Hard Attack: How English is getting more "choppy"

[@cassinipanini]

one of my favorite things about linguistics is the sudden realization that everything you've ever known about your own speech patterns is called into question. its the most friendly of all existential crises 🤣

[@DodderingOldMan]

Ha, yes, well said! It's like, 'Do I speak like this? Why do I speak like this? *How* do I speak like this? Why have I never thought about how and why I speak like this? How do I make my vocal cords do that? Now I've started thinking about how I speak, will I ever be able to speak normally again!?"

[@rakkatytam]

​​@@DodderingOldMan You're about to stumble upon the Dialectics of Nature, I envy you

[@bigguy7353]

If you see it as an existential crisis, I suppose. It's not all that serious.

[@patrickcrabb6212]

Yeah, I came in here wondering what this was and now I'm leaving knowing that as a native English speaker I almost never use this hard attack. Everything I say is more or less connected. Or maybe I do and I can't really hear it because I'm a low bass voice, who knows.

[@the-core-experience]

@@DodderingOldMan After that, you would resort to coding to infallibly record your own distinct accent and recreate it perfectly using computer at any time. Except that you will again find some video on the internet and soon question the grammars of programming languages, and alas, even math itself.

[@KTSTHofficial]

My German teacher once said you spend your entire life learning your native language. It's been fifteen years and those words still ring true for me.

[@minibuns5397]

Nah you stop naturally unless there is emphasis for extended vocabulary and grammar by academics… in reality we only need to use a few key commands or statements over and over. Computers do it all the time and look at how successful they are becoming these days!

[@artugert]

You CAN spend a lifetime learning more about one specific language (native or otherwise), but that doesn’t mean most people do. Unless you’re referring to just occasionally learning a new word. I suppose most people at least learn a new word every month or so, and new words are also being created all the time.

[@manboy4720]

usually screaming and intense eyebrow movements can get across a message well enough.

[@ArCher11-iq9co]

You should know that when "scholars" or "academics" do this, they are trying to subvert and demoralise your culture/people. Who wants to be told your language doesnt make sense and is confusing? Who likes to be told your language is redundant in the face of more general and accessible languages? Nobody. The existential crisis is to demoralise and hurt you, make you feel unintelligent or part of a people who are being replaced.

[@whiskeyvictor5703]

As a professional Linguist, I always tell people (to their stubborn disbelief) that one can begin a language, but it's nearly impossible to finish learning about it. It's humbling, really.

[@smlein7278]

This feels like a college course for free and incredibly well produced

[@Volkbrecht]

You just gotta love the internet. Today it's this, tomorrow you learn how to fix your washing machine, and the day after you refresh that basic knowledge in statistics that you took in college years ago. For free and without even having to leave your home. The world has become so much more amazing since I was born into it, and that was just a few decades ago.

[@tj-co9go]

Damn you have bad college courses

[@asparagusnoodle]

@@tj-co9go have you been to a college before? a lecture is usually not even this informationally dense; course material is typically almost all readings and other secondary media.

[@roachies4242]

@@Volkbrechtme when I hit the blunt 😊

[@inejunta6569]

Wait, casual speech exaggerated is slurred, maybe contrast association made articulate its own thing so people lean into it to dissociate from people like that. Maybe to sound more educated. But what's funny is I study in a group of premed students (as a lowly 30 year old highschool upgrader) and they are very casual. It's like the insecurity of being smart enough went away when they achieved a certain level of schooling. Prob biased and wrong, But teenagers do get dismissed... But if your a male you grow out of people dismissing you... When your a ladie, what if being treated like a teenager never really ends. Would this make you try to be articulate and trying to gain credibility or is that a leap. But it might be a phase you get to grow out of as a teen, but something that sticks around to compensate, especially if you are in a traditional role and you're not secure about it...like people that stay home to take care of kids. There has to be demographics that get more out of sounding this way. But on the other hand, idk. Something's not hitting the mark with all that. I think that's coming from a healthy dose of current KZbin politics. And like always there's more to it

[@smasome]

I'm a 72 year old American. My mother was highly educated, insisting that all well bred women know Latin. Thus, one summer she taught me the first semester from her own lesson book.. In 2015, she died at almost 103. You have no idea how I long to watch this presentation with her, discussing it in minute detail. Thank you for rekindling wonderful memories, along with the realization that Mother is the only person I can think of who would have as much fascination with this topic as I do.

[@8pija22]

I’m so sorry for your loss, I’m grateful you shared this. She sounds like she was a wonderful woman.

[@ashgonza92]

"well bred" 🥴🥴

[@alandeutsch9987]

Didn't know "bred" could be used in that way. Language has surely changed since your younger times

[@ttt5020]

@@alandeutsch9987American Eugenics was in full swing from 1880-1940s; sounds like the mother was born right in the middle of that. Jarring to hear for us, but it’s interesting that the phrase back then was used in place of ‘proper’ or ‘high class’

[@ahmedshaharyarejaz9886]

Thankyou for sharing your wonderful memory with us.

[@seccommasada]

I have an audio processing disorder, it didn't occur to me until watching this that I have a far easier time understanding speech using large amounts of hard attack whereas lack thereof usually results in me having to ask the speaker to repeat themselves several times before my brain can comprehend what is being said. Fascinating!

[@Adam-kn3tv]

Oh wow, I didn't realize this, but me too! I was diagnosed with an audio processing disorder a couple of years ago in conjunction with autism.

[@erifetim]

Now I wonder if people with an audio processing disorder don't have such a big problem when their native language uses a lot of glottal stops compared to ones that don't

[@FlynnAlek]

DUDE ME TOO

[@BlackDragon-tf6rv]

I have this issue when listening to songs. Not hearing hard attack on some words, makes me completly unaware of what's being said. But i 100% understand normal speech

[@wessyde9476]

Bro same I get tired of talking bc my voice is jarring in my own ears with the added vocal fry on top of hard attack "loudness" so I'm like Tripple prone to selective mutism

[@eypandabear7483]

As a German, I had to learn about the glottal stop in other languages to realise it even existed as a sound in its own right. Its implicit use is easily the most distinctive feature of a German accent in English or French, and conversely its absence for speakers of those languages. A similarly eye-opening experience was when I dabbled in ancient Greek, which distinguishes aspirated and non-aspirated consonants (pi/phi, tau/theta, kappa/chi). German and English both use these implicitly before vowels, which gives a distinctive accent in languages that do not. I believe some basic phonology should be taught at school. It would be useful to children both in learning foreign languages and in better understanding their own.

[@seneca983]

"German and English both use these implicitly before vowels" My understanding is that in English the (typical) pattern is that they're aspirated when they're the first sound in a syllable. Thus e.g. the 'p' is aspirated in "pit" but not in "spit" (even though it's before a vowel).

[@eypandabear7483]

@@seneca983 I think that’s correct, and also the case in German. I expressed it too generally.

[@javierantunez3937]

There is a video in this channel about those non-aspirated p t k in english and how they are actually b d g, quite interesting!

[@MannyBrum]

It's interesting that you mention learning ancient languages, I find that the way ancient languages are taught is far more insightful and easier to follow than the way modern languages are taught. Because there are no audio clips and nobody knows with 100% certainty how things were pronounced, the language is fully explained and then you learn vocabulary as you translate old texts rather than try to memorize a whole bunch of different linguistic concepts that are barely explained (even ones that may be present in the learned language that aren't in the learner's native language) and mainly serve to just teach you how to communicate on vacation.

[@starving_autist]

​@@MannyBrum Language learning courses need to stop talking about vacations

[@rb5078]

I think one of the reasons we're hearing hard attack more often is a result of what I call "KZbin speak." KZbinrs tend to adopt a certain way of speaking. Cadence, emphasis, grammar, etc. get copied and passed around on KZbin, podcasts, and TikTok.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Yes, I'm making a video on KZbinse. But I think hard attack had been increasing independently. It's also *possible*, though hard to demonstrate, that hard attack has generally been greater in female speech while phonetic descriptions have been biased to male speech.

[@0ptriX]

@@DrGeoffLindsey Will "your guys'(s)" feature in your KZbinse video, Geoff?

[@curlyhairdudeify]

​@@DrGeoffLindseyI think women are just trying to sound "smarter and educated" and poke at men for being "uneducated and voting for conservatives".

[@rufusneumann9703]

​@@curlyhairdudeify interesting[ʔ]idea

[@WaterShowsProd]

@@0ptriX It made me scream when she said that.

[@whatr0]

I have to say this has been one of my new favorite channels I've discovered as of late. It's just so refreshing how you approach English from such a descriptivist perspective and you don't assign any sort of positive or negative connotations to how languages evolve, just merely observing and documenting them.

[@milesrout]

If you ask me, what would be refreshing is someone breaking free of the strictures of linguistic practice and being prescriptivist for once.

