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Hi! I want to share the fascination and fun of speech, language and accents, and I'm so grateful to anyone who feels able to support this work via my Patreon.
I studied at University College London and got my PhD at the University of California Los Angeles. I've taught at universities including UCL, Edinburgh and Cambridge, published research in many areas, and worked as a forensic analyst. I've given invited lectures and workshops around the world.
I wrote the influential 'English After RP' (Palgrave Macmillan), and my blog contains over a hundred audio-illustrated articles. I'm co-editor of the free searchable online pronouncing dictionary CUBE.
I've also worked in film and TV as a screenwriter and director. I wrote the screenplay and arranged the music (performed by Lang Lang) for the animated fantasy Magic Piano, which was shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination.
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I'm American and you have a lot of these pronunciations wrong. Don"t know where you found them. Processes? Not prOcesseez.
Not sure if this is a feature in British English but from what I understand, an “overly” or rather noticeably sibilant s is a characteristic feature present in the idiolects of gay men in America, not just in stereotype, but in my actual experience. I’m very curious as to whence that might originate
Keep all the vowels you want. Just please pronounce the R at the ends of words, and pronounce TH correctly, and not as an F or V. That's all I ask of everyone in England.
Never have I heard or said trip or drip like that.
This video in particular made me realize that as an American, I’ve been labelling what is clearly SSB as RP
Sally sells seashells by the seashore. Yes the dumb game but can be used to train yourself to say 's' differently
I say S with my teeth touching, my husband is chinese and says S with his jaw closed, it's such a small change but you can hear it
a year is 12 munts long 🤭
i IMMEDIATERLY recognized the voice samples for thank you to surfshark but i cant ID the youtuber and im going crazy lol
Oh!! Its RagnarRox!!! I could remember the voice talking about Haunting Ground so I searched my history for that and saw it was him. Love his video essays~
Ew. That's instead my throat? Im never talking again......Not going to be a big difference.
A question: You provided examples of vocal fry as a gatekeeping behavior, giving examples from RP. It seems like it wasn't a female phenomenon in the Anglo-Saxon world. How did it become one? As a generational hallmark that shows you're different from your parents, like millennials' skinny jeans (cultural), as a social gatekeeper to determine who's in, and who's out (social), as an adaption to lower male voice pitch (professional)? Did some idols - the Kardashians - make it their hallmark and everyone just imitated? Or is there no clear origin?
I'm an American, and to me, the words "just" and "already" are just modifiers to the sentence. So, if there's a semantic difference between "I ate" and "I've eaten", then to me the presence of the other words just shift the tone. And, yes, I do feel there's a difference between "ate" and "have eaten". The former is more a statement of action, while the latter is a statement of being, at least to me.
Dr Geoff, the guy who only picks on our American Brothers and never picks on the god awful language us Brits have cobbled together in a sort of bastardized abomination of proper english Ffs Americans get more words right than we do, turn the mirror on your old bigoted arse 😂😂
Maybe on the glottal T subject you were trying to be politically correct. The sample given with a man was a man that was effiminate. Studies must also consider men with feminine qualities in their speech pattern. I, for instance have some of them having been raised largely surrounded by women and even being the first son born of my mother in between two girls. Regardless of sexuality this shall have an effect. But Also homosexuals often show feminine speech patterns, and many that are openly gay often address or refer to other men as "girl" and she, even if they are heterosexual.
Hudson Valley dialect here. I’m pretty sure I have an v/e distinction (forgive inverted transcription please). I can say UNdone and unDONE, and I can interchange v and e. But v is the stressed syllable (with the tongue farther back) in either case. I have to work very hard to keep my tongue in place for a double e. And doing so doesn’t sound like undone. It sounds like I’m saying (L)ondon, but slightly weirdly because I would naturally say Londin.
These changes are a prominent part of the North American "Middle West" region's accent which the accent most TV anchors trained to use as it sounds the most "neutral". I noticed it when I first moved to that area long ago.
My take on Star Wars is that British accents were used for characters that were born on planets towards the center(core) of the Republic/Empire, worlds that are longer settled(older), and more populated. While American accents were used for people born on the more far-flung and more recently settled worlds between the core and the outer rim territories. Essentially, British accents were used for people who are from higher status worlds, and they could be good or evil.
Vocal fry to me seems like the most lazy way to speak. You literally can't be arsed to put more breath into your sentence. It shows lack of care about what you're saying. Kinda makes sense because most of these women speaking with a vocal fry are shallow airheads and have nothing truly interesting to say.
Could vocal fry gotten its authoritative connotations because a deep, resonant, non fry voice had or has authoritative connotations. Then people whose voices are not low enough to do a resonant low tone used fry to get that low and immitate that tone, and fry became associated with being authoritative as well?
James Marsters is an American actor, who put on an 'older English' accent for his character. In one scene he was talking to a policeman and pretending to be American, and he produced the funniest over-the-top exaggeration of a (somewhat Texas-sounding) American accent I ever heard.
i'm a young australian and it's a bit weird but a lot of the newer pronunciations you gave, i perceived as older. For example I always assumed "kjo:" and "matsho:" (forgive my ersatz ipa) were an extremely archaic RP thing but apparently i got it the wrong way round! Mischief and mischievous are another one, i always thought misCHIEF and mischievious was a very old timey thing to say and i've always said them the other way. This might be a Britain/Australia divide (australians tend to think all british accents sound "old" so modern british characteristics might be misinterpreted as old fashioned)
There's no 'r' in 'drawing'! Why put one in?
