I think you probably do what I do, in two different ways. On the one hand, when I read words by people I’ve never heard speak, I hear their voices in an accent close to mine most of the time. Ironically, such people might never be able to do the accent I hear their voices in convincingly. In that sense, I think you probably speak like me when I read your words. I also think you probably do this too, when you read my words if you’ve never heard me. If you’re in the States, for example, you might hear my words in an accent I couldn’t convincingly imitate. Maybe not. Perhaps you realise I’m from Southeast England and therefore have a certain kind of accent which might be reflected in the words and spellings I use, although actually that’s not always so. For instance, at least in my childhood I said “couch” for sofa and “lounge” for living room. My mother actually used to say “mad” for angry. I’m aware that the first two are some kind of aspirational thing in that the cognoscenti say the latter and hoi polloi the former, but I’m not sure they come from there. For all I know they may not be American as such but be regional in Britain somewhere, probably the Thames Valley or the Medway towns.
When I was a child, my accent may or may not have been afflicted by speech impediments, in that my pronunciation of certain sounds differed from RP in a way which I suspect others’ didn’t. Specifically, I used a velar semivowel rather than a voiced palatal one for the sound expressed by consonantal Y and a labiodental semivowel for the sound expressed by R. My short E was also more open than it is now and in particular my pronunciation of long I was “oi”. I want to use IPA here but I worry that I’ll leave people baffled. The vowel differences are probably to do with accent at the time, and the drift short E has undergone is probably a general thing. Something I never did but children around me did do was pronounce the voiceless palatal semivowel as “fy”, which I think is quite common, and in fact someone close to me had that addressed by a speech therapist. I recently discovered that the Guarani language uses both velar and labiodental semivowels, so maybe I’d have a good Guarani accent.
Present in my father’s accent right up to the end of his life was TH-fronting: saying “th” as F and V. This is widely associated with the Cockney accent. He also did something which is widely associated with a working class Southeastern English accent: he used an intervocalic glottal stop for T. This particular sound fascinates me. In particular, it’s remarkable that a sound pronounced just behind the teeth should somehow slip all the way to the throat, although almost the reverse happened when the sound written as “GH” turned into an F. Something similar also seems to have happened in Gaidhlig, and it seems in Scottish English and Scots around here, where the TH, far from being fronted, has become an aitch sound.
I’m sorry, I can’t do this because it feels so sloppy. Here’s a chart of the IPA:
Okay, so that’s messy but this is what I’m talking about and I’m not going to fool around with spelling pronunciation vaguenesses any more. The situation is this. I used to say /ɰ/ when other people said /j/ and /ʋ/ when other people had /ɹ/. The latter’s quite common in Southeast England and I’ve also heard it from a Cornish person, but as far as I can tell, the former was just me. The Cockney accent is known for changing /θ/ to /f/ and /ð/ to /v/, and also famous for using /ʔ/ for /VtV/. With me?
Right, so the presence of the intervocalic glottal stop tends to get written as an apostrophe even when transcribing other languages. In English it occurs in Southeast England northward to the former Bedfordshire and also in Scottish English, and while I’m at it, isn’t it weird how both Scottish English and Southeastern English English use /ʌ/? I recently realised that the Gaidhlig GH and DH between back vowels, i.e. the broad allophone, is also a glottal stop in some accents. In other words, the eastern isles of this archipelago are sporadically spotted therewith.
Common use of the glottal stop in that position in English is stereotypically associated with poverty, a low degree of formal institutional education, social deprivation and possibly being White. It’s also associated with Southern England but apparently it’s also used elsewhere nowadays due to the influence of ‘Eastenders’. It comes quite naturally to me to use glottal stops but I’m thoroughly middle class though also exceedingly White. Its history is that my father did it, although I probably didn’t learn to speak much from him, then I did it to fit in at school, so in fact I’m diglossic. However, my paternal grandfather was from the Gorbals, which makes me wonder if his probable glottal stops, and for that matter unrounded short U’s, are actually in an unbroken line from his accent to mine. This probably doesn’t exist, but it reminds me of Hume’s view of cause and effect, that there is no sense in which a cause produces an effect and there’s nothing more than constant conjunction, temporal precedence and contiguity to cause. This is a weird way of thinking about causation to be sure, and not one I accept, but it might reflect my family phonology.
