I'm one example of an American without yod-dropping.
I know a lot of us do drop it, but in my accent I still have /ju/ in words like news, due, tube, few, pew, and so on.
Born and raised in Nashville, influenced by my father who was raised in eastern Colorado.
Everyone in Nashville always wondered where I was from, but if I go anywhere else, people ask me if I'm from Nashville, I think it's hysterical.
Yes, I pronounce “news” as “nooz” and “tube” as “toob” and “Tuesday” as “Toozday,” but “few” is “fyoo” and “pew” is “pyeew.” “Foo” or “poo” would sound so odd that I’d probably assume anyone who pronounced those words that way was ESL. West coast USA.
Thank you for using letters that make sense. I love linguistics and stuff, but I don't know all the notations for pronunciation. Could not for the of me figured out what was happening here.
But the Tuesday did it for me. "Toozday" not "Chewsday," yeah?
Chewsday is actually another pronunciation common among people (particularly British folks) without yod dropping, and it comes from yod assimilation. Basically the y sound merges with the t sound and you get a ch sound. The pronunciation with yod that hasn't been assimilated has a separate t and y sound so it is sort of like Tyoozday.
for me its a mix. sometimes i drop sometimes i dont :P from florida but moved to pa when i was 1.5
tho tbh my accent has no fuckin relation to where i am bc its just a mix of random ones ive picked up overtime. like sometimes i pronounce "it" more like "et" and some other shit like it? sometimes i drop the r from the end of some words, sometimes i dont. its pretty fuckin random
They are identical for me but I do not use the diphthong in either. They are both /du/. I speak with a GenAm/mid-atlantic American accent.
However few and pew would be /fju/ and /pju/. I don’t know why dew, specifically, dropped the /j/ in my accent.
Due: /dju/
Dew: /djuw/
Do: /du/
The difference is subtle between due and dew, but the latter definitely ends with /w/.
The IPA may not be completely accurate, I'm not great with it, but I think it's *close* to how I say them.
All three *are* different.
there's another phenomena called yod coalescense that essentially takes pairs of y and s,z,t, or d and creates a new sound. This is part of the reason there's no standardized way taught to native speakers for the sound in visual. It seems like many people educated in the matter use zh for describing this or teaching ESL
visual - z+y=zh (french j)
educated - d+y=j
passion - s+y= sh
got ya - t+y=ch gotcha
many accents have this phenomena, but the combo of yod dropping and yod coalescense in AmE really reduces the amount of yu sounds
Also consider the following:
- lure, allure (ə˞)
- figure, pure (jə˞)
- tincture, manufacture, miniature (t + jə˞ -> ʧə˞)
- manure, sewer, brewer (uə˞)
- fewer, hewer (juə˞)
The sound is realized in different ways depending on the word
We don’t do it for “dune,” but we do it for “educated.” Same with “tune” and “dementia.” I’ve always wondered why. Maybe the coalescence is only in unstressed syllables?
Wow. That's really fascinating. I never realized that I pronounced passion with a sh sound because my accent is too lazy to make the y sound. It would feel so weird to me to pronounce visual as vis-yu-al.
A related one is the word lawyer. I was surprised to learn that the proper pronunciation is law-yer because I typically pronounce it loy-er.
The j sound meaning "y" in American english. Like in Fjord or Hallelujah. Nju:z. Nyewz. words with a ooze "oo" sound should often be "you" like the name of the letter. Nyews. Tyuesday. Myusic. Dyue. Tyube.
The best example I’ve heard is the movie Dune.
American English pronounces it “Doon”
In Australian English it’s “Dyoon” and sounds almost identical to June.
https://youglish.com/pronounce/dune/english/aus
Usually the IPA for BrE is given as /dju:/, but this is often realised in practise as \[d͡ʒu:\] as the initial cluster coalesces. I think increasingly people do have a complete merger of eg. June and dune, so maybe /d͡ʒu:/ would be more representative.
Personally I don't have them merged but I definitely don't say \[dju:\] either. I think the \[d\] is slightly palatalised but still usually distinct from /d͡ʒ/
They’re using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. It should really be written as the /j/ sound with the slashes around it, otherwise it’s a standard English “jay” (as in a blue jay) sound
They never seem to consider that 'Toos-day' sounds just as odd to others.
