random linguistic question

For anyone who speaks Arabic native, fluent, third, started two weeks ago or even cares....

Over the last nine months between work and other stuff, I lost duolingo entirely and went back to start over my Hindi (interesting and related here, but I'll come back) I saw they added Arabic, Navajo, and a couple of others, and even if I don't plan to start anything new, I like to start the first lesson to look around, kick the tires, etc. Then I spent three hours happily working through the first two Arabic alphabet skills before I realized what I was doing, which is super weird since I've never actually in my entire life spent any amount of time looking at Arabic script other than when friends would write things and I'd say "pretty" because yes it is, and also, Americans are intimidated by words that look like modern art to us or something, IDK. Americans, dude; we're like this.

I do not know whether this is true or not, but Arabic within the context of Duolingo shares a lot of basic southern drawl rules in how to deal with vowels and the perfectly logical uses of 'ha', 'ya', and 'ay' when vowels try to be boring. I'm not saying I am going to expertise this shit, but it's nice to be hanging in a language that is like 'maybe more Atlanta around here, but here, rural central Texas farmer is perfect, well done!'

Which has had the funny side effect of having to work codeswitching my English out of 'so that's a lot of drawl' which I can hear and have to fight down. This really doesn't happen anymore unless I'm in a conversation with another Texan (born or assimilated) and on first drawl, we both devolve. (We don't do this around Yankees unless we're screwing with you. Yes, you aren't crazy, it is deliberate, we call this 'fun'.) I never defaulted into a hard drawl--Texas variations include twang and a lot lot lot of Mexican Spanish and Texan Spanish influence and my parents spoke two different dialects of Central Texas (Austin and rural Hill Country)--but once you get any drawl variation, it's fairly easy to adjust to anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon from Kentucky and Georgia to northern Louisiana (French-Creole influence then becomes a thing and you have to rebase the rules).

More importantly, I never ever do it at work, because while everyone is fluent in English, I use 'diction is your friend' rules. We all work in tech, and often, I'm the only native English speaker in the room with everyone else super fluent in English but in second, third, fourth, and fifth position with diffent first language start values of, in order of frequency, Hindi and Telugu (yes, I do feel inferior thanks for asking). So I start precise and read the room as Hindi-first language and Telugu-first language speakers also have some variation in how they learned English. Again, perfect fluency everyone (see me, inferior) but that means it's super easy not to even realize something may be off and double check.

(Note: for any native Hindi speakers who come to Texas; eighteen months, you will be saying y'all regularly, lose some 'g' on more than a few 'ing's, and that's just to start, you won't notice, and that means Texas has claimed you for its own for all time and you're now Texan. You can physically leave, sure, but your linguistic English centers are now ours. Y'all will never leave your vocabulary and those 'g's are pretty much lost forever unless you concentrate very hard speaking for the rest of your life. I didn't make the rules, okay, I'm a victim too, this is just how Texas rolls. Welcome, my brothers and sisters; we're all in this together.)

Now, back to Hindi, which is what i was doing before Arabic southern drawl seduction; I erased all my progress because I remembered nothing, my own fault; it took me way too long to form pattern-recognition of Hindi script when they got to consonant-vowel sounds. When I started, I confirmed I have no goddamn language centers: I knew nothing.

This depressing state of affairs continued until lesson one, level three, and it wasn't like a dramatic flash of memory, an amnesia patient going "I REMEMEBER EVERYTHING" but just--there. And this time, my brain set up correct organization.

The first time, it took me a month to get through alphabet lessons one and two, all five levels, by which I mean until I did all lessons perfectly and that was a lot of repetition for something that still barely stuck. This time, it was three hours, give or take, and even better, everything was organizing immediately by consonant --> consonant-vowel --> consonant-vowel-vowel, etc. And I cannot say this enough; this is not like accessing active memory. I don't actively remember anything from before, but I do know that unlike last time, it's persisting. I no longer feel like I'm writing on a white board with an almost empty marker I keep having to go back and frantically rewrite as it fades (quickly), but have graduated to a number two pencil where I need to be careful of smears but remains legible.

Right now, anyone multi-lingual is wondering what sort of deal with Satan happened that I acquired my native tongue or even understand what language is; welcome to my life. I think my language centers weren't appropriately tested before deployment to the live environment via birth and so are not working by design. And this is why testing is important.

Comments

Testing is always vital!

[jesse_the_k]

and on first drawl, we both devolve is a great line!

Can you point to any famous speakers who define the boundaries between "drawl" and "twang," not to mention "soft" and "hard" drawls?

Re: Testing is always vital!

[seperis]

You could do it, actually:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6596815

I wrote this to phonetically match farmers at my parents bar. Location: Hare, Texas, three to five miles from Thrall since I'm not sure Hare is actually a town still or ever was.

This is not a literal linguistic explanation but more a symbolic illustration.

Think of a drawl as the verbal equivalent of writing cursive, but with the ideal of all words becoming one word of a size equivalent to how long until we need to breathe. In this case, verbal cursive works basically like this: if we can't get the a sound to join the one directly before it, we try to find something like it that could work or eliminate it. If there are two sounds in a row that won't join, then the first sound survives as the end of the word/unholy word-phrase-sentence and the second starts the new one, which is useful for breathing.

