In honor of the spookiest month of the year, I've been watching the Halloween-themed video "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" by the famous 90s band the Backstreet Boys.
Despite having listened to it for several years, this week was the first time I noticed that the chorus was not, in fact, "everybody (yeah) rock your body (yeah)", but in fact had a phantom 'yeah' added in: "Everybody yeah (yeah) rock your body yeah (yeah)." I checked several lyrics sites to confirm this and yes, these are the official lyrics. How did I miss this yeah for so long?
Well, the introduction of the song has a very clear extra yeah.
Everybody, yeah. Rock your body, yeah.
ɛvrɪbadɪ jɛə. rɑk jo bɑdɪ jɛə
You can clearly hear that there is a 'y' in that 'yeah'. Compare how they say "body yeah" with the next section, with no 'yeah':
Rock your body right.
rɑk jo bɑdɪ rait
It turns out that this pattern of a lyrics plus a 'yeah' actually repeats in every chorus. But I had never noticed because, well, there is some pretty wild smoothing going on:
Everybodye (yeah) rock your bodye (yeah)
ɛvrɪbadɪɛ (jɛə) rɑk jo bɑdɪɛ (jɛə)
Did you catch it? [ɛvrɪbadɪ jɛə] has become [ɛvrɪbadɪɛ] or [ɛvrɪbadɪə]. The [j] has mysteriously disappeared!
It doesn't help that the Backstreet Boys use a lax-HAPPY vowel in 'everybody' and 'body,' which means there is less distance between the 'ih' in 'everybody' and the 'eh' of the swallowed yeah. I think I would have noticed it if they had used a tense HAPPY-vowel - it would have been harder to ignore the difference in vowel quality.
This particular conversion of a falling diphthong to a monophtong is called smoothing, or at least it is in the study of English. Indeed, the only other example I can think of smoothing happens in RP, where a word like 'fire' /faɪə/ can become [faə].
Is this part of some larger linguistic trend? Not that I can tell. The lax-HAPPY is definitely very typical of the period (as I shall write about soon), but I don't think smoothing of this sort was widespread. This smoothing seems to have been motivated by the meldody, which was melismatic in the first chorus ("Everybody, ye-e-ah") and then became syllabic in the following choruses ("everybody-e"). It was easier to reduce the 'yeah' to a monophthong than to try and produce the full form, especially since the full form was repeated by the backing vocals anyway.
You may be familiar with the question of which is the "proper" past tense form of the verb 'dream': is it 'dreamed' or 'dreamt'? But one form has long since dropped out of discussion: 'dreampt,' a form old enough to be found in Shakespeare's plays. The form 'dreampt' seems to survive only for people invoking an old-fashioned mystique. But whence dreampt - where did that 'p' in 'dreampt' come from?
The 'p' in 'dreampt' was introduced through a phonetic process called 'intrusion due to coarticulation,' or 'euphonic insertion' in the older philological tradition. Intrusion happens due to a fact about how vocal sounds are made. You see, the tongue and lips have to actually move from one place to another when we are speaking. When we write 'dreamt', or [drɛmt] in IPA, the letters abstract away this fact. The cluster [mt] makes us think that the velum lowers to produce a nasal sound, the lips close perfectly, the velum raises and the lips open, and then the tongue strikes the alveolar ridge.
But this sequence is an ideal version of [mt]. The reality is more often as follows, using the example of 'something'. Bold emphasis and paragraph breaks are included for emphasis and readability. (Reetz, 2009)
[...] Intrusions [are] when phones are inserted. These insertions can [...] result from coarticulation. In English, this happens when a nasal consonant precedes a voiceless fricative, as in the word 'something.' In these cases, a voiceless plosive with the same place as the nasal may intrude between the nasal and the voiceless fricative.
Namely, to produce the nasal, the oral pathway has to be closed completely (similar to an oral stop) and the velum is lowered.
Next, in the production of the following fricative, the velum is raised and the plosive closure is released at the same time to allow turbulent airflow for the fricative.
If the velum is closed first and the oral closure is released slightly later, the articulation is the same as an oral stop: an oral closure with raised velum and a release. As a result, an oral stop has been inserted.
For example, chance [t͡ʃæ̃ns] can become [t͡ʃæ̃nts], length [lɛ̃ŋθ] can become [lɛ̃ŋkθ], or something [sʌ̃mθɪ̃ŋ] can become [sʌ̃mpθɪ̃ŋ].
The quote above focuses on nasals followed by fricatives, but the same can happen to nasals followed by stops in a different articulation.
Indeed, English has a rule that nasals + stops must shared the same place of articulation (in other words, they must be homorganic consonants) within the same morpheme. Think of how strange the sequence [anp] would be in English. I bet when pronouncing it, you want to turn that [n] into an [m] to create the comfortable [amp].
'Dreamt' could be analyzed as two morphemes: 'drem' plus the past tense marker '-t', which explains why this non-homorganic (or heterorganic) sequence exists in English.
Em(p)ty Movement
'Dreampt' is not the only word to have a 'p' sound euphonically inserted. In some words, the intrusive 'p' became part of the standard spelling, and therefore part of the standard pronunciation. One such word is 'empty,' which originated as Old English 'æmettig.' Once that middle vowel was lost, the spelling 'empty' with a 'p' appears to have proliferated.
Some spellings came to include this 'p', and other spellings do not include them. H.L. Mencken noted:
Boughten and dreampt present greater difficulties. [...] The p-sound in dreampt follows a phonetic law that is also seen in warm(p)th, com(p)fort, and some(p)thing, and that has actually inserted a p in Thompson (=Tom’s son).
This sort of intrusion occurs cross-linguistically as well. The word 'tempt' in English comes from Latin (via French) 'temptare,' a variation of 'tentare.' It's not clear how that 'n' became an 'm' in the first place, but we can imagine that once someone attempted to pronounce 'temtare,' that dastardly 'p' moved in to create 'temptare.'
There are other types of intrusion other than a [p] being inserted between an [m] and a fricative or alveolar stop. As mentioned above, 'chance' can become 'chants,' and 'length' can become 'lenkth'. The Middle English compendium does have a single citation for 'lenkthe'. I couldn't find a word with [ns] that was spelled 'nts', but I also did not look very far.
Though the spelling 'printce' for 'prince' doesn't seem to exist in Middle Enlish or in today's modern English, the similarity between these two words has not gone unnoticed. The following joke from the Animaniacs series depends entirely on the similarity between 'prints' and 'Prince', as well as the flexibility of 'finger' as a noun and 'finger' as a verb.
Dot: I found Prince! [holding up Prince, the singer]
Yakko: No no no, finger prints!
[pause]
Dot: I don't think so.
Works Cited
Reetz, Henning and Jongman, Allard. "Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception." 2009.
This article is also available in video form! You can watch below. The article has more points and citations while the video has more visual aids, so they both complement each other.
At the end of April, you'll start seeing memes of Justin Timberlake everywhere with the text "it's gonna be may." This, of course, is a reference to the 2000 hit song "It's Gonna Be Me," where Justin sings the hook. Only except of the expect "me," he sings "may." The meme itself dates back to 2012, but it has proven enduring as a cyclical meme. It reminds of us of both the hopeful month of May and how weird it was that pop stars used to sing like that. If you need a reminder or you've never heard the song before, here's a clip of the offending pronunciation:
"Baby, when you finally get to love somebody, guess what: it's gonna be may." - It's Gonna Be Me, N'Sync (2000)
Justin is not the only pop star to sing "me" as "may." We've all probably heard a pop star sing something like "I'm missing you like canday" or "I want to be the minoritay." The nameless but frequent phenomenon even inspired an Atlas Obscura investigation by Dan Nosowitz.