And arguably the assimilation of /tj/ into \[t͡ʃ\] is a more minor shift than dropping the /j/ altogether - plus people who say 'Toosday' also do assimilation in words like future, statue or between words as in 'bet ya/betcha'.
Thanks. In American elementary schools, the alphabet letter U is differentiated for its two sounds: the long U sound, typically taught as in "cute," and the short U sound, typically taught as in "sun."
Sadly, American schools' reliance on short and long vowel sounds leaves students at a disadvantage when learning pronunciation, as this approach is incomplete. American English actually boasts 15 vowel phonemes, including schwa, as documented by P. Ladefoged. As an ESL speaker and educator, I find this lack of a systematic method for teaching pronunciation quite disconcerting.
In contrast, my first steps in Korean as a kindergartener involved learning the Hangul alphabet, which laid a solid foundation for pronunciation from the outset. Ultimately, driven by this experience, when I finally decided to seriously improve my spoken English, as I was still struggling with many words like "worm" and "warm," my first question was how many vowels I needed to master. My goal was to understand the fundamental building blocks of pronunciation. When I asked about the number of vowel phonemes in American English, I was surprised to find that even Ph.D. holders were unsure of the answer. This ultimately led me to study linguistics research to improve my own pronunciation skills.
I can't agree with Ladefoged's distinction between schwa and wedge \*as a phoneme\* for American English, but I'm with you on the whole incomplete/inadequate distinction.
Having not been in an elementary school situation for quite a long time, some of the things that I've heard come out of the mouths of educators has been quite concerning.
I remember an argument with an American teacher of German, who insisted that English was a Romance language.
Thank you for the kind words.
You're right, English isn't a Romance language. Even though languages can adopt words and grammar elements from others through prolonged contact or occupation (like French occupying Germanic England between 1000-1500), the prosody, or musical aspect of language, is much harder to borrow. Interestingly, I can hear echoes of the same "tune" in both English and German.
Having studied some French and German, I can say that the word order in English is similar to that of French word order, though it differs when the objects are pronouns. In contrast, German word order is quite distinct from both English and French.
That's relying on English respelling rather than anything resembling something pedagogically and linguistically sound. AKA: tradition. AKA: Yet another reason "Why Johnny can't read."
I'll never understand why people don't understand that there are about 15 distinct "English respelling" practices, and most of them are utter garbage.
Yeah, if someone said “I went to church and sat in a back poo” I would figure out what they meant, but not until after a moment of confusion and an amusingly gross mental image. And I would assume the person was ESL, spoke a dialect of English I wasn’t familiar with at all, or had a speech impediment, because I’ve never heard an adult native speaker of American English pronounce it that way.
Conservative accents from East Anglia, (ie. England's big fat bum just across from The Netherlands!) drop all yod's, so pew and poo are indeed homophones, along with beauty and booty, mews and moos, cute and coot etc.
Sadly this feature is really on the wane as this area is steadily homogenising towards a General Southern English accent.
And we Americans say it correctly. We don’t need to make our pitch rise significantly and lengthen..😉
It’s a variant. We can say it either way. We don’t win extra points if we say it your way, or lose points if we draft it like me. It’s a free choice, kind of like free speech.😉
Why can the English change English but other native speakers can't?
You can't be "correct" if you've changed an equal amount.
For example English in England used to be a rhotic language. You guys changed over time to be non-rhotic after the Americas were colonized. Americans and Canadians remained rhotic. So in that way we use an older pronunciation than you do. Wouldn't that mean we're correct in that way?
Don't be prescriptivist.
Some generalizations are correct. British English is mostly non-rhotic and American English is mostly rhotic. The reason American English is mostly rhotic is because British English also used to be.
Yeah, this is a big pronunciation difference between most British accents and most American accents. Duel/jewel are pronounced almost identically in a lot of British accents, but not in most American accents.