[@yumeironeko]

@@milesrout I guess there's a place for that for people who are taking language lessons or something. But I find this descriptive approach so interesting because I'm not trained to be able to notice all of these little quirks myself, and I find their discovery absolutely fascinating. If you're not paying attention to this stuff, you have no idea of all the intricacies and complexities of actual, spoken language going on just below the surface. You'd never learn about this stuff unless you study linguistics (which I haven't save for one semester course), so this type of content is great for those with an interest but maybe not the background.

[@JoelDZ]

​@@milesrout Okay! I'll do it. From now on, i prescribe that we all stop capitalizing the word i when it isn't at the start of a sentence. Who's with me?

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

@@milesrout It's called science.

[@Schnolle]

​@@DrGeoffLindsey Yes! And good scientists will suppress their personal opinions even though those may be very strong indeed.

[@mollyoxy]

I don't have a particular speech impediment but i found due to my social anxiety i would often speak a little too quickly and almost slur words together. which made people ask me to repeat myself. i hated doing that so i began to speak a lot more clearly with more of those slight stops to really emphasize when a new word begins. i should also note my first language is spanish which is more "flowy" than english in my opinion. so that may have also added to why i "slurred" words sometimes.

[@gomer2813]

I have been wondering if languages that require certain vowel sounds are better. Because, certain vowel sounds seem to force the voice box into a different position. Also, I notice that English requires that we say a lot of consonant sounds together (for example, words that end in -nts such as “consonants”!!!) and I think that it is sometimes difficult to pronounce a lot of consonants at once. It is easier to say , vowel->consonant->vowel->consonant…

[@gomer2813]

@Calen Crawford yea

[@godrilla5549]

I just bite others real good like.

[@Mili-bedili]

​@@gomer2813 Indeed. Some of the most common sounds in English: sss, shh, zzz

[@ashgonza92]

Wow we're the same way haha

[@rozharris6834]

I'm an ESL teacher, and always use hard attack (presentational style) when speaking to new learners, or beginner English speakers. If you use more linked words, it's often harder for them to understand.

[@yucol5661]

I had a similar experience. In Spanish (at least my accent) you don’t pronounce a pause between lots of words. So my teacher had to remind me to pause and pronounce all the spaces between words, otherwise THEY wouldn’t understand me

[@thememelord6510]

@@yucol5661 at least they didn't insist that that was wrong like what happened to my friend, he's from chile

[@Geisla54]

Same! When new students get used to my voice after a couple of weeks, I start to speak more naturally. But now that I'm realising how harsh hard attack is on the vocal chords, I think I'll try to do it less :/

[@zilvoxidgod]

This is why french is so lard to learn as an english speaker.

[@SpydersByte]

@@Geisla54 why would you think its harsh on your vocal chords? He didnt say that at all, and its certainly no harsher than yelling or singing

[@fyang1429]

I am Chinese and have spoken English for over a decade for daily life and I considered my accent mostly native for years. Yet I always felt my pronunciation of the word "accent" was a bit weird, with too much emphasis on the initial "a". It was only with this video that I finally realized that somehow I really like to use the hard attack just for this one word for no reason!

[@sluggo206]

I (American) say "ak-sent" I think. It sounds like you're saying "a-ksent" or "a?-ksent"? I can't even pronounce that. I think it's something about English not having the "ks" sound at the beginning of a word or starting a syllable after "a". E.g., "xylophone" starts with a "z" sound, and it's a bit unnatural for me to say the Russian name "Ksenya". But I can say "axe" fine because it's in the same syllable.

[@syntheretique385]

Just realized that in French we're saying xylophone with a strange gz consonant thingy. Stop making me feel weird about my own language dammit!

[@yumeironeko]

It's so exciting to have your eyes opened to something you have been doing without noticing! It's such a cool feeling of discovery.

[@TheAzorg]

@@sluggo206 what about "axe-scent"?

[@jennypai3763]

Me too. My native language is chinese as well, and I have been told numerous times by people that they thought I was a native speaker. But after living in the South (US) for so many years, I find myself developing a southern accent as opposed to the neutral accent from when I learned english. Whenever I say that to people or myself while I was noticing it, I always find saying "southern accent" weird, because generally if I catch myself sounding southern, I can switch back, but when I say these two words, I seem to have a hard time not saying them in a southern accent, so I don't think I know how to say "accent" right either

[@lohphat]

I believe that conforming to speech recognition devices are encouraging us to add stops to break up word boundaries is also a factor.

[@BearBettermentSchool]

Interesting idea!

[@davebell4917]

That is a tendency you might find in my telephone style, more likely when I am dealing with a call centre. But I do also use a speaking alphabet, usually the current alpha, bravo, Charlie... I am very doubtful about word recognition - speech to text - which seems a part of the current AI techbro daydreaming, even if voice recognition could be valid as an ID check. And how much is centred on US English and so of little use elsewhere?

[@lohphat]

@@davebell4917 ELEVEN!

[@cmposting]

@@davebell4917 speech to text recognition hardware has existed for over a century, and software since the 50's, with some famous instances such as Apple's Siri (released 2011) and Google's 'Google Assistant' (released 2016) source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_assistant

[@atriyakoller136]

As an ESL teacher that uses authentic materials I can say that it's such a blessing for learners of English at earlier levels of skill when it comes to listening - I've heard so many complaints about not being able to separate words from beginner to intermediate level learners. Granted, I do use materials that are suited for the students but since I work with adults of various backgrounds, they sometimes don't have enough experience listening to actual real-life English...

[@roy1701d]

As a lifelong stutterer, some sounds (particularly consonants, in my case) are difficult for me to produce without blocks and other interruptions. These deep dives into the mechanics of speech help me find other ways to produce difficult sounds such that I sound fluent. For that, sir, you get my immeasurable thanks. 🙂

[@curlyhairdudeify]

I agree, I had a stutter as a child. Worked on it, and it pops up at times when I try to pronounce some words, and I get called that I need to be "more confident". Like, excuse me. I can't control it.

[@rufusneumann9703]

​@@curlyhairdudeify Did your parents mock you for your speech or why did it develop?

[@lilpetz500]

Ah stutters are such an interesting part of human speech, and one that we can't really suppress or "cure" it's just part of us, I process it kind of like I do an accent really. I get one as a nervous/overwhelmed thing, where I stop mid word because my mind is too distracted to actually flow my sentence properly, my sibling has the same one and our Mum thought I got it from him 😂

[@curlyhairdudeify]

@@rufusneumann9703 My parents didn't mock me as a child, but their friends did. Now, my mother tells me "you need to be more confident". When, my stutter pops out every now, and then. I'm like, what???

[@chloegrobler4275]

@@curlyhairdudeify stutters are psychological. it is all in ur head but still dickish to ask to "be confident" xD.

[@robbru3112]

As a native English speaker (England) I think I naturally lean towards linking consonants but “annunciate, boy!” is an instruction to use hard attack. It was actually really nice to see the Archbishop of Canterbury use beautiful flowing English linkage and still sound clear and engaging.

[@CoreStarter]

I'm going to be real with you, he sounded drunk to me, or like high, without the subtitles or giving me a few seconds to process I literally could not understand him.

[@cindystewart5417]

​@CoreStarter I didn't have any problem with him, found him perfectly understandable. Of course, my SIL had to come get me to interpret some American accents from the South.

[@PoetryInHats]

No, "Annunciate, boy!" is an instruction to slap on a pair of wings and tell a virgin she's with child. "Enunciate, boy!" might be looking for hard attack, however. 😊

[@ricardodogfishtiger8582]

Did you mean: enunciate, boy!Or are we in the presence ofAngels? Just asking. R😎🙊♥️.

[@ricardodogfishtiger8582]

French usurpers? Did you mean The Normans because they weren't French, strictly speaking, so to speak. R😎🙊♥️.

[@gabrielpline7490]

As a native speaker in the southern Appalachians, I found this fascinating. Very little hard attack where I’m from. A sentence seems to be just one continuous, uninterrupted breath. But it shows up here and there. (For example, I just noticed that I pronounce the word “fascinating” thusly: “fass-eh-nay | en.” The | denotes the hard attack.)

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Yes that use of glottal stop for 't' is getting very common in American accents, and I'll do a video on it soon.

[@smalleranimals]

@@DrGeoffLindsey it's pretty easy to imagine 'fass-eh-nay | en' in a London or Aussie accent - or even 'fass | eh-nay | en' if i think of Dick Van Dyke's Cockney accent.

[@jacksyoutubechannel4045]

While not the _same,_ Southern American English seems _much_ closer to myriad British ways of speaking. I'm guessing something to do with colonists and immigration patterns? Either way, I seem to find Brits produce much more natural Appalachian-type Southern accents than they do any other type of American accent. I am the most lay of laypeople, but I've always noticed a big commonality between Brits and Southerners in speech: rarely, if ever, do the corners of their mouths pull back when making vowel sounds. I don't know exactly what this means, scientifically, but I do find that I'm more able to emulate a British accent or slip into a Southern one if I remember to relax my mouth and not "smile" my vowels.

