Been a while since I've done a quick little article like this! This one is inspired by an interesting trends I'd noticed in speech. I've had it pointed out to me that 1970s disco singer Andy Gibb pronounces the word "string" as "shtring". Gibb was born in England and lived in both Australia and England as a child.
"Open up that heaven in your heart and let me be the things you are to me, and not some puppet on a shtring." - I Just Want to be Your Everything, Flowing Rivers (1977)
I noticed it again when Todd Motto, a front-end web developer from England, used this pronunciation frequently in his Angular material. He also uses it on the word "string":
"...This creates the base base element. Then we have template inside a shtring - we all love shtrings..." - Todd Motto
It's not s before any particular consonant cluster - it's a consonant cluster with /tr/. I asked the #lingtwitter community on Twitter if anyone had any familiarity with this pronunciation. Thankfully, they pulled through! This phenomenon is called s-retraction. It is called that because before the /tr/ cluster, the tongue is pulling back - retracting, which results in a "sh" sound instead. A similar thing happens in Standard German.
#lingtwitter, any anecdotes or research on the phenomenon where /str/ becomes [ʃtr] (ie 'string' is 'shtring')? It seems more common in BrE and AusE than AmE but I lost the one paper I found about it 😢 #linguistics #linguisticstwitter
— Ace Linguist (@acelinguist) February 12, 2019
Although I had thought that s-retraction happened mostly in England, it was actually more widespread than I had expected. Several American responders noted it in their own speech. S-retraction does not seem to be a very notable feature for most people; unlike other stigmatized or notable linguistic features like ai-monophthongization, I have never encountered any jokes or prescriptivism regarding "shtring." Perhaps it may become more common in the future, and one day English will have a similar pattern of s-retraction as German does. I myself do not have any s-retraction in my own speech.
Update September 13, 2019: I have found an example of s-retraction but with no 'tr' - it happens with "stop" and "spit". In "The What" by the Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man, listen to the following lines by Method Man:
"shtop, look and listen, I shpit on your grave" - The What, Ready To Die (1994)
To further complicate matters, Method Man was born and raised in New York City, where our previous examples were from Australia and England. Perhaps this is an example of how innovation can happen spontaneously, but fail to be picked up more consistently - it's not common for New York City English to have s-retraction. A quick google search shows that some people regard Method Man as having a "lisp" - could it be in reference to s-retraction? In any case, it's yet another diverse data point for a group that so far, does not seem to have much in common.
If you are interested in further reading regarding s-retraction, here are some papers regarding s-retraction in English. Note that these papers are written in academic English and assume a prior familiarity with the research, so they may be challenging to read if you have never read any linguistics papers before. Thanks to @drswissmiss, @ergodos1, @ajroyerR, and @funalogist for their assistance in finding these articles!
- Stevens, M., Harrington, J., & Schiel, F. (2019). Associating the origin and spread of sound change using agent-based modelling applied to /s/-retraction in English. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 8. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.620 [Full text available]
- Wilbanks, E. (2016) Social and Structural Constraints on a Phonetically-Motivated Change in Progress: (str) Retraction in Raleigh, NC. [Full text available]
- Hinrichs, L., Bergs, A., Bohmann, A., Brozovsky, E., Hodge, B., Meemann, K., & Schultz, P. (2015) Sibilants and ethnic diversity: A sociophonetic study of palatalized /s/ in STR clusters among Hispanic, White, and African-American speakers of Texas English. [Abstract only, page 168]
- Magloughlin, Lyra. (2018). /tɹ/ and /dɹ/ in North American English: Phonologization of a Coarticulatory Effect.
