Pronunciation question (from L. Urdang)

James Harbeck jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA
Thu May 31 01:39:55 UTC 2007


>>From many years' living in England, I can attest to the appearance
>of a glottal stop almost anywhere in a word, a phenomenon that
>started in Estuary English and has spread to the West End.  But my
>comments on didn't were restricted to American English.

Sorry, unclear use of initialism by me. By BE I meant Black English,
i.e., AAVE or whatever it's called this week. My exposure to Black
American English is not as extensive as I would like, and there are
many dialects and features that aren't so familiar to me. There
really isn't an equivalent dialect in Canada -- bits of the American
dialects get picked up, but it's a different scene in general. And in
Toronto a lot of the Black community are from the West Indies, not
the American South. (And in Alberta when I was growing up, it was all
pasty white, all the time, except for some Chinese and Vietnamese
people here and there.)

James Harbeck.

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