An American T-dropping conspiracy?! 

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From history, you know how we Americans are about dropping 'T'.

These videos always have me babbling to myself, hopelessly trying to figure out which way I “usually” say things. I think in casual speech I use the flap, but if I were to narrate something or speak deliberately, I’d have more glottal stops

I'm from the piney woods of East Texas, where we're likely to just get rid of Ts all together if they're not flapped, though they'll get a glottal stop occasionally. The best example I've got is from a story my dad's best friend was telling at the deer lease a few years ago. In the story, he had to "climb da wahr tahr fer sum'n.'" For those people who aren't from East Texas, that's, "climb the water tower for something," but the first T was tapped, second dropped entirely, third annunciated, and fourth stopped.

I was raised in Michigan, am older, and definitely heard people saying "bu'in" for button and "mi'in" for mitten even back then. I thought it was a Midwestern thing, but now I have a friend, same age as me, who was raised in Connecticut and also does this.

hilarious to hear Dr. Geoff pronouncing words in an American accent.

I really have to say that I think your videos are the best thing on youtube. Not only are they well-edited, -presented etc., but above all they feel cutting-edge - the equivalent of reading a new article, not a reference handbook. Thank you.

Some years ago, I was trying to add a greeting to my voicemail system. My message included the phrase, “I can’t come to the phone right now” but when I listened to what I had recorded, I heard, “I can come to the phone right now.” I erased it and tried redoing it about 4-5 times, each time with the same result, until I got frustrated and ended with recording myself saying, instead, “I can NOT come to the phone” as that was the only way the message would make sense when played back. The voicemail system simply couldn’t properly record my implied “t” in “can’t.” (I’ve always referred to it as an implied T in my own speech. Like saying maow-n for mountain, or as was in the video, cur-n for curtain.)

I’m so glad you made this video. I had noticed the recent tendency among young Americans to say, e.g., “impor’ent“ and was surprised to learn that my friends didn’t even know what I was talking about. Now I can send them this video, with its many examples.

I live in the Midwest. I first noticed people online using this in “mountain” and “important,” and it really bothered me. I still don’t hear it much in person, except in younger children. I found this video really informative - I realized I don’t bat an eye when older people say “moun-nn,” while I say “moun-tin,” but hearing “moun-in” was irritating. The more things change the more they stay the same 😂

"Ride on time" was a 1990 dance music hit. It has that title because the Italian house musicians misheard "Right on time" in the hook that they sampled.

Hello Dr Lindsey, Recently I was watching a video with a Welshman speaking welsh English. He had an unusual way of connections within words that I have never seen before. You have spoken at length about dropping the T and replacing it with a glottal stop in some English accents (I.e. words like "Better" become (Beh'ah") but this fellow put an R in instead. In fact, just about every instance where there was a T in the middle or the end of the word, he replaced it with an R. So instead of saying "Forget about it" he said "Forge'r abour'it". I thought it was a conscious affectation at first but I listened to him speak for about 3 hours and he was consistent. It's like he had the London dropping-of-T-'s-and-putting-in-a-glottal-stop but took it a step further and hyper-intrusive-R'd all of those instances. Is this even a linguistic "Thing"? Thanks for all of the knowledge you've shared!

I’m American and I must admit I never noticed these differences were age associated. I guess I just assumed these were regional differences - they all sound Northern to me. I’ll be paying more attention in the future!

My girlfriend has general American pronunciation and was surprised to learn that "kiddy pools" had nothing to do with small cats after hearing me say it with my British pronunciation and realising it wasn't with a T.

This video made me realize that I am no longer a "young speaker" of American English and I resent it! I am youthful and vibrant!

About 17 or 18 years ago, I worked in Texas with a man from Pittsburgh who did this with “button”, pronouncing it something like “bu n”. It wasn’t sure what he had said until he repeated it a bit later.

