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David Beckham’s “Poshification”
Researchers from University of Manchester recently announced that David Beckham has “poshed up” his accent since moving the the United States (pun probably intended). Given that Beckham is one of the...
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Regional African-American Accents
Painting: Jacob Lawrence (National Archives) Annie Minoff has written a fascinating, in-depth piece on African American English over at WBEZ in Chicago. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but the main...
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On “Local” Place Pronunciations: “Manhattan”
Geographicus While on a train to New York, I overheard the following from a young man speaking Nuyorican English (i.e. the Latino-American New York dialect): “I’m on a train in Jersey to visit my...
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“Button” vs. “Butter”
Apropos of a recent conversation in the comments, it’s worth noting that Americans generally pronounce /t/ in words like “button” and “Manhattan” in a different manner than one might expect. To take...
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Goombye
A reader recently wrote me a question concerning the word “goombye,” which appears in this up-tempo Ivie Anderson song (penned by Duke Ellington) from 1939: At first glance, I figured “goombye” might...
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What Rhymes Tell Us About Changing English
Shakespeare’s 1st Sonnet One of the incidental pleasures of reading Shakespeare’s sonnets is finding rhymes that give us clues about Elizabethan English. One of these occurs in the first four lines of...
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