Funny enough, this has almost become the common British pronunciation of most "hard t" words. It's quite common for people to say "a bottle of water" like "a boh-ell of wah-er", or "butter" like "buh-ah. The sound comes from the back of the throat instead of the tip of the tongue.
I had the impression such is considered "lower class" talk, for lack of a PC way to describe it. Please hear me out before giving me negative points.
If you are "educated", then you are "supposed to" pronounce the middle constantans, as skipping them is considered "lazy". I'm not making a value judgement, but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private. All things being equal, parents want their children to sound wealthy and well educated. Similar for certain rural or "redneck" talk in the US. Example: "Murica" instead of "America". My mother used to lecture me against certain verbal shortcuts so that I didn't "sound ignorant". Her words, not mine.
It's no big secret that different social groups exhibit language variation, and that while there's nothing inherently lesser about certain dialects, they are nonetheless coded as e.g low or high status.
Also due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection ,I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English is a fascinating and accessible example. A terrible summary: dropping the R is lazy (dropping anything is "lazy"), but at the same time sounds British and therefore fancy to some American ears. But other people, to avoid laziness, add Rs. But then their speech can sound low-status in some cases too.
It is (or was) considered "lower-class" to drop your Ts in the UK. But these days, it's not fashionable to talk like Boris Johnson, even if you went to Eton, so many upper-middle class people emulate aspects of "lower-class" speech, including the glottalization of "t" when it's followed by an unstressed syllable (like water). Even someone as indisputably posh as Prince Harry will T-glottalize on occasion.
Not being posh has been fashionable before. A fashion for dropping terminal g existed the upper classes in the 1920's UK. Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey did this, and it was fascinating to hear this affectation in the 1970's BBC adaptations with Ian Carmichael. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/no-g-men-frank-mcnally-on...
Also, there is a backlash against Received Pronunciation as inauthentic. Now I enjoy BBC announcers with regional accents, unlike the voices I heard on BBC in the seventies and eighties.
Famously in "huntin', shootin', and fishin'." But I'm not sure it's the upper classes emulating the lower. It seems to be parallel evolution from different forms of Old English [0]. Which makes sense; it's unlikely an upper-class English person of the 1920s would be motivated to copy lower-class speech patterns. Bertie Wooster wouldn't want to sound like his scullery maid.
> Now I enjoy BBC announcers with regional accents, unlike the voices I heard on BBC in the seventies and eighties.
I agree. The downside of the loosening of the old standard is heard in the number of actors who mumble through their lines. I wouldn't want to go back to a time when RADA enforced a kind of RP but I would like them to focus just as hard on diction.
>but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private //
I correct my childrens' pronunciations. I've honestly never thought of it as a class thing. In part it's "inherited", so it could have consciously been a class thing for one of my ancestors. But really to me it just seems necessary for preliterate speakers to understand the proper way to say a word based on its spelling, which they don't know. I find myself correcting USA-ian word use ("garbage") and pronunciation far more with my youngest than I had to at that age with my oldest ... we probably let him watch too much TV (several shows, like Paw Patrol have shifted to USA versions from British English versions).
It's hard to discern every phoneme from a new word, and hard to say some of them.
I do shift my accent, and vocabulary, to mark myself as a local I guess (when I'm back in that area of the country). If I get to use certain words in their localised (to about a 20mi long area) meaning it makes me happy for some reason. But I've never consciously worked on my accent to sound more/less posh; but have modified it to be more understood.
My wife is what I call a 'sympathetic speaker', she very quickly adopts the accent of those she's speaking with. An interesting phenomenon.
Re: My wife is what I call a 'sympathetic speaker', she very quickly adopts the accent of those she's speaking with.
Politicians are often known to do the same. It's usually painted as "pandering", but I'm not making a value judgement here. There's arguments both for and against.