[@gabrielpline7490]

@@jacksyoutubechannel4045 The old joke I heard growing up was that in the south, it’s so hot that we don’t want to work too hard talking. Ha! But yes, the southern dialect is heavily influenced by immigrants/settlers from the British isles as well as west African languages. This pops up in interesting ways like the tendency to pronounce “th” as “f” or “v” - my grandmother would say “bafroom” and “don’t monkey wivvit.” An interesting tidbit I heard was that speakers on the coast (e.g., Savannah, Charleston) and those speakers more inland have different dialects due to two separate populations of immigrants based on their political affiliations and socioeconomic levels back in England. (I believe I read that more wealthy Loyalists primarily settled in the coast.) I am the most amateur of amateur linguists, so I could have some of this info wrong.

[@rachelf5466]

I was born and raised in the southwest US, and I don't think we have a lot of hard attack at all. There's not much of a discernable accent where I'm from, but we're notorious for slurring many of our words together. When I tried saying the examples in this video myself, I found that I didn't use much hard attack at all.

[@idglet9565]

The interesting part of all your examples of contemporary hard attack is that they're all clear examples of modern "presenter voice", or just general authoritative KZbinr voice. It's been observed that a new type of accent has been developed among Gen Z due to the exposure of KZbin among every type and nationality of child the past decade due to linguistic tropes and patterns common in the most popular KZbin videos. Portugese children have been developing specifically Brazilian accents in the past decade due to popular KZbinrs, so I would pay attention to the internt's infulence in these regards.

[@ArCher11-iq9co]

Its called subversion. Have your people abandon their values and basic thing like identity (citizenship) or language. It is not pleasant to be told your prose or some trait about you is inferior, comical or incorrect. Some cultures and races just cannot do things properly. The final play is to subvert white western culture by laying trope after trope against the English language, as if it is a lexicon full of problems and nothing more. And not the universal lingua franca spoken across the world, convienient and rudimentary easy to pick up. This is subversion and malicious use of educational platform

[@Naixatloz]

That is super cool!

[@gordo6908]

​@@Naixatloz as a phenomenon its certainly interesting, i just hope it doesn't homogenize sounds too much. the variety is beautiful and may be incrediblely difficult to revive

[@stentorion3669]

@@gordo6908 change is inevitable, however, some sounds are actually evolved in some languages and not in others, and I think, that will be inseperable from cultures for as long as there is still individual culture. If that makes any sense

[@realpv_aka_vp]

Unrelated but nice pfp

[@danielrobinson7872]

I have a feeling the massive surge in phone usage has played a large part in this. Since certain phonetics are harder to distinguish over cheaper microphones, younger people have adapted so it easier to understand them. It has just carried over into regular conversation.

[@ashleystokols]

Like what phonetics?

[@DracoSuave]

@@ashleystokols Try spelling license plates out over the phone and see how long it takes before you start using phonetic alphabets.

[@unliving_ball_of_gas]

@@DracoSuave The only confusion I noticed would be between the "c" and the "e" if a glottal stop isn't used.

[@scaper8]

​@@DracoSuave Even a simple cold can cause enough distortion that someone talking face-to-face can have trouble with ones like that. Given that, I have little doubt that speaking into microphones has had a not insignificant impact on common speech patterns.

[@DracoSuave]

@@scaper8 Yeah, it's like, linguists wouldn't ask of mass communication would lead to changes in speech because we've already seen it happen. There's a dialect of English that only exists specifically because of mass communication--Received Pronounciation isn't an accent that exists except in media! There was also the Transatlantic accent that only existed in US media in the 20s-40s.

[@Sos_tenuto]

I had noticed for some time that "opening up my throat" on English vowels as opposed to "closing my throat every time" on my native Japanese vowels made my English sound somewhat more Englisher. This video made it very clear to me what was going on and also reminded me that even among native speakers there are lots of variations. Thank you for the video.

[@yumeironeko]

That's great that you were able to make a discovery about your pronunciation. I really liked being able to literally look at video of the throat making sound. I wish the anatomy of pronunciation were taught more when learning language (ex. being able to look at video or scans of the insides of mouths and throats to be able to literally see how to produce sounds). Cheers~

[@SpiritmanProductions]

May I give you a tip about comparatives? The word 'more' and the suffix 'er' perform the same function; you should only use one. So, "more English" and "English-er" are the same. When you use the suffix in a non-standard way, you need a hyphen. Short adjectives usually get 'er', and longer ones get 'more', although there are exceptions, e.g. when used in poetic or rhetorical speech, and simply due to convention (see 'fun'). big → bigger amazing → more amazing clever → cleverer curious → more curious (but, for comedic effect: curiouser [non-standard]) fun → more fun funny → funnier delightful → more delightful 🙂

[@resourceress7]

@@SpiritmanProductions As a native speaker, I understood perfectly what they meant by Englisher. Though personally I might have spelled it English-er, since using the hyphen like this is one of the standard ways to spell a word when turning something into a non-standard comparative. The other way I may have said it is when something sounds English-y (adding hyphen is common for spelling non-standard adjectives with a final Y). Instead of English-er I could also say English-ier (or Englishier). Among my friends it wouldn't be weird to say Englishy or Englishier in spoken language, whether we spell it with a hyphen or not. Sure, we are word nerds, but it really is common to add -y, -er, and -ier to build one-word adjectives, comparatives, and superlatives, even to words that the standardized school dialect say must follow completely different rules (using ___-like or like ___; more ___; and most ___). There are different dialects and registers and sets of rules. It's kind of you to explain about the "more" rule. I just wanted to add in that there are other, just as standard, ways that we say and write things. Especially outside of the textbook-dialect contact. EDIT: in my dialect, "funner" has become one of the correct versions of the comparative form of "fun," along with "more fun." Not all words that previously required "more" in the standardized school dialect are following this path. But that's one that I've noticed. (You'll note from some of my words and spellings that I am US American. There are a lot of other sociolinguistic variables here, but I do know that things happening in my dialect might not be happening in every dialect, including geographically.)

[@SpiritmanProductions]

@@resourceress7 When someone talks about sounding more English, I naturally gravitate towards the origin of that demonym: England. I want people to be happy with their language, but I also recognise the benefits of maintaining standards that allow for more efficient international communication and reduce the scope for misunderstanding. Personally, I think the solution would be for each country to name its own language according to their location, even if it is a version of another country's language. Singapore has Singlish, originating with the arrival of the British and the establishment of English-medium education in the country, and Malaysia has Manglish, similarly evolving from the British-Malaya economy. I think it would stop all the tension and arguments if Australia, Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, the USA, and any other countries that have derived a main or significant language from English did the same. ;-)

[@MuriKakari]

I don't know if you like to sing, but if you're aiming for a nativesque accent, emulating a native singer can be a great way to practice the vowel sounds. Particularly, this lets you practice the boundaries of the vowel sounds as many singers are pushing the boundaries of those sounds to make it easier for them to hit or sustain the note. Several native Japanese speakers told me English sounds kind of like singing to them in some ways; we eventually figured out that the opening the throat you discuss was reminding them of singing.

[@fancypantsy08]

hard attack IS the youtube style. I've been trying to figure out what this is! thank you for this video.

[@Rufusdos]

Professional pronunciation teacher and linguist here: Thank you so much for these beautifully edited, up-to-the-minute and insightful videos. I learn something new every time.

[@timpauwels3734]

Dutch spoken in the Netherlands uses a lot of hard attack, while the Dutch spoken in Belgium goes to such lengths to avoid hard attack that short sentences can start to sound like one long word.

[@gummynoodles9036]

Yeah im from belgium and i was like, do we even have that?

[@ihopeicanchangethisnamelat7108]

@PalestineWillBeFree2 did you watch the video?

[@viktorvondoom9119]

​@PalestineWillBeFree23:06

[@christopherbentley7289]

I've been aware of that ever since the turn of the Millennium when I'd discovered the Flemish TV weather presenter, Sabine Hagedoren and she was featured on a Dutch-based site called 'Belgische Babes', where the advice was given, on trying to do an impression of her voice, to ensure that everything should be pronounced as softly as possible to sound more Flemish and less Dutch. Another thing I appear to have picked up is that Flemish appears to drop the terminal '-n', such that 'Sabine Hagedoren' is pronounced something like 'Sabin Hahedoruh', which probably accentuates that softness if words don't have a clear consonantal ending and sort of fade into the ether.

[@Drag0nfoxx]

@@christopherbentley7289 NL Dutch drops the -n all of the time as well though, except in the east

[@KevinWMoor]

I'm from north west England. I started contracting in the early 80s and soon discovered that people in other parts of the UK had difficulty understanding me sometimes. I corrected this, fairly subconsciously, by using hard attack. I still use it now, mostly when talking to groups of people during on-line meetings. Thank you. I often learn something new about my speech from you videos

[@hayvenforpeace]

That’s really interesting! It’s pretty fascinating to me that native English speakers can have trouble understanding each other, even when they are from the same country (not even Scotland or Wales, etc., just a different section of England).

