One thing I’ve recently started noticing is that some english speakers sometimes ‘roll’ the ‘h’ sound when speaking. It’s kind of like a guttural sound where the back of the tongue hits the roof of the mouth.
Here’s 3 examples of it.
9:46: “… I think and I hope…”
4:29: “… there were only around a hundred computers…”
6:30: “… little hole that you put the line…”
Is this an evolution of the spoken english language, or has this always been there, but I’ve only just noticed it? Thanks.
My completely inexpert opinion is that it’s a possible natural consequence of emphatic speech, and probably only noticeable with good modern sound recording.
interesting. It’s not guttural in the way a word like “loch” is, but I think I hear what you’re hearing. It doesnt sound like anything new to me, though. It just sounds like it’s slightly emphasized, but only slightly, just like how you might make the “b” in “big” extra plosives or whatnot to emphasize something’s bigness, or even just in slowed down, carefully enunciated speech.
In the first video, you’d expect that there would be a different “h” sound, since the speaker is, I believe, Turkish by origin.
As for the other two, it’s simply a matter of emphasis of the word. It’s very difficult to aspirate a lot of air without getting some sort of glottal involvement.
I thought this too, but I haven’t found any examples of “old” videos where native english speakers are rolling the ‘h’.
To the point of the OP, I am trying to work out if the ‘rolling h’ pronunciation is something that’s newly crept in to english pronunciation (for native english speakers), or if it’s always been there.
Would be good to link to some ‘old’ clips where people are clearly rolling the h.
(Finding old clips where people aren’t rolling the ‘h’ is easy, just as it is for finding new clips).
Yes, it’s just a paralinguistic way to emphasize, and as you point out, we do this in many other ways, whether we realize it or not–it’s common in most languages.
This is going to be dialect-dependent, isn’t it? It has already been noted that one of the speakers in the videos linked in the OP comes from a Turkish-speaking background. But even for native English speakers, different dialects and variants of English will make the -h- sound (and lots of other sounds) differently. So what you perceive as a new trend in English pronunciation might just be new (on your part) exposure to a particular dialect.
It may also be context-dependent. Where somebody is speaking formally and/or to an audience they may conscously or unconsciously change there enunciation for greater clarity or projection, and this could lead to certain speech characteristics being emphasised.
Well that looks like evidence, depending on how you define “newly”.
I’m not hearing any great difference. The point about Higgins and Eliza is that he’s getting her to emphasise a sound she wouldn’t normally make, so that she can get into the habit of pronouncing the “h” as a standard RP sound (i.e., without the emphasis). For the other examples, it’s probably no more than a bit of “public speaking” emphasis with maybe a temporary additional supply of saliva.
The British character actor Richard Haydn used to affect both rolled R and rolled H sounds for some of his characters.
You may remember theCaterpillar from the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland (a bonus when Alice rolls her H right back at him.)