Is there a name for this little quirk of speech?

January 4, 2018 8:25 PM

Is there a name for this quirk of speech where some people (US) pronounce words such as "button" and "mitten" as "BUD-in" and "MID-in"?

Kitten - "KID-in"
Smitten - "SMID-in"

etc.

It would probably help my explanation of this if I knew what to call the little "catch" in the T sounds of kitten and mitten for most people I've ever heard.

Regional influence doesn't seem to play a role.

I have a couple of friends who use this pronunciation and I actually find it quite endearing, just wondering if there's an "official" name for it.

posted by clseace to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

T-glottalization.
posted by praemunire at 8:28 PM on January 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

This is a known Michigan thing. I had to break myself of it.
posted by k8t at 8:28 PM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yep! It’s called a glottal stop.
posted by bq at 8:32 PM on January 4, 2018

Response by poster: Isn't t-glottalization the usual way of pronouncing "button" (kind of like BUH-in)?
posted by clseace at 8:46 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It would probably help my explanation of this if I knew what to call the little "catch" in the T sounds of kitten and mitten for most people I've ever heard.

That’s T-glottalization.

Is there a name for this quirk of speech where some people (US) pronounce words such as "button" and "mitten" as "BUD-in" and "MID-in"?

That’s flapping.
posted by roosterboy at 8:46 PM on January 4, 2018 [14 favorites]

You could have

Since you described it a "catch," you might be describing a glottal stop. This is the sound in the middle of the word "uh-oh." In some varieties of English, the "t" sound is turned into a glottal stop in the words "button," "mitten," ... (mostly before syllabic nasals but it depends on the variety and the speaker).

But you spelled it with a "D" and your comment makes it sound like t-glottalization is how you pronounce these words. So you might be talking about flapping. In some varieties of English, the "t" sound is turned into a flap sometimes (most often between vowels). Instead of forming a complete closure for a "t" or a "d", the tongue strikes the roof of the mouth quickly. This makes the word "writer" sound a lot like "rider."
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:55 PM on January 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

It is, as mentioned above, a particularly noticeable feature of upper Midwest regional accents, but standard American English tends to voice the medial alveolar stop.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 9:22 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's also very much a Northern California thing that baffles me with the kids these days. Here, though, it's more like Ki[d]-in and Mi[d]-in, where that hard consonant in the middle of the word is completely elided and replaced by the glottal stop.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:56 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

My So-Cal woworkers do this all the time, it's so cute.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:21 PM on January 4, 2018

Huh. I just said all of these words and had different pronunciations for a central double t depending on the sounds preceding and following it. So kitten and mitten and button were more like how mudpuppie described them, with a glottal stop (of note, I've lived in Northern California for 8 years, but did not grow up here), but butter is flapped. Pretty much any word that doesn't end in a nasal but has that double t I pronounce as a flap (eg little, gutted), but with the nasal on the end, it turns into a glottal stop. However, if the word ends in a nasal but the central alveolar consonant is voiced (ie hidden), I pronounce it with the flap. Anyone else notice this in their own dialect? Or something else interesting?
posted by Illuminated Clocks at 12:55 AM on January 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

Illuminated Clocks, what you're describing is the most common pattern in the US. (And well-spotted on the details! That's, yeah, exactly how it works!)

The big picture here looks like this:

1. In most American accents, like the one Illuminated Clocks has, /t/ is glottalized before /n/,* but flapped before vowels.
2. In some British accents, /t/ is glottalized before /n/ and just left alone before vowels.
3. In other British accents, /t/ is glottalized both places.
4. In a few American accents like the one the OP is asking about, /t/ is flapped both places.

*Words like "button" are written with a vowel before the "n", but if you think about pronunciation, there's no vowel there: you don't pronounce it "butt ton," you pronounce it more like "butt nnnnn." So the /t/ counts as coming right before the /n/ in terms of sound, even though in writing there's letters in between. When people say English spelling makes no sense, this is the sort of thing they're talking about. :)
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:58 AM on January 5, 2018 [11 favorites]

I have noticed this also with words ending in -ing. A co-worker has a tendency to say cook-en instead of cooking and do-en instead of doing. Just flies all over me. We were on a teleconference with a computer company recently and the caller kept telling us to click the butt-en on the computer screen. Many an eyeroll from the older staff I can tell you.
posted by PJMoore at 10:05 AM on January 5, 2018

Also seen in an English/European DJ fake American kind of voice, e.g. "I do a lot of work for char-i-dee".
posted by w0mbat at 7:15 PM on January 5, 2018