But tracing the pedigree of this feature has eluded most of the people who write about it. Nosowitz's article offers an explanation for why it happens now, but it doesn't tell us who first started using it. Moreover, it confuses the vowel in "it's gonna be may" with a different vowel entirely, which muddies the waters even further. He refers to Stevie Wonder saying "thirteen month old babay," but that's not actually what Stevie Wonder is saying: he's saying "thirteen month old bab-IH," with a short 'i' and no diphthong. These two vowels have separate histories and need separate accounts.
"Thirteen month old babee [beɪbi] ... thirteen month old babih [beɪbɪ]." - Superstition, Stevie Wonder
So why does it matter which vowel happened - singers change their vowels all the time, right? Well, most linguistic changes of this sort aren't random or arbitrary - there is usually a reason that sound changes happen, and a reason that they spread as well. The spread of "may" and "babay" doesn't seem to be caused by random innovation - it's a daisy chain of influence from disparate genres and peoples all reaching their zenith in the massive pop moment of the 90s.
I first tackled this subject in 2016 (re-published in 2017) in one of my earliest articles. This is not just a rewrite, but a totally new theory to explain just why pop singers do that thang. I hope you'll join me in what is probably the most comprehensive history of "it's gonna be may" yet.
Setting the boundaries
First, let's talk about "it's gonna be may." What’s happening is the "ee" [i] vowel is being converted to "ay" [ɪi]. This is an example of diphthongization, or a vowel "breaking" into two vowels. This breaking can apply to other words that have an 'ee' /i/ sound in them, like "knees" /niz/ can become "knays" [nɪiz]. We’ll call this pattern ‘ME-breaking.’ There some dialects that have ME-breaking commonly, like Southern American English (Lee, 2012; McDorman) and London English.
"He loves mee [mi]." No breaking.
"He loves may [mɪi]." Breaking.
Words like ‘happy’ and ‘sadly’ have an ‘ee’ sound in them, but the stress doesn’t fall on the ‘ee.’ This puts them in a separate category, called ‘HAPPY’ words. Nowadays, most dialects of English have an ‘ee’ sound in these words: this is called tense-HAPPY.
But in the 1800s, these HAPPY words were pronounced with a short 'i' [ɪ] sound. So they sounded like ‘happih’, ‘verih’, ‘anarchih.’ This pronunciation is called 'lax-HAPPY'. While lax-HAPPY isn’t popular nowadays, older speakers of conservative Received Pronunciation (Wells, 1980), Southern American English (Thomas, 2006), and African American English still use it.
So what if you had breaking in a HAPPY word? This would result in ‘happay.’ There’s no agreed-upon term for this, but I’ll call it HAPPY-breaking. You can find HAPPY-breaking in working class varieties of London English and in Yorkshire varieties, among others.
"She is happee [hæpi]." Tense-HAPPY
"She is happih [hæpɪ]." Lax-HAPPY
"She is happay [hæpɪi]." HAPPY-breaking
To keep things simple, I will use the IPA symbols [ɪi] to note that a word has vowel breaking: m[ɪi]. This is because the vowel breaking in "it's gonna be may" isn't actually identical to the sound in the word "May." Some instances of vowel breaking are not as obvious and will not sound as close to the word "May." I am less interested in the degree of breaking and more interested in the fact that it occurs at all, so both subtle and obvious breaking will be written with [ɪi].
Timeline
Here's the fun part: we're going to look at popular songs from the 20th century to find out who started this whole ME-breaking and HAPPY-breaking mess. To keep things simple, I mostly focused on songs that topped on the Billboard Hot 100, which is an American popular music chart. An even more comprehensive review would compare this with the UK charts or also look at songs that charted below #1, but I am just one person and listening to every #1 hit of the 80s was enough work for me.
One question we're going to try to tackle here is how could singers have been exposed to "may" and "babay"-like forms? Remember, it's unlikely that multiple people over multiple decades just happened to come up with vowel-breaking on their own, so we have to posit an explanation for how they picked up on it.
Unfortunately, there are rarely direct examples of a singer saying "I sang it like this because I heard it from this person/someone told me to." As such, we have to rely on some circumstantial evidence at times - such is the nature of tracing influences in pop music history. Sometimes we're lucky and we know that a singer was a fan of early singers because they've done covers of their material. Sometimes they even do interviews. Sometimes we have to rely on genre similarities and the fact that musicians tend to be aware of other people working in their scene. But sometimes there's no obvious explanation. Tracing history is rarely clean.
1950s-1960s: Lonesome Cowboy
The earliest example of ME-breaking I've been able to find so far is in country music, by Southern American English speakers. Lefty Frizzell had a hit in the 1951 song "Give me more, more, more (of your kisses)," and also some ME-breaking. Another example is in his unreleased 1951 song, "You Want Everything But Me."
"They'll even pay the weddin' bills to just get rid of m[ɪi]" - Give Me More, More, More (Of Your Kisses), Lefty Frizzell (1951)
"You want everything but m[ɪi]" - You Want Everything But Me, Lefty Frizzell (recorded in 1951s, released 1981)
Another Southern country singer was Waylon Jennings. He sang a cover called "She Called Me Baby" in 1967 with some HAPPY-breaking.
"She called me baby, bab[ɪi]" - She Called Me Baby, Waylon Jennings (1967)
You could also find some breaking in jazz. The singer Chris O'Connor was Missouri born and raised, and has a diphthongized 'me' in S'Wonderful.
"That you should care for m[ɪi]" - S'Wonderful, Chris O'Connor (1957)
Overall, breaking in popular music is limited to Southerners in these two decades.
To my surprise, I was unable to find examples of African American singers with ME-breaking. ME-breaking appears to be more a characteristic of Southern American English than African American English, including Southern African American English. I haven't found examples of ME-breaking in the literature for African American English. I listened to influential black blues and rock 'n' roll artists such as Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard, and Fats Domino, but they had no ME-breaking at all! (There was some lax-HAPPY, but remember that that is a different feature. Don't worry, I'm covering it in another article in the future.)
1970s-1980s: the Rock and Punk Years
The earliest example of breaking in rock music is the Rolling Stones. This group also happens to be from London, which is a region with ME-breaking. You can hear an example of it in their song "It's Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)," from 1974:
"I said can't you say s[ɪi]" - It's Only Rock and Roll (but I Like It), the Rolling Stones (1974)
In 1975, an American-English rock group called the Arrows recorded a response to this song, called "I Love Rock and Roll." Their American lead singer also gave ME-breaking a try:
"I saw her dancin' there by the record mach[ɪi]ne ... And I could tell it wouldn’t be long till she was with m[ɪi], yeah, m[ɪi]." - I Love Rock 'n' Roll, The Arrows (1975)
Then in 1976, the English punk group the Sex Pistols released their first single “Anarchy in the UK.” Besides being massively successful, it also had ME-breaking (be -> bay) and pronounced HAPPY-breaking (anarchy > anarchay).
"I want to b[ɪi]anarch[ɪi]" - Anarchy in the U.K., the Sex Pistols (1976)
The singer Johnny Rotten came from a working-class household in London, so this ME-breaking wasn’t copped from country music. You can hear in this interview how he makes 'week' sound more like 'wake':
(1:07) Watch Top of the Pops and send their boring little letters into Melody Maker w[ɪi]k after w[ɪi]k.
From here, both ME-breaking and HAPPY-breaking appear sporadically throughout the 80s. The 1982 cover of I Love rock and roll by Joan Jett is the first #1 US hit of the 80s to feature ME-breaking, imitating the same vowel that the arrows used.