[@mathoskualawa9000]

The glottal stop is a consonant in the Hawaiian language. The ʻokina, often confused by non-speakers as an apostrophe, is the written form of the glottal stop. A lot of popular Hawaiian words, like "Hawaiʻi", " ʻae ", or " ʻaʻole ", are often totally mispronounced by non-speakers. It is interesting that in many cases, native speakers of the Hawaiian language sometimes omit the ʻokina, as in " kuʻu ". Very interesting, "English hates hiatus," whereas the Hawaiian language is heavy on vowels, like the place names " ʻAiea ", or " Waiʻanae ", the latter having both connecting vowels and a glottal stop. Very interesting video. Thank you very much, or as we say in Hawaiʻi, mahalo nui loa!

[@therealgrawger]

Very Interesting! In the Mayan languages this is also true, and there is distinction between a regular consonant and a glottalised one, like the one in the clip of Ed Sheeran in this video. For example, “na” is house but “na’” is mum. “Taan” is used for present continuous tense but “t’aan” is tongue and language.

[@TheOtherBoobJustDropped]

I became very aware of my personal tendency to use hard attack when I had to learn a song in Hawaiian and had to try REALLY HARD not to use it unless indicated with an apostrophe

[@FletcherDoesStuff]

I grew up listening to a LOT of audio books and noticed how my speech/accent was shifted a bit when compared to my family and friends. I’ve alway wondered how the global accent would shift over time but didn’t think about how ‘presentative’ it could be! A small anecdote, but one summer I was severely depressed to the point that I only ate, slept, and watched hours on hours of a certain Irish KZbinr. It got to the point that I started unconsciously speaking and thinking in his specific accent and started fully hearing the accent of those around me. It lasted a couple months as I’d affectedly hotboxed myself with ONE accent from ONE person for so long. Definitely really weird!

[@martavdz4972]

Very common experience for non-native speakers of English who know English well but don't live in an English-speaking country 🙂 And, actually, a very common experience for any advanced language learners.

[@ElementalWhispers]

Was it Jacksepticeye you were watching?

[@FletcherDoesStuff]

@@ElementalWhispers Yep! It was crazy because I wasn’t just getting AN accent, I was getting HIS accent 😂 If I practice a bit it’s pretty good 😅 I will say his old intros and outtros are the easiest haha.

[@ElementalWhispers]

@@FletcherDoesStuff He does have an infectious accent 😆

[@FletcherDoesStuff]

@@ElementalWhispers Right??

[@AMRARDvermebrungruppe]

This is actually very interesting. In an American perspective, it would seem that a classic sort of old Western speech pattern uses very little hard attack, which gives a sort of run-on sentence effect where words flow smoothly, whereas speaking with hard attack gives special emphasis on the words, like you say is common in presentational speech. Since so many people today are taught to enunciate clearly, the hard attack works its way specifically in to business communications. Women often are specifically told that they need to speak more "confidently" and I think there is a specific link to trying to "sound confident" and using hard attack.

[@ColtraneTaylor]

Confidence. An awful word.

[@miro.georgiev97]

​@@ColtraneTaylorHow so?

[@ColtraneTaylor]

@@miro.georgiev97 As OP said in the last para, such confidence leads to the hard attack.

[@sethwick8348]

​@@ColtraneTaylor so? What's wrong with that?

[@ColtraneTaylor]

@@sethwick8348 Watch the video.

[@katarinavomdach]

I love this channel. This video again gave me new insight in my own native language (German) as well as my first foreign language (English). After using English for several decades, I still love to learn new things about it while trying to further improve or at least not to fall back too much over time. Thank you so much for keeping this topic so interesting. .. Also, again I'm really thankful that most of my English (and French) teachers in my schooldays were native speakers. It helped a lot since, as kids, we mainly imitated our teachers, before getting to the rational part of learning a foreign language.

[@Worldaffairslover]

Your English is near native level. That last sentence would give it away☠️

[@1000Tomatoes]

As interesting as they are, vocal folds always look quite alien when you see them.

[@Tony32]

I had to look away, they make me uncomfortable.

[@rufusneumann9703]

looks a bit like female lower lips to me, if you get the hint

[@shlongusinterruptus]

look like a vajayjay 😂

[@Heheha329]

​@@rufusneumann9703 Omg I wish those vibrated

[@Oh_Ok0]

​@@Heheha329Both of you need to seek help.

[@Rhadgar]

Interesting note is that, as an American non-native Spanish speaker, I can often tell Anglo-Americans from native Spanish speakers by the use of hard attack in their Spanish. In my experience native Spanish speakers rarely use hard attack and instead tend to hiatus vowels and in general let words flow together, and this can be confusing to American English speakers who are use to words being more clearly differentiated by way of hard attack.

[@jared_bowden]

This has actually tripped me up when looking at lyrics from Spanish and especially Italian (I like opera); it'll look like there's too many syllables and not enough notes, but it fits because two words with "touching" vowels are fused together into a single syllable in a way English wouldn't do.

[@celty5858]

@@jared_bowden Same 😭

[@afz902k]

Lad - don - naim - mob - bil - le!

[@MrEdes7]

Oh that's interesting, I hadn't thought of that being the reason why people sometimes can't understand me when I'm talking very quickly. I get told I mumble and slurr words, and get told to slow down, I wonder if I could be merging words together like I often do in Spanish.

[@lilpetz500]

As a Spanish learner, I've noticed this, and it's cool to hear it more confirmed by a speaker. I've worked at a private international college with a pretty high Latin American and European Spanish enrolment, and it's interesting to hear the differences in accent and dialect of our Hispanic students and agents when speaking, the soft flow of vowels is noticeable in just about all of them. Even the few words I understand, it takes a moment afterwards to kind of mentally cut out and distinguish the term from the smooth sentence, so it feels important to familiarise with this trait for better comprhension.

[@Secretsaver]

I was always nagged at by my parents for mumbling and running my words together so I learned to enunciate. I guess along with enunciation comes the Hard Attack. Makes sense that a lot of your examples came from people recording something for the purpose of being available to the public. We want to be understood clearly, so that involves separating out most words. Would be vastly different if I were just chatting with a friend

[@LaVieDeReine86]

It is necessary in German to separate words like erinnert or verändert to clearly mark a prefix on a verb. Prefixes can drastically alter a verb e.g. hören (to hear) abhören (bug/tap) aufhören (stop). When we smoosh them together it is a compound noun. Where auf- and ent- as prefixes on a verb use hard attack (aufheben- pick up or entnehmen- take out/away), in nouns they just blend in e.g. Aufenthaltsgenehmigung (residency permit) where it splits like au-fent, instead of auf-ent.

[@JaniceinOR]

Cool distinction! Aside: When I was first absorbing the part of the video about hard attack, I paused the video and tried to consciously produce hard attack before a vowel, and thought I failed. Then he mentioned it is much more common in German (my 2nd language, though my greatest fluency was many decades ago), and I first thought "Oh, no, has my German accent been even worse than I thought?" Then I compared my pronunciation of the German phrases with the pronunciation in the clips -- I was hard attacking just fine :-) . I guess I can already do hard attack, but I am not used to choosing "okay, now use hard attack" as a way to produce it!

[@TheLtVoss]

​@@JaniceinORwell im a German and had kinda the same strugel 😂 you use it so naturally and unconscious that you can't realy make it conscious

[@a-og3ku]

I'm struggling to recognize how hard attack makes any difference in any of the examples you used there? ʔerʔinnert and verʔändert sure, but other than that you're not really talking about hard attack/glottal stops (within the word to distinguish the prefix). ʔAufenthaltsgenehmigung has a glottal stop at the beginning just like ʔaufheben and ʔentnehmen. And neither have a glottal stop after the prefix. You're correct in saying ʔAufenthaltsgenehmigung doesn't have one before the e because the syllables split differently but it has nothing to do with it being a noun and the comparison to aufheben and entnehmen doesn't really make sense because neither would have a glottal stop there in any case?

[@somnium607]

It's also a regional thing: I come from southern Germany and in everyday life speak standard German. However, when I hear recorded voice I notice a lot of subtle regional influences. One of them is that I use the glottal stop to a lesser extend: Especially, in the examples use mentioned: I would say a-bändern instead of ab-ändern. Interestingly, in classical singing one learns to never use the hard attack at all (also because of vocal health) but to connect whole phrases together as one does e.g. in French.

[@annakellnhofer689]

Being a classical singer from Germany I'd say that depends a lot on your teacher ;) There is this fear that it could hurt your voice because the phenomenon is called "Glottisschlag". My teacher always stated out that all Germans would suffer of severe voice defects if hard attacks were generally bad for the vocal chords. She taught her students to always use hard attacks for the benefit of a correct pronunciation. It's just a very short moment and it can actually help to improve your sound and your breath balance. Many famous singers show: with good technique that should not be a problem. @@somnium607

[@Grumpini]

I record narrated videos for a large company and I have been consciously doing this for a long time. It makes the videos much easier to edit and I find I get better feedback from people whose first language isn't English because the words don't blend into each other, so it's easier to listen to. I believe a lot of people are employing it for the same reasons.