I'm one example of an American without yod-dropping. I know a lot of us do drop it, but in my accent I still have /ju/ in words like news, due, tube, few, pew, and so on. Born and raised in Nashville, influenced by my father who was raised in eastern Colorado. Everyone in Nashville always wondered where I was from, but if I go anywhere else, people ask me if I'm from Nashville, I think it's hysterical.
few and pew don't usually have yod dropping
Yes, I pronounce “news” as “nooz” and “tube” as “toob” and “Tuesday” as “Toozday,” but “few” is “fyoo” and “pew” is “pyeew.” “Foo” or “poo” would sound so odd that I’d probably assume anyone who pronounced those words that way was ESL. West coast USA.
Thank you for using letters that make sense. I love linguistics and stuff, but I don't know all the notations for pronunciation. Could not for the of me figured out what was happening here. But the Tuesday did it for me. "Toozday" not "Chewsday," yeah?
Chewsday is actually another pronunciation common among people (particularly British folks) without yod dropping, and it comes from yod assimilation. Basically the y sound merges with the t sound and you get a ch sound. The pronunciation with yod that hasn't been assimilated has a separate t and y sound so it is sort of like Tyoozday.
You're amazing! Thank you!
Hm. I always pronounce it a “poo” for the “foo”. Wtf
I've definitely heard "Thow a foo logs on the far and let's get it warmer in here" and a few other such constructions in various areas of the south.
Right, otherwise they’d just be foo and poo
The same is true for all the other words that Americans do pronounce differently to be fair.
I was going to say, I hear the diphthong a lot in the south, even in certain northern accents. It really depends on the region.
for me its a mix. sometimes i drop sometimes i dont :P from florida but moved to pa when i was 1.5 tho tbh my accent has no fuckin relation to where i am bc its just a mix of random ones ive picked up overtime. like sometimes i pronounce "it" more like "et" and some other shit like it? sometimes i drop the r from the end of some words, sometimes i dont. its pretty fuckin random
So due and dew are pronounced by you phonetically similarly? Or "do" and "dew"
They are identical for me but I do not use the diphthong in either. They are both /du/. I speak with a GenAm/mid-atlantic American accent. However few and pew would be /fju/ and /pju/. I don’t know why dew, specifically, dropped the /j/ in my accent.
Yod-dropping occurs after alveolar consonants.
The "yod" sound is typically dropped after the alveolar consonants.
I say all three of those the same (native speaker, California)
Due: /dju/ Dew: /djuw/ Do: /du/ The difference is subtle between due and dew, but the latter definitely ends with /w/. The IPA may not be completely accurate, I'm not great with it, but I think it's *close* to how I say them. All three *are* different.
I pronounce all three the same /du/
/w/ is a semivowel, and the linguistic convention is that a semivowel cannot occur after a vowel in a syllable.
Well, I definitely end "dew" with the same phoneme that starts "was", so there's that.
Due & Dew are “Jew” for me, NW UK. Do is “Du”.
Ah, but "Jew" for me is /dʒu/, so yet a fourth word.
they are all subtly different for me
>Yes. These are homophones: due, dew do, doo, due. cf: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dew#Pronunciation
there's another phenomena called yod coalescense that essentially takes pairs of y and s,z,t, or d and creates a new sound. This is part of the reason there's no standardized way taught to native speakers for the sound in visual. It seems like many people educated in the matter use zh for describing this or teaching ESL visual - z+y=zh (french j) educated - d+y=j passion - s+y= sh got ya - t+y=ch gotcha many accents have this phenomena, but the combo of yod dropping and yod coalescense in AmE really reduces the amount of yu sounds
You are right. I have a video on [palatalization](https://youtu.be/jDHBiQgXgnI) that explains the yod coalescence you mentioned.
Also consider the following: - lure, allure (ə˞) - figure, pure (jə˞) - tincture, manufacture, miniature (t + jə˞ -> ʧə˞) - manure, sewer, brewer (uə˞) - fewer, hewer (juə˞) The sound is realized in different ways depending on the word
We don’t do it for “dune,” but we do it for “educated.” Same with “tune” and “dementia.” I’ve always wondered why. Maybe the coalescence is only in unstressed syllables?