"He was looking at me, yeah, m[ɪi] ...take your time and dance with m[ɪi]" - I Love Rock 'n' Roll, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts (1982)
1986 had the top 10 hit by the Beastie Boys, “You gotta fight for your right to party.” Although the Beastie Boys were basically a rap group by that time, they started out as a hardcore punk band and the influences can still be heard in their instrumentation. Perhaps there’s also some influence in their vowels, because we hear HAPPY breaking:
"You gotta fight for your right to part[ɪi]!" - (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party), the Beastie Boys (1986)
ME-breaking hadn't just infiltrated classic rock and punk - it also made its way into glam rock. The 1987 song, "Pour Some Sugar On Me" by the English group Def Leppard should perhaps be called "Pour Some Sugar On May."
"Pour some sugar on m[ɪi]"- Pour Some Sugar On Me, Def Leppard (1987)
The 1990s and beyond: Pop Takes Over
As we leave the 80s, we can tell one thing. ME-breaking and HAPPY-breaking had firmly entrenched themselves in rock and rock-adjacent genres. You'll find examples of ME-breaking and HAPPY-breaking in rock music throughout the 90s. One could even consider them to be a part of what it means to sing rock music: a part of a rock singer "register." My favorite 90s-era of ME-breaking and subtle HAPPY-breaking is the theme song to the video game Sonic Adventure, which is a beautiful example of all the cliches associated with rock music at the end of the decade.
(upper harmony) I don't know what it can be but you drive me craz[ɪi] ... open your heart and you will s[ɪi]" - Open Your Heart, Crush 40 (1998)
However, knowing the path it took for ME-breaking and HAPPY-breaking to get into rock music doesn't explain how it got into pop music. That path is a little more mysterious and murky - but we're going to tread it anyway.
In 1994, rapper Notorious B.I.G. posthumously released "Juicy." The Brooklyn girl group Total sings on the hook:
"You had a goal but not that man[ɪi]" - "Juicy", The Notorious B.I.G. (ft. Total) (1994)
The chorus was interpolated from Mtume's song "Juicy Fruit" 1983, but this original version did not have HAPPY-breaking. Why did this girl group use HAPPY-breaking on the pop hook of a rap song? Perhaps influence from growing up around rock music? It's not clear, but what is clear is that this song was a massive hit, spreading HAPPY-breaking across the airwaves.
HAPPY-breaking and ME-breaking both appear in an unusual place in the 90s - Mariah Carey’s #1 hit song “Always Be My Baby.” This is one of the earlier places in pure pop music where we see HAPPY-breaking and exaggerated ME-breaking.
"Boy, don't you know you can’t escape m[ɪi]? Ooh darlin' cuz you’ll always be my bab[ɪi]" - Always Be My Baby, Mariah Carey (1995)
Like with "Juicy," it's not clear how Mariah came across this form. Perhaps she picked it up from "Juicy" - Mariah was a noted fan of hip-hop. She was also a noted fan of glam rock - she's covered songs by Def Leppard, which we noted were big users of this sort of breaking.
HAPPY-breaking makes a re-occurrence in the song “Quit playing games with my heart” by the Backstreet Boys. This song was produced by the Swedish producer Max Martin, a fact that we'll revisit later.
"Bab[ɪi], so bad, bab[ɪi], quit playing games with my heart." - Quit Playing Games (With My Heart), the Backstreet Boys (1994)
Then we have "Wannabe", released in 1996, has subtle ME-breaking by Mel B. Mel is from West Yorkshire, another region with ME-breaking. (Source).
"And as for m[ɪi]? Ha, you’ll see!" - Wannabe, Spice Girls (1996)
In 1999, HAPPY-breaking and ME-breaking reached levels of vowel-breaking heretofore only dreamed of by man with Mandy Moore talking it all the way. This is one of the most obvious and exaggerated uses of HAPPY-breaking. It shows that by this point, HAPPY-breaking and ME-breaking had become associated with contemporary pop music.
"This feelin’s got me week in the kn[ɪi]s... come to m[ɪi], sw[ɪi]t to m[ɪi]... I'm missing you like cand[ɪi]" - Candy, Mandy Moore (1999)
It all comes full circle in the year 2000. N'Sync released “It’s gonna be me,” which topped the US charts for two weeks. The song has both normal 'me' and ME-breaking, which makes them easy to compare. No HAPPY-breaking, though.
"I remember you told m[ɪi] ...It’s gonna be m[ɪi] ... but in the end you know it's gonna be m[i]. It's gonna be m[ɪi], it's gonna be m[ɪi], gonna be m[ɪi]"
Justin was asked about this pronunciation in an interview and said something rather interesting:
Justin: I will say in my defense Max Martin made me sing 'me' that way. [...] I just want to throw Max Martin on the chopping block for that one.
[...]
Anchor: Did he give a reason for that?
Justin: I think he just wanted me to sound like I was from Tennessee. [...] He just kinda likes that.
Max Martin gave him direction on how to sing. Max Martin, if you'll remember, also produced "Quit Playing Games With My Heart," which had HAPPY-breaking. Perhaps he also guided the Backstreet Boys in using this pronunciation.
Timberlake clearly associated it with southerners as opposed to english punk rockers, but Max Martin was a fan of hard rock, so it’s likelier that Max Martin heard the pronunciation from them and decided to use it. He also could have picked up on it from Mariah Carey and the Spice Girls - he listened to pop music and could tell a trend when he heard one.
Noticeably, a number of Max Martin produced songs feature ME-breaking. This may seem coincidental, but Max Martin has been known to record demos of songs before giving them to singers, and telling them to copy the performance as much as they can. Another popular singer he worked with was, of course, Britney Spears. (She has enough linguistic peculiarities otherwise to merit her own article.)
There's nothing you can do or say, bab[ɪi] ... I'm not your property as from today, bab[ɪi]
Martin is known to be controlling about the music he writes. Music journalist John Seabrook writes:
And yet Martin is known to insist that the artists he works with sing his songs exactly the way he sings them on the demos. In a sense, Spears, Perry, and Swift are all singing covers of Max Martin recordings. They are also among the few people in the world who have actually heard the originals. Countless self-proclaimed performers on YouTube sing Max Martin songs, but there is not a single publicly available video or audio recording of Martin performing his own stuff. (In the course of researching my book “The Song Machine,” I got to hear an actual Max Martin demo, for “… Baby One More Time,” when a record man who had it on his phone played it for me. The Swede sounded exactly like Spears.)
If true, this would go a long way to explaining why other artists who have worked with Martin use breaking. For example, Martin worked on Katy Perry's song "Part Of Me." In this demo, she even rhymes "me" with "way" twice:
"I just wanna throw my phone away, find out who is really there for m[ɪi]... You can take the dog from m[ɪi], I never liked him anyway. In fact you can take everything except for m[ɪi]."
2010-era pop songs don't have to be produced by Max Martin, but his imprint is still strong. Taylor Swift's song "Out of the Woods" was produced by Jack Antonoff, but she still uses ME-breaking on the high notes.
"You were looking at may [mɪi], you were looking at may [mɪi], you were looking at may [mɪi]."
The Run-down
So we've traced the path that HAPPY-breaking and ME-breaking have taken through pop history. HAPPY-breaking and ME-breaking are no longer hot and trendy. But they haven't faded away entirely - instead, they've found a home in the linguistic toolbox of singers. They've expanded from the rock singer register to the pop singer register. Perhaps this is why we don't even comment on contemporary singers who still use it; it's become invisible to us as a sign of pop-ness.
The question to ask is why singers found these features so appealing. There are plenty of other vowels they could have used, after all. Why these?
