{"id":79,"date":"2023-07-31T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/?p=79"},"modified":"2023-07-31T10:08:16","modified_gmt":"2023-07-31T09:08:16","slug":"geordie-german","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/2023\/07\/31\/geordie-german\/","title":{"rendered":"Geordie German"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sounds like an amazing combo, right? It’s a reality for a friend of mine. A native German speaker raising two children in Newcastle, she noted that her older child – we’ll call her Viktoria – used to produce certain German words with a strikingly Geordie accent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before we kick off, a couple of notes on notation that follows. When I talk in this post about sounds, I won’t use the Roman alphabet to represent them (e.g. ‘k’), but I’ll be using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)<\/a>. I’ll put example sounds from the IPA in between slashes like this: \/k\/. So in the word kick<\/em>, there are two \/k\/ sounds: one spelled ‘k’, and one spelled ‘ck’. In reality, that second \/k\/ sound is often pronounced a little differently in spoken English because it’s at the end of the word<\/a>, – the last ‘kick’ of the \/k\/ isn’t fully released, so we might represent it like this: [k\u00a0\u031a]. Notice the brackets have changed: because I’m now representing a sound not in its ‘ideal’ form, but as it’s *actually* pronounced, I’m using square brackets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Geordie German!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a typical Tyneside English accent (that’s academic for Geordie), intervocalic (between-vowels) \/k\/ is often pronounced with glottal reinforcement – that is, at roughly the same time as a glottal stop [\u0294k].<\/a> A glottal stop occurs when the the glottis – the opening between the vocal folds – is completely closed, stopping airflow from the lungs. Glottal stops are pretty common in contemporary British English in place of final consonant \/t\/. That means words like ticket<\/em> are pronounced roughly like \/t\u026ak\u026at\/ or \/t\u026ak\u026a\u0294\/ in many British Englishes, but are pronounced more like [t\u026a\u0294k\u026a\u0294] in Geordie – it’s one of the most recognisable features of the dialect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A “workie ticket” is a classic piece of North East slang featuring two intervocalic \/k\/s…
Copyright: Mordue Brewery<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

So if you’re two-and-half year old Viktoria and learning both German and English in Newcastle, maybe it’s not surprising that German Socken<\/em> (socks) and Jacke<\/em> (coat), which also have an intervocalic \/k\/, morph from \/z\u0254kn\/ and \/jak\u0259\/ to [z\u0254\u0294kn] and [ja\u0294k\u0259]. It’s even more likely given that German-acquiring children can take a while to accurately acquire intervocalic \/k\/ compared with word-initial and word-final \/k\/<\/a>, and some even pronounce it further back in the mouth, albeit not as far as the glottis. As a bilingual learner, Viktoria will hear fewer examples of German intervocalic \/k\/ from only a couple of speakers, and will hear plenty of Tyneside intervocalic \/k\/ from her nursery carers, the general population, and probably even her nursery peers – intervocalic \/k\/ is acquired pretty early in (US) English<\/a> (there’s no work out there on intervocalic [\u0294k] in Tyneside English specifically). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Black
What do you get when you cross German, English, and a pair of socks…?
Copyright: GeogDesigns on<\/a> <\/a>RedBubble.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Two years down the road, Viktoria has gained a lot more experience of both German and English and has dropped [\u0294k] from her inventory of German sounds. However, her mother notes another feature of Tyneside English in Viktoria’s German which is hanging on more stubbornly: rising intonation outside of questions. This one could endure a wee while – bilingual children often only settle on different rhythmic patterns for each of their languages around age 11, as Whitworth shows for German-British English bilingual children growing up in West Yorkshire<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Postscript:<\/em><\/strong> It was *way* harder in writing this post to find the literature on English acquisition compared with German or bilingual literature. Why? Because the paper I eventually found on acquisition of intervocalic consonants in English doesn’t mention the word “English” in the title, abstract, keywords…in fact, *anywhere in the article*. So we can only infer that the language at issue is English because the children were recorded in a lab for work that included the author, and the author is at the University of Washington. So this is a good time to introduce the (ironically also born of the University of Washington) Bender rule: always name the language you’re working on<\/a>, because language =\/= English. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Bender, Emily M. 2019. The #BenderRule: On Naming the Languages We Study and Why It Matters. The Gradient (online)<\/a>, 14 Sep 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kehoe, Margaret M. and Conxita Lle\u00f3. 2002. Intervocalic consonants in the acquisition of German: onsets, codas or something else? Clinical linguistics and phonetics<\/em> 16(3), 169-182. DOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/02699200110112213<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stoel-Gammon, Carol. 2002. Intervocalic consonants in the speech of typically developing children: emergence and early use, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics<\/em> 16(3), 155-168. DOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/02699200110112204<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watt, Dominic and William Allen. 2003. Tyneside English. Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet: Illustrations of the IPA, 33(2), 267-271. DOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/S0025100303001397<\/a>. Click for online PDF<\/a>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitworth, Nicole. 2002. In Diane Nelson et al (eds), Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics<\/em> 9, 175-205. Click for online PDF.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sounds like an amazing combo, right? It’s a reality for a friend of mine. A native German speaker raising two children in Newcastle, she noted that her older child – we’ll call her Viktoria – used to produce certain German words with a strikingly Geordie accent. Before we kick off, a couple of notes on … Continue reading Geordie German<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4055,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-tidbits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4055"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}