A Charleston pronunciation

Gordon, Matthew J. GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU
Sun Apr 11 16:52:22 UTC 2004


The linguistic atlas research (e.g., Kurath and McDavid 1961) found this pronunciation scattered from Virginia to Georgia. It's also been reported in Belfast and is/was no doubt heard elsewhere in the UK. I believe it's still fairly common in Jamaica but is probably dying out in most other areas.

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Alan Baragona
Sent: Sun 4/11/2004 11:29 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      A Charleston pronunciation

A good friend of mine from Charleston, SC, has a pronunciation that even he recognizes as unusual.  He inserts a y-glide between a velar, voiced or unvoiced, and [ar], so he pronounces <car> [kiar] and <garden> [giarden].   He says his mother pronounced them this way, and she was born and brought up in Charleston, too, but nobody he knows outside his family, even in Charleston, seems to have this pronunciation.  Is anybody familiar with this phenomenon and know where it comes from?

Thanks.
Alan Baragona



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