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The process known as t-flapping or t-tapping, which results in such pronunciations as ˈæɾəm for atom and ˈmiːɾɪŋ for meeting is of course well-known in North American accents of English, and, I think, is becoming much more common in other accents. How many of you, I wonder, know of a similar home-grown British phenomenon that turns t into ɹ?
The pop singer and TV celeb Cilla Black, who comes from Liverpool, is well-known, in Britain at least, for the phrase “a lorra lorra laughs”. To my knowledge, the phenomenon occurs in Cheshire and Derbyshire as well as Liverpool, but I am not sure where else. I would be quite surprised if it didn’t occur in Staffordshire (Graham?). What environments it occurs in exactly I haven’t figured out. It certainly is more constrained than t-tapping. I can’t imagine it happening in atom and meeting for instance. Got a → ɡɒɹə seems fine to me, but I am dubious about got to undergoing the same transformation. And does it still happen a lot or is it dying out?
Any information gratefully received.
I think I was the first person to write about this phenomenon: Accents of English p. 370, 374 (vol. 2), where I call it the t-to-r rule. It’s certainly restricted to the environment of a preceding short vowel, and is usually but not always word-final. I imagine it’s lexically restricted, too, probably to high-frequency items.
LIVERPOOL
“Between vowels, the first of which is short, /t/ may be realised as [ɾ] through /t/-flapping (…). Alternatively, this alternation can be argued to arise from the application of the so-called T-to-R rule, whereby intervocalic /t/ is realised as a rhotic segment, which may be [ɾ] or [ɹ]. T-to-R cases in which /t/ is realised as [ɹ] are limited to certain lexical items such as ‘matter’, ‘what’, ‘but’ and ‘get’, but [ɾ] has much more relaxed lexical constraints on its distribution.”
‘English Accents and Dialects’, Hughes, Trudgill & Watt, 2012, pp.112-113.
Also see Clark & Watson (2011), Testing claims of a usage-based phonology with Liverpool English t-to-r. “English Languaga and Linguistics” 15(3): 523-547.
Certainly alive and well in Pontypridd, South Wales:
got to, got a, get a, what a, lot of, matter, forget it, let a, let her/him/it, not a, shut up, that I…
but not:
met a, sort of, fit a, hit a, set a, bought a, hotter, spotter, lit a, litter, nutter…
In respect of the dating of the earliest comments on the phenomenon of the weakening of intervocalic /t/ to [ɹ], it was well known to various nineteenth-century dialectologists. Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Grammar of 1905 at §205 had this comment: “The change of final t to r in in monosyllables with short stem-vowel occurs sporadically in most parts of Eng[land] when the next word begins with a vowel, as \ger əm\ get them [etc]. It occurs far more frequently in Yorkshire , Lancashire and the north Midlands than elsewhere”.
I was surrounded by it growing up in Cardiff and my impression is that I hear it occasionally but increasingly from various GB speakers among whom I’ve noted the BBC’s Hugh Pym and Lord Lamont. In Cardiff it was not entirely limited to following short vowels as has been pointed out by my fellow Cardiff originary Bev Collins eg “…by many in starting…” See ‘The Phonetics of Cardiff English’ by Collins and Mees in English in Wales (1990) ed. Nikolas Coupland.
PS My specimen of “unsophisticated” (aka basilectal) Cardiff English at p.6 in m.f. #121of 1964 contained the four items “get ‘im, take it off, straightaway & got to” where the intervocalic voiceless alveolar plosives which wd be expected in GB were represented as “either ɹ or ɾ “.
Hi John. The Merseyside t > ɹ environment is basically the one which is most conducive to t-voicing more generally, e.g. in SBE. Note that in Merseyside r varies between ɹ and the tap ɾ. So we can say that Merseyside (1) applies tapping to phrases like ‘lot of’, ‘get off’, etc. and (2) allows both underlying and derived “r” to vary between ɹ and ɾ.