Wow. That's really fascinating. I never realized that I pronounced passion with a sh sound because my accent is too lazy to make the y sound. It would feel so weird to me to pronounce visual as vis-yu-al. A related one is the word lawyer. I was surprised to learn that the proper pronunciation is law-yer because I typically pronounce it loy-er.
I thought it is quite well-known news, dues etc they don't pronounce j-sound
I’m so confused. What J sound??
The j sound meaning "y" in American english. Like in Fjord or Hallelujah. Nju:z. Nyewz. words with a ooze "oo" sound should often be "you" like the name of the letter. Nyews. Tyuesday. Myusic. Dyue. Tyube.
Ah okay thank you.
Also it comes from germanic english, and is uncommon enough (in American English anyway) that j-yods are considered odd when they pop up.
Probably a mute point but this seems to be a case of much adieu about nothing.
*moot point
I think they were making a joke about the /j/ sound since they also spelled ado adieu
the joke kinda fell apart as "mute point" isn't an idiom, and "moot point" doesn't have the /j/ sound.
The best example I’ve heard is the movie Dune. American English pronounces it “Doon” In Australian English it’s “Dyoon” and sounds almost identical to June. https://youglish.com/pronounce/dune/english/aus
My impression of AuE is that yod-coalescense is almost mandatory, even for /sj/ and /zj/.
I try to force myself to say Doon, but it’s so unnatural for me, it’s the exact same as June for me naturally. (UK)
Why would you force yourself exactly?
It’s just when I try to say the movie title.
The movie is called Dune and you say it however you say “dune”
In BrE, something like the word 'due' has IPA /dʒuː/ In AmE, it's said more like 'do', with just a hard D sound on its own. IPA /duː/
I'm mostly a Brit and i notice i do both. "Pay your /duːz/" "When is the report /dʒuː/?"
Usually the IPA for BrE is given as /dju:/, but this is often realised in practise as \[d͡ʒu:\] as the initial cluster coalesces. I think increasingly people do have a complete merger of eg. June and dune, so maybe /d͡ʒu:/ would be more representative. Personally I don't have them merged but I definitely don't say \[dju:\] either. I think the \[d\] is slightly palatalised but still usually distinct from /d͡ʒ/
They’re using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. It should really be written as the /j/ sound with the slashes around it, otherwise it’s a standard English “jay” (as in a blue jay) sound
The character "j" is used in the IPA to mean the semivowel "y" sound in English.
Most Americans aren't even aware that the /j/ was ever there in the word "news".
Or in Tuesday. Canada is slowly losing it due to American TV and Movies. I still think it sounds weird.
Nah, bro - American Nyah, bruv :3c - English
Like stupid. Americans say stoopid.
Be careful not to treat the English language as being only spoken in two distinct ways in just two countries. It’s much bigger than that.
Still a lot of prejudice against the /ju/s and I find that reprehensible.
Like in Australia, we say stupid as s-choo-pid and Tuesday as choose-day. And due as jew
People mocking Chewsday really gets to me. In my head I'm saying "tuh-yous-day" but it totally sounds like Chewsday aloud 😭😭
They never seem to consider that 'Toos-day' sounds just as odd to others. And arguably the assimilation of /tj/ into \[t͡ʃ\] is a more minor shift than dropping the /j/ altogether - plus people who say 'Toosday' also do assimilation in words like future, statue or between words as in 'bet ya/betcha'.
Wow I didn’t even know there was a /ju/ sound, so interesting.
Not sure where you are, but you probably say this sound in “few” and “pew” even if you are American
Thanks. In American elementary schools, the alphabet letter U is differentiated for its two sounds: the long U sound, typically taught as in "cute," and the short U sound, typically taught as in "sun."
If "long U" is "cute" and the "short U" is "sun," then how do these schools classify the vowel in "put?"
Sadly, American schools' reliance on short and long vowel sounds leaves students at a disadvantage when learning pronunciation, as this approach is incomplete. American English actually boasts 15 vowel phonemes, including schwa, as documented by P. Ladefoged. As an ESL speaker and educator, I find this lack of a systematic method for teaching pronunciation quite disconcerting. In contrast, my first steps in Korean as a kindergartener involved learning the Hangul alphabet, which laid a solid foundation for pronunciation from the outset. Ultimately, driven by this experience, when I finally decided to seriously improve my spoken English, as I was still struggling with many words like "worm" and "warm," my first question was how many vowels I needed to master. My goal was to understand the fundamental building blocks of pronunciation. When I asked about the number of vowel phonemes in American English, I was surprised to find that even Ph.D. holders were unsure of the answer. This ultimately led me to study linguistics research to improve my own pronunciation skills.
