"di?nt" (with glottal stop)

[Wilson Gray]

Until ca.1961, I never heard the glottal stop used by anyone, black or
white, except in British movies. But, in 1961, when I was in the Army,
I buddied up with a bruthuh from Fuquay Springs, NC, which is somewhere
in the Raleigh-Durham area. He used a glottal stop in seemingly as many
environments as any Cockney. When I tried to question him about it, he
would become defensive and reply, "Man, I don? use no glo?al stop!" I
concluded that this was probably a speech defect of some kind, since he
seemed to be utterly unaware of it. If I had known then what I know
now, I would spoken to him using glottal stops myself to see what his
reaction was.

In any case, the use of glottal stops by BE speakers didn't come to my
attention again until rap music became popular. I've since heard the
glottal stop used by many, many rappers. Then I noticed that on trash
TV - Jerry, Maury, et al. - not only BE speakers but also
Latino-English speakers, whose speech patterns appear to be based on
those of BE rather than those of standard English, and even some white
speakers who talked black were all using the glottal stop. However the
glottal stop came to be used by rappers - I doubt that they all come
from North Carolina -  IMO, the glottal stop seems to have become an
in-group marker of the rap culture and, unfortunately, seems to be
spreading like wildfire. I first noted its use by kids in Roxbury (the
Harlem of Boston, as it were) about ten years ago. I haven't noticed
its use by West-Coast blacks, yet, but I figure that it's only a matter
of time.

Many years ago, I read an article by Labov in which he claimed that
"I'ma" for "I'm going to" was spreading among BE speakers. I don't use
that form myself and I'd never heard any other black person use it,
either. So, I dismissed this claim as just more bullshit from The Man.
You can imagine my surprise, shock, and chagrin when I finally did hear
a black person say "I'ma" and that person turned out to be none other
than one of my own brothers, a Federal judge in California. What I'm
getting at here as that my opinion WRT the BE glottal stop may be as
worthy of respect as my opinion WRT "I'ma."

-Wilson Gray

On Nov 14, 2004, at 10:57 PM, Mark A. Mandel wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      "di?nt" (with glottal stop)
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> A question from a friend in Boston:
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
> I was on the Green Line, and there were a couple of African-American
> teenage girls talking loudly to one another (they were about twenty
> feet
> away, almost out of sight, but I could hear every word they said).
>
> And it occurred to me as I was listening that there's a linguistic
> artifact that I've only heard from urban African-Americans my age or
> younger, mostly girls.  It's a sort of glottal stop used in place of t
> or
> d; eg. di-unt instead of didn't.  Do you know where this might have
> come
> from?
>
> =====================
>
> -- Mark
> [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>