Develarization of Final Nasals: Going, Goin', Gonna
(For those of you who do not speak phonetics, velar nasals are the /ng/ sound, IPA [ŋ])
The English language has a strange relationship with velar nasals. Like most languages, we have them, and like most western IE languages, they do not generally appear at the beginnings of words. But we have assigned them a weird social significance. Lower prestige forms of English often change final velar nasals to alveolar nasals (and in writing change the velar nasal digraph /ng/ to /n'/). In addition, if one wanted to sound especially (even pretentiously) correct, one might separately pronounce the terminal /g/. For example, the word "going" could be pronounced three ways: standard [ɡowɪŋ], colloquial/low prestige [ɡowɪn], pretentious/high prestige [ɡoiŋɡ].
What this suggests is a correlation between the rendering of the velar nasal as a digraph and an interpretation of the two graphemes as different parts of the single phoneme. Thus, there appears to be a presumed positive correlation between number of sounds and amount of prestige.
Additionally of note is the specificity of this rule. It is only applied to the ends of present tense verbs and gerunds. So, while a phone might be ringin', in standard colloquial American English it will never rin'.
The English language has a strange relationship with velar nasals. Like most languages, we have them, and like most western IE languages, they do not generally appear at the beginnings of words. But we have assigned them a weird social significance. Lower prestige forms of English often change final velar nasals to alveolar nasals (and in writing change the velar nasal digraph /ng/ to /n'/). In addition, if one wanted to sound especially (even pretentiously) correct, one might separately pronounce the terminal /g/. For example, the word "going" could be pronounced three ways: standard [ɡowɪŋ], colloquial/low prestige [ɡowɪn], pretentious/high prestige [ɡoiŋɡ].
What this suggests is a correlation between the rendering of the velar nasal as a digraph and an interpretation of the two graphemes as different parts of the single phoneme. Thus, there appears to be a presumed positive correlation between number of sounds and amount of prestige.
Additionally of note is the specificity of this rule. It is only applied to the ends of present tense verbs and gerunds. So, while a phone might be ringin', in standard colloquial American English it will never rin'.
Labels: language
posted by Mephisto at 11:20 AM
1 Comments:
I think you're missing an obvious connection here. Low class to literacy to creative pronunciation. though conspicuous over pronunciation certainly could be a semi-conscious response.
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