Thank you very much for not judging the younger generation. I study acting and everytime someone tells me young people's speech is bad because they are lazy and watch too much tv, a little bit of my inner linguist dies. You gave me an argument for the next time my patience inevitably runs out and I start explaining that no, that is not how any of this works 😁 You genuinly made my day ❤

I'm a native German speaker, who's spent some time in Australia and went on to study English linguistics. In my seminar on accents during my studies, I analyzed my own accent as largely American with sprinkles of Australian. So, I was quite taken aback when I noticed that I've recently begun replacing the t in "that" by a glottal stop. It seems, I've also picked up on this trend. Thank you for this fascinating video!

I don’t study language or anything like that, but I find these videos endlessly fascinating. I also typically feel extremely self conscious afterward, so thanks for that 😅

The word Internet is an example of t-dropping. Most North Americans don't pronounce the first t.

I’m 63, American, and grew up in Maryland, now live in Colorado. I say ‘button’ with what I guess is a tongue ‘tap’ for the ‘t’ but it’s not a tap and release. My tongue stays up and then I go straight to the ‘n’. My sons seem to do the same. My daughter, however, does a full glottal version of the t. She grew up here in Colorado. It’s so noticeable to me, and I do tend to notice that more in people her age (early 30s) and younger. She seems unaware of the difference. I might have her watch this episode. I love these--fascinating. Not only the main content, but the way you slide into your adverts imperceptibly. This is both humorous and maddening.

I miss being at university. I love listening to an intelligent analysis and well thought out presentation of ideas that are new to me.

Showing so many examples of the hard attack in action could lead to a heart attack ❤

These hard attacks are prone to give me a heart attack. The one dropped t sound that I can’t stand, for some reason, is in the word button, because it seems doubled up.

Dr. Geoff, as a former linguistics grad student I am absolutely fascinated by your incredibly insightful videos! I am originally from the Midwest, am a practicing lawyer in Texas, and have also lived and practiced law in New Orleans. You did a video a while back on ask vs aks and the social constructs that go with it. In New Orleans there is a well-respected member of the judiciary who uses a very strong “aks” that would get a strong side-eye by the educated elite in Dallas but is perfectly acceptable in New Orleans. I’m wondering if you have ever studied the various accents in New Orleans. I find them fascinating and I would love to hear some of your analysis on any aspect of them. For example, a large sector of the population uses an accent that is very similar to a Boston accent.

While watching this video, i got an ad for chocolate, and the (seemingly American) speaker said "treat yourself" with a glottalized t! I love your videos, every time i watch i learn something new about the way i speak. Thank you for making this content! (Also, as a young American girl, i personally use glottal t all the time, i haven't noticed much of a gender bias around it in my personal life)

American here. When my Ukrainian aunt was first learning English, I was talking to her about something and said the number 20. She looked confused and asked me to repeat it. Speaking more slowly, I pronounced it as "twun-ty". But she shook her head and said that wasn't how I had said it originally. It turns out that I actually do completely drop the t in 20 in casual speech, pronouncing it like "twunny."

In Spielberg's Lincoln, actor Jared Harris (as General Ulysses S Grant) does a near-perfect rural Northern Illinois accent until his final line where he pronounces the words January 18th and gives away some of his native accent by pronouncing them "Janury eighdeenth" instead of the full Illinois way of ""Jan-u-ary eighTeenth".

I'm a 33 year old American from Southern California and the phenomenon heard at 11:40 drives me CRAZY. I'm hearing it more and more. It is for some reason very common in the state of Utah I've noticed.

Early 20’s American guy. I definitely have a glottal stop in words like button, cotton, gotten, etc. This seems to work across word-boundaries for me, provided the following syllable is [weak vowel + n], as in “cat in the hat” or “caught in the rain” or “bat an eyelash”. I don’t think I do glottal stops across word boundaries when the following syllable isn’t [weak vowel + n], e.g., “one cat alone”, “caught off guard” or “bet on it”, where instead the Ts are tapped.