Bio-mechanics and song
Nosowitz's Atlas Obscura article has an important point: close vowels, like 'ee' [i], are harder for singers to sing with than more open vowels like 'ih' [ɪ]. If you'll look back at a lot of the examples, you'll notice that breaking is more common on sustained or high notes. I personally do find it easier to sing high/sustained notes on 'ih' and 'ey' than on 'ee' (Mitrano, 2002).
Changing vowels to make singing easier or more 'beautiful' isn't unusual at all in sung speech. Classical singers have to learn the correct vowel placements to get the large, resonant and particular sound they need (Nix, 2004). These vowel placements are not the same as you would find in spoken speech! Pop singers are not usually classically trained, but you don't need classical training to experience the bio-mechanical feedback when you sing 'ee' on a high note versus 'ey.'
What if you could used these sounds on a lower note, which doesn't need the help of a different vowel? Vocal coach Lis Lewis (quoted in Atlas Obscura) suggests that "this is an attempt to co-opt the signifiers of intensity without actually needing to use them." This would match with JC Chasez's recollection of how "It's Gonna Be Me" was recorded:
[...]But because "It's Gonna Be Me" has become a meme for the month of May, it was interesting when we cut that record. It was actually a very conscious choice to say it that way, because we wanted it to really punch.
For certain words, we bent the pronunciation. We were hitting the L's hard on "lose." Instead of saying, "You don't wanna lose" -- which would be kind of boring -- we'd be like "You don't wanna NLUUSE." But when you're listening to someone in the studio singing it that way, at first you're like, "What is wrong with you?" But you have to dig and hit these different shapes of consonants and vowels to give them energy. Instead of saying, "It's gonna be ME" we said "ET'S GONNA BAY MAY!" for it to hit harder.
Those conscious choices sound funny from the outside, but when it all comes together it sounds amazing. There weren't memes back then, but we knew it needed to be more.
There is another process we need to consider before coming to the conclusion that it's all "fake energy"...
The process of enregisterment
A register is "a particular socially identifiable variety of a language." The classic examples are of formal and informal registers: a person who is giving a public speech will be speaking in a more formal register than someone who is hanging out at home with their friends.
You can also broaden the concept to refer to things like how English speakers can put on a 'vampire voice' by saying "I vant to suck your blod." Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch points out that this is because one of the most iconic Draculas was played by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian man with a Hungarian accent. So when Adam Sandler's vampire character in "Hotel Transylvania" says "welcome to hot'el trenseelvenia," he's not trying to communicate that his character is Hungarian - he's trying to communicate that he's a vampire. We call this association of linguistic features with an identity "enregisterment."
This concept can also apply to music. Originally, the people who said "may" and "happay" were just using their own Southern or London accents. But when singers started copying their pronunciation, they removed breaking from its origins. In turn, these features were re-analyzed and "enregistered" as part of a rock register. As the feature kept popping up in smash songs, it also became enregistered in the pop register.
Registers aren't mandatory - you can have vampires without Eastern European accents. But registers do communicate something: your awareness of belonging to that group. A rock or pop singer who uses "may" is able to signal their awareness of rock and pop singing styles (not to mention make use of a useful vowel modification in difficult songs).
That doesn't make using "may" a sign of fakeness or inauthenticity. Registers aren't always explicitly taught or acquired. You can learn different registers by osmosis: Just being in a different linguistic environment makes people change their own speech to sound more like everyone else. This is called "accommodation" and it's a sign of good faith and wanting to make things easier for other people (West & Lynn, 2017, p. 468-469).
Conclusion
Linguistic innovations happen all the time, but not all of them catch on. With HAPPY-breaking and ME-breaking in music, we are lucky to have such a long corpus of recorded music to use to trace its origins. The spread of breaking is a fascinating example of how different genres of music interact with and define each other. It's also an example of how modality-specific features can make a difference: it helps that breaking made it easier to sing harder notes.
Despite the massive spread of breaking in music, it remains locked to sung speech. Nobody starts saying "I hope you love may" or "I hope you're happay" in speech unless they're joking (or speak one of the varieties of English that we mentioned with these features). This also illustrates another feature: how we are clearly able to distinguish between registers. A singer can say "it's gonna be may" multiple times in a song and then get on an interview and use "me" consistently the entire time. Sung speech and spoken speech registers aren't anywhere as porous as the different genre registers are.
In the Atlas Obscura article, Nosowitz writes that it is surprising that nobody has taken the linguistics of pop music seriously considering how obvious the difference is, even for lay people. There is a treasure trove of interesting information for both linguists and musicologists in sung speech, if we only care to listen. After all, the simple meme that started this whole thing was almost 60 years in the making.
West, Richard & Turner, Lynn. 2017. Introducing Communication Theory: Analysis and Application
Mitrano, Melanie. 2002. The New Music Connoisseur. Vowels and Word Articulation. ("Closed vowels, as in the words greet and moon, are difficult to sing and articulate in the upper range.")
If you've spent your whole life only speaking one dialect, it can be utterly mind-blowing to know that there are dialects out there that make totally different distinctions that you were not even aware were possible. I speak a mostly uninteresting variety of General American that mostly corresponds to that hegemonic variety you find on television, with a few minor diversions from it. Learning about different mergers and sound changes that happened in English is one of my favorite parts, and I'd like to share some fun accidents of English language history with you all.
Today let's take a look at something that I am sure my American visitors and English visitors will diverge sharply on, and that is whether the words "hurry" and "furry" rhyme. The majority of my American visitors will likely say that they do rhyme, while my English visitors will say there is no way they could rhyme. (I count myself among the former.)
Canadian readers will likely side with the Americans on this one, while Australian and New Zealand readers may side with our English and British readers. If you're from South Africa, Nigeria, India, Singapore, or any other part of the world where English is spoken as a national language in addition to another language, I would like to hear how you treat these two words!
Americans and Canadians may ask, "how can you pronounce these two differently?" And the answer is that "hurry" will be pronounced with an 'uh'[ʌ] vowel instead of an 'er' vowel. Imagine saying 'huh' and then 're' afterwards, and you will approximate how 'hurry' sounds in those dialects: [hʌri]. In broad North American English, they will instead collapse into an 'err' sound.
If you'd like a comparison of how these two sound, listen to these clips. The first one is from a speaker who says 'huh-ry'.
A h[ʌ]rry up affair
The second one is from a speaker who says 'herr-y.'
A h[ɝ]rry up affair
How to tell HURRY and FURRY words apart
'Hurry' is not the only word that has this pronunciation. 'Murray,' 'courage', 'worry', 'turret', 'curry', are just some of the examples of words that have the 'uh' + 'r' sequence in them. You'll notice that these are all multisyllable words. That's in English phonology, 'uh' /ʌ/ is a 'checked vowel' and cannot appear stressed at the end of a word. (Depending on whether you consider the 'uh' in strut and the 'uh' in comma to be the same vowel, the explanation for this varies. Take this as a sort of broad explanation that will work for most cases as opposed to a definitive phonological theory that is valid for every single variety of English.)
Meanwhile, words with 'er' /ɜr/ can be one-syllable words: fur, her, nerd, word. And if you add a suffix to them, the 'er' doesn't change: fur-ry [fɜri], nerd-y, word-y.
So if you're a North American who is distressed to find out that their English accent impersonation is subpar due to missing this essential distinction, how can you learn to distinguish them? English spelling can give us clues. One hint that a word might be an 'uh' /ʌ/ word is that it is spelled with a '(o)ur(r)' and has a vowel after it. If we know our multisyllable rule, we know that a hypothetical word 'lur' cannot be a candidate for being an 'uh' word, but a word 'lurry' might.
