I heard a young lady the other day say to her fellow burger joint comrade “Just push the buh’in.” She literally dropped the t’s from “button”. And is the “valley girl” expression “wha’ever” another example?
Is there a linguistic/phonetic name for this?
Thanks,
What’s substituted in the examples you gave is what’s called the “glottal stop.” It’s common in some dialects of English; I remember learning from my mother as a child, “Put the stopper in the bottle, Myrtle,” where each medial consonant cluster turned into a glottal stop. (She didn’t talk that way; she was explaining dialects to me.)
Also common is the dropping of the /t/ sound in a wide variety of words, e.g., “fasten” – for which the Standard American pronunciation is not “FASS-ten” but “fass’n.”
Thanks!
IIRC, this is a feature of shorthand “stage” Cockney (like what the Young Ones spoke?). However, I’ve heard that actual Cockney is not like that.
Can any Londoners provide the Dope?
It used to be a common linguistic quirk here in Schenectady. People would say, “ki’in” for a baby cat, for instance, or “mi’in” for a type of glove.
Brought up in Sarf East London here. The Young Ones accents are pretty much middle-class London, not Cockney. But, London accents (including Cockney), and “Estuary English” do drop Ts all over the place when in the middle of words. Water -> wa’er, like you said button -> buh’on, even “it” gets abbreviated to sort of “ih”.
My accent varies: when talking to my bruvver the old (school yard) Lun’un creeps back, talking to my mum I sound much posher, switching back to something resembling RP, all Ts present and correct.
Yeah, Londoners definitely do the glottal stop on Ts, and in extreme cases their Ls disappear as well, so “bottle” ends up sounding something like “bo!uw.”
Geordies also do a glottal stop for Ts, but we pronounce the T at the same time. A good trick if you can manage it.
Dropping t’s? Oh, you mean 1/2 of the Vermont accent (or rather, Vermon’ accent). 
Are there actually American dialects that truly pronounce the Ts in words like button, kitten, mitten, etc.? I think I could count on one hand the number of Americans I’ve heard pronounce those words with something other than a glottal stop.
Or, in any case, people in my experience pronounce them the same way I do, and I don’t think I am really pronouncing the Ts. However, I would read the OP’s example of “buh’in” differently from how I say it, which is more like “buh’n” (the difference being the sound following the glottal stop).
So says Peter Ladefoged in A Course in Phonetics. (The alveolar nasal he’s referring to is n, and I left out the end of the sentence because I’m too lazy to try to reproduce his IPA for the word beaten.)
This isn’t the exaggerated “Dick van Dyke Cockney” glottal stop – it’s something you often don’t notice until it’s pointed out. I speak that way, and my accent is a damn near regionless mishmash of American (despite having lived in SoCal for twenty years, I haven’t picked up the accent). In fact, I think the only native English speaker among my classmates I’ve heard pronounce the t in “kitten” as anything but a glottal stop is from Essex. Although some people may pronounce it as a tap, which makes it sound kind of like “kidden”.
The Valley Girl “wha’ever” is a different matter, although I think it’s only pronounced that way for emphasis (i.e. you would say it as a standalone “Wha-EVER!” but not in a phrase like “get wha’ever you want”).
– Dragonblink, linguistics grad student extraordinaire
Isn’t it also common for black people? I remember when I used to watch Martin Lawrence’s T.V. show, it seems like the characters all said, “Mah-in” rather than “Martin”.
When I say “button”, I swallow the “t”, and my tongue only touches my palate once, as opposed to separately for the “t” and for the “n” sounds. But it definitely doesn’t sound like “buh-in” when I say it. It sounds more like “butn”. I’m not sure exactly what the difference is.
I’ve heard some people from Brooklyn (NY) say “buh’n” and “bo’ul,” as opposed to most people, who say “but’n” and “bot’l.” I’ve heard only a few people actually pronounce the second syllables, preceded by a hard “t” sound.
So how different is the London accent from the Kentish (?) accent? I know a guy from Kent who had lots of problems understanding Americans because they dropped their Ts.
I’m from central NJ, and I drop my Ts–it’s “Tren’n” (the capitol city of NJ), “buh’in”, and so forth. If I’m trying to make myself clearer, I’ll pronounce the T but it’ll end up sounding like a D. I have to really concentrate if I want to clearly enunciate the Ts so they actually sound like Ts.
Central Pennsylvania does it, too. I say mou’n for mountain. But I say boddle for bottle. And a “boddle a pop” is a bottle of soda.
Isn’t that the beginning of a limerick? 
I first noticed the effect from a Zappa song. One line contains “through the curtain”, with “curtain” covering two beats, so he pronounced it as curr-ten. To hear a hard “t” sound in “curtain” was jarring. Same with mountain, but I will use a hard “t” in “mountainous” roughly half the time.
Is there something all you language experts can 'splain me?
Ask me to pronounce “kitten.” I’ll clearly say “kitten” with the t’s in full force.
Saying it in a sentance in a non-presentation mode, I’ll almost always say “kit-un” – in my case I always imagine that the “t” is there, just really, really, really soft. It could be that you’d not hear me saying the “t.”
Is there a social or language explanation for this? Is it just laziness?
Mid-western Canadian here. While I don’t think I’ve heard anyone here pronounce the ‘t’ in fasten, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone drop the t in the other words mentioned here such as button, mitten or mountain. And for the popular teenager, whatever, usually the ‘t’ is very pronounced.
That sounds very strange indeed…I suspect he might have been winding you up
London accents (plural, there’s many) do vary from those of surrounding areas. However, the generic ‘estuary English’ already mentioned is encroaching on these areas. Where I live, 80 miles from London, is around about the border dividing areas where young people are still acquiring the local accent, and the bland greyness of Essex…
To return to your Kentish friend, though - the local accent here drops just as many Ts as any.
This is definitely an element of the “Brooklynese/Bronxese” accent. In fact, my college German textbook used this New York pronunciation to explain what a glottal stop was.
quarter = kwar-'uh
bottle of water = bah-'ul uh wah-'uh
shuttle = shuh-'ul
I’m from the Bronx, and these pronunciations are common among my family members and neighbors.