A good friend from Liverpool (I'm American) shared an anecdote about glottling: Mum: "Pronounce your tees!!" daughter: "wha[]evah"

I cracked up when you mentioned words with centered “N” being more complicated and not being addressed in this video. I live in NA where I am absolutely certain my neighbors do not know that the word “mountain” has a T.

I find myself rewatching your videos time and time again-and it is always a delight to do so. Please, never stop doing these.

One thing I absolutely love about this channel is that it often helps me to better speak and understand languages other than English. Your explanation about hard attacks in German was such an ear-openner! On the course of following this channel, I've become a better speaker of English, French, and German. Three languages for the price of a single youtube subscription. Thank you so much.

I think I have a new euphemism, to use during the holidays.... to 'Not Give a Flying Reindeer'. 🤣 As an older Maritimer (East Coast of Canada) I find that I actually pronounce my T's, in most of these words. But also being Canadian, the American and British pronunciations sound normal for American and British accents. We tend to be exposed to both, a lot. and just go with the flow. As always... a fascinating video Dr Lindsey.😊

I'll say it again: you have the best linguistics-related content hands down. As hugely entertaining as it is educational. Thx Geoff

Fascinating. Yes, as an American, I've definitely noticed these trends in younger speakers. And I do seem to notice them more in female speakers (things like bu-in for button, for example). I've also noticed the loss of the T at the ends of sentences, where there is no following sound. "Did you understand that part? becomes "Did you understand that par?"-so there seems to be an attack on the T all the way round. 🙂 On another subject, I also hear some (again mostly female) young speakers placing a glide in words. "I do, too" becomes "I dyoo tyoo."

I just want to say that your videos always surprise me a lot. I couldn't even imagine that these bits specifically hide so much behind them. Thank you for fueling the linguistic curiosity with every episode!

I'm so glad you made this video. As an older American, I have been noticing the glottal t in younger people and my peers think I'm nuts when I mention it. Especially noticed in words like certain and important.

you've made me realize that the glottal t before an inserted vowel from americans has been a pet peeve of mine for years even though i never identified it as such, i just knew it felt "off" to me

I'm an American in my 50s and only discovered recently as a result of a language survey here that I drop my Ts occasionally. I don't do it much, only in very specific situations, but I hadn't realized I was doing it at all and it came as a bit of a shock. I'm quite gratified to learn more about some of the reasons for it in this video!

T-flapping is also common in some Australian accents. It's particularly noticeable in numbers like "thirty" and "forty," which combine British R-dropping and North American T-dropping in a single word!

Hi Geoff, great video! I would purport that maybe your sample data could be skewed by the "RU-vid accent" that a lot of content creators use, which can be quite different than the way that people talk normally in the US. With that said, I do notice the younger generation adopting some of this "RU-vid dialect" and delivering their words as if they were presenting information on RU-vid. This is to say nothing of your evidence and conclusions in the video! I just wanted to mention something I am aware of as a GenZ/Millenial cusper from the US Northeast

I’m from Essex, UK and my SO is from New England. I’m an accent chameleon, shifting as the situation requires for understanding. She’s a singing teacher studying Estil. Love your videos! Of course we all know what Americans did with their Ts. Chucked it in Boston harbour 😂 Merry Christmas!🎄

I live in Connecticut (where we're known to drop the "t" (glottal stop) off the end of "connecticut"... as well as dropping the second "c", and flapping the following "t"), but we do say "cotton" here with a glottal "t", like you mentioned at 23:00. There's also a town called "Clinton" which we pronounce with a glottal "t" and without the "n" before it. But there's a town called "Canton", where we do pronounce it with the "n" and a regular "t".

I'm always so amazed by your videos... I'm Brazilian and I think that I learned my English 95% by myself. First I learned how to read and write, then listen, and the last thing was my pronunciation. The problem is that I love British series, movies (Harry Potter fan), audio books by BBC etc., but most of the material that I consume is in American English. So you can imagine that my pronunciation is all over the place. Watching your videos has been great to understand where I can improve. I love watching them and going back and forth trying to learn how to identify the "vocal phenomena" that you describe. You're truly amazing!