You can also remember that 'er' words don't become 'uh' words if you add suffixes to them - if you recognize that a word like 'furry' comes from 'fur', which has an 'er' sound, you'll realize that even though it has the 'urr' spelling, it's not an 'uh' /ʌ/ word.
When it comes to phonological rules, though, English likes to throw exceptions at us. For example, you may expect the word 'furrier' meaning 'a person who sells furs' to be an 'uh' word. But it is actually pronounced 'fuh-rier' [fʌriər], even though it comes from 'fur.' To make it more confusing, the word 'furrier' [fɜriər] which means 'more furry' is actually an 'er' word!
The unfortunate reality is that although looking at spelling helps, in the long run you simply have to memorize the 'uh r' words if you did not grow up hearing them.
Meanwhile, if you're from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, or any other non-North American English speaking area, and you want to imitate a General American accent, your task is simpler. Just replace all 'uhr + vowel' words with 'err' and you're set! Make sure you use a rhotic 'err'.
Not all American dialects have this merger. Older dialects of New York Metropolitan English, Boston English, and Coastal Southern American English may have the distinction. Keep this in mind if you're doing an older American actor or a period piece from earlier in the century. And there are more conservative General American dialects that keep the distinction, too. Just consider the age and period of the character and piece.
Why did this merger happen?
Let's take a look at the dialects that have the HURRY-FURRY distinction:
The dialects that do not have the merger are non-rhotic (majority of English English dialects, Australian/New Zealand English, conservative New York/New England/Coastal American), and the rhotic ones either do not have r-colored vowels (Scottish English and Indian English) or have very lightly r-colored vowels (General American English, Irish English). R-coloring is when a vowel is pronounced seemingly at the same time as an 'r' sound, with the 'r' appearing at the end. Meanwhile, dialects with the merger have noticeable r-coloring on vowels.
R-coloring causes vowels to trend towards sound like 'er' [ɝ]. In dialects that have strong 'r' coloring, there are a lot of mergers that happen before 'r's that do not happen in other dialects (another example marry-merry-mary merger and 'cure' sounding like 'kyer').
The 'r' itself isn't the problem - Scottish and Irish English are rhotic accents that preserve the distinction. The problem is the nature of the 'r', and how that 'r' ends up strongly attached to other vowels. It's also hard to make a lot of fine-grained distinctions when you have strong 'r' coloring - try it yourself, combining vowels with an 'r'. In a sense, r-coloring is contagious!
What are some examples of this sound in the wild?
Because the HURRY-FURRY distinction was still relatively common at the beginning of the century, when sound recording was beginning to take off, we can find some early examples of HURRY-FURRY distinction in Americans.
From 1933, Brooklyn-born singer/actor Mae West gives us one of our earliest examples in her song 'A Guy What Takes His Time':
A h[ʌ]rry up affair
In 1953, South Carolina's Eartha Kitt gives us another 'huhry' example:
So h[ʌ]rry down the chimney tonight
A male ensemble member in the track 'Orphan in the Snow' from the musical Celebration (1969) gives us 'huhry' as well:
So huhry huhry huhry huhry huhry little orphan boy
Finding 21st century examples of American youths saying 'huhry' is more challenging. The closest I've ever found is the way Meghan Trainor, who is from New England, says 'encourage' in her song "No." But she doesn't use this pronunciation on other 'uhr' words like 'worry', and perhaps it's really just an 'eur' instead?
How you let your friends enc[ʌ]rage (?) you
Yeah my mama she told me don't w[ɝ]rry about your size
Finding examples of English English speakers with the distinction is easier. Listen to how Prince Charles says 'encouragement':
Fun fact - there are actually not as many 'ehry' words as I would have expected, and I had a harder time finding examples of 'furry' or other 'er' + vowel words. Thankfully, my search results found that there is a British community of 'furries' on YouTube, which is useful to provide a counter to the 'uhr' above:
'It has come to my attention that the f[ɜ]rry scene in the United States is a hell of a lot different than the f[ɜ]rry scene in the United Kingdom... they list f[ɜ]rry as their occupation ... f[ɜ]rry in name only.'
Some speakers of English English aren't aware that Americans merge 'hurry' and 'furry'. Even if they try to Americanize their accent for whatever reason, they still continue using 'huhry.' Here's an example from the English-Irish band One Direction, with their song 'Back For You' from Take Me Home (2012).
You don't have to w[ʌ]rry
In dialects of Northern English English where all 'uh' words are pronounced with a short 'u' vowel, you can actually see this affect 'hurry' words so that they sound like 'hoory.' Listen to the below football commentator from North England say 'wurrying' for 'worrying.'
They avoided the press quite c[ʊ]mfortably... Is this now the w[ʊ]rrying time for Liverpool fans?
In an unusual twist, I've found an example of an American who uses a short 'oo' in an 'uhr' word. Dinah Washington, who was born 1924 in Alabama but raised in Chicago, Illinois, pronounces 'flurry' as 'floory' in her 1961 recording of 'Mad About The Boy.' Any ideas what's going on here?
Who's in the fl[ʊ]rry of her first affair
What does the merger sound like?
The Andrews Sisters were an American trio. The youngest sister was born in 1918 in Minnesota (the American Midwest), meaning they probably finished acquiring their native language by 1930. If you compare their 'worry' to the 'er' they use in 'cure' and 'hearse,' you can tell that it's not quite the same sound. But it's not a distinct 'uh ri' like Mae West uses in 'A Guy What Takes His Time.' Perhaps this is an example of the merger in progress? The following song was recorded 1952.
if you start to w[ʌ]rry, you can order the h[ɝ]rse... So why w[ɜ]rry? Why w[ɜ]rry? W[ɜ]rry gets you nowhere at all!
A clearer example of a merged 'uhr' vowel can be found in child singer Shirley Temple. Shirley was born in 1928 in Santa Monica, California. Shirley was 7 years old when she starred in The Littlest Rebel (1935) and she's clearly using an 'err' vowel for the song "Polly Wolly Doodle."
If you think you're gonna w[ɝ]rry, you can stop it in a h[ɝ]rry
That someone as young as Shirley was used the merged vowel means it was possibly already done by the time she started acquiring language. California therefore would be very likely to have had the merger at the beginning of the century.
Another Californian example is the Beach Boys. Their song "Don't Worry Baby" (1964) clearly uses an 'er' vowel. (Also, am I crazy or does Brian Wilson, the lead, use a rounded, fronted 'er' in general? He always sounds like he's trying to say a short 'oo' and an 'r' at the same time.)
Don't w[ɝ]rry baby
Halsey is from New Jersey, and uses a 'her' vowel in 'hurricane.
I'm Halsey and this is h[ɝ]rricane... I'm a h[ɝ]rricane
Even new Yorkers have lost this distinction. Cardi B, who is from the Bronx, has reduced 'worry' to 'werr' entirely, showing how the 'r' colored vowel spreads.
Hectic, don't w[ɝ]rr 'bout what's on my left wrist
Modern hip-hop and rap uses the HURRY-FURRY merger clearly. Canadian singer Drake's 2013 hit "Started From The Bottom" shows a clear example of an 'er'y 'worry':
I'mma w[ɝ]rry 'bout me
How do other languages and ESOL speakers deal with English loan words?
The question of which variety of English gets used as the basis for second language instruction is usually related to what region you're in. In North America, you are likely to find American English as the basis due to the United States being the most prominent English speaking power. In Europe, you are more likely to find English English being used as the basis due to the United Kingdom being the most prominent English speaking power nearby. But it's not always as simple as that.