[@evelynphipps610]

this is my experience too! I have a speech impediment, and people can understand me more when I over enunciate with hard attack. I didn't know what it was until now, but I was taught to do it

[@6ThreeSided9]

Honestly I think this is the result of learning to enunciate for clear reception over media. Pretty much all the examples you showed were of experienced content creators who have refined their voices to be better picked up by a microphone. With that said, it’s also entirely plausible that both are true, and my version is simply causing the change in language you’re describing, as younger generations are growing up on this content. We would need more candid examples though.

[@sweetycamy]

non native speaker here. I find myself doing this because otherwise it just wouldn't make sense to me and would feel like a mush sentence.

[@tibbygaycat]

​@@sweetycamySo perhaps it's something people tend to use to sound clear? Possibly? Interesting!

[@aarondyer.pianist]

I have the opposite experience. The choppy delivery turns me off and many times I will simply abandon the video because I can't stand to listen to it. Choppy speakers do not use abandoned techniques in a way that delivers crystal-clear content without need for the stops. Maybe it takes practice, or maybe it sounds to different from their peers. I don't know. But I spent many years developing the techniques and have proven in my own speaking and script reading that it works beautifully without having to rely on non-stop stops.

[@6ThreeSided9]

@@aarondyer.pianist Well I’m not saying that it necessarily is easier to hear. After all, speeches of the past weren’t like this as mentioned. What I’m really getting at is technology. Recording devices may pick it up better, or maybe modern speaker systems have trouble relaying it otherwise.

[@aarondyer.pianist]

@@6ThreeSided9 I'm surprised at reading so many of the comments on this video saying the chops are preferable. Speech patterns are contagious and the default position is not to think about them but just catch them. Yes, chops make speech clearer, but only because without them the speaker would have no clarity without learning other techniques that work so much better. If you want anything else you have to work at it...which I have done for many years. Most people probably don't care but I do.

[@Hi_Im_Akward]

Native to U.S. english and have auditory processing disorder. This may have helped me understand what and why I can have such a hard time understanding people. More pronounced words are waaay easier and when people flow the words together its so hard to separate everything out. Also the maybe examples at the end looked like smiley faces.

[@benschwartz6565]

My cat loves using glottal stops in the middle of words. Her favorite word is "ma-ow"

[@travroot]

Back when I taught English my older students said I was easier to understand than most Americans... I realized I was speaking to them like a KZbinr with all hard-attacks and was probably not doing them any favors. From that point I smoothed it out and hopefully gave them better practice 😅 I also remember being on the other side of it-- I met someone from a different part of the country, speaking her language with a sharper accent + more hard-attacks, and suddenly I could comprehend what she was saying way better. Turns out the city I was in was somewhat infamous for their "smooth" accent lol

[@DodderingOldMan]

I really do find it mindblowing just how much complexity there is in something I do every day, almost literally without thinking about it, ie speaking.

[@jeffreyestahl]

I'm a native American English speaker who started in life with a severe speech impediment. (I often had a problem with linguistic ligatures) My mother taught me to sing and enunciate every single phoneme as a means towards correcting it. The result as an adult is that I speak with a very patterned cadence and continue to spit out my consonants. More than a few people have stated I have a radio announcer's voice as a result.

[@Content_Deleted]

That's awesome!

[@jeffmorse645]

I love learning something about English that I didn't know existed or was aware I was using. Your observation about young American women using "hard attack" the most reminded me of something my late mother said. She had an accent from the American South (slower and smoother than most American accents) and would often get frustrated speaking with young women working in businesses here in California. She said that they spoke too fast and choppy and sometimes it was difficult for her to understand them.

[@pleasesetmeonfire1166]

This finally has given a term to the issues I was having. As a native English speaker who was learning French, my biggest issue was the absence of hard-attack in between words. I found it *so* hard to both understand, and speak… especially when multiple words in a row start with a vowel, and it all just flows together somehow.

[@dannymarie]

This is actually really helpful for my German learning. I've noticed my American cadence while reading German aloud and now I have a better understanding how to grow on that :)

[@martavdz4972]

Btw it's nost just German, it's about 1/4th of European languages, I'd say. It's also Dutch, plus some Slavic languages have borrowed this from German (Czech, Slovenian), and I think it's also present in Latvian, Estonian and Finnish, and some languages in the Balkans.

[@SchmulKrieger]

​@@martavdz4972yes, Czechian, Sorbian, Slovenian, I think even Rusyn has it borrowed from the Germanic languages. Ukrainian on the other hand does not have it. They even transform consonants to vowels to link words as if they were one.

[@septanine5936]

this helps me understand so much. people don't always understand me when I'm talking and I always used to think it's just because I can talk rather fast, but now I know it's in part due to my rare use of hard attacks, causing my speech to blur together more than it would for most. but now I can see that that's also what helps me sound more native-like when speaking French

[@katharinawindham5118]

German native speaker here, who has spent some years in Ireland and is now living on the US West Coast. I'm really enjoying your channel! Fun fact: the German "Knacklaut" can also be called "Stimmritzenverschlusslaut". A lovely German word, I thought I'd throw that in here 🙂

[@rufusneumann9703]

okay wusste ich nicht und werde es bestimmt bald wieder vergessen haben

[@HenryLoenwind]

Thanks for your Stimmritzenverschlusslauterklärungskommentar.

[@leximatic]

​@@HenryLoenwind ...and the Stimmritzenverschlusslauterklärungskommentardanksagung. Germans could do this all day.😂

[@dcr645]

i think the swedish version would be "stämbandsförslutningsljud" if you translate the word piece by piece. idk i just think its neat i can make that out with no german experience. funny how similar language can be at times

[@katharinawindham5118]

@@dcr645 Oh, I just took a beginner's class in Swedish! I don't know a whole lot yet, obviously, but it's fascinating! Many words are so similar, I can get them immediately, like "lärare" for teacher ("Lehrer" in German). And then some words are completely different, like "läkare" for a doctor/physician ("Arzt" in German).

[@gren1977]

i think i just found my new favorite channel!

[@AmbassadorBreadloaf]

As someone who has difficulty processing what people say, I must say I'm thankful I ended up on the right timeline where linking words together is becoming less common.

[@elumbella]

This has been really enlightening. As a German quite proficient in English (especially listening), I never realized the difference hard attacks have on an accent. I will try even harder to link my words together in speech (as I was actually explicitly taught when learning French, but not for English). I was wondering if the tendency of English getting "choppier" might have also to do with the increasing influence of online video, and especially the use of jump cuts in speech. I am probably not the only one to notice an increase in heavily cut speech. And I feel that possibly, that way of cutting may have an influence in two ways: the produced videos might sound a lot choppier than the uncut speech with all the "errs" and linking r's removed, and also possibly (and I might be going out on a limb here) on the speaking patterns of a video's protagonist: Using a glottal stop more frequently might make it a lot easier to cut speech a lot shorter without it sounding too awkward. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Yes, in fact I'm going to make a video about KZbinse. However I think hard attack was on the rise anyway.

[@annklonl5207]

I concur with Dr Lindsey's observation as I have observed this phenomenon during my stay in the UK, mostly London, where I had frequently been moving between several boroughs of London, between 2003 and 2013, too. That is, before the rise of KZbin. My theory is that both the rise of the glottal stop as the use of the hard attack occurred mostly amongst inner city-dwelling descendants of recent immigrants before it began to spread out into suburban "yoof" as a signifier of "coolness".

[@stevevarholy2011]

If you are an experienced audio editor, your edits should be undetectable. Less skilled editors the jumps are very obvious.

[@CloudSociety420]

@@annklonl5207 youtube was actually pretty common and popular starting around 2007 onward.. I remember using it all the time and everybody around me was starting to use it. It's just more common for people to upload rather than just watch cat videos 😂

[@quinterbeck]

Dr Geoff, you have such a clear way of communicating on linguistic topics. I came across your article on the vowels of SSBE several years ago and it cleared up so much of my confusion around IPA transcription of English (as a native speaker and a budding linguist). I'm really glad you've added videos to your repertoire so that a wider audience can get access to your excellent explanations!

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Thanks so much for letting me know. Can I quote you (anonymously)?

[@quinterbeck]

@@DrGeoffLindsey You're welcome. May I ask in what context?

[@dliessmgg]

I'm a swiss german speaker and this video (especially the "erinnert ihr euch an ute" part) made me realise a difference between my pronunciation of standard german & how germans do it. not that i have any desire to erase it, but it's fascinating.

[@ovecka17]

i was always confused when people described the glottal stop as "the sound you make in the middle of uh-oh" cause when i pronounced it out loud i always pronounced it /ʕʌ.ʕoʊ/ with hard attack at the beginning as well. then i eventually noticed that ʕi pronounce ʕevery vowel with ʕa glottal stop before ʕit. didnt realize that thats a newer thing in english rather than just a 'regular' english thing. that makes a lot more sense now

[@EverAppl14]

This is really interesting because for years I’ve been wondering about what exactly makes speech in my hometown in Northern NJ sound harsher or more “severe” in a way, as I’ve been told. Additionally people in other states will sometimes ask me if I’m from another country originally because there’s something about how folks from my place of birth speak which makes our accent slightly unusual to other Americnas, I suppose. Well, it turns out that hard attack is a huge feature of Northern NJ pronunciation, and I just tried to say a few words without using it and it is almost impossible for me to get the words out without employing hard attack. I didn’t even realize that I was using hard attack all the time before now.