Its interesting that all these ways of pronouncing T still register as being T, with the words still being completely understandable. It really speaks to how amazing the brain is.

i think that youtube has had an incredible impact on both american and british english in the time its existed, and has caused the convergence of the two dialects which began in 1945 to quicken like never before

as a 30s californian who glottalizes before vowels and even before some syllabic Ls, ive always wondered how late down the line intervocalic t glottaling was in britain, or if it ever happened in nyc. i imagine the stigmatization alone would either prevent it or leave the environnement as the last to be affected here in north america

I'm a vocal music teacher, and I love your videos! They help SO MUCH with helping students sing sounds they CAN do but often don't think they can! Many Rs should be flipped in sung English but are not flipped in standard American English, but this has been so helpful!

I'm curious if a lot of the American hard attack pronunciations are occurring when the younger generation is speaking in "presentation mode." Given that I'm sure they've consumed online content in a larger portion of their lives than the older generations, they probably picked up that presentational speech pattern in their produced content. I sort of hypothesis that these same people use more t flapping and "relaxed" speech patterns when not in "presentation/formal mode." Also, I bet if you go into an American RU-vidr's years old content, they probably have more relaxed speech. Their current speech patterns are probably far more formal.

Around age 40 (the year 2000-ish), as a male photographer of female models and actresses, I started noticing that the younger women I worked with (who were roughly half my age) handled their "T"s very differently than I did. You described very well what the phenomenon sounded like, glottal T followed by an added vowel I myself wouldn't have pronounced. My favorite example being in the word "didn't", which to my ear sounded like they were saying "di'-int". Living in Ohio at the time, I associated it with something they'd picked up listening to women from the American south and west coast on various TV shows and internet videos. But how the spread into normal midwestern American for women of that age actually transpired, I have no clue. Thanks for this video, it really helped me understand a lot better what I'm actually hearing versus what I thought I was hearing.

A friend of mine who lives in Michigan has noticed that the glottalisation of t in younger speakers in “mountain”, “decanted” and “painter” results in a stressed nasalised vowel followed by ʔ and a schwa or barred i before the final consonant

I am so glad to see you address this. I first started hearing it back in the late 80s, in central NY state, and thought it was regional and socioeconomic. Since then, of course, it has come to be everywhere. The surprising thing is that many people seem not to be able to hear it. When I point out how we used to say a word, compared to how it's now said, look blank and say they never noticed.

Just experimented with a friend, I found that not only did they freely use regular t, flapping, and glottal stop + hard vowel attack, in some cases they even dropped the t completely and relied on the listener being able to hear differences between two vowels to recognize the t For example, in "legitimately", I noticed they dropped the first t (the second one was glottal) and pronounced the two i's as the "ih" in "kit" becoming a schwa (I'm not very good with IPA). I think some people could chalk up this sort of t-pronunciation as being lazy, but I do it too, so something else to think about...

As a Canadian from Ontario, when I lived in California the glottal in "bitten" and "mitten" stood out to me a lot. Also the name "Martin", which always made me think of the theme song to the Martin TV show in the 90s (starring Martin Lawrence), where it was a very prominent element of the music. Your video has been interesting in helping me identify the more consistent places where it might occur.

We dropped the T in Boston and never looked back

As an example in my American speech, I pronounce the words "mitten", "smitten", "written", etc. with a glottal stop in place of T. Same thing before suffixes in "flightless", "fitness", "witness", "shirtless", "fitful". Also "heightened, brightened, fateful"

I first became aware of this trend 20 years ago, when the American rock band The White Stripes released the song, "The Hardest Button to Button." It was a glottal orgy! I found the sound quite grating, but of course this kind of pronunciation has proliferated in the U.S. since then.

