T-dropping in English dialects not influenced by French
“Please fact-check the claim that the 'T-dropping' (for example the stereotypical "bo'oh o' wa'er") that features in the phonology of some English dialects in the south of England is influenced by French.”
Summary
T‑dropping in Southern English dialects is an internal phonological development of English, not a result of French influence. Linguistic studies do not link this consonant deletion to French phonetics, so the claim is unsupported.
Sources 60 searched
- Cross language phonetic influences on the speech of French-English bilinguals - PMC
We examined the voice onset times (VOTs) of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and French to address the question whether cross language phonetic influences occur particularly in simultaneous bilinguals (that is, speakers who learned both ...
- Rwandan government rejects old claim that French no longer an official language | Fact Check
Contacted by AFP Fact Check on ... along with Kinyarwanda, English and Swahili. We also found no reports in reliable news media that the country had dropped French....
- The long adieu: how Britain gave up learning French | Ed West | The Guardian
Much of the blame for this can be placed with the Blair government, which dropped the requirement for foreign languages at GCSE level. As a result, the number of people taking them soon went down by almost a half.
- Explore the influence of French on English
While French uses the definite article · for certain jobs and titles, ‘le Prince William’ (FS, l.1), in English there is no article: ‘[Ø] Prince William’ (DT, l.7). Although this use of the definite article is obsolete in PDE, it was · present in some ME texts that were influenced by Norman French, for example ‘þe king
- French – Talking with Teresa
My breakdowns are structured around accent features and influences described by Knight-Thompson Speechwork, a 21st-century, skills-based approach to speech and accents that celebrates language diversity. KT Speechwork offers the “4 Ps” below as a framework for exploring many different facets ...
- Language Variation and Change, 10 (1998), 245-261. Printed in the U.S.A.
by a native English speaker from southern Louisiana. The questions dealt mainly · with sociodemographic topics concerning the speakers and their family (resi- dence, work, education, parents' origins), their social network, and their linguis- tic usage of French versus English.
- Language expert tackles claim that over 50% of English comes from French | UCL News - UCL – University College London
Dr Beth Malory (UCL English) investigates the sources of the English language after a recent news article claimed over half of English words are of French origin.
- Influence of French on English - Wikipedia
However, English has continued to be influenced by French. Estimates of the proportion of English vocabulary that originates from French range from one third to two thirds. In the early 11th century, Old English was not a single unified language but a dialect continuum that stretched from the ...
- Plonk, napoo & soo la voo: how French influences modern English
French has long served as the donor language par excellence in the history of English, since before the Norman Conquest. Julia Schultz’s study of the Oxford English Dictionary, widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language, demonstrates the continuing influence of French on the English lexicon.
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