- Hi, I'm Erik Singer.
I'm back and today I wanna talk about
some interesting similarities between different,
unrelated accents in the English-speaking world.
- South. - South.
- Fish and chips.
- We can define a vowel sound
according to pretty basic things.
One is what the lips are doing,
whether they're rounding forwards or not,
and the other is where the tongue is in the mouth.
And to pinpoint that, we use a map.
We call it the vowel space.
Looks like this.
[chalk scratching]
It's a quadrilateral.
The front of the mouth,
it's basically a person facing to the left like this,
we're in a cross-section.
The front of the mouth is over here.
Back of the mouth is over here.
So let's talk about a feature
I've talked a lot about before.
Goose-fronting.
[geese honking]
What is that exactly?
I've said it means the goose vowel
is pronounced further forward in the mouth,
but what does that mean?
So, if the tongue is up like this,
somewhere up in this area
and the lips are rounded forwards,
we have an ooh sound.
You can probably feel that,
make an ooh sound like a 19th century Shakespearean actor
or a 1950s Noel Coward character saying, you too.
And breathe in some cold air over that tongue,
you might be able to feel that it's arched up high
in the back, right up here.
Now, if that arch of the tongue moves forwards,
and you get something that's arched up high,
but closer to the front of the mouth,
something like ooh,
then you've got goose-fronting.
And we can find this goose-fronting
in a lot of different places in the world.
You hear goose-fronting in Australia.
- Goose.
- In London.
- Goose.
- In Ireland.
- Goose.
- You hear it in the southern US a lot.
- Goose.
- You can hear it in California accents.
- Goose.
- And here, for your viewing and listening pleasure,
a goose-fronting medley.
- Goose. - Goose.
- Goose.
[pensive music]
- Now, let's talk about something called mouth raising.
This is a feature that we might find in Australian accents.
- Mouth.
- London accents.
- Mouth.
- New York accents.
- Mouth.
- A lot of southern accents.
- Mouth.
- Mouth, in my own accent, starts down here,
something like ah, and moves up here,
and rounds the lips a little bit,
something like ooh.
Ahh-oh.
And you might be able to feel that in your own mouth
if you imitate my mouth vowel.
Mouth raising, then,
would raise the starting point.
So instead of being down around here,
it's gonna be a little bit higher.
And gonna go something a-ow.
I'm not sure exactly which accent that was.
They're all roughly similar.
Not exactly the same sound,
but they're all gonna start that mouth vowel
from a little bit higher up.
Here's a London version.
- South.
- Here's a New York version.
- South.
- Here's an Australian version.
- South.
- Here's a US southern version.
- South.
- And here they are all up against each other.
- South. - South.
[pensive music]
- So, in a kit set of words,
words like ship and women and bid and mist,
we have a phenomenon in New Zealand,
where the vowel sound, instead of being towards the front
and pretty high, something like an ih,
it's gonna move back towards the center,
back towards the schwa, this uh sound.
And that's why we had fish and chips
as a way you might be able to tell
an Australian from a New Zealander.
- Fish and chips.
- In South Africa, we have something very similar.
We have kit centering as well.
The trick is, it only happens on some of those kit words.
- Milk, myth.
- It's a little complicated,
but if you follow that kit vowel with a guh or a kuh,
a hard G or a K sound,
that's actually gonna keep it from centering,
it's gonna keep it up,
so you'll get big or kick.
- Big, kick.
- In other words, when you don't have
one of those sounds following,
it will also be centered like New Zealand,
so but, cut.
- But, but.
- Fish and chips, and chips.
- So, that's a weird, totally coincidental similarity
between those two accents.
[tense music]
Let's talk about a really similar start vowel
in Boston accents and in Irish accents.
- Start, far.
- And trust in their heart, their heart.
- Instead of a start vowel like mine
that might be very much towards the back of the mouth,
arr, I just followed mine, arr,
but it starts back here, ahh,
a sort of low cupped area,
we're gonna have something that's much more fronted.
We could call it start fronting.
So we'll have a Boston accent
that doesn't have that arr sound,
it's kind of just a vowel at the front, start.
Here's a Boston speaker.
- Start, far.
- In a very pronounced Irish accent,
we're gonna get a really clear version
of that exact same vowel sound.
We are gonna hear it with an arr after it,
but the vowel sound is still this front ah, start.
Here's one of those.
- And trust in their heart, their heart.
- Start, far.
- So hopefully now you know what the hell I'm talking about
when I use terms like higher, lower,
fronted, backed, centered.
It's a map.
[tense music]