a vowel), while if it occurs at the end of a syllable, hold out the preceding vowel sound and link the r into the next syllable, or leave it out altogether, like a non-rhotic person would. The goal is to have a choir with a unified sound by not transitioning from a vowel sound to an "r" sound at random times. In solo singing, there is more leeway to use the "r" sound as a means of expression. American choir directors have to pick their battles on getting people to follow these rules, and only the best choirs have everyone consistently doing this.

@lizzclark4543

3 ай бұрын

Charlotte Church is Welsh and Welsh English does have flipped Rs. But in general yeah people, especially trained singers, don’t necessarily sing the same way they speak.

@pXnTilde

3 ай бұрын

As a singer, I've always thought it was funny how much of an accent is lost when singing. There are just things that are necessary or more comfortable when singing that aren't present when speaking, especially for opening up vowels.

I, a midwestern american, have a coworker who is also a native midwestern american, who says "warsh" and "warsher" with the most harsh r you can imagine jammed right up into wash/washer. I don't understand where she gets it from, but it definitely feels intrusive to my ears in a way that none of those linking-r's between words do.

As an American vocalist and music teacher, I taught my students to pronounce “the” differently depending on whether the word following begins with a consonant or a vowel-“schwa before consonant and long ee before vowel. “The (uh) first nowell thee angels did say….”

@suanach

2 күн бұрын

That's interesting. What specific accent do you and your students naturally speak?🤔 I'd never thought about that before and would have to think pretty hard to find exceptions, but it almost seems like a rule to me that a short "e" in "the" naturally precedes words that start with a consonant, and a long "e" precedes words starting with a vowel. It takes extra effort for me to extend the "e" in "the first" and to add a glottal stop between "the" and "angels." And hearing them reversed would _sound_ just as awkward. If I'd ever heard those two word combinations pronounced any other way, it would be extremely noticeable to me (like trying to say "Meghan Thee Stallion"!). It's hard for me to imagine anyone needing to be taught that ... except for a very young child just learning how to read by sounding out the letters (as I did when I first started trying to learn how to read, and I still have difficulty because I read _every_ word when reading a book (or story or news/magazine, letter, email, or blog--especially so if I'm reading--or typing--on a backlit screen, the latter most likely because, as I discovered three years ago, _well_ into adulthood, I'm autistic, which finally explains my hypersensitivity to light), OR a deaf or hard-of-hearing person, for whom written English _is_ very difficult to learn because of all the exceptions to the rules. One of my Deaf sign-language teachers gave us the example that, logically, "laughter" & "daughter" should rhyme. And I had a Deaf boyfriend (among the 10% of genetically deaf people not born to hearing parents who are the ones who keep American Sign Language alive, or at least that was the story last time I, ahem, heard it back in the '90s) whose mother taught him how to read using comic books. So he often made/still makes spelling errors because he reads entire words at a time. (We're still friends; I just got an unexpected email from him two days ago for the first time in a long time, in fact. Apparently, it's been my turn to write back for almost a year now! (I'm too busy writing long replies to replies to KZread videos to a bunch of strangers! Which is probably another of my autistic traits: hating small talk but "overthinking" and, therefore, "overwriting" about topics of special interest to me when I find someone who seems to share them and have no one around to interrupt me/break my "hyperfocus" Happy last two hours of Autism "Awareness"/"Acceptance" Month!😊 Now the countdown to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Awareness Month begins.⏱ I'm lucky enough to have _both_ plus ADHD--the trifecta!!!🏆🙁--all of which are frequently co-occuring with each other.) If, however, what you're teaching is universally true in _all_ native-English-speaking accents, we'll have to call it "Thuh Nichols Rule."😉

@ThomasNichols04

Күн бұрын

I grew up in the Air Force as my dad was a pilot. So I was exposed to Arkansas, Southern dialect, Guamanian, Spanish, influenced dialect, Northern Maine, Twain, and, of course, deep east Texas, southern accent akin (a kin?) to the Tennessean accent. I studied voice at Baylor University, a southern or southwestern institution. We had to notate the addiction, two songs and I just remember that money before words beginning with a bowel was a rule.