One fun example is ABBA, the Swedish pop band from the 1970s. The Swedish National Agency for Education, or Skolverket, has historically explicitly taught British English as the default (see page 3, background to research). American English was not taught until 1994 (source). This means the members of ABBA almost certainly experienced British-centric English education.
But the variety of English they use in their music has some noticeable American flavor. The way they say 'chance' in 'Take a chance on me', as a dipthongized 'kean', is distinguishably American - among other features. How do they treat the 'uhr' words? Well, inconsistently. In 'Take A Chance On Me', 'worry' and 'hurry' have an 'er'-like sound in them. But in 'If It Wasn't For The Nights,' the word 'courage' has an [a]-like-sound (which is as close as they ever get to the American 'uh', which does not exist in Swedish). And in 'When All Is Said And Done,' 'hurry' is also pronounced with an [a] sound (the same vowel they use in 'done').
I'm no h[ɝ]rry ... you don't have to w[ɝ]rry ... I'd have c[a?]rage left to fight... There's no h[a]ry anymore when all is said and d[a]ne
How about Japanese, which has a number of English loanwords? Both American and British English have historically influenced Japanese. But when using the katakana syllabary to represent the sounds of English words, it bends towards British English, and this is seen in the difference between 'furry' and 'hurry'.
'Furry' is ファーリー (faarii). This matches with how the 'er' sound is usually transliterated into Japanese, with a long 'aa' sound. Meanwhile 'hurry' ハリー (harii) is transliterated with a short 'a' sound, as is used to represent the 'uh' sound. In a hypothetical Japanese English, you could have a length-based HURRY-FURRY distinction! (source)
You can see a similar transliteration distinction in Russian, where the 'uh' word 'curry' becomes карри 'karri', while the 'er' word 'girlfriend' becomes гёрлфренд 'gyorlfrend'.
Let's wrap this section up with an example from a Latin American Spanish speaker. Shakira was born in Colombia. In her song "Timor," you can hear that she uses an American-ish 'er'-like vowel in 'hurry' and 'worry'.
if they forget about us, then h[e]rry, if we forget about 'em, don't w[e]rry, if they forget about us, then h[e]rry
Conclusions
Do you merge HURRY and FURRY, or are they distinct to you? Perhaps you only have a partial merger? If you speak English as a second language, were you taught to pronounce these words differently? As always, I would love to see new examples.
Postscript
Another example of a strange realization of a HURRY word: Christina Aguilera seems to realize "worry" to rhyme with hoary! She's from Staten Island, New York City, but moved around a lot as a child.
I have spoken about glide affrication before - the process that makes "y" sound like "j" and "w" sound like "v." But did you know there's also affrication of stops in English? It makes "t" sound like "ts" and "d" sound like "dz." It can also make "k" sound like "khhh" and "p" like "pf".
What causes stop affrication? Well, it's a natural result of 'lengthening' a stop. A stop, by definition, is when a bunch of air builds up behind part of your mouth and is then suddenly released, causing a 'pop' sound. How can you lengthen this release of air? You can't, but you can continue pushing air from the lungs through, which causes a friction - hence affriccation. You can think of it like a stop combined with a fricative that's formed at the same part of the mouth.
Wells's Accents of English associates this sort of affrication with Cockney English speakers. But I've found examples of it across different dialectal regions. Like S-retraction, it seems to be a change that has developed multiple times in different places.
From New York City - musicians as distinct as Latin pop singer Ricky Martin and j-pop singer Utada Hikaru have d-affrication. Utada's example is especially song. (I recommend headphones to be able to hear the frication more clearly compared to the music.)
Her lips are dzevil red
The dzaily things
Billy Joel also has t-affrication at the end of a word:
If that's what it's all abouts, mama if that's movin' up, then I'm movin' outs... mmm I'm movin' outs.
Over in California, Disney Channel child actress Emily Osment (from Hannah Montana) has some dramatic d-affrication:
Dzoesn't matter what you say, I'm knockin' you dzown, dzown, dzown
And in Texas, fellow Disney Channel alum and singer Demi Lovato has some d-affrication, though not consistently (audio slowed down):
Are you kidding me? I'm so not a dziva
In the Midwest, the lead singer of the rock band Fallout Boy, Patrick Stump, frequently uses affrication in his music. Sometimes it's from lengthening the consonant. Compare the 'k' in 'mistakhhh' to the simply released 'k' in 'take':
And just one mistakhh is all it will take
Stump also seems to display a curious case of p-affrication where 'proof' sounds like 'pfroof' (at least, the official lyrics are 'proof'). This has led multiple fans and lyrics sites to mistakenly hear the lyric as "frozen fruit."
And here's the frozen pfroof
Some of these examples seem to result from attempting to 'extend' a stop consonant (Stump's "mistakkhe"). Some might result due to being near a front vowel, like Demi Lovato's "dziva." This sort of affrication before front vowels also happens in Canadian French (audio slowed down):
La fondation Celine Dzion
A similar thing happens in Russian. In Russian, oral stops that are palatalized (pronounced with the tongue raised, as if prepared for a 'yuh' [j] sound) also have some frication (source.
Affrication can progress even further to become lenition, so that the 'stop' component disappears completely. In Liverpool English, this can result in 'khh' simple sounding like a sharp 'hhh' [x]. The following clip was originally found via Dialect Blog and shows the [x] appearing in Liverpool footballer Steven Gerrard's speech.
Every player is loohing (looking) forward
I have [dz] as an allophone of /d/ in my speech. I especially have it at the beginning of a syllable, not at the end. Do you have any stop-affrication? What about stop-lenition? Are there any other examples you are familiar with, cross-dialectally or cross-linguistically?
The word 'speech' can mean 'manner of speaking.' This is useful when talking about "analyzing's someone speech." However, there is no equivalent single word for 'manner of singing.' I suppose you could use 'song,' as in "analyzing someone's song," but that doesn't sound right. I've used roundabout descriptions before like "vocal style" and "singing style," but these have a connotation of analyzing the musical qualities of song as opposed to the linguistic qualities.
I have thought about simply coining a new term, such as "songspeech." This would make it easy to say "John uses this pronunciation in his speech, but a different one in his songspeech." But "songspeech" appears (rarely) as a translation of the operatic term "sprechstimme" and refers to a style half between singing and speaking, which is not what I'm talking about at all. (1, 2, 3). There is also "SongSpeech," used in 1970 to refer to "the singing of old and new political songs." Although these terms are rare enough that I could attempt to co-opt them, I would rather not risk confusion.
There's the classic "borrow from another language." Or perhaps just borrow one word. "Songsprache" came to mind, but apparently it means "song language" as in, "a language that is suited for singing." Not what I was looking for either. The one that really works is "canto," from Spanish meaning "singing." But alas, canto has a different meaning in English. What about 'chant'? That one, much like 'cant', also refers to speaking. I suppose cantus is free, but must we go to the Latin straight away? It always sounds a little pretentious to dig up Latin words and use them willy-nilly in English.
Perhaps there is no one word-alternative to "speech." No simple or elegant way to say "in his speech as in his [songspeech/cantus], John likes rounded vowels." And even if you try using the more unwieldy "in his speech as in his song/manner of singing," it doesn't seem to point at what I want to point. "His song," by force of habit, seems to point to a single work, to an actual song, as opposed to a pattern of singing. If I, the person writing this, find it ambiguous, I can't imagine it would be any clearer for those reading it.
Luckily, a kind Redditor introduced me to the contrasting terms spoken speech versus sung speech. They are a little strange at first blush, since "spoken speech" seems redundant. But if you encounter both in quick succession, I think it clears up instantly, and one gets used to it right away. I have taken to using spoken and sung speech as descriptors in my articles since being introduced to the term.