Thank you so much for your research and videos! They are so interesting and fun to watch! I can't believe this one was 25' long, it felt like less than 10'. 💜

I've been hoping someone somewhere would say something about all the young people now saying sweet-EHN, cert-EHN, fount-EHN, or my name Shelt-UHN. It was exciting to hear Dr. Lindsey mention this in his video. A glottal T with an inserted vowel, I believe he called it. For me, at 64, and living in the Midwest my whole life I don't ever recall this being a thing until around maybe ten years ago. Now it seems it's everywhere. All the youngsters in waitress and cashier jobs are saying these things constantly. In restaurants you have to be prepared for "Do you want un-sweet-EHNED tea or sweet-EHNED tea?" My wife and I always silently look at each other when someone says this to us because it sounds so jarring. I heard an episode of The Five once in the past year where Greg Gutfeld said he wouldn't address the guest's question until he pronounced it correctly. This is what he was referring to. The guest used this glottal T and inserted a vowel in some word. It was fun to know Gutfeld was as bothered by it as I am.

I’m convinced Dr. Geoff Lindsey is a genius. These videos are truly incredible. Thank you for opening my eyes to the peculiarities and nuance of language!

We dropped tea a long time ago.

I love these videos. I only understand a fraction of what you talk about, but i appreciate your brilliance an' energy!

I’m so glad to hear this strange new insertion described because I certainly have noticed it!

I was a bit sad that the "center"/"international" example didnt get more time, as someone with the winter-winner merger. But there is another complicated example that might deserve more exploration, which is T-flapping after L (e.g. "alter", "falter") where us Americans tend to disagree. Notably, if you watch NFL games, you will notice a lot of variation in how the commentators and referees pronounce "Baltimore" and "penalty".

There's a trend I've noticed in younger Americans where they do the stereotypical British working class glottal T to such a degree that it actually sounds like two separate words. For example, the word "certain". Instead of just replacing the T with a glottal stop, it's spoken as if it were two words, with the first word being pronounced fully rather than as a shortened weak form, and a hard attack on the second word. So instead of "certain", it sounds like "sir N". They almost pause and go completely silent between the two syllables. The first time I heard it was in a Collegehumor sketch called "Gluten free duck", which portrays a duck complaining about the bread it's being fed, saying things like "Does that bread have glue N? Because I can't eat glue N." It was exaggerated for the sketch, but after that I started hearing it everywhere.

What a fun video! I have no idea why it came up in my stream, but I hovered and got hooked immediately. Your video answered a question that I'd thought about often when listening to young youtubers: Where did that first 't' go in important?

Finally! It's such a facepalm moment when auto captions on US speech show "medal" when they meant "metal", and "hurdling" when they meant "hurtling", etc. At least the Bri'ish glottal T is distinct from other letters, unlike the flap that sounds just like a D.

Young American speech tends more and more to be influenced by African American speech, both in lexicon and accent. I've always assumed the increase in hard attack is related to that. I also notice that especially with articles, where 'a' and 'the' sometimes only appear in their schwa form, without variation before vowels. This is accomplished by treating hard attack almost like a consonant

I don't know why the phrase "American flapping" has me giggling so much

Dude always brings to my attention something about my language that I’ve never even noticed or thought about. Awesome

The attack sound is what we call "influencer speak." I hope people don't pick this up as "normal" speech.

Dr Geoff, I started watching your videos out of sheer curiousity, kept watching because of how well you break everything down and make it understandable to people with no background in linguistics - but what I have learned from your videos helps me in my work! I'm a musician and I love using speech synthesis, which requires me to transcribe vocals into phonemes. I realised quite quickly that the "correct" phonemes makes synthesised speech/singing sound very strange and awkward, and your videos have helped me move past the trial and error method of getting natural sounding vocals!

