/t/ versus /d/ and /tS/ versus /dZ/ alternation in NAE

[AnTeallach]

I sometimes elide the n, especially before [ʔ] (so [kãʔ] for can't), but it's variable, and I'm not sure whether I've adopted this from American varieties or if it is present otherwise in Britain. When I was young, 'can't' was [kanʔ] (whether [a] had nasalisation i'm not sure), and was very difficult to distinguish from 'can' in fast speech, annoyingly. I suspect this is why so many scots adopt 'cannae' instead of 'can't', even if they might otherwise not have (m)any 'Scots' forms. (I never did, but meh)

Putting excessive nasalisation on vowels is one way that we start to sound American, FWIW. It's not the case that nasalisation is completely absent, but I just think it's a lot stronger in American English. I can't claim that no Brits drop [n] but I don't know of any such varieties that do it consistently.

I agree with you: if I put the amount of nasalisation on a vowel before /n/ that I'd associate with, say, a French nasalised vowel, it tends to "sound American". I have actually wondered whether this might explain why American varieties seem more prone to sound changes conditioned by nasals, e.g. the pin/pen merger. (Or maybe this is nonsense and I'd think of examples in British English if I thought harder.)

I also agree that the exception is /n/ before /t/ realised as [ʔ], in which case my normal realisation seems to be a nasalised vowel followed by a glottal stop, e.g. don't [dõːʔ]. But I don't have very many glottal stops, and I mainly notice this in n't forms of verbs.

[Travis B.]

I should have noted that my own NAE dialect is rather extreme nasalization-wise even for NAE varieties; even to many other Americans it sounds very nasal. Interestingly enough, though, it has no vowel changes aside from just [+/-nasal] conditioned by nasality, including being pin-pen-unmerged.

The widespread elision of /n/ has other complications, though, as a checked vowel followed by an /n/ that is elided followed by an unstressed vowel frequently results in a nasal diphthong from the two vowels being merged (think what happened in Old Galician-Portuguese). On the other hand, elided /n/ before /j/, /w/, /r/, /l/, /f/, /v/, and /θ/ (including /j/ and /w/ from historical unstressed /iː/ and /uː/ before another vowel) may or may not result in the following consonant being geminated; geminated and ungeminated realizations seem to be in free variation here, including where this happens across word boundaries, with more careful or stressed speech tending to favor geminated realizations and less careful or stressed speech tending to favor ungeminated realizations.

[Amuere]

Though "garden" may have an influence on the first, there's not really any need for an extra explanation-- post-stress t normally gets realized as [d] here. 'Carted' and 'carded' are homophones for me.

Do you also have [d] in "carton", though? Carted and carded have [d] for me too, but not carton or kindergarten; they both have [?] because of the syllabic nasal.

I have [d] in carted, carded, and kindergarten, but [t] in carton. For "sandwich" I have [sanwitʃ], and in "congratulations" I switch between [dʒ] and [ʒ]. I've noticed that in alot of my speech [dʒ] becomes [ʒ] idk why.

[Tropylium]

"Congratulations" sounds like a case of t ɾ, which was then, for the purposes of the change /tj dj/ /tʃ dʒ/, reanalyzed as underlying /d/. I'd expect there to be other similar examples if that's the case however ("spatula", "furniture", etc)…