A specific example is a certain type of accent, of which I think the Northern Irish accent is an example, where words such as ‘home’ become ‘hey-ome’. Or a youtuber whose channel I follow-- I can’t identify specific accents well enough to know what his is exactly, but he has the same pronunciation. For example he pronounces the word ‘case’ as cay-us’.
What I mean by a term for it would be similar to the terms ‘rhotic’ and ‘non-rhotic’ to refer to whether or not the ‘r’ sound is pronounced. ‘Non-rhotic’ pronunciation examples would be the ‘posh’ or ‘Queen’s’ British accent “mahvelous, dahling” or the classic Boston example “pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd”. I find the history of Rhoticity interesting- how the British actually started dropping their 'R’s after the American Revolution - as opposed to American accents developing to pronounce the ‘R’ sound, as one might assume. Upper-class Bostonians later adopted the developing British non-rhoticity because Boston did a lot of trading with Great Britain, and they wanted to sound ‘classy’ like the Brits.
I figured this would be an easy thing to google, but I spent a whopping 5 minutes googling for an answer and had no luck.
Similar. “R” is a funny letter. The mouth shape to produce it is similar to the shape for the schwa vowel sound. When other vowels are used with an “r”, the r forces the vowel to shift.
Fi er (fire)
Fla ir (flair)
Fa er (fare)
Faw er (far)
The vowel dipthongs as the mouth reshapes for the next letter. Some dialects emphasize that shift more, thus setting up the perception of two syllables.
More generally, that may be the cause in the other observed cases. Some dialects may be more prone to it.
Yes, and there are dialectects that turn dipthongs into one sound. Classic case I remember was a guy named Brian, pronounced “Brine”. Think Texas drawl.
All of this fits under the heading “vowels is weird”. (Deliberate phrasing -I know the subject and verb don’t agree on case. That’s me being amusing.)
I don’t have an answer but I have another example. The Cleveland Guardians (baseball) radio announcer pronounces “foul” as “fow-el” and since he’s a professional speaker it always makes me wonder if I am pronouncing it wrong. Or at least lazily.
I don’t know if this is a hijack, but I thought it worth mentioning that it happens in the other direction too - ‘Mirror’ is two syllables in most BrE dialects I think (although it might be variously mi-rah or mi-rer), but in some US dialects it sounds, to my ear, like ‘meer’.
I should perhaps admit I am assuming the direction of change here.
I’m from Chicago and I have a feeling I tend to do that subtly with words like “school,” “fool,” “fowl.” Which would track with Cleveland doing it too, being the same dialect area.
I shoulda mentioned that the announcer himself is from Wisconsin, but yeah that would track with Chicago and Cleveland (he’s been in Cleveland since the 80s).
Southern vowel breaking (“Southern drawl”): All three stages of the Southern Shift appear related to the short front pure vowels being “broken” into gliding vowels, making one-syllable words like pet and pit sound as if they might have two syllables (as something like pay-it and pee-it). This short front vowel gliding phenomenon is popularly recognized as the “Southern drawl”. The “short a”, “short e”, and “short i” vowels are all affected, developing a glide up from their original starting position to [j], and then often back down to a schwa vowel: /æ/ → [æjə~ɛjə]; /ɛ/ →[ɛjə~ejə]; and /ɪ/ → [ɪjə~ijə], respectively. Appearing mostly after the mid-19th century, this phenomenon is on the decline, being most typical of Southern speakers born before 1960.[30]
Although I’m not seeing anything re: Northern Ireland per the OP. And not for “home”.
‘Vowel breaking’ does seem to be the proper term, thanks @pulykamell (right outta the gate) and @Ruken .
As to me suggesting ‘Northern Irish’ as a regional example, that was kind of a guess, from a TV show I watched that I’m pretty sure was set in Northern Ireland in which they pronounced ‘home’ with two distinct vowel sounds, as in ‘hey-ome’. But now that I had a term to google, I found this article about ‘Hiberno-English’, which says:
the local Dublin accent is also known for a phenomenon called “vowel breaking”, in which MOUTH, PRICE, GOOSE and FLEECE in closed syllables are “broken” into two syllables, approximating [ɛwə], [əjə], [uwə], and [ijə], respectively.[30]
We kids used to laugh while my religious aunt watched televangelists on TV because they would pronounce the word “sin” as see-yunn. We were too young to know then it was vowel breaking.
As an aside, vowel breaking is how Latin portus, corpus, terra, pettia developed into Castillian Spanish puerto, cuerpo, tierra, pieza (Eng. port, body, earth, piece). Note that the broken vowels came to be represented in Spanish orthography.
Non-vowel-breaking Iberian Latin dialects developed into modern languages such as Catalan, Galician, and Portugese (cf. Port. porto, corpo, terra, peça).
I watch the British panel show Would I Lie to You? a lot. I remember one episode where comedian Lee Mack told a story which involved the local mayor. He pronounced “mayor” almost identically to the word “mare,” as in a female horse. So much so that it was hard, at first, to understand what he meant.
Lee Mack is from Lancashire, and the show frequently mentions his “Northern accent.” I know that the UK has a great variety of regional dialects, but this was the first time I had ever encountered that particular pronunciation.
Many years ago I did a play where my character was described specifically as having a Lancashire dialect. I worked my ass off, and the dialect coach said I did OK, but also said I kept wandering eastward into York.
Most of us do, I think. As I recall, when Tony Blair was having some internal party problems over the Labour nomination for the London mayor, a leading Tory taunted him with the suggestion that the two candidates should do a job share, so his favourite could be his “day mayor” and the troublemaker his “night mayor”. It wouldn’t have worked without the similar pronunciation.
