The American glottal conspiracy revisited
My new video revisits a topic that I first discussed here in this article almost five years ago.
The conspiracy in the title refers to two very different processes in the speech of some younger Americans which ‘conspire’ (in phonological jargon) to manifest the consonant T as a glottal stop [ʔ] before vowels. Pre-vowel T-glottaling is something traditionally associated far more with British accents.
In the video I describe the two processes essentially as I did in the article; but the video presents a lot more exemplification, and some musings on who uses these glottal Ts, and why.
Ideally I’d like to get more real examples of this two-pronged phenomenon, so I’d be grateful if any of you could post links, in the comments below, to nice examples of North American pre-vowel T-glottaling that you may come across. It would be nice if you could include timings (unless it’s a speaker who does it frequently), and any information you can add about the speaker’s region/accent.
I’m especially interested in the sounds immediately preceding the glottal T when it occurs within a word. A preceding R is quite common, as in cer[ʔ]ain, impor[ʔ]ant, cur[ʔ]ain, shor[ʔ]en, Mar[ʔ]in. I’ve heard other preceding sounds only rarely, like bea[ʔ]en and co[ʔ]on. I’d also be interested in more examples of glottal T before -ing like figh[ʔ]ing. And do you ever hear North American glottal T inside words with no following /n/, like ci[ʔ]y or be[ʔ]er? Lastly, can you find any examples from D, like the prou[ʔ]of which I once heard?
Please remember that I’m not looking for glottal T before a traditional syllabic N, e.g. cer[ʔn̩] – only before a vowel, e.g. cer[ʔɪn] and righ[ʔ] angle.
Thank you!