[@charzar17]

What town or county are you from? I am from union county and I'm very curious what it is that makes people assume that English is your second language. Typically most Jerseyans are mistaken for New Yorkers by those not from the tri-state area.

[@EverAppl14]

@@charzar17 Top corner of NJ, literally. I think people mistake the accent for "European", but I've also been asked if I'm from Canada because of how I say certain words. There's a divide up here. Some people here enunciate all the consonants in almost a British way, but with very hard Rs and hard attack, and others have almost a Southern Appalachia type of twang with overall less enunciation.

[@martavdz4972]

Wow, this is fascinating! I've just made the same realization about Prague and the surrounding area vs. the eastern parts of Czech Republic. I live in the eastern parts now, speaking the soft, twittery local dialect, and whenever I visit my parents near Prague and revert to my native Prague accent (probably influenced by German), my throat starts hurting after several days. Probably because of this. It's incredible how the same speech elements distinguish accents in different languages around the world...

[@kered13]

Half way through this video I started wondering if this was an effect of trying to enunciate clearly for videos, I'm glad you mentioned that at the end! I do feel like it's a bit easier to understand the samples with hard attacks, and I'm pretty sure that I would do the same if I were reading from a script or to an audience, while in casual speech I would blend my words together more, like (I believe) most native speakers do.

[@fixpontt]

as a non-native english speaker (and listener) im glad this new phenomenon becoming more widespread becuase it is much easier to understand than the old way, i think educational channels use it specifically for catering foreign audience

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Great comment, thank you.

[@antimatterhorn]

i often interact with people who are non-native english speakers, and i normally have a very linking speech style, but i've unconsciously taught myself to use a lot more hard attack when speaking to non-natives - probably as a learned behavior from the reinforcement of being asked to repeat myself otherwise.

[@tdmm]

maybe the usage of english the "lingua franca" helps spread this as well then

[@afz902k]

I'm a non-native English speaker and I work with other non-native speakers. During meetings and even conversations, I've noticed I to tend to use more hard attack with them than I would with a native speaker. This has happened unconsciously over the years, and I reckon it is because when I don't use hard attack I tend to get asked to repeat myself much more often.

[@Slouworker]

Unfortunately.

[@duncanfoss9000]

I haven't seen this channel before and I expected this to be one of the many low quality or light detail videos covering an interesting topic (aka education video spam) but this was really great. I not only learned some new things, but also corrected some assumptions I had unknowingly made. Thanks for making this.

[@martavdz4972]

Yeah, he's a lifelong expert in the field, really makes a difference 🙂

[@Chris_Teaches_English]

Whenever i'm preparing a video or a lesson, i check in to see if Dr Lindsey covered it. Just to make sure I don't claim anything outlandish. My number one, go-to source on phonetics. Hasn't let me down yet. And the comments section is endless food for thought, which I can't say about every youtube video!

[@dcseain]

I'm from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and old enough to have grown up speaking a lowland middle Appalachian dialect. When I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, people couldn't hear the difference between picture and pitcher, as the ct in picture is replaced with a glottal stop in my native dialect, but not in the dialect in Boston.

[@freddychopin]

I'm curious to know what your native accent sounds like. I grew up in Loudoun (Potomac Falls, to be precise) in the '90s, and I and all my peers speak with an accent that's as "General American" as they come with absolutely no trace of regional quirks.

[@cacogenicist]

@@freddychopin - I bet there are plenty of traces. Play a recording of a person who grew up in Potomac Falls and ask someone from Lansing, MI, or Portland, OR, if the person has an "accent."

[@dcseain]

@@freddychopin Well, despite 5 years of speech therapy, I still cannot pronounce 'iron' as more than on syllable.

[@ElJosher]

@@dcseainembrace your native accent. I love listening to regional accents, it teaches us about the history and people from the region.

[@freddychopin]

​@@cacogenicist people still have what are known as "idiolects"--individual quirks in speech and accent. So you could take anybody, play a recording of them to anybody else, and someone might always say that it sounds like they have an "accent". That's not the same as having a distinctively regional dialect or accent, though. If it were regional, that would mean that the vast majority of speakers from a given area have that characteristic. What I really mean when I say we have no distinctive regional accent or quirks is this: if you play recordings of us to other Americans, from anywhere in the US, nobody will consistently be able to guess our region. We sound like we could just as easily be west coast as east coast, and we don't obviously sound like we come from any particular part of the east coast. When I tell other Americans I'm from Virginia, they're surprised because they expect me to have something like a southern accent. Furthermore, you could play recordings to me of other speakers from my area and I still wouldn't be able to tell you that they're from my area. There are people from all over the US sound pretty much the same as I do to my ear, and I have a decently good ear for accents. "General American" is a sort of nebulously defined average of what you hear from American television and movies. It's what speech sounds like when Americans attempt to lose their original regional accents. I'd be more than happy to provide a recording of my natural speech via vocaroo or something if you think you can point out what regional features it might have.

[@Justme-ip3wc]

I love videos like this. Understanding something you do naturally (or don't) is just so interesting. As a non-native speaker of both English and German, this helped me with both languages.

[@flawlix]

I studied Linguistics in California in the mid-2000s. Hard attack with every word that begins with a vowel is one of the first things we learned about in phonetics.

[@Bellehiek]

Bizarre! I’m about to graduate with a degree in Applied Linguistics from UCLA and I’ve never heard of hard attack!

[@jesscorbin5981]

Was it an LA college?

[@Kairensclass]

This is fascinating - I've recently noticed that the past few years of teaching English as a foreign language abroad have impacted my speech in this specific way! It's probably because I am compelled to speak very slowly and enunciate everything as clearly as possible in the classroom, for fear my delivery won't be understood... my rationale is that it's better to err on the side of individuating phonemes than to mumble and muddle when it comes to the classroom. So, for me it was a conscious choice, but I never really knew what to call it. I've half a mind to go back to school to study this kind of thing too :) Insightful, thank you as always for the wonderful information and content delivery :)

[@hmvollbanane1259]

Fascinating to learn something about your own language and dialect while watching a presentation about a totally different one. I never thought of the concept of hard attack before but it's true that that's the normal way of speaking in High German, however it is a lot less common in my regional dialect (Rheinisches Platt ~ Kölsch) in which we also tend to blend words together. We are aware that we speak more melodic than other Germans and have a totally different rythm to our speach, however I would have never guessed that this had anything to do with how we start the pronunciation of our vowels before watching this

[@phileo_ss]

This video came at just the right time! I have been noticing this phenomenon and have been wondering about it. When I lived in England many years ago, one of my classmates told me that my English was choppy so I have been making efforts to 'correct' it, but during that time, native speakers started speaking increasingly choppy English....

[@FreyaGem]

This is just endlessly fascinating! As a native U.S. English speaker, I've found it irritating when people use a high amount of hard attacks- especially in places where they don't seem to belong in normal conversation. It always seemed overly robotic to me, with exceptions, of course, for non-native English speakers and people with disabilities.

[@HeadOnAStick]

I noticed that many of the American English speakers in this video who demonstrated frequent hard attack also spoke with a lot of vocal fry. I wonder if those are related, since when speaking with fry, the vocal cords are poised to produce the hard attack more easily. It would also explain an increase in the use of hard attack, since speaking with vocal fry has been clearly on the rise (at least for female American English speakers).

[@rhubarb_runner2]

This is my observation as well. It's difficult to find a modern female vocalist not using vocal fry to some extent.

[@shoka_01]

I think the whole bit increasing the usage of about hard during presentations is true. I honestly think most people subconsciously use it when they’re trying to convey information or are trying to slow down their speech. It’s a way to clearly separate one word from the next, so it is a great way to slow down and enunciate.

[@aarondyer.pianist]

Dr. Lindsey, I am so glad you made this video! I've been an informal student of phonetics and speech for many years. The glottal stop in English nearly drives me batty because it finds its way into nearly everything. I do plenty of speaking and reading aloud and have trained my voice for many years in this respect. It is habitual to make a glottal stop before words beginning in vowels because I hear it so much, and I have to consciously reverse it. I go so far as to sometimes avoid a glottal stop before the word "of" when preceded by a vowel. (That takes some doing!) There are some exceptions but as a general rule I try to keep things connected. Yes, it can sometimes sound posh even for an American. I pay attention to actors whose voices I love and who have impeccable delivery, such as Nancy Carroll, Patrick Stewart, and many others. It really is worth it to train myself because to the ear the message is so much more understandable without all that blasted noise. And when I do use the glottal stop for emphasis it is much more noticeable.

[@vocabpope]

This is excellent freaking stuff. I'd never heard of this whole depth to glottal stops affecting the beginnings of vowels. Cats are looking at me funny, I'm making strange noises at 1am.

