Two Vowel Shifts in Almost All ESL Accents

In addition to sharing useful information about shifts to the /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ sounds, I use an example word that fills me with regret and joy. I love to be inappropriate, but sometimes it's even better when it's by accident:

Even the direction of my gaze is perfect... So grab your mitt, and toss some balls around, you crazy sons of beaches!

Here's a transcript of the video:

Hey there, Jim Johnson for AccentHelp.com, and I want to talk about a couple of vowel changes that tend to happen in all ESL accents. So ESL meaning English as a Second Language.

So when people are learning English, or learning any language, they're carrying over sort of some baggage from the way that they have spoken their own language, and tend to find it especially difficult to do sounds that don't exist in their home language, what they're used to.

So a couple of those vowels are the /ɪ/ and the /ʊ/. So the /ɪ/ sound on the vowel quadrilateral. So in the IPA, the international phonetic alphabet, the /ɪ/ is what's called a lax vowel, as is the /ʊ/. So /ɪ/ as in MISS and ʊ/ as in COULD.

Those don't tend to exist in most languages, so people have to shift to something that's as close as they can get. Now most languages do have the sounds /i/ and /u/, which are tense vowels. The tongue is in a more tense and specific position, whereas with lax vowels, the tongue tends to be a little bit harder to track exactly what's happening. And it doesn't tend to have as much tension in it. So that's why they're called lax vowels.

And notice they're inside of the vowel quadrilateral, so they're not as distinctive sounds as those that are out there.

In fact, those symbols didn't used to exist in the IPA. They added them at some point after it got going, after it been going for a few years.

So the /ɪ/ very commonly moves towards the /i/ sound MEET, MITT becomes "meet." So many many people will say, "meet." "Grab your meet." "Why don't you seat."  Yeah? And that'll happen in many many accents.

Same thing with the /ʊ/, as in COULD, going a little bit more towards the /u/ (yes?) as in SOON. So that COULD may sound more like "cooed" like the sound of a bird. "Cooed." Notice it's almost C O O E D instead of C O U L D in the sound that it makes.

So these are a couple of vowels that really consistently, in many many accents, when we're talking about ESL accents, these are vowels that pretty readily and pretty regularly shift over towards the /i/ and the /u/. They're a challenge for people to do if they are not native English speakers. There you go.

For more info on accents, check out AccentHelp.com.