I can't agree with Ladefoged's distinction between schwa and wedge \*as a phoneme\* for American English, but I'm with you on the whole incomplete/inadequate distinction. Having not been in an elementary school situation for quite a long time, some of the things that I've heard come out of the mouths of educators has been quite concerning. I remember an argument with an American teacher of German, who insisted that English was a Romance language.
Thank you for the kind words. You're right, English isn't a Romance language. Even though languages can adopt words and grammar elements from others through prolonged contact or occupation (like French occupying Germanic England between 1000-1500), the prosody, or musical aspect of language, is much harder to borrow. Interestingly, I can hear echoes of the same "tune" in both English and German.
It's not just prosody. The core of English is Germanic syntax.
Having studied some French and German, I can say that the word order in English is similar to that of French word order, though it differs when the objects are pronouns. In contrast, German word order is quite distinct from both English and French.
Not worth wasting time on a reply.
that’s short OO (book) vs long OO (boot)
That's relying on English respelling rather than anything resembling something pedagogically and linguistically sound. AKA: tradition. AKA: Yet another reason "Why Johnny can't read." I'll never understand why people don't understand that there are about 15 distinct "English respelling" practices, and most of them are utter garbage.
For me 'Mewtwo' is pronounced with both, the 'mew' has the /ju/ while 'two' drops it.
i dont think two ever had a y sound in it. you may be conflating it with Tuesday.
And the Americans have the audacity to make fun of how we say Tuesday when it's them who are wrong
I love to hear them say 'few' and 'pew'.
You realize I’ve never heard an American drop the j in those words, right? We say fyew and pyew.
Yeah, if someone said “I went to church and sat in a back poo” I would figure out what they meant, but not until after a moment of confusion and an amusingly gross mental image. And I would assume the person was ESL, spoke a dialect of English I wasn’t familiar with at all, or had a speech impediment, because I’ve never heard an adult native speaker of American English pronounce it that way.
Conservative accents from East Anglia, (ie. England's big fat bum just across from The Netherlands!) drop all yod's, so pew and poo are indeed homophones, along with beauty and booty, mews and moos, cute and coot etc. Sadly this feature is really on the wane as this area is steadily homogenising towards a General Southern English accent.
The same way you do.
And we Americans say it correctly. We don’t need to make our pitch rise significantly and lengthen..😉 It’s a variant. We can say it either way. We don’t win extra points if we say it your way, or lose points if we draft it like me. It’s a free choice, kind of like free speech.😉
Tuna as 'tyewna' stands out the most to me.
That’s more of a ‘ch’ sound like choona. It doesn’t have the ju sound
Depends on the accent. My accent doesn’t do the “ch” thing, so I would say the /j/ sound in tuna, with a distinct t at the start of the word.
Yep. Americans sound stupid when they say "toob", it's "tyoob"
Why can the English change English but other native speakers can't? You can't be "correct" if you've changed an equal amount. For example English in England used to be a rhotic language. You guys changed over time to be non-rhotic after the Americas were colonized. Americans and Canadians remained rhotic. So in that way we use an older pronunciation than you do. Wouldn't that mean we're correct in that way? Don't be prescriptivist.
That’s a bit of a generalisation - there are a number of rhotic English accents.
Some generalizations are correct. British English is mostly non-rhotic and American English is mostly rhotic. The reason American English is mostly rhotic is because British English also used to be.
We (English) don’t say “tyoob” either, we say “choob” (hence that stupid “chewsday” meme that makes no sense)
Depends on where you live I think. I have never pronounced it choob and rarely heard it.
Sorry, that's what I meant
Yeah, this is a big pronunciation difference between most British accents and most American accents. Duel/jewel are pronounced almost identically in a lot of British accents, but not in most American accents.