Whadda'yat?!

Most of us use this pieced together word everyday, and it is becoming increasingly more popular. While it is still mainly used in informal settings (as it isn't exactly "proper" English), it seems to be creeping into more and more situations. Now this isn't a hard word to come across, just walk pretty much anywhere and you'll hear it, but when I heard it at my dad's office the other day, it struck me as strange. Now, my dad doesn't work in your typical office or anything, it's much more casual than most. One of his employees walked in the other day, and exclaimed "Whadda'yat Paul?!" and my dad just went on like this was normal, and carried on a conversation with the man (I  have no idea what his name was), telling him what he had to do next. This was a fairly informal conversation taking place in what is typically thought to be a formal situation. The only other people present besides my dad and his employee were my mother and myself, who had dropped in to drop something off.

This word is a good, yet informal example of portmanteau morphology. This is a process found in most languages where two or more words are blended into one, and the meaning does not typically change drastically. The word "whadda'yat" takes four words ("what are you at" meaning "what are you doing?") and makes them one jumbled up word. Other examples of portmanteau morphology in English would incluse things such as smoke and fog put together to form "smog" and breakfast and lunch put together to form "brunch". While this is seen as a slang word, it seems to be making it's way more and more into our everyday lexicon, especially around Newfoundland. Also, the use of this word at the workplace like I seen in my fathers office, which is traditionally a very formal place shows the changes in our society, and how casual we are becoming with our speech in everyday situations, even when it may not be appropriate. These changes may eventually make it appropriate to say "whadda'yat" to your boss or your professor, as most of us now wouldn't do.

Scrawb vs Scratch

Some words are seen as being distinctively from Newfoundland, and the word "scrawb" is one of them. While I am not a big user of this word, many of my friends are. While sitting outside the library the other day with two friends, Sarah who has lived in Newfoundland her whole life, and Ryan who is originally from British Columbia, we took notice that Sarah had a huge scratch on her arm. We asked about what had happened, and she said "my stupid cat scrawbed me!" After this, Ryan just stopped and looked at her, then burst out laughing, saying "scrawbed? What kind of word is that?" Both of us never realized that this is a very localized word to Newfoundland, and that he never would have heard it before, but we later explained to him it meant the same thing as "scratch". The word was said in a very causal conversation involving only three of us. I'm sure other people could have heard what we were saying, although it didn't seem like anyone was listening, as there were many other groups sitting around us. And we also got some very weird looks when Ryan burst out laughing.

This is only one example of a word unique to Newfoundland English. Others would include things such as "narn" for none, "fousty" for something with a bad smell, and "buckle" as another word used for bend. Words such as these are what makes our language so different from others. While some of our words may sound funny (like scrawb did to my friend), the people from here who regularily use and hear them find them completely normal. Hopefully people will continue to use words such as these in an effort to keep the Newfoundland dialect so distinct from others, rather than conforming more to the standard, seemingly more accepted words that most people are using now.

So, which do you use more?

Yeahh

Most people don't like to criticize themselves, so it's seems to be much easier to pick out odd features of other people's than it would be with your own. During a conversation with a friend of mine in the UC one morning, right in the middle of talking about our weekend, how much school work we had to do and all that fun stuff, she began teasing me about how I say the word "yeah" while inhaling rather than exhaling (like we normally do to speak). I never even noticed how often I did this, but since that say I am extremely aware of it every time.

This got me thinking about how common this was, and it seems as though it happens in a lot of places, especially Newfoundland. This is a linguistic feature known as ingressive sound, meaning that sound is created by an inward flow of air, and occurs in three different types: 1) lingual ingressive
                         2) glottalic ingressive
                         3) pulmonic ingressive

The example of the inhaled "yeah" we are looking at here is a pulmonic ingressive, where the sound you hear is produced by an air flow created in the lungs. These are ususally used in statements where someone is agreeing to something. This is exactly where I use the inhaled "yeah" the most, and apparently I do this a lot (which I have now come to notice). After my friend teasing me about it however, I began to listen around me more for this feature, and one strange thing I noticed was it is much more common with girls rather than guys. I tried to think of more examples where i've heard this inhaled sound made, but the affirmative "yeah" is the only one I have ever heard myself or anyone else saying.

