Question on "anythink"

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
You will doubtless receive better-informed answers than this, but I
can say something.
 
In most varieties of English, the plosive /g/ was lost after /n/ in
word-final or morpheme-final position quite some time ago, leaving
behind the new velar nasal phoneme.  But this change apparently never
happened in a sizeable area of England, including the West Midlands
and southern Lancashire.  In a continuous area including the cities of
Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Manchester and Liverpool, /g/ has remained
in this position down to the present day.  In this area, words like
`sing', `long', `thing' and `bring' all end in a plosive /g/, and
`singer' rhymes with `finger'.  According to John Wells, this also
happens, uniquely in Yorkshire, in the city of Sheffield, of which I
have little experience, and was reported in the past in a part of
Kent, from which it now appears to be absent.
 
This type of pronunciation, which is very striking to my American
ears, is categorical among all social classes in the West Midlands.
It is not stigmatized, but is in fact regarded as prestigious, and
speakers from the region typically do not lose it even when they
otherwise adjust their accents strongly toward RP, or at least toward
the speech of southern England.  That is my experience, and that is
the conclusion of John Wells, who reports that only a tiny minority
of out-and-out RP-speakers in the region lack this /g/.
 
Now, John Wells says nothing at all about the devoicing of /g/ to /k/
in this position, but I know from experience that it happens.  I
believe it never happens in a monosyllable: that is, `thing' is
always pronounced with final /g/, and never with /k/, which would
make it homophonous with `think'.  However, in polysyllables,
devoicing is frequent.  I have noticed this above all in words like
`anything' and `something', in which a final /k/ is often heard,
though /g/ is (I think) also possible.  I am uncertain about the
treatment of verb-forms in <-ing>, though I *think* I have heard
things like "What are you doing?" pronounced with a final /k/.
 
So, the West Midlands and southern Lancashire would appear to be the
obvious place to look for antecedents of the NZ pronunciation.  On the
other hand, the information from Sheffield and Kent suggests that the
plosive pronunciation might have been more widespread in England not
so long ago.  Against this, I am not aware that the pronunciation with
the plosive is recorded at all in North America, except in
metropolitan New York, where it is prominent, but usually attributed
to the influence of immigrant speech habits.
 
The reference to John Wells is this:
 
J. C. Wells (1982), Accents of English, 3 vols., vol. 2, pp. 365-366,
Cambridge University Press.
 
I hope this is helpful.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
England
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk