English as a second language--blame your spelling teacher

I have already noted my occasional difficulty in understanding what Londoners say to me. Yesterday, riding the bus, I was listening to a fellow passenger talk and analyzing his "glottal stop ". One word he used had me fascinated--"equipment." His way of saying it was "equih'-men'." The p is swallowed. In mine, the p is softened, so it almost sounds like "equimen'." Neither of us pronounce it the way it's spelled.

As this site notes:

In many areas the American ‘t’, when not the initial consonant in a word, is pronounced closer to a ‘d’, and in some cases can disappear altogether. Thus latter and butter sounds more like ladder and budder, and words like twenty and dentist can sound like twenny and Dennis.

Why do Americans pronounce t as d? Perhaps because to pronounce the frequent ‘r’s at the end of words ending in ‘-er’ it is easier to say ‘-der’ than ‘-ter’.

In Britain, ‘t’ is generally pronounced like a ‘t’, but there are areas the glottal stop is very well known. This is the sound in between the two vowels in uh-oh, or the initial consonant in honest. In these two examples, and others like them, the glottal stop occurs as much in America as in Britain. But the glottal stop that replaces the ‘t’ in the Cockney and Glasgow dialects is much stronger; imagine bracing for a punch in the belly when you make the sound. Words like butter become [bʌʔə].

But I got to thinking: What is it that creates dialects? Well, mostly migration and exposure to people speaking other languages. (It explains how American English and British Isles English diverged, as well as how the American English of the Upper Midwest reflects the influx of Scandinavians and how the American English of New York reflects the influx of Italians). Of course, having some effect on the pronunciation differences is the Great Vowel Shift (GVS), but also the differing influences on language--as Wikipedia notes, English was just one in a mishmash of languages competing for primacy in North America during colonial times. (While it's an urban legend that German nearly became the official language of the United States--and the United States doesn't have a formally recongized official language today--it is true that in 1795 there was a push to have all federal laws published in German as well as English.)

But here's a surprise: Wikipedia tells us that Americans are the more "conservative" speakers:

In many ways, compared to British English, American English is conservative in its phonology. The conservatism of American English is largely the result of the fact that it represents a mixture of various dialects from the British Isles. Dialect in North America is most distinctive on the East Coast of the continent; this is largely because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing changes. The interior of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England, as they had no access to the ocean during a time when journeys to Britain were always by sea. As such the inland speech is much more homogeneous than the East Coast speech, and did not imitate the changes in speech from England.

Most North American speech is rhotic, as English was in most places in the 17th century. Rhoticity was further supported by Hiberno-English, Scottish English, and West Country English. In most varieties of North American English, the sound corresponding to the letter "R" is a retroflex semivowel rather than a trill or a tap. The loss of syllable-final r in North America is confined mostly to the accents of eastern New England, New York City and surrounding areas, South Philadelphia, and the coastal portions of the South. Dropping of syllable-final r sometimes happens in natively rhotic dialects if r is located in unaccented syllables or words and the next syllable or word begins in a consonant. In England, lost 'r' was often changed into [ə] (schwa), giving rise to a new class of falling diphthongs. Furthermore, the 'er' sound of (stressed) fur or (unstressed) butter, which is represented in IPA as stressed [ɝ] or unstressed [ɚ] is realized in American English as a monophthongal r-colored vowel. This does not happen in the non-rhotic varieties of North American speech.

(Side note: Our New Jersey family tends toward the non-rhotic, so this is less of a problem for us.)

The root of the problem, though, lies in one thing: A standardized written language.

The GVS is a particularly important linguistic change for students of literature to understand because not only did it effect a massive change in the language, it did so at a time when people were increasingly interested in standardizing English. Once upon a time, people spelled words the way they sounded; those written manifestations of the language are very helpful to the historical linguist. But once people started standardizing the spelling of words, the written language no longer kept up with the natural and inevitable changes in pronunciation.

So if you have trouble ever understanding another English speaker, blame your spelling teacher.