One of the most famous scenes from Xenoblade 3 gave us "wotah" poking fun at one of the characters' Welsh accent, especially since it's juxtaposed with another character's tapping American accent. Less well famous is a scene with the same word from two other characters, including a glotalizing Cockney accent. So there are at least 3 different pronunciations of "water" within one game. I'll also mention that all 4 of these characters are main party members and no one in-game points out the different accents. "Wotah" "Wawder" and "Wo'ah"

Fascinating video. I first noticed this when I moved to NYC for my undergrad linguistics degree. I did student teaching at an elementary school in Chinatown. I heard the glottal T in "mountain" and "button" from the teachers, not just students. This was around 2014, where I was saying [ˈmaʊnʔn̩] and heard others more than 5 years my senior say [ˈmãʊ̃ʔɪn̩]. I say [ˈbʌt̚n̩] (no audible release [t]) but heard folks from New Jersey say [ˈbʌʔɪn̩]. The difference between these is my glottal stops for t might've been unreleased [t] most of the time (i.e., my tongue is alveolar ridge-bound), but for these New Jerseyites, I definitely noticed their glottal stops were following almost no tongue movement from the vowel position. This was incredibly noticeable with "button" since my STRUT vowel was "closed off" (the formants pinched a bit in praat) but for those who said "buh-in" the formants were much more even for the duration. But even for "mountain", they would nasalize the vowels and drop the "nt" so "mou-in".

Thank you for this video. I noticed this gradual change visiting the United States and Canada frequently particularly in speakers under 25. Always wanted to know more about it!

I find myself doing hard attack on vowels at the start of words when I am intentionally trying to enunciate or speak clearly, like in a presentation or when talking to a foreign English speaker

I live near Canton, Ohio (named after Canton, China) and we can always spot a local versus an outsider by how they pronounce the city name. We use the glottal T and syllabic N to make it "Can'n" like "Moun'n" for "Mountain" versus an outsider's more complete "Can-ton."

I need to say something about the wonderfully quietly amusing humor in these videos. Absolutely charming!

I have just discovered your channel and I love it. My own insights as a Gen-X flat/standard midwest american english speaker (originally from Ohio, a state with a large German and English historical ancestry, and where major cities had german language public schools well into the early 20th century), my spontaneous reaction is that the hard attack vs the flap pronunciation between words has a lot to do with emphasis and urgency tone. When generic middle-Americans try to sound angry or intense, we also try to sound stereotypically German, and this is tied to popular culture in late 20th century media depictions of angry/intense German accents in film and television. So I think the flap sounds more "calm" (NOT "carm" ;) and the glottal stop sounds more "urgent". You (Dr Lindsey) pointed out when it appeared idiosyncratically in one of the videos of a You Tuber talking about the columbian exchange of eurasian crowd diseases in Hispanola, and I think you might be able to hear the contextual difference of the two pronunciations of the same phrase. In the first case he was emphatically / intensely introducing the fact, and in the second case he had relaxed his tone and was mentioning it in passing, as a mere matter of fact rather than a matter of intruigue. So as the intensity of speech declined, the flap replaced the stop.

Hello Dr. Lindsay - I'm a Lithuanian that's lived in the UK for 13 years and when I originally came to the UK to Sheffield I sounded Australian for no reason whatsoever (to the point where me and my friends convinced an Aussie exchange student that I was from Sydney and he demanded to see my passport when we finally broke the news to him a year later). Today my accent wanders and meanders in weird ways, making Europeans believe I'm British, and Brits to be very confused. I think a key feature of my accent is genuine t-dropping (which is not at all a feature of Lithuanian, for example), rather than flapping or glottaling. Would you like to have a chat and see if you could make it into an interesting linguistics video?

As a Geordie speaker, I have noticed people saying that we do not pronounce 't' in the middle of a word. Admittedly it is soft and sometimes pronounced as a 'd". I once heard a dialect coach teaching actors to speak in a Geordie accent by dropping ALL midword 't' s. The first time I heard someone try this in TV drama, I thought they must be portraying someone with a severe speech impediment.😂

Absolutely wonderful video! I love linguistics, and you explained things wonderfully

Great video! The glottal T in front of the syllabic n is a long-time feature of the western Massachusetts accent (well, I first encountered it personally 45 years ago). I work in the town of Dalton, which regional natives universally pronounce "Dal - n", the hyphen standing for the glottal stop. I've also heard "di - nt" for "didn't" and a number of similar examples, suggesting a broader glottal dental. I'll see if I can get some examples.

