[Ads-l] She text me

Brian Hitchcock brianhi at SKECHERS.COM
Wed Mar 2 04:24:16 UTC 2016


The reason the spoken past tense of "text" can sound like "text" has to do with the fact that many people do not pronounce the present tense as "text". This is particularly true of, for instance, native Spanish speakers of Mexican heritage (Ixtapa notwithstanding).  And IMHO it is difficult, even for native AmE speakers, to clearly pronounce the "xts" in the plural noun or the present-tense verb "texts".

What seems to happen in spoken AmE (at least in California, where I currently live) is that the final T is elided:
	The singular  noun is pronounced as "tex".
	The plural noun is pronounced "texs(schwa)s" or "texes" (which can sound exactly like Texas).

	The present tense is conjugated as "I tex, we tex, you tex, she texes, he texes, they tex.
	The past tense for all persons is then pronounced as "texed" (which sounds almost exactly like "text").

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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