Even better, there is precedence for the terms sung and spoken speech in academic journals. Some examples:
It seems more popular in speech pathology than in traditional linguistics; perhaps because most phoneticians and phonologists study spoken speech almost exclusively, while use of sung speech for therapeutic reasons is currently being investigated by speech pathologists and other therapists. Nevertheless, it is exciting to know that this term is already in currency and that you can use it to look up other articles.
Do you have any particular feelings about "sung speech" and "spoken speech" as distinctive terms? Have you come across them before? Are you familiar with any other alternatives?
Those of us who have bought a car will notice a curious phenomenon where, just as soon as we purchase our car, we immediately begin to see the same model everywhere on the streets. It's remarkable how we all become trendmakers as soon as we buy a car; we singlehandedly turned a Toyota Corolla into a bestseller. After all, we only start seeing this car in mass numbers after we purchase it.
Or perhaps you relate more to having psychic powers capable of influencing the world. You learn about a particular term, or meet someone from a country, and suddenly you see reference to that country everywhere. Once I started studying the Scottish accent more, I found references to Scotland everywhere - Scottish bands on my Spotify auto-generated playlists, Scottish actors referenced on Twitter, and even more books on Scotland at my local bookstore. Could it be that me learning about Scotland raised the prominence of this northern country?
Luckily (or not), these were not incidences of the Toyota Corolla and the country of Scotland suddenly becoming more popular after one learns about them. These are examples of what is popularly called the Baader-Meinhof effect, also called the Frequency Illusion. This is a cognitive bias resulting from selective attention (you don't pay the same amount of attention to everything all the time) and confirmation bias (looking for/remembering things that support our hypothesis and ignoring contrary evidence). The Frequency Illusion is especially relevant in linguistics research, and it was indeed coined by a linguist. We're going to take a look at the Frequency Illusion and some examples of how it applies in language.
History
Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at the University of Stanford and former writer for Language Log, codified this observation in a
2006 post.
In any case, we have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again -- retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc. -- the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It's not just Kids These Days.
Professional linguists can be as subject to the Recency Illusion as anyone else. Charles Hockett wrote in 1958 (A Course in Modern Linguistics, p. 428) about "the recent colloquial pattern I'm going home and eat", what Laura Staum has been investigating under the name (due to me) the GoToGo construction. Here's an example I overheard in a Palo Alto restaurant 8/6/05: "I'm goin' out there and sleep in the tent." But Hockett's belief that the construction was recent in 1958 is just wrong; David Denison, at Manchester, has collected examples from roughly 30 years before that.
Another selective attention effect, which tends to accompany the Recency Illusion, is the Frequency Illusion: once you've noticed a phenomenon, you think it happens a whole lot, even "all the time". Your estimates of frequency are likely to be skewed by your noticing nearly every occurrence that comes past you. People who are reflective about language -- professional linguists, people who set themselves up as authorities on language, and ordinary people who are simply interested in language -- are especially prone to the Frequency Illusion.
Here at Stanford we have a group working on innovative uses of all, especially the quotative use, as in the song title "I'm like 'yeah' and she's all 'no'". The members of the group believed that quotative all was very common these days in the speech of the young, especially young women in California, and the undergraduates working on the project reported that they had friends who used it "all the time". But in fact, when the undergrads engage these friends in (lengthy) conversation, tape the conversations, transcribe them, and then extract occurrences of quotatives, the frequency of quotative all is very low (quotative like is really really big). There are several interpretations for this annoying finding, but we're inclined to think that part of it is the Frequency Illusion on our part.
Zwicky wasn't the first to notice this phenomenon; the name Baader-Meinhof Effect had been circulating on message boards since 1994, and is more widely recognized. This wasn't even the first time Zwicky had written about it;
he noticed his own sensitivity to a character in a book saying "and yet" despite the phrase only occurring three times in a novel. He has made a collection of posts on the Frequency Illusion, helpfully listed on his site.
He uploaded a short pamphlet
to the Stanford University website that helpfully summarizes the sub-types of the Frequency Illusion:
Why are many people – including, on occasion, linguists – inclined to systematic dogged
misapprehensions about variation in language (like the five below, from postings to the
Language Log over the past two years)? These illusions follow from psychological processes
and social practices, combined with bits of language ideology, and are facilitated by the fact that
hardly anyone has a panoptic view of language variation; we mostly have to think about it on the
basis of our personal experience.
(1.1) Recency Illusion: If you've noticed something only recently, you believe that it originated
recently. (Example: a widespread belief that the case selection in between you and I is a recent
innovation.)
(1.2) Antiquity Illusion: If you do something yourself, you believe that you always have, and
that people in general have done it for a long time. (Example: the idea that the whole nine yards
is a venerable idiom.)
(2.1) Out-Group Illusion: Things you view as novel, or simply ba d, are characteristic of groups
you don’t see yourself as belonging to. (Example: an Australian’s assertion that “double is” is
not found in Australia, but is probably an Irish thing.)
(2.2) In-Group Illusion: Things you view as characteristic of groups you see yourself as
belonging to are peculiar to those groups, not shared by outsiders. (Example: many
Pittsburghers’ belief that items like needs washed and redd up are unique to their city.)
(3) Frequency Illusion: Once you notice a phenomenon, you believe it happens a whole lot.
(Example: a widespread belief that quotative all occurs “all the time” in the speech of some
(young) people.)
One of the most humbling observations that Zwicky has made is that the Frequency Illusion can happen to anyone, even to professional linguists. The reality is that there are far too many things happening in language
for one to be able to keep track of. Even keeping up with published papers is a challenge, let alone running statistical models of every phrase that catches the ear. It is easy for us to be mislead as to how common something is, and our intuitive responses on who is doing it are often simply wrong.
That being said, these intuitive responses can be a good jumping off point. I often go into my Dialect Dissections with certain expectations about what I will find and which features will be the most salient, but almost every time the evidence takes me in a different direction from what I expected. That being said, without my initial intuition, I would not have even known where to look. When the Frequency Illusion is the beginning and the end, it can be harmful. But if we let it guide research, we can learn what is really going on - and then hopefully share with others to 'shatter' their own Frequency Illusion.
Although Zwicky has already discussed several examples of the Frequency Illusion in his writings, I'm going to
extend that analysis to some other areas.
Examples
One of the most noticeable examples of the Frequency Illusion is the discourse surrounding creaky voice, also known as glottal fry and vocal fry. Creaky voice is a kind of phonation that results in a noticeably 'croaky' or 'creaky' sound. It is an important phonemic mode in some languages, where presence and absence of creaky voice tells some words apart. But most of the attention paid to creaky voice isn't about its use in distinguishing words. Instead, it has focused on the supposed epidemic of creaky voice affecting college age girls in the United States.
Carrie Gillion has a great article discussing creaky voice. She mentions that creaky voice used to be associated with British men, up until an article was released that mentioned that college age women use creaky voice often. At this point, the association flipped and also took on an increasingly negative tone.
Gillon mentions that prejudice against young female speech is an important part of this. I would like to add
that this is an example of the Frequency Illusion, for I have found a surprising number of examples of creaky voice from before 2011 that nobody seems to have been bothered by.
An example of the old-fashioned association of creaky voice with British men can be found in "Courage the Cowardly Dog." The character "Naughty Fred" appears in a 2005 episode. He has an English accent, although he is played by a Canadian actor. What is curious is the amount of vocal fry that his actor applies. It is especially noticeable each time he says 'naughty.' This episode aired in 2005, before the hullabaloo about creaky voice. Perhaps his voice actor still associated creaky voice with English men. I haven't found any references or comments about the high amounts of creaky voice this character displays. The notion that creaky voice is a new phenomenon or only prevalent in young women thus seems to suffer from a mass example of the Frequency Illusion striking at a particular time.