T-flapping is actually possible between two vowels AND two liquids. For example, the flap in 'chortle' is preceded by the retroflex liquid and followed by the lateral liquid.

Hello Dr. Lindsay, excellent video! I believe an aspect of this trend worth considering is the realities of a society that communicates more and more via microphone! A glottal stop has a much lower chance of creating a nasty plosive in your recording than a softened /t/ sound. To my American ears, a lot of the glottal stops seem to be replacing /t/ sounds that are more often hardened than say, in “city.” The examples you gave also only occur in places where the glottal stop doesn’t introduce any additional speaking time, preventing their adoption from interfering with the traditional rhythm of Standard American speech (stopping during “ci-iy” would introduce a surprising pause). One has to wonder if the trend has an origin in people cutting nasty plosives out of their recordings online (manually or by a de-essing program), eventually becoming adopted to avoid the need in the first place, and ultimately finding place in day-to-day speech! Additionally, I believe this could also provide a basis for the reintroduction of vowels after preexisting glottal stops before /n/. When recording my voice, I find a mostly nasal sound like /n/ is captured disproportionately quietly. This effect is amplified as microphone quality decreases, and further still when introducing VoIP compression and basic noise gating found in most software like Teams, Zoom, Discord, etc. Perhaps this is overselling the impact of digital communication, but I’m curious if this aspect has been considered in the wider literature. Cheers!

This is fascinating. I’m Canadian and I totally use hard attack vowels and dropped Ts. I’ve never noticed it before at all.

Since the emergence of multimedia on the internet, and its ubiquity across international boundaries previously impervious to outside influence - variations in language and accents are now possible to be heard by anyone with a broad enough subscription list. For example, on RU-vid I subscribe and regularly listen to New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, Canadian, Australian, Central American, South American, South African, Indian, Ukrainian, Russian, German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese channels all of which speak English in different forms. I think an interesting study would be to look at the top influential videos over the past 20 years, and track their exposure across international boundaries to discover if they have a significant impact on language, or not. I'm guessing young developing and impressionable minds will congregate on certain speech patterns they hear more frequently, and that the source of those patterns must have enough mass to overcome the resistance to previous patterns. Building that mass organically previously was a slow process (e.g. my speech patterns don't vary much from my parents - many idioms are identical between me and both my parents and my grandparents [I'm 59, my parents are in their 80s - and my grandparents would be 100+ if they were alive]). Today I detect more significant changes - grand departures - in the speech patterns of my children who are in their 20s and 30s, than I ever did between my forebears. When I was young I used to think my language differed, but later I found that the words I was using were rehashing old words. For example, 'man' ('bloke' in UK) - I first started using that word, "hey, man!" when I was 12 or 13. I'd never heard my parents use that before, and thought it highly original. For me, the source of the term was from my peers - and it became the most common vernacular greeting. Later on I saw movies from different eras, and found that it was used all the way back into the beginning of movies, and later still in even older books. So, it really wasn't new at all - it was just regurgitated into the language with enough mass to keep it going. The opposite of that happened with my children, who have a language that is a significant departure from English spoken by Americans in the last century, not only their dictionary/jargon, but also their accents and speech patterns. I question whether they will be able to grasp the past, since the meanings of common words are now changing at a rapid rate, without some Rosetta Stone to allow them to translate between the two. Often I find myself completely at a loss when trying to communicate with young people, not only me - but THEM. Some of them don't understand what I'm saying, whereas I always understood what my parents generation, and my grandparents generation were saying without the need of a translator - and I don't recall a single conversation with friends in my youth complaining about not understanding the words our elders were using. I guess my question is - what the heck is going on? Am I just getting old, or are we really in an era of significant and accelerating change in our language?

