Mind your language | 30 September 2006

A reader (whose name I would be able to tell you if my husband had not put her letter in the recycling skip, along with the television licence demand and that leaflet from the Post Office about the confusing new postal rates) asks if people are not over-pronouncing words such as little.

It is not easy to discuss pronunciation without using a phonetic transcription, and that is generally unfamiliar. But the usual objection to the pronunciation of little, bottle or bitten is the substitution of a glottal stop for the ‘t’ sound. This is often regarded as lazy, though it is just as energetic to make a glottal stop as to use a ‘t’

The disapproval of the glottal stop is chiefly motivated by social considerations — dislike of many of the people who employ it. Similarly there was a feeling of dislike for Mr Michael Howard’s very strange way of pronouncing people. This was widely held to be a Welsh trait. The trouble was not the ‘p’ but the ‘l’, and a phonetician on the BBC demonstrated that this derived not from Cambrian but from Slavonic influences.

An even less popular method of pronouncing little combines the ‘darkening’ of the ‘l’ and the insertion before it of a diphthong similar to that in owl. Accompanying it is a descending screech of intonation. All very c2c.

The vowel before the final ‘l’ of little is represented in the Oxford English Dictionary by an ‘e’ upside down, in the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. This indeterminate vowel is sometimes known as a shwa, after the sound present in Hebrew. With little, the OED put the shwa in brackets to signify that the succeeding ‘l’ may be syllabic — standing on its own without a preceding vowel.