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Wed Apr 8 22:54:50 UTC 1998

Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 15:26:28 -0700 (PDT)
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To: DISTERH at vm.sc.edu
From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald)
Subject: Re: Question on "anythink"

Lyle Campbell sent a query about the "anythink" pronunciation in NZ.  It is
also observed in Australia.  It gets discussed in an article written by me
and Tim Shopen called "A Researcher's Guide to the Sociolinguistic Variable
(ING)" 219-249 in T. Shopen & Joseph M. Williams, eds.  Style and Variables
in English.  Cambridge, Mass: Winthrop Publishers, Inc., 1981.

The evidence discussed there suggests an origin in London, not in the West
Midlands, as Larry Trasks suggests (very tentatively).  Wyld makes the
observation for London in the 1920s, in a statement similar to the
anonymous much earlier one Lyle refers to.  I have personally not heard the
pronunciation in London (even Cockney East London), and suspect it may be
as extinct there as the beta pronunciation of "w" which gave rise to
"w"/"v" interchanges in literary representations of London "Cockney"
English in the early 19th c (e.g., by Dickens) (cf. for the merger/unmerger
typology that Larry Trask was also interested in, i.e., w vs. v > 19th c
"literary" Cockney w/v > 20th c w vs. v in the exact same words as
earlier).

It turned out that in Canberra, Australia the pronunciation of "-ink" was
quite rare, relative to either the variants -ing (velar nasal) or -in'
(representing the apical unstressed syllabic nasal).  However, it seems to
be quite common, and, I assume, becoming more common in parts of NZ.  It
was very noticeable in the speech of working class urban Maori English
speakers in a fairly recent film from New Zealand.  (My conjecture is that
this is not due to anything in Maori but motivated by the same social
mechanism which promoted the Portuguese on Martha's Vineyard to further the
sound change discussed as originating with the Anglo group in Labov's study
of that change, i.e., raising the nuclei of /aw/ and /ay/ to a mid central
position).

Larry's suggestion was reasonable to the extent that he noted that he would
not expect such devoicings to occur in monosyllabic words.  That is because
they are stressed, and the -ink variant occurs like -ing and -in' only in
final unstressed syllables.  However, the general phonological systems of
Australia and New Zealand, and esp the vowel systems, are much more clearly
based on Southern British, and not Midlands or the North, than the earlier
established North American dialects of English.  Incidentally, urban South
African English departs radically from other "Southern Hemisphere" dialects
of English by not having even an -in' variant of -ing (even among the
working class), although it does share with Austr/NZ the vowel shift
involving the short vowels /i/ (as in bit) and /e/ (as in bet).  In
general, and most specifics West Midlands speech is too different from
either Southern British or Australia/NZ to be a credible source for the
"-ink" change.

My guess is that the -ink variant was nascent in London and perhaps allied
Southern dialects of English in the late 18th to early 20th c, but aborted
(or remains dormant) in Southern England, and perhaps remains somwhat rare
in Australia (apart from "somethink", "nothink" and "anythink"), but has
taken off in urban NZ for sociolinguistic reasons, and come to the point
where it is very prominent and noticeable, a relatively advanced stage of
development for a sound change.  A question back to Lyle is whether or not
this pronunciation has become so common and salient that it is subject to
overt comment among NZ speakers (i.e., non-linguists).    -- Benji