This is so fascinating!! I used to speak a bit differently - I’m not sure why I changed certain pronunciations. I’m 40 and live in New England (NY-CT metro area). I used to use glottal stops/flaps for words like “mountain” and “counter” and have changed to pronounce those with sharp “t’s”. Most people in my region still use the stop or tap in those words. It might be because I used to work with toddlers and read them a LOT of books out loud - I wanted to speak very clearly for them and it seems to have changed my speech a lot. This is so so interesting! The hard attack seems to be dependent on what we’re talking about - we seem to use it a lot when we’re speaking in a lecture-type voice - and I’d actually wager that RU-vid has influenced it a lot because everyone tends to use the same exact delivery. Too be honest, most amateur people on RU-vid seem to speak in their videos like they’re eight year olds giving oral reports at school and it’s AWFUL lol it strikes me that hard attack stems from that place in people’s brains here in the states - people wanting to sound “professional” or “smart” and they revert to how they spoke in school. I’d also say that hard attack is IMMENSELY influenced by the Kardashians - their vocal fry and slower and more deliberate way of speaking (especially Kourtney) has both features.

Absolutely the best segue into a Ground News spot that i’ve heard - and, hoo boy, i’ve heard a lot of ‘em.

Oh no sir! Hi, middle-aged general american here, in response to 23:00, cotton, button, and mountain, have always contained glottal stops, for me and most everone else I know. (Well, possibly a glottal stop along with an unreleased T closure, but certainly a glottal stop.) Your other three examples; "biting", "proud of", and "city" - yes, those are flaps. -- Your stuff is excellent! Thank you so much for doing this!

Utterly fascinating. Thank you.

Since I was about 5, I've wondered why people (in south-west England) pronounce my name, Jordan, with some sort of back-of-the-throat /d/ that isn't quite a /d/ sound. Now I realise it's a result of the glottal stop + syllabic N together (I think). Thanks!

Thanks for the video, I have been bothered by how many times I hear the first T dropped in the word “important “ now I know that it is a glottal T. It drives me nuts (lol) I’ll be checking out your channel more! Greetings from Seattle 😊

Your videos are fascinating. Thank you.

You really made me think about the class judgments I make when I hear both the reinsertion of a kind of epinthetic vowel in cases of syllabic /n/ and also glottal stop for /t/ in American English. Both I relate to less educated speech or English in certain immigrant communities.

My take on this is that it's a combination of two things: one, younger people are, I feel, more likely to put emphasis on speaking clearly, especially with the rise of social media. It's much easier for others to understand you when you're posting videos of yourself speaking if you are using hard attack to separate the words out more. Also, with the constant possibility of having your voice caught on video, I think you just become much more aware of how you speak. Two, it could be that because of the internet, we're exposed so frequently to such a broad range of accents, including UK ones, that our speech begins to unconsciously mirror the speech of those we constantly hear day-to-day. I can say that for me personally, I probably watch at least one video with a British person speaking at least once a day- not because I'm particularly an Anglophile, but because there just happens to be a lot of British people out there making videos.

I worked at a theatre in Kansas where--dividing the backstage and the house--was a little black curtain. Throughout the rehearsal process, anytime anyone was coming in and out, they'd have to say, "curtain" to avoid running into someone coming the opposite way. I picked up on the variable 'glottal t' and 'syllabic n' because we had a wide age range of people from all over the US. I wish I knew about this then so I could've seen any correlation between region, age, and pronunciation of "curtain"!

@14:00 Would classifying this particular phoneme of T as a fricative stop be correct? I am so fascinated by this! Taking in account of the overtone series found within pitch, the sudden postural change of the tongue produces a subtle shift in the word's inflection which indicates an end to the word. It is also done using the front of the oropharynx so it is closest to the listener... i.e. this phoneme juxtaposes subtlety of pitch shift but prominence in the dynamics of volume. There is also a visual indicator for seeing people that clarifies even further that it IS in fact a T being pronounced and not some flub of diction. So much to consider!