Non native speaker?

[Herbert Stahlke]

I've heard this phonology from other educated, middle or upper middle class
African Americans from Eastern Virginia.  One of them was an IBM sales rep
serving the Ball State account several years ago whose English was clearly
Tidewater but had D initially and f/v finally.  Could it be a Tidewater
variant?

Herb Stahlke

> >
> >While I'm asking questions, Chief Moose (who is, incidentally, Dr. Moose)
> >replaces all of his "th" sounds with either a hard "D" (initial) or "F".
> >I have heard this from time to time, though usually not so pronounced,
> >including a classmate in 1950s rural Pennsylvania with a 100 percent
> >white school population. I had always assumed it was a minor speech
> >impediment (is there a new PC word for this?) or an ideomorph. Are there
> >dialects that include this shift?
> >
> [d] and [t] for /dh/ and /th/ are standard non-standard dialectal
> variants in certain northeast urban areas (NYC--where it's a
> shibboleth for "Brooklynese":  dese, dem, dose, Boston, etc.), New
> Orleans, U.P. of Michigan, and other areas with foreign substratum.
> I haven't been paying attention to Chief Moose's fricatives, so I'm
> not either agreeing or disagreeing with your assessment on that.  (I
> know he was formerly police chief in Portland, OR, but I don't know
> where he was from before that.)
>
> Larry
>