You just opened a door to a new world!
While that way of pronouncing s in Spanish is not exactly uncommon, it's also not the most usual way to pronounce it. Most Spanish speakers pronounce s much more like we do in English than "sh"; if anything, when speaking English their "s"s are too soft (almost like unvoiced or something). But I'd say that implying that Spanish speakers generally tend to pronounce that way is a bit like picking English with a lisp and saying we pronounce like that.
I've never said draw/r/ing. To me gotten is American. Trip with a ch and drip with a j? Not for me, t and d. What annoys me is the lack of T in words. I ough-a get my daugh-er a glass of wa-er.
Thanks so much for this! I remember being frustrated to find dictionaries stubbornly insisting we didn’t anlready all shift to pronouncing “our” like “are”.
i never say it like that 😭
At first it surprised me this R was there and I was confused. Then I moved to the UK and adapted to the real everyday language. Now I do it without even realising.
The youtube algorithm has dragged me to your channel. I don't know why, exactly - I have no connections to linguistics and I'm not a native speaker of English. But I can't stop watching your videos apparently. 😄
I'm American and definitely pronounce "if it were an ending" (<an> is [ən]) differently from "if it were unending" (<un> is [ʌn]). There's no hard attack on "unending". Is it possible for the phonemes to be the same, but "secondary stress" in "unending" causes a different phonetic realization from "an ending" in which the first <n> seems to belong more to the following syllable (like with French enchaînement) than to the preceding one?
The s in months sound to me a lot like ts in rats. I like the s in Spanish and Greek because it has more character seems to me to be more of a whistle to it and lean more towards a sh sound and little hint of the Ll in Welsh.
Love this format! Many of the topics discussed here, I didn’t notice much before and I like the explanations. Greetings from Germany
I had to check my doors for creaks. Had the 3-in-1 oil out ready.
of a certain type says it all 🙂- disgusting !!! When I hear this or gender speak I stop listening or change the channel or go away.
This is a really interesting video but I am unable to focus on it as I am still laughing at Dr. Mike talking in slow motion lmfao
yknow i talk with torresean crows in australia. the harmonics of croaking go deep down here. or, as we say, "Oiyernarei" the sound and timbre of cicadas and the energy required to shout over a desert with a dry mouth influence the accent and the culture. it's like a very drunk cockney waking up hungover on a beach and shouting himself hoarse before finding the loudest buzz for the least kilojoules. i get there's a whole ecosystem of human culture, but there is also the old fashioned kind. and of course, the torresean crows have real language so it's a whole other culture which oozes very nuanced creaky voice.
I can’t hear it. It all sounds normal to me. Lucky I guess.
The British confuse schwa with ethel because they don’t like Danish ø. Some Americans confuse schwa with the “a” in America because we are badly educated. However, ethel is ethøl, foot is foot, and America used to be a union of sovereign States.
those all sound like clicks to me and that one guy in the video sounded like he was making a sort of percussive 'o' sound by slapping his tongue to soft palate
19:33 When I tried to imitate his tongue position (tip between the teeth) but still make an [s], I succeeded pretty well even when I pulled my lips out of the way by just using a further back part of my tongue to make the constriction at my alveolar ridge (so I guess I pronounced it sort of "dorso-alveolar", though it wasn't THAT far back of a part of my toungue, so it's sort of between that and "laminal alveolar" or whatever I guess). I can hear the lower lip making it louder and higher pitched, though.
I can't hear the "f*ck" just listening, but can sort of hear it if I concentrate on watching Ken's mouth, which looks more like it's saying "f*ck" than "Barbie". This may be because he opens his mouth a lot for the vowel suggesting a "u" and he doesn't appear to do anything other than grimace after bringing his mouth closed for the "ck" or "r". I realize that grimace is supposed to be the "ie", but I don't see him make the second "b".
My "s" and "sh" do sound louder and higher pitched with my teeth closed, but I still think it sounds quite sibilant with mouth open. On that note, I don't really see why the bottom teeth should matter, since the top teeth are in the way regardless, and maybe that says something about my articulations. I also wonder if there's any effect from choir making practice being able to pronounce as many phonemes as possible with my jaw as open as possible, even though I don't do this except sometimes when singing. I only remember consciously worrying about this with vowels (which are most important to be open for choir anyway), but I'm sure I did it with most consonants, too.
14:34 You can can also hear that "ashita" sounds almost like [aθθа]. (I didn't feel like trying more precise IPA, so just said "almost".)
3:59 AAVE somehow looses 3rd person singular s I think, though maybe that's not of phonetic origin.
everyone I know would say mischevous
Fixty-eight year old racially mixed male who was born and raised in the rural US deep south. We used two different pronunciations for processes depending on how it is used. 'She processes paperwork.' (ehz) But 'We have different processes for different sizes.' (eeze)
That ending was brilliant! Cracked me up, along with the phonetic "clusterfuck" midway through. Great and informative video
A danish friend described his native language as a throat disease.
My singing teacher would have thrown the Piano at anyone with vocal fry.
This is fascinating. I had always thought of this as a glottal stop at the beginning of vowels pronounced in isolation.
One abused consonant is “t”!! It drives me CRAZY to hear people who should know better, pronounce the word “im por tant,” “im por ent”!!!! AAAAARRRRGGGH. Why would someone say the word, content, properly and then mispronounce the word, important?