I found it interesting that the Australian pronunciation video teaches kids that "al" can sound like "ar" (or an American might say that "al" can sound like "ah"). I was at least 40 years old when I realized that many people don't pronounced the "L" in words like calm, palm, talk, walk, stalk, almond, folk, yolk, etc. I pronounce the "L" in all of those words (though I barely pronounce it in "walk" and "talk"), and I had never noticed that other people don't. I had quite a revelation when I got into an online discussion/argument about whether "folk" rhymes with "poke" (for me it doesn't).

@bloosy1771

3 ай бұрын

That's really interesting! Has anyone ever picked you up on that pronunciation? I've never heard anyone say the 'L' in those words before.

@Paul71H

3 ай бұрын

@@bloosy1771It's possible that you *have* heard people say the "L" in those words, but you haven't noticed -- just like I hadn't noticed people *not* saying the "L" in those words for decades. In the discussion I had online about "yolk" and "folk", about half the people said they pronounce the "L"s and couldn't believe that other people don't, while the other half said that they don't pronounce the "L"s and couldn't believe that other people do! Both sides cited the example of the character Porky Pig saying "That's All Folks!" at the end of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, and both sides were sure that Porky Pig pronounced "Folks" the same way that they do (either with or without the "L"). So I think there are two things going on here. First, the difference in pronouncing or not pronouncing the "L" is subtle, since even if you do pronounce the "L", it gets masked somewhat by the following consonant (especially true for words ending in "k", but less true for "almond"). And second, I think there must be some confirmation bias at work, where we perceive the sounds that we expect to hear. Having said all that, I'm an American, and most people in the discussion were American. I'm not sure if this same dichotomy exists in England, Australia, etc.

@NotSomeJustinWithoutAMoustache

3 ай бұрын

That's interesting. I've never heard anyone pronounce the "L" in talk, walk, stalk, or yolk, but I have heard L in the other words before, I alternate between either pronunciations of those other words myself.

@cassinipanini

3 ай бұрын

​@@Paul71H i think even if we are not pronouncing the L in some of those words, its still performing a function. after all 'calm' and 'cam' are totally different vowel sounds to those of us who dont say it. i think it applies more for the a than o vowels, as our o is pretty consistent (unless its doubled oo which is more of an uu), since we have a soft a and a hard a. the L helps us differentiate which vowel sound to use

@sharmanmurphree-roberts4018

3 ай бұрын

It doesn't. 😄

Your videos have a weird way of confusing my brain. I live in the American Midwest, and after watching a video and speaking along with a lot of the phrases and concepts you present, I actually start to hear my own accent. For example, at 15:55 when you said "Law, Saw, and Draw", I repeated it with _your_ accent, and then when I said it as I normally would it felt super wrong! I have never had that happen before, and it actually makes me even more aware of my own accent in a way I quite enjoy!

@pXnTilde

3 ай бұрын

Same, I felt like how I think about rednecks lol; unrefined and unnuanced

@jamesmcinnis208

3 ай бұрын

"actually"

@brianmiller1077

3 ай бұрын

Do you call a small sack, often made of plastic a "bayg" ? I flip between bag and bayg, I haven't figured out the context yet.

When I was a kid my mom and I were in Boston and trying to find a park that had swan boats that we'd heard about. We went into a store and a very nice man told us what street it was on. My mom and I spent an hour looking for Pack Street, before we realized our mistake after seeing the sign for Park Street.

@kimfleury

12 күн бұрын

I'll never forget a trip I was on where I heard a Boston Ma (mother), in the parking lot, shouting to the 3rd floor window above her, "Anthony! Yoah fawthah is wai'in in the cah!" 😂