Dueling impressions

[Stahlke, Herbert F.W.]

My impression, from the data that I've seen and the utterances I've
heard, is that AmE implosives are pragmatically governed, as Arnold has
hinted.  The longer utterance I reported from Oklahoma was spoken
emphatically.  But the question remains how widely they are found
outside the South and the Lower Great Plains.

Herb

On Sep 8, 2004, at 11:24 AM, Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <hstahlke at BSU.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Dueling impressions
>
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> 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.
>
> They show up also with d and g.  Ladefoged notes them also in his
> Course
> in Phonetics, where he says that they turn up in emphatic speech.
He's
> referring to Carl Sagan's pronunciation of "billions and billions".
>
> Herb
>

I'd expect that the whole /b d g/ series would be affected. It's just
that implosive b rolls most trippingly from the tongue, if implosives
are not native to your speech.

-Wilson Gray