[@electricrussellette]

12:02 I find it interesting how we anglos have typically perceived languages with more "hard attack" in the past. What comes to mind almost immediately with the German and Japanese examples is how both of those cultures were perceived in the anglo world during and immediately after WWII. The 'hard attack' of their speech patterns were often used in propoganda during the war, and in many tv shows and movies after the war as a symbol of their inhumanity. German and Japanese people talked at you like they were angry at you for some reason. In contrast, the stereotype of the French speaker (sans 'hard attack') was someone who sounded like they were trying to seduce you. Of course that isn't the case today as we know so much more about Japan and many people in the anglo world are enamoured with Japanese culture. But referring to German, Japanese, and Chinese speech patterns as "hard attack" can't be doing them any favours in the anglo world. Lol! 😅

[@ArCher11-iq9co]

Its subversion. What better way to demonise a group of people than to poke at the language they speak. You can stereotype them easier because speaking is part of their natural behaviour- which we profile people on

[@artugert]

Does Mandarin Chinese use hard attack?

[@nkm6789]

Excellent video, as always Dr. Lindsey! Amazing that we hear these variations every day without ever noticing them consciously, just folding them into the many subtle features that make some languages, accents, and idiolects sound different from others

[@devilsadvocat]

Very interesting indeed and it taught me some things about my own native language: As a native Austrian (ie. German speaker) I always wondered, why Germans generally sound so choppy, when speaking English, as opposed to Austrians (at least those of us, who are quite proficient in English). And there I have to mention that not all German is so full of hard attacks or "Glottisschlag" in between words. The (eastern and southern) Austrian variant frequently links words together in pronunciation, "Heute Abend" does not include a hard attack in Austria, but rather a continuous melody-like pronunciation of these words. That's probably the reason, why Germans think of most Austrian variants of German to include an element of "singing".

[@Josukegaming]

This was fascinating!! Thanks for providing so many examples of different languages

[@silentverdict]

Dr Lindsay, your videos are amazing! My only point of feedback is to put some absorption sound panels in the room, it'll make you sound much closer and less echoey and make the videos much more pleasant to listen to. There are myriad tutorials on youtube and elsewhere of easy sound treatment for rooms.

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Thanks, I think the sound could do with improving all round...

[@silentverdict]

@@DrGeoffLindsey You'd be shocked at how much just putting up some padding helps, you can keep it out of frame. That would also free you up to use a shotgun mic instead of a clip on and then things would sound amazing!

[@nickmoore5105]

If you want to try it out on the cheap, even just hanging up a couple of thick blankets does wonders.

[@Arcanist_Gaming]

Well, I've learned a bit about myself today. Despite being a native English speaker (Canadian), I don't do vowel linking most of the time (unless I've been drinking) and tend to speak in a presentational manner regardless of context. This might be part of why people generally find me aggressive lol

[@HxTurtle]

I'm a native German speaker living in Canada! now it's slowly dawning on me as to why I'm frequently perceived as being aggressive 😂

[@Arcanist_Gaming]

@@HxTurtle I always lean towards non-native modes of speaking because I put weird value on enunciation, and that _definitely_ seems like it might be a factor!

[@soulscanner66]

@@HxTurtle My parents are German. The only place I hear their accent (I generally don't because I grew up with it) is on words like 'mother' and 'coffee' where they put the hard attack on the 'th' and the 'c' respectively. It's because the similar german words 'mutter' and 'kaffee' put a hard attack on the 't' and 'k' respectively. I guess you not only have to learn English with these words, you have to unlearn the German pronunciation.

[@HxTurtle]

@@soulscanner66 yes, you're very right there! what seems to work best is attempting to sing it a little. that's the easiest approach to make an accent disappear. but the main thwart in a regular/common speech setting is the inability to effectively multitask. it's easy to get it just right all by yourself in the comfort of your own home, but as soon as you concentrate on the actual content, you forget pretty much anything else. my ultimate goal is, to be quicker than Schwarzenegger 🤣

[@soulscanner66]

@@HxTurtle Ahhnold made the accent work for him, though.

[@gustavocortico1681]

I think that this is a back and fourth from native English speakers and peoples of other nationalities. English became the international intermediate language. I'm a brazilian but I've talked to my swedish uncle as well as worked with french people in the English language. When learning a language we tend to try to either mimic the stressing pattern of our own or to deliberately speak every word without much fluency. As a non native speaker, I'd say it does aid the understanding a bit. Chop chop

[@ahobbit1273]

Everyone is talking about the main subject of the video, but the thing that blew my mind is the different uses of long and short “the” and “to” when followed by vowels or consonants. This is something that I’m going to try to be conscious of in myself from now on.

[@ssaammii]

my boy ء getting the recognition he deserves

[@HxTurtle]

the audible concatenation of words is the biggest barrier to a language for new adopters. even non-speakers are usually able to make out single words in Slavic language; something not true for many others, including English.

[@sluggo206]

Especially learning French.

[@skyworm8006]

every language is like this i find slavic languages hard to hear. some languages are written closer to speech however.

[@HxTurtle]

@@skyworm8006 I was with a Croatian girl, once and we frequently traveled to her home country. it was there where I initially noticed, that they indeed do make a very tiny break just long enough to catch on for the human ear before the start of every word. despite only knowing like five words, I was always able to single out individual words. something next to impossible for French. not even English, because it's only my second language and when I watched a movie or the "wrong" TV show before I properly acquired it, I felt lost in one continuous, undistinguishable stream of words. and the same (as I stated for Croatian) is true for Russian as well. now, if you'd like to tell me that for instance Czech however is different, then I've to admit that I simply don't know this and therefore, that's quite a possibility, yes.

[@sluggo206]

@@HxTurtle I know that I and many Americans slur our words together. When I'm with somebody who's learning English or to make it clear over noise or a bad phone line, I make it a point to keep the words separate.

[@HxTurtle]

@@sluggo206 that's very kind of you! you're the exception, though. when I started learning English more than 25 years ago, I barely had someone slowing it down for me or heaven forbid, go the extra mile to use different words. after repeating the same sentence about three times, they usually just gave up altogether. in other countries, I noticed more flexibility. and I think that I'm not just imagining this because other countries also at least try to pronounce foreign words that made it into their everyday vocabulary the correct way. whereas in America, everything gets pronounced the typical American way, no matter what.

[@JonNeimeister]

This is incredibly fascinating. I actually started picking this up when learning to sing and analyzing professional vocal mixes; I noticed this sharp crispness before vowels that seemed to allow them to cut through the instrumentation, and they're almost always artificially enhanced by compression or manual volume editing. I wonder if the fact that we hear a LOT of speech digitally now, almost always through compression, we're subconsciously training ourselves to speak this way naturally.

[@urinstein1864]

As a native German speaker I always struggle with myheavy use of glottal stop in other languages. Good to know it may not actually be that big a deal in English at least. Fantastic video as always.

[@lucavlogstory]

As a native speaker of Italian, I've started to connect words and vowels about a year ago and have noticed my English flows much better. I haven't perfected the technique yet. It's great to find a video about this topic and also to learn one of the major reasons why it is so hard for native Italian speakers to speak English with a good accent.

[@dhuy-ti9os]

this is actually the greatest time to explore our speech and elements of creating language. its so open source.

[@uncletrashero]

this was fascinating thank you. i never even understood that there was any difference, i simply thought of the blurring between vowels or the soft attack as "lazy", and as an american i now realize that I have adapted myself to use more of these glottal/hard attacks because I wanted to make my pronounciation more clear to foreign speakers. i never realized that I was doing it (glottalization???) specifically because i was targeting foreign speakers of primarily chinese and japanese. now i think i must have subconsciously picked up on this difference while listening to asian speakers, and started implementing it into my natural speaking

[@DaltonHBrown]

7:45 "it may be that young American women are in the vanguard...of speech innovations." That...that's so true its scary.