However, I’m not here to talk about myself except as an example of someone who has been known to produce intervocalic glottal stops. My concern is something else, and something on which I’ve recently come to ponder: the hard left glottal stop. A similar phenomenon occurs with aitch-dropping, but not to lose focus, there seems to be a tendency for SWP and other Trotskyist activists to use intervocalic glottal stops to a greater extent than in the general population. I’ve no idea if any research has been done into this but until the other day I’d generally thought that it was an affectation to make the speaker seem more stereotypically working class. A genuine example of a very similar phenomenon was of a member of the RCP who referred to a comrade as “‘Olly” when her name was Holly. This led me to think they were referring to someone called Oliver. I now think this accent was genuinely affected and specifically directed at me as someone they perceived as bourgeois with a near-RP accent, which was the case at the time, so it’s akin either to inverse snobbery or as a tactic to unsettle me. Little did they know that I was actually diglossic, and they were failing to fake an accent authentically. They were attempting to reproduce a West Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire accent unsuccessfully, because I may be wrong but I don’t think those accents drop aitches at all. Consequently I perceived them as referring to someone called Oliver.
I have a hunch, then, that the accent was fake and adopted for tactical purposes, but I’ve just changed my mind, or rather have acquired doubts, about the fakeness of intervocalic glottal stops in Socialist Worker activists. Owen Jones recently posted a video from the Your Party conference where he interviewed a member of the SWP whose accent as presented definitely did include glottal stops, so my kneejerk reaction was “fake”, but I no longer think this is true. I think something else is going on. Thomas Pynchon once referred to an American military accent as “Southern” and then withdrew that claim as a sign of his lack of experience. He later concluded, and I tend to agree with him, that the US Army accent sounds Southern to Northerners and Northern to Southerners. In other words, there’s a specific US Army accent which kind of averages out the accents of its soldiers. I further suspect this accent confers a sense of cohesion, like the uniform, rituals and general camaraderie of the military, such as it is. Moreover, maybe people adopt this accent in an attempt to fit in and it later becomes second nature to them, the same process, in fact, that I went through when I was at secondary school. It would be hypocritical of me to condemn this process.
It’s just possible, then, that the SWP glottal stop deserves a bit more sympathy than I’ve previously afforded it, because it just may be a kind of institutional accent, conferring membership and emerging without conscious intervention. It might actually not be fake at all much of the time, and when it is, it’s about wanting to fit in to the in-group and oriented in that direction rather than outwards.
The other anecdotal datum from all this is What Sarada Did. Sarada has a near-RP accent and lives in Scotland with me. Previously she lived in the English Midlands, but she’s from West London. A few years ago, she went to a political meeting in London and I saw a video of her in which she used glottal stops. She didn’t seem conscious of this and I think it’s simple unconscious influence from either others around her or being in Central London. If this is so, maybe it’s not fair to blame Trotskyists for talking this way either. It seems she used to use it at school and when talking to her friends. As for our children, one of them has an accent closest to Liz’s and the other’s used to be like mine but is now more Yorkshire.
Glottal stops in English, or at least English English, have historically been frowned upon, but in other languages they’re considered entirely respectable sounds in the standard language. This is true of Arabic, Maltese, Hebrew, Hawaiian and Samoan for example. In Germanic languages other than the ones spoken here or derived from them, glottal stops begin words which are written with initial vowels. I once said to my ex’s mother “Das ist ein Problem” and she thought I’d said “Das ist Dein Problem”. Danish uses something like a glottal stop which they call “stød” where Norwegian and Swedish use tone to distinguish otherwise identical words, although apparently not all Danish does this and it can be a creaky voice instead. The Austronesian languages Hawaiian and Samoan both use glottal stops and Hawaiian in particular is very focussed on having a letter for it, which they call ʻokina – “ʻ”. I have to admit that I don’t really understand their insistence on it in this manner. It’s considered the final letter in the alphabet and affects alphabetisation, but at the start of a word the following vowel is capitalised. The Samoan apostrophe was temporarily dropped in the 1960s CE, then adopted again in 2012, and likewise is considered the last letter in the alphabet. My perception of the Cockney or Scottish English glottal stop is that it’s a written letter which has identical capital and lower case forms and I suppose I’d alphabetise it as if it were a T. Hebrew and Arabic both kind of have the glottal stop, represented as aleph in Hebrew and in a more complicated manner in Arabic, where it’s called “hamza”, as the first letter of the alphabet. Our own letter A is descended from the glottal stop letter. Maltese uses a Q. All of these are fully-fledged letters.
Scots politicises the apostrophe. Words written with apostrophes as if they have missing letters compared to English words only had those introduced in the eighteenth century, and are often non-etymological and they’re therefore deprecated. But not all of them, because some do actually represent missing letters. It’s been referred to as the “apologetic apostrophe”. The glottal stop in Scots is simply represented as a T.
I could say a lot more, and often do, but that’s all I’ve got for you for now, except to say that there can be more than one way to politicise both the glottal stop and the apostrophe. Maybe Cockneys should start proudly using the ʻokina, and maybe Scots could distinguish between the relatively few legitimate apostrophes and their allophone of /t/ by doing the same.
A Box Of Chocolates 