"Cause me to be quite ~naughty~"
Creaky voice as an artistic choice has also been criticized heavily. On two different ends of the pop music spectrum, we have Britney Spears, who was hugely influential in popularizing the use of creaky voice, and on the other end we have indie and indie-aligned artists like Billie Eilish who also use creaky voice frequently. Both usages of creaky voice are subject to heavy criticism and attack - though perhaps not that heavy since both Britney Spears and Billie Eilish are successful singers who have sold millions of records.
Creaky voice as an artistic effect is not even new, although its increased prevalence may be. In the song "Can't Smile Without You," we hear Karen Carpenter use creaky voice to transition from the musical phrase "finding it hard even to talk" to "and I feel sad." Karen Carpenter is the poster child for that pure, 'clean' 70s style of singing, with few affectations and a nice dose of vibrato on sustained notes. It is surprising to hear her use creaky voice in much the same way Britney does, to demarcate different musical phrases. While her use is definitely very limited compared to 1990s+ artists', it damages the notion that creaky voice is a novelty.
"~I~ don't even talk to people I meet ~and I~ feel sad when you're sad"
We can continue finding examples of the Frequency Illusion. For instance, I highly suspect that some aspects of Indie Voice are subject to the Frequency Illusion. The musical style is very common, but the linguistic style is rarer. The diphthongization, which was the subject of a Buzzfeed article, is difficult to find consistently. My articles on Indie Voice collect a number of these examples. There are even quotations from people complaining about how 'these artists are saying dreyss' and how you 'have to add an i' to sing in this style. But many of the early examples are noticeably subtle. Indeed, I have had several commenters tell me that they cannot hear the supposed diphthongization in the early examples.
There is evidence that something similar to this diphthongization does happen in spoken speech, as reported by John Wells and in the scant two examples I found. But if this has been happening since 1980, the publication date of the John Wells book, why did people only start talking about it now? There are pre-2013 examples of this subtle diphthongization, but there are few online records of people specifically talking about the diphthongization. I even have had commenters tell me that they do something similar in their own speech and that they don't consider it a noticeable linguistic phenomenon. If this has been happening in speech and in song, why did people start paying attention?
The indie voice example does not have a clean resolution. Perhaps the Frequency Illusion caused people to associate otherwise uninteresting phonetic features specifically with the singing style. I don't think the Frequency Illusion is the whole story, but I would not be surprised if it weren't a part of this perception that 'indie voice is everywhere' when actual linguistic examples are not as easy to come by.
Conclusion
I once read a post on a message board where a man in his 50s was complaining about how 'young people' cannot speak English correctly. His example was the word 'tree', which he claimed young people pronounced 'chree.' It seems this man was unaware that this sort of affricative assimilation is common not just in English, but cross-linguistically.
He had likely heard this form many times in his life and never paid it any mind. But when it came from the mouth of someone he was suspicious of - a young person - his brain suddenly noticed it and not only registered it as a 'young person thing,' but started hearing it everywhere and taking it as proof that 'this is how all young people talk.' It was his subjective experience, but his conclusion was not based on any evidence.
We all need to be aware that our intuitions often lead us astray when it comes to linguistic phenomena, and that pop explanations can lead us astray. Our own feelings about a group (young people, young women, the Irish, Pittsburghers) can cause us to inaccurately attribute certain features as being unique to them and as also being newer than they seem. If we want to have an understanding of language variation that lines up with reality, then we need to as much as possible collect evidence to try and test these intuitions. We also need to be wary and skeptical of 'new' features without accompanying proof, especially if we are claiming some particular group is doing it.
I’ve been listening to Lingthusiasm episodes over again and hit upon the presupposition episode. If you haven’t heard it yet, you should check it out (or read the transcript if you’re not a fan of podcasts).
What’s a presupposition
A presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world that is taken for granted in an utterance. Presupposition is an important concept in pragmatics, semantics, and philosophy (a lot of the work that has been done on presupposition has actually been done by philosophers as opposed to linguists). We presuppose many things all the time, because actually having to state every single thing in a sentence that exists would take a long time.
“The sheep are grazing.”
This sentence presupposes that there are things, sheep, and that they are capable of doing an action, such as grazing. This seems obvious, but if you change this…
“The matriniax are grazing.”
This presupposes we know what a matriniax is. Do you know? I don’t know either. In this case, we would have benefitted from a prior description of what a matriniax is. As it stands, we can’t really understand this sentence except for that there is a thing, a matriniax, that there are many of them, and they are capable of grazing. The nature of matriniax is unknown to us.
There are plenty of words and grammatical situations that trigger presupposition. Wikipedia has a pretty good list.
As an example of the philosophical interest of presupposition, think about what it means for a presupposition to be false. The most famous example is “The King of France is bald.” There is no person alive right now who can be called “the king of france.” Does that mean that this sentence is false? But if this sentence is false, then that means that “the kind of france is not bald” must be true, and that sentence cannot be true because there is no king of France. Some philosophers say that a negative presupposition results in a statement without a truth value - a statement that is neither true nor false.
Using Presuppositions for Effect
One thing McCulloch mentions is presupposition in the Lizzie Bennet diaries, where Lizzie’s sister pretends not to have watched an episode of Lizzie’s diary. Lizzie asks, “you just want to know about Darcy’s letter, don’t you?” Darcy’s letter was mentioned earlier. Lizzie’s sister says “No I don’t!” which outs her as having watched Lizzie’s diary - there’s no way she would know about Darcy’s letter otherwise. Outed by presupposition.
This is a pretty popular technique in fiction. TV Tropes has a page dedicated to the trope, although they do not mention how presupposition plays into it. Presupposition in media can be used for dramatic effect for one character to verify knowledge by presupposing it.
Some additional examples: in the musical Legally Blonde, Elle is part of the defense team of Brooke Wyndham, who has been accused of murdering her husband to run away with her poolboy. Elle suspects that her poolboy is lying about having been amorously involved with Elle because she thinks he’s gay. Her colleague Emmett decides to prod him by asking him, “And your first name again is?” with the poolboy responding appropriately, and then asking “and your boyfriend’s name?” and the poolboy replies “Carlos,” shocking everyone. Emmett presupposes that the poolboy had a boyfriend, and the poolboy absentmindedly confirms his presupposition instead of challenging it. This reveal leads Carlos to show up and declare that the poolboy is indeed gay, and has never been involved with any woman.
In an actual courtroom, presuppositions can be dangerous. Presuppositions can be used to create loaded questions, such as “when did you stop smoking?" which presupposes that smoking - of a legal or illegal sort - must have taken place. The defendant, if they have never smoked before, must make the clarification: "I have never smoked."
Villains can also make use of presupposition. One of my favorite examples is from Sonic Adventure 2. Tails and Sonic were offering a fake Chaos Emerald to Dr. Eggman, who was trying to collect all 7 for nefarious purposes. However, Dr. Eggman imprisons Sonic as he's approaching, and he states, “You didn’t think you could fool me with that fake chaos emerald, could you?” Tails, believing he’s been caught, asks “how did you know that was fake?” Sonic tries to get Tails to stop, but it’s too late. Dr. Eggman replies, “because you just told me, fox boy!” Here presupposition is used to confirm information that one is not certain about - as in Legally Blonde where the poolboy could have been gay or European, Dr. Eggman knows that there is a fake emerald, but he wanted to confirm it was fake, likely to rub it in their faces.
Note: volume increases a lot in the second half of the video.