How often in the run of a day do you say "I'm just after doing that" or "I'm after telling him to stop that?" Usually, with the unique features of Newfoundland English, we use them more than we think. This is something we hear all the time around the province, and while it sounds normal to us, other people think it's completely nonsensical.

In a conversation with my father over the weekend, I made a joke about how i've been waiting for him to fix something for me for over two weeks now. He just stopped and looked at me and said, "I'm after telling you a million times to keep reminding me!" We just laughed it off (but I did get the thing fixed later that day!), and went on about our day. I often have this type of conversation with my dad, as does the rest of my family, as he tends to be a bit forgetful sometimes. Usually in a joking manner, or just some friendly reminder as I see him throughout the day.

 Like I said before, this sounds completely fine to us, and is a sentence structure that is common for Newfoundland. But really, the use of after in this sentence is completely unnecessary. In our dialect of English, we tend to avoid using the past participle of the verb to have. While no one can be completely sure why we still do this, we do know it originated from the Irish influences to language in Newfoundland. Most of the influence and comes from the towns of Waterford and Cork in Ireland, whose people settled here in very large numbers to work as fishermen in the early nineteenth century. In the traditional Irish language, they do not use the verb "to have" at all, but rather have another word which translates to "after." This translation must have stuck close to the Irish settlers in the area, and became a distinct feature of the Newfoundland dialect, as we still hear this today. This just goes to show how much Newfoundlanders have held on to their past, and which pieces of our heritage have become so important, even things in language. After so many years have passed, we are still using, and saying things the first people to come to our province brought here.

Let's Talk Intonation!

Intonation is defined as being the variations of pitch we use in everyday speech, but it is not used to distinguish between words. The most common example of intonation we all know is the rising of our pitch when posing a question. Alright, so now that you know what it is, let's talk about it!

I work in a fast food place, and we get all kinds of strange people come through in the run of a day. While working last night, I had to serve a man who spoke in nothing but rised intonations. Pretty much what this means is this man goes around talking like he's surprised all the time. The encounter I had with this man was fairly informal, as we just generally chatted while he waited for his food to be prepared, and only lasted for a period of around five minutes. There were three people total involved in the conversation, myself, the customer and another employee at the store (who found the way he spoke equally as strange as I did).

We all know, of course, that most of us do not talk in all rised intonations (unless we are actually surprised). For a normal declarative statement, most of us follow the regular 2-3-1 pattern of rises and falls for English, with one being low, two being middle and three being high. The other rate on the scale would be a four, which means a very high intonation. The pitch this man spoke in all the time rose from a three to a four, and this made him quite difficult to speak to. When someone does not change the pitch of their speech at all (whether it be all high or all low), we cannot pick up on the normal cues we are used to when speaking. For example, most of us know, as earlier stated, we rise our voices when posing a question to someone, therefore changing the pitch of our voice, typically at the end of the question. This phenomenon is commonly known as the "high rising terminal" or simply HRT, and is becoming increasingly common around the world. While most people speak like this when they are uncomfortable with the statement they are making, some people just have this as their normal speech. With this becoming more and more common, we may have to adjust the way we distinguish between different types of statements because we no longer have those unintentional cues we are all so used to hearing in our everyday speech. To me, this seemed like such an awkward conversation (seeing as he was almost yelling the whole time), and I had to pay much closer attention to what this man was saying just to pick up on simple things like if he was asking me a question or just saying a simple statement.

Are you Ready for Skewl?

Although this is not something I have encountered recently, it is always something my parents joke about when talking about when they were in high school and something I have always found very interesting. They are both from Marystown (on the Burin Peninsula), and apparently when they were growing up, everyone from there would be teased about their pronunciation of the word "school," and how it always came out as "skewl." 

