Dueling impressions

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 8, 2004, at 8:01 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> I was once chatting with a Kentucky-born, white linguist about
> dialects. In the course of the conversation, he asked me about the
> implosive consonants of BE. I was caught off guard. I asked, "Implosive
> consonants of Black English? What implosive consonants?" He replied,
> "You know. As in 'boy' and so forth." When I heard his example, I was
> totally flabbergasted. The type of pronunciation that he considered to
> be a defining characteristic of BE is one that I've always considered
> to be a defining characteristic of the speech of "country"
> White-English speakers!

me too.  in " 'Bama" 'Alabama' with an implosive b, most
stereotypically.  (i think that b is by far the most affected consonant
-- possibly the only affected one, for many speakers.)  but then i'm
not a scholar of southern states phonetics.

>  I didn't know what to say, not wishing to
> contradict someone famous in the field, so I just changed the subject.
> This type of pronunciation can be heard in an old song entitled
> "All-American Boy" in which the singer, a white man with a "country"
> accent, uses exactly this implosive b. I haven't looked, but there's
> probably a sample of the song at towerrecords.com, if anyone cares.

surely (he says, once again, possibly foolishly) someone has studied
this systematically.

arnold