Example: what are you going to do?
Drawled: Whaddaya gonna do?

In a sense, drawls are Aesthetic English; flowing, smooth, less choppy, round instead of sharp or edged, less rigid, prettier. A sentence should flow like water, not fall like rocks. But since its basically passed down purely verbally and no one feels inspire to make some rules, people twenty miles apart can use the exact same words and make completely different choices on how to pull this off.

Example: what are you going to do?
Drawled: Whaddaya gonna do?
Drawled 2: Whatcha gonna do?

Some of those choices are obviously wrong. Why on earth you would keep the hard sharp 't' and sub in a rough 'ch' for the already smooth 'y' when the 'dya' is round, warm, adds lyricism, and slides honey-smooth off the tongue, I have no idea. Sure, it's two syllables to whaddaya's three, but it's totally not worth the sacrifice. I try not to judge. I usually fail.

Re: Testing is always vital!

[ratcreature]

Do you know how that choice to drawl developed?

I don't think I could drawl even if I wanted to. German is somewhat on the other end because in German standard pronunciation you put in extra glottal stops to make word boundaries clearer (when words start with vowels, sometimes even inside compound words), and because you aren't really conscious of them as a real sound, putting them is a very hard habit to break when learning other languages which don't do that. You aren't even aware that you are making that little throat noise before the vowel to make the words or parts stand out, and think you are just saying a vowel. It's crazy making.

Re: Testing is always vital!

[seperis]

Honestly, I'd love to know, and if it forms only in compatible languages or--I suspect--that can be one way a language starts to change or slowly meld into the a similar or distinct version. And an inevitable way to make that happen fast is influence of another language in some way.

Example: British colonialism and English

One of my coworkers was born in Cameroon where colonial French influence was high, so his first language was Cameroonian French, but at the same time, he also learned English as spoken there. Then he said he started learning English in school (I think age seven to eight), and I realized that he could not only speak two more languages than I could, in addition he spoke two different Englishes when I only speak one. So I asked to hear what he learned first, hoping against hope I was mistaken and we were still equal in at least number of Englishes spoken if not foreign languages.

He played a youtube video of a guy singing in English as spoken in French-speaking Cameroon and sure, it was definitely English, but it was very different though I don't have the training explain what. It wasn't just some brand new to me words--that I'd expect, like how much Spanish is worked into Texas English or French in Louisiana--or alternate pronunciations, but cadence, rhythm, some grammar that had nothing to do with the fact it was sung. Unmistakably native English, but as native to--I assume--French-speaking Cameroon at least.

It was cool yes, but I had to listen a couple of times even though maybe ninety percent was identical to how I speak English and five percent was a matter of unfamiliar accent. Five percent, though: that was brand new, though again, I'm not a linguist, so I can't work out what exactly that was.

So German now probalbly couldn't--though now that feels like a challenge or something--but given time and influence, German could be drawled. It might not sound anything like any German you have ever heard, but you'd probably understand it, just feel like it was mirror universe.

Re: Testing is always vital!

[ratcreature]

I'm pretty sure you can drawl German, just not with the standard pronunciation. German is very diverse with regional dialects, as much or more so than English. Even as a non-native speaker I have rarely any trouble with regional variations of English, but German dialects often aren't mutually intelligible for native speakers from a different region and people have to code switch to standard.

Not all German dialects do the glottal stop, and not all to the same extent. Like I think Swiss German doesn't use glottal stops, but then the dialects there are really hard to understand. But I think their regional version of standard German doesn't do glottal stops either. Neither does Austrian German, I think. But that's pretty understandable compared to Swiss.

I have actually seen Austrian German described as "drawling" in English. I'm just from the North and we put in more glottal stops than average I think, at least I've seen pronunciations with extra glottal stops in the middle of words labbeled as "Northern".

But if you listened to an Austrian German speaking their dialect you'd hear that it sounded significantly different from Standard even without understanding anything. Though I'm not sure it's quite analogous to Texan versus Midwestern English.

ETA: Here is a YouTube video with someone older from Vienna talking in his dialect (https://youtu.be/0bIcZVLmuFY). I can mostly understand what he's saying after acclimating a little, but it's quite removed from standard.

Re: Testing is always vital!

[malkingrey]

Twang is the accent in which this joke works:

Q: How is a lemon cream pie like the third finger of my left hand?
A: Because it has meringue on it.

And "y'all" is, like, the coyote of English pronouns, in that it's steadily expanding its range into areas you wouldn't expect. My theory about this is that a) Modern English seriously needs a second-person plural pronoun anyhow, and b) unlike most of the other regional possibilities ("youse", "yins", and so forth) "y'all" is not also class-marked.

Also: unless I'm in a conversation with another Texan (born or assimilated) and on first drawl, we both devolve.

It's probably a good thing that we're highly unlikely to ever physically be in the same room, because the mutual drawl-devolution would be alarming. I've been living in far northern New England for three decades now, but get me into conversation with another expat Texan and both of our accents start heading southward at great speed.

