What are the phonological features of the thing popularly called the American twang? What is a twang, formally described?
Posted Mar 22, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC
2013
There is no such thing as a 'twang, formally described'; it's a term only used in popular discussions of dialects and has no consistent phonological profile associated with it. There are a lot of dialects in the US, as well, and while maybe not all of them have been referred to by the word 'twang', it's equally impossible to characterise all American dialects, as they differ from each other so much that they lack almost any shared features that aren't also shared with the rest of English.
(Cf the word nasal, which, despite the fact that it actually does have a quite useful technical definition - albeit one about specific sounds rather than whole speech varieties - is still used popularly to describe dialects in so many ways that it also wholly lacks a consistent phonological profile in its popular use.)
14
A twang isn't a rising pitch at the end, maybe?
1†
We call that uptalk or upspeak. It's distinct from what would be considered a twang - although you could have both at the same time.
10
The dialects I've heard described with the word 'twang' don't have such an effect used commonly.
4
There's not really a formal description, because "twang" is a broad group of non-connected features.
It's like the term "accent". It's not precise in the slightest
7
It often refers to a high occurrence of diphthongs.
1
Some features of Southern US English come from older varieties of English, and in some cases these pronunciation changes that have happened elsewhere in the world including Britain are preserved in spelling. In the South a lot of people pronounce words like “bread” as “bray-udd” with two syllables because it approximates how it used to be said in Middle English.
-1
Middle English 'bread' was bre(e)d /bɾɛːd/, with largely the same vowel as modern General American English. Southern US English does have some notable retentions, but that's definitely an innovation.
2
Words like twang and drawl are not linguistic terms. They are often used to refer to accents more broadly, a Southern twang usually just refers to a Southern accent. When they're used more specifically they usually refer to vowel quality, either diphthongs or monophthongs particular to those accents.
They could refer to what is called TRAP breaking, the tendency to pronounce the vowel in the word trap, /æ/, as a diphthong, which is common in many General American varieties. Or the breaking of vowels in words like it or head. Drawl is usually used to refer to that latter case in the US, but not necessarily globally.
Or they could refer to a fire-far merger, most accents "break" the vowel in fire, [fajə(r)], but in some accents, it merges with the vowel in far instead, /fɑr/. Or other such variations.
Depending on where you are and how that quality is being used to mark out a specific community of speakers, the use of a term like twang might be narrower or broader.
I think a drawl is a pretty specific thing: the vowels are elongated, and the tempo slows at the end of each utterance.
That's the vowel breaking I mentioned, it's perceived as a slowing, a word like it becomes something like [ɪjət]. That's the most common interpretation in the States, but like I said, there's no technical definition, YMMV.
Twang usually refers to a nasal pronunciation of vowels, which is pretty uncommon in English overall, but happens in the midwestern USA.
Haha this is what I mean by non-technical, Midwestern US accents don't have nasal vowels (English in general nasalizes vowels before a nasal consonant, but this is common to most, maybe all, English dialects). What people are referring to when they say this is usually vowel breaking, especially of the TRAP vowel.