See, the thing with being from such a small community as this is you need to find something to do, and apparently when my parents were growing up, it was making fun of the way people pronounced their words. People from Grand Bank made fun of those from Marystown, and people from Marystown would make fun of those from St. Lawrence and so on. So this made me think, why such a big deal about pronunciation?

The difference between the two pronunciations of the word "school" does not change the meaning, but lies more in the articulatory processes involved. The more standard way of saying "school" is a rounded vowel sound, and this is characterized by the way your lips round when pronouncing the word. Also, in the ending consonant, the tip of your tongue comes up just to touch the alveolar ridge (located just behind the top row of teeth). In what is said to be the Marystown pronunciation, "skewl," the lips still push forward and make more of a Q sound than an O. They also do not round quite so much, rather stay relatively flat together while pushed forward. You can also notice that when making that final consonant sound, which is similar in both pronunciations of the word, the tip of the tongue does not quite reach the alveolar ridge, but rests more on the top teeth.

As stated, these slight differences do not show a change in meaning like pronunciation would in some of the worlds other languages, but do show that there is clearly more than one dialect of Newfoundland English in our language. These variations are found all over the province, depending on your geographical location. All the places earlier listed are within one hour of each other, but all still have their own quirks displayed through their language, and are clearly strong enough to be noticed by people of other areas. This is what, I feel, makes our language so interesting. While we all have some traits of what people call typical "Newfinese" we also display things that are unique to our own home towns, giving us all that connection to where we came from. 

While living in Conception Bay South for the last twelve years, I have heard some weird traits about the language in the area. The most common one would have to be the saying "you drop your h in 'Olyrood and pick it up in H'avondale." The process of h dropping and adding is very common in Newfoundland, and has some roots in the history of the English language and its progression throughout time. 

What got me thinking about this phrase was over the weekend, when I ran into a friend of mine while running some errands around town. She has lived in Holyrood her entire life, and while she isn't someone I talk to often, I have always noticed this little quirk about her speech. No matter if it is in a formal conversation, like a presentation in a classroom, or something more casual like the encounter I experienced, she always has a tendency to drop the H from her words that begin with this consonant. Even in the five minutes or so I was chatting with her, she displayed this feature countless times.

H dropping and adding are example of the many phonological aspects of the English language. The first is described as being the omission of the initial h-sound in a word, and the other being the opposite. Many people add this phoneme to the beginning of words which are not spelled with it, or do not typically have it. While these two processes do not change the meaning of a word in any way and most people still fully understand what is meant, they just make them sound a little funny. These process of h-dropping and adding seem to carry their roots in the history of the English language. To begin, we will first look at h-dropping.

This is seen as being a cross between the new and old dialects of the English language, and a feature which is common in the Newfoundland dialect. Linguists often debate which words initially had a beginning h consonant and which ones picked up on it later, so it seems as though this is peoples way of holding on to a more old style of English. Everyone knows this language has undergone many changes, and almost seems as though it is a completely different language altogether (most of us would not be able to read pure old English), but some of it's features have stuck around in dropping the h consonant from words that did not have it in the beginning. 

On the opposite end, we have the process of h-adding. This is said to be a hyper correction of English, mostly found in areas which are common for h dropping. Maybe trying to make up for what they miss in other words? Not so much, as it is mostly a stylistic feature of the language, depending on the speaker of the utterance and what is being spoken. While this is not quite so historic as h-dropping, it is still a very common feature in the Newfoundland English variety.

The phrase I mentioned above are only two small places which show both of these features. We can hear this all over the province, as well in many other places in the world (h-dropping is apparently common in places like Serbia and Sweden). To me, this is very noteworthy because it shows the progression of the English language and how some people make steps to keep it back to it's older roots, especially in Newfoundland. So, next time you are out for a Sunday drive, head up the shore to Olyrood and H'avondale and talk to some of the locals, you may see more people than you think displaying this feature of language.