[@gardengeek3041]

A revelation! The concept of 'glottal stop' is something I've been trying to grasp for years. No better way to explain it than to show actual vocal chords in motion. As an amateur language lover in Western Canada, one thing that has always puzzled me is the special twist given to spoken English by many of our aboriginal people: The amazing thing is that even though they come from distinctly different tribes with no similarity in their native tongues, they speak a unique style of standard Canadian English, which seems to transcend geographic origins. In my region, for example, there are 3 tribes who've been speaking English since Fort Calgary was erected in 1875. We have Blackfoot to the east, a branch of Sioux (like the heroic chief Sitting Bull) on a reservation about the size of Holland. But on the west city limits, are the Sarcee peoples, in the Athapascan language group, like the Navajos 1200 miles south. A third tribe, close by in the foothills are the Nakota, speaking another different native tongue. They are a far flung relative of the Dakota/Lakota group, about 1000 miles to the southeast in the U.S. So, originally from 3 quite different language groups, one can hear the same choppiness in the way they speak English. So, it would appear that glottal stops are very characteristic of the pre-European languages of the Canadian prairies and US great plains. I think this could be taken even further: I have heard the same charming choppy inflections in English spoken by people of Cree descent, now scattered all over Canada, but a language group that ran almost coast to coast along the southern edges of the boreal forest. Even more fascinating is the way glottal stops also characterise English spoken by aboriginal peoples of our West Coast. There, a complexity of tribes and unrelated languages had no contact with the inland tribes described above. I have seen on KZbin, a documentary showing a revival of some of the almost extinct West Coast languages. A little is using our Roman alphabet to spell a native word, and part way along she pauses to say 'glottal stop'. Now, thanks to this video, I know what that means. I also understand now why the apostrophe is used when our local plains' tribes spell out the way they call themselves. The apostrophe represents a glottal stop. For example, the Sarcees are also Tsuut'ina, sometimes rendered as tsu t'ina. That's the name that's applied to their stretch of Calgary's brand new ring road. I can spell it, but can I learn to say it properly. A bit off topic, but when I went to school with some of these lovely, shy people 65 years ago, we didn't have a clue about tribal or language differences. There was still a belief that suppressing their language and culture was the best way to turn them into us. It's only in the nick of time, that experts and the last of native language speakers have come together to preserve and expand what is left. There are of course still schools on every Reserve, where is taught the standard Canadian curriculum, but among the Stoney's (Nakota), children speak their language at home and don't encounter English until starting school at age six. It is thought that at least two of the languages mentioned here, Cree and Blackfoot will likely survive into the next century.

[@coasterairtime]

3:45 The joy in your face when telling about the German words for that made me smile

[@Scripture-Man]

Also bear in mind that most modern recording technology actually changes vocals, this is certainly true of broadcasting, and particularly entertainment, where speech audio is processed to emphasise harder attacks. Effects such as compression can make quiet sounds louder, while transients are often made more dynamic to give the audio more punch. So what you hear in the media _is_ generally different what was originally spoken. Modern webcam technology takes this to extremes, with the audio having little in common with the original speech. I believe all this could well be having a cyclical effect, shifting the way language is used over time.

[@BFDT-4]

Excellent description of what most ESL teachers don't even know they do, much less know enough to teach properly.

[@rothgang]

One of the greatest disservices to the English Language is poor teachers around the globe. Asian countries, I've noticed, in particular have this cycle of learned errors that get passed on from teacher to student.

[@mrcoolchip2727]

@@rothgang I’ve noticed this particularly in Japanese, where the English words have become so ingrained in every day speech that they assume that the japanified pronunciation is correct

[@kirabera]

Where are you from? Almost all of the ESL teachers I know (Canada) are native speakers and don't do this. In fact, I don't think I've met any qualified ESL teachers who speak like they aren't a native speaker.

[@esiebring7436]

@@kirabera Huh? Almost all the school teachers in the Netherlands are plain Dutch; they're responsible for teaching (Cambridge) English to kids and teens. I remember my primary school teacher trying to explain the difference between the pronunciation of 'eyes' and 'ice'; a valuable lesson even though he certainly didn't sound native. I can't remember a lesson ever about glottal stops.

[@margett__]

Your deep dives into the world of sounds make my nerdy heart burst with joy ❤ Thank you so much for uploading the highest quality educational content!

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Don't have a nerdy heart attack!

[@BramVanhooydonck]

I never really thought that sounding choppy would be caused by the glottal stop. What I found most interesting is that German the glottal stop is such a crucial part of speaking the language and how that is so different from Dutch, which like French is more flowing and glued together.

[@caroskaffee3052]

babe are we talking about the same dutch?

[@Techyena]

Just got this recommended randomly, I’m hooked, this is fascinating

[@kyrag4373]

yaaaas the Na’vi language has glottal stops and ejective consonants, makes it sound so cool

[@xhappybunnyx]

This was FASCINATING. I've always thought I had a sort of flaw in my speech and now I know that, more specifically, I tend to avoid hard attacks even when they would benefit my intent. A lot of times my vowels will blur together between words. Thanks for something to think about!

[@Hollaraedulioe]

I'm not really sure if there's always a hard attack in German, but rather the notion of distinct pronunciation of each word on it's own. In fact, it very well goes with the way German concatenates words. Where English writes multiple words like mother ship but pronounce it as one word mother-ship, German writing does acknowledge this by combining them in written as well (Mutterschiff). A step English gramer never took, despite spoken language doing so.

[@silentdragon1555]

God, i would love you to do a video on the australian dialect. Would go so well with this video you made. Many of the words we use are shorten down for simplicity and for better flow due to the way we speak. Be bloody awesome.

[@mxnevermind]

I was thinking the same thing - I'm Australian and after watching this I realised that I barely use hard attack at all, it feels so unnatural!

[@lizbecker1677]

I suddenly realize after watching this that I have speech patterns! I never thought about this. Now I'm going to record myself and listen to see how I talk! Love this video.

[@screet.s]

The amount of times this guy states that he needs to make another video on each of the individual topics that BRING TOGETHER THIS ONE is CRAZY. Like a rabbit hole of linguistics

[@joejohnson5297]

Being from the southern US, my words rarely if ever have stops in them. We also replace a lot of hard sounds with something softer like an "N" or a "D", making for smoother speech. Id love to send you a video for a chance to be analyzed. It'd be really fun.

[@7piecebucket]

As a fellow Southerner, I totally agree! We definitely run allurwords, (ahem), all our words together. The speech pattern of the Archbishop of Canterbury, even though with a different accent, was more familiar in the way that the words were blended and flowed together. The most famous example is "y'all". For non-English speakers, this is a contraction of "you all" that runs together and comes out sounding like "yawl" or "yuawl".

[@yuvalne]

As someone whose first language has the opposite relationship to hard attack as that of English (there's usually always a hard attack, but in very sloppy speech it gets dropped), it's very hard for me to hear the difference, but the waveform and live transcriptions makes it easier to notice it. Great video as always!

[@bob___]

This is a terrific video on a subject that deserves attention. I have noticed the increasing use of the glottal stop before vowels, which I learned to recognize in high school German classes. (I'm an American in my mid-sixties.) Based on the observations in this video, many of the uses of the glottal stop to separate words may have originated with people trying to speak the written language, as opposed to speaking a formal version of the spoken language. However, the use of the glottal stop after the definite article seems to be in a different category, much more of a development of the spoken language. I think I noticed it coming out of my own mouth as long as 40 years ago, although I have since trained myself not to use it.

[@NaoPb]

You've taken me on a whole new journey and this will be on my mind for days to come.

[@ChromeDaimao]

I think you hit the nail on the head with the difference for "presentation." When presenting some information deliberately, a speaker tends to slow down in an attempt to remain clear and concise, and this necessitates the use of hard attack between the very deliberate delivery of individual words. Generally, I'd say there's a leniency for this when the listener is aware that the speaker is attempting to clearly deliver information wholesale without repeating themselves (it's still considered a bit amateur, but generally acceptable). In normal, person-to-person speech, this is tolerated far less; as you pointed out, during a personal phone call she used almost no hard attack. Despite it becoming more common, it is in fact a contrast to the naturally flowing sound of english in a fluent native speaker. As a result, overuse of hard attack gives the impression that you're stupid, unsure of what you want to say or how to say it. This is where that stereotypical assumption that a foreigner with an accent is somehow less intelligent originates. It's a complete fallacy, but you see it happen constantly. Movies and TV often make fun of it, with some stuck up aristocrat slowly yelling their sentences at the foreign servants as if that will make it easier for the idiot to understand or, conversely, slowly shouting "BANO!" or some other foreign word like that's the only way the listener can understand their own language. If someone, even a non-native speaker, is constantly halting their words, even subtly, your brain interprets the signal as "slow," and therefore unintelligent. And who are the queens of the english hard attack? Um, like, well, it's, like, totally valley girls, like, duh! Ah yes, of course, and what is their reputation? This shift, if it does happen, won't happen until every member of the generations who didn't grow up reinforcing their english through youtube videos has died out. Until then, the bias to think the frequent hard attack sounds stupid (a bias I definitely share) will make overuse of it in your speech pattern undesirable. In the meantime, if you are learning english and want to speak properly like a native, you've got to feel the flow, baby.

[@howard555]

im a young, male, singer/songwriter from the US (for context). i’ve noticed this “hard attack” phenomenon before. I find that it takes me a lot of practice to remove it from vocal performances that i feel it doesn’t belong in. i once wrote a song that has the words “can’t explain” in it. i found it nearly impossible to say this expression without hard attack on the e. it took a whole lot of repetition, but i eventually achieved the smooth performance i was looking for.

[@user-pq6py8mt5b]

​@@lurch789That's a weird thing to say, there's a lot of music that doesn't contain singing.

[@tiltil9442]

@@user-pq6py8mt5b lurch went out on more than one limb with several opinionated statements in just one comment - a couple of salt grains should be enjoyed alongside

[@Aya-cr1yi]

Arabic has the glottal stop, and it can take several forms depending on the vowel it follows: ء stands alone أ with a sound ؤ with o sound ئ with i/e sound Many people found it hard to comprehend the technical part of producing the sound, but for native Arabic speakers naturally. Good news for me since I am learning German and it is not all a foreign sound.