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Here's a personal admission about off-putting (at least to my ears) regional dialects. I've been trying for at least two decades to rid myself of yer and fir in place of your and for. I've made great progress, but it still creeps in occasionally and gives me away as a southern Ohioan.
Oh my gosh, me too!! I hate hearing yer and fer come out of my mouth! I lived most of my life in central Indiana. I'm sure there are other Midwest pronunciations I've tried to get rid of, but I can't think of them now.
I don't hear it where I live in Colorado. But dialects evolve, yes. We muddle our ts in words like little and I'm sure someone somewhere in the past would have cringed at that, and certain British accents turn that into a glottal stop. So, nothing new under the sun..... one trend I hear on TV that really annoys me is vocal fry in young women in particular. A little bit of it I don't notice, but when pop singers even sing that way, just ugh! I can't stand the sound....
When I first moved from England to the US I ordered water with my meal, the waitress bought me vodka }:\ I've since learned to ask for wadder.
We were taught elocution at school, my grandmother wouldn't entertain us if we didn't speak properly.
People without training in linguistics often think the way they talk is different from the way they actually talk.
If all the people who say they "pronounce" intervocalic "t" listened to a recording of themselves they would likely understand the difference. For example, the consonant sound in the middle of the words "latter" and "ladder" is pronounced the same. It's called a flap d. The only way you can tell the difference is that the length of the preceding vowel (I'm not talking about the so-called Long A or Short A here) is longer before the voiced consonant in "ladder".
If you pronounce all the "t"s in a word the same way, with an aspiration the way you would at the beginning of a word, you're doing it wrong.
Glottalization of t's, especially after back vowels or consonants (as in "bottle" or "mountain"), has been going on for centuries and isn't going away.
A smart post! Thank God!
I am always amused by non-linguists and their "OMG...that's so annoying! Speak proper English!" diatribes. They have no clue how language works and they truly believe the myth of the "Standard American English"...
Linguistic snobs are hilariously dumb (and clueless).
It almost seems the linguistic snobs have never taken even a basic linguistics class, otherwise they'd know that speaking with a certain dialect doesn't make the things you're saying "wrong."
Do you lis-Ten to music or do you "lissen" to music?
Do you have a DahTer, or do you have a dauder? (daughter)
Regional speak/accents are what they are.
I'm more concerned about those kids whose parents don't get them speech therapy for their inability to pronounce the letter "r" correctly no matter where they live.
Not all grow out of it and it's really NOT cute to hear a 17 year old say, "Awe you coming to my pawty?"
And even worse when it's a 20-something +.
My 8 year old was playing with a 5th grader today at ASP (parents of 5th grader are good friends of ours, he's a sweet kid - the boys know each other well but haven't seen each other in a while) and my 8 year old said to me, after giving me the run-down on how much fun he had playing with "Joe" after so long, "Where does his accent come from?".
It has nothing to do with being a snob. There is a proper way to proununce words, and there is an improper way to pronunce words. Being wrong is not an "evolution" -- it is ignorance.
Really, Joe from Day-in?
Many Americans do not pronounce a "t" in the middle of the word.
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Linguistic snobs are hilariously dumb (and clueless).