Re: Testing is always vital!

[seperis]

I legit snorted through my coke after saying that out loud.

And "y'all" is, like, the coyote of English pronouns, in that it's steadily expanding its range into areas you wouldn't expect. My theory about this is that a) Modern English seriously needs a second-person plural pronoun anyhow, and b) unlike most of the other regional possibilities ("youse", "yins", and so forth) "y'all" is not also class-marked.

For a: God yes. It says something that (American, at least) English speakers en masse keep desperately altering the a major grammatical structure of English almost as soon as we grasp language. I am not a linguist but have disproportion number of linguist relatives, relatives by marriage, and friends who have broken down into very small words what parts of language are ridiculously hard to even want to change much less do it. And yet, we've been doing this shit like, maybe the moment we realized hey, maybe thee/thou was useful, what were we thinking?

Which really makes me wonder what on earth was going on linguistically with thou/you becuse some you-plural regionalisms seems to have existed when thou/you/you was still at least somewhat active. (I am not a linguist, as you can tell, but like reading about it even though I understand maybe twenty percent at best.)

B: I'm not sure about that, but come to think... Growing up, the y'all/ain't thing was very weird as a kid. Y'all was considered, if not technically grammatical, good enough for anyone not snooty coastal elite (eighties version of that concept) just don't use it in essays obviously, but ain't, despite being equally ungrammatical and also pretty useful as first person singular to be was the only one that didn't fit contraction rule, was SO GODDAMN WRONG WRONG WRONG hillybilly/trashy/uneducated, which at the time made no sense but when you're a kid, what does? Now I suspect it was both a class marker but even maybe more, 'uneducated' was code for 'Black'.

I can't prove it, but when I got older, it dovetails with how people (white) seemed to super resent or look down upon pronouncing 'asked' as 'aksed' or 'axed' which I used to find baffling coming from people who haven't spoken a single 'ing' with a hard 'g' in possibly a decade. Then someone said ti was 'urban' and at twenty-eight,I was poor at recognizing racism, but even I was mentally like "...seriously?????"

I only added that because by any logic, that being associative language in the south, how on earth y'all ended up not getting that stigma considering how much African-American English is rooted in southern linguistics.

Re: Testing is always vital!

[malkingrey]

"Y'all" is just too damned useful.

"Ain't" is weird. Anybody who's read much Regency romance, or even Golden Age mysteries of the titled-detective variety, knows that "ain't" was alive and well, at least on a slangy, sporting-buck level, over in England long after its use was deprecated in the US.

And while my father (a well-educated man who came from big-fish-in-small-pond Southern stock -- as in, the family farm that the my generation of heirs finally got shet of in 2018 was originally the family plantation, with absolutely everything that word implies†) never used "ain't", nine times out of ten when he said "can't" the pronunciation that came out of his mouth was "cain't."

That was an Arkansas accent; my mother, who came from near Grapevine, Texas, back when Grapevine wasn't even a particularly wide spot in the road, never used it at all. On the other hand, "wash" came out as "warsh" for her a lot of the time.

(Me, I grew up on and around university campuses, so my accent was more or less Standard Educated Southern. Himself, now -- he grew up in Westchester County NY as the son of a couple of midwesterners, but 15+ years in the Navy gave him an overlay of that particular military accent that I always think of as Service Southern.)

---

†How it is that the sort of people who writing agonizingly soul-searching essays for The Atlantic about their Awful Ancestors apparently manage to make it to established adulthood without ever having known about said Ancestors for years . . . I don't know.

[krait]

Ahhhh, I too have completely forsaken Duolingo for... long enough that they've stopped sending me reminders, anyway! Ack. I'm sure I have also forgotten everything, but especially those things that are kanji, which is depressing and doesn't exactly make me want to go back. (But Navajo... might lure me.)

Good luck beating your language centers into some kind of working order! If you figure out a patch, be sure to tell me? :D

[seperis]

My reward for three straight days of Hindi and Spanish is two lessons in the Navajo. I am so curious!

They also added Scotch Gaelic and Swahili!

On one of the fact things about Duolingo is that there are more people are learning Irish Gaelic than currently speak the language. Truly we live in the future.

[lillian13]

Oh lordy.

I remember when I first moved to San Antonio to go to college (from Midland) and my sister called me and then complained that I "sounded Mexican" since my hard West Texas twangy drawl had slid into a more Central/South Texas one. After years of theater and living in Michigan for a while, I mostly killed it (though I still hear it in my vowels and it really shows up when I'm tired or pissed off).

It's been proven that the old South accent has much more in common with the English spoken during Shakespeare's time than Modern British English--that modern BE diverted at some point and Old Southern is what we would have gotten without that divergence.

After seeing No Country For Old Men--they did such a good job of casting local out there in west Texas that when I got out of the theater my accent was back in full force, to my friend's hilarity.

I took many years of French and after taking French grammar and English grammar, my hat's off to anyone who learned English after any codified language. Our grammar is so full of "except when..." rules that I know it drives Romance language speakers crazy.

[lessonsinescapology]

I speak Arabic but I'm not sure what you mean by southern drawl^^ Sorry.