Some people affect the use of a glottal stop when it’s not really part of the standard language. You’ve probably heard this in Cockney English, but you also hear it among certain young people in the U.S.
We were doing a college visit when I distinctly heard our student guide say that the cafeteria is “buttface style.” My teenage daughter and I both tried not to laugh when we both figured out that he said “buffet style” but added a severe glottal stop before the double-f that made it sound like a t.
It’s when you stop the sound by closing your throat, rather than enunciating the consonants, like saying “uh-oh” (the first “h” is a glottal stop, the second one isn’t(?)). More seasonally, pretend you’re a very sarcastic Santa and say “Ho. Ho. Ho.” So, “buffet style” becomes “Bu-fay style” which becomes “buttface tile”.
No Cockney would put a glottal stop before the F in “buffet style”, just to get that out of the way. The English glottal stop is used in place of a T sound, after vowels.
SerafinaPekala, a glottal stop is when the glottis, down in the throat, interrupts the voicing of a sound by stopping air flow. Americans often use a glottal stop between words when one ends in a vowel sound and the next one starts with a similar vowel sound, to keep it from sounding like one word:
no ocean
free email
Thai iced tea
I don’t like the way the guy in that video describes it, because he puts the stop after the tt in “mitten.” I am not a speech therapist but it seems to be that is a lingual stop, not a glottal stop. You are halting the flow of air at the tip of the tongue. His examples are all like this except Hawai’i. Hawai’ian has a glottal stop as part of the language, and so does Arabic. In English it’s just an undocumented feature
Cockneys use the stop instead of the tt (actor explaining it, go to 1:30 for glottal stop), and some Americans do too. My daughter does this with “button” and it drives me crazy because it’s a teenage affectation, not anything in Northern Virginia culture.
Agreed, especially double-t sounds. I think it’s odd to use it in “buffet” although I think it may be an African-American thing.
Not with “mitten.” I noticed that around here: the pronunciation is “mi’in” and the stop clearly comes from the glottis. There is no “t” sound (which is a lingual stop).
Where I live, those second two examples would often be uttered not with a glottal stop but more with a lingual-palatal separation. Kind of like “free-yemail” or “Thai-yaiced tea”. American English can get incredibly sloppy, the first example might end up sounding like “no-wocean” in informal speech, and sometimes the words can actually run together with no audible division, especially of the context is narrow enough to exclude ambiguity. When I hear the way some people talk (including myself), ti is amzanig we cna veen tesae uot the menaign form the aduio slaad ew aer heranig.
I agree with the nature of the characterization, but I’d point out that it only seems “sloppy” to speakers of NAE because it’s our dialect, (and therefore “easier” for us) . To non-native speakers some if these phonological traits are just as acrobatic and difficult to produce as any other aspect if English.
But also apparently because of the syllable stress (on the first syllable)–which is probably at the heart of the problem in the OP. Otherwise it couldn’t’ve been much of a glottal stop.
Which really does explain the confusion. In my part of the country, the word is typically pronounced like b’FÁY, but I have heard a few people pronounce it BÚfay, mostly east of the Mississippi. The stress division in both forms is pretty steep, the tonal change in the second could be perceived as a glottal stop that is not actually present.
