I was chatting with a Canadian neighbour a little bit ago, and he pronounces film ‘fillum’. I met a Salish Indian on Vancouver Island who pronounced it the same way. Is it a western-Canadian thing?
Very common in Irish dialects too; maybe no connection at all though.
Mangetout is right. It’s the way you say ‘film’ if you want to sound irish when saying it. I am not sure why. It’s like they are over-emphasisisng the ‘m’. The way to say ‘m’ in the alphabet is ‘em’ so they are emphasising the ‘m’ by saying ‘filem’ which is virtually identical in sound to ‘fillum’
Heh. I always thought that pronunciation was American. I suspect it pops up at random here and there.
That’s a common pronunciation in the Philly area, also. Various other words have an added syllable: Ac-a-me instead of Acme, ath-a-lete instead of athlete, and War-min-i-ster, instead of Warminster. No clue why.
I started a thread over at the American Dialect Society about friends of mine who pronouce the name of a local supermarket(Acme) as “AK-a-me.”
It’s evidently a phenomenon called epenthesis.
http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/generalizations/gendefinitions/epenthesis/epenthdefine.html
I think it’s a learned speech pattern, learned from generations of bygone immigrant ancestors.
If you want to investigate this further, just Google the word “epenthesis.”
“Fillum” is not uncommon amongst older working class Australians. For the rest of the population, it is sometimes used tongue-in-cheek.
I occasionally hear “cock-a-roach” as well.
Nope, at least not in my part of Western Canada, the prairies.
It was quite common in the Saskatchewan town I grew up in - when I worked in my Dad’s store I was often asked for some filum, since we kept it on shelves behind the counter.
Also often heard the word miluk (white stuff that comes out of a cow).
I heard that it comes from Gaelic- the fact that Gaelic does not allow adjoining consonant sounds without a vowel sound between them- hence the tendency for people whose speech patterns are based on a Gaelic history would tend to place a vowel sound between the m and n.
from:
http://www.sisterfidelma.com/pronounce.html
Hidden vowels
Most people will have noticed that many Irish people pronounce the word film as fil’um. This is actually a transference of Irish pronunciation rules. When l, n or r are followed by b, bh, ch, g (not after n), m, or mh, and is preceded by a short stressed vowel, an additional vowel is heard between them. For example, bolg (stomach) is pronounced bol’ag; garbh (rough) is gar’ev; dorcha (dark) is dor’ach’a; gorm (blue) is gor’um, and ainm (name) is an’im.