A listener named Anne wrote in with this question:
Have you written anything about the way some people pronounce short E and short I the same? For example, my husband says “pin” [P-I-N] and “pen” [P-E-N] the same way (sort of like a combination of how each is supposed to sound separately), and it fascinates me that he says he can’t hear a difference when I say them differently. I now ask my husband to spell words for me to avoid having any more misunderstandings. He thinks I’m crazy. I grew up in Minnesota and think it’s a Southern thing.
Anne has stumbled into the world of dialects—versions of a single language that have differences in pronunciation of certain sounds, in vocabulary, and even in rules of grammar. The variation that’s tripping up Anne and her husband is an example of something called a vowel merger, which happens when people who speak a dialect stop making a distinction between two vowels. This particular merger is well-known to dialectologists, who call it the “pin/pen” merger. That’s right: They named it after the same pair of words that Anne is asking about, probably because those are the most common words where this merging of two vowels causes confusion.
This merger turns other pairs of words into homophones, too, but usually the meanings are different enough that context clears up any confusion. For example, speakers who have the “pin/pen” merger will also have identical pronunciations for “bin,” as in the container, and “Ben,” the shortened version of the name “Benjamin,” but really, how many situations can there be where you just don’t know if someone is talking about, say, a recycling bin or some guy named Ben? The same goes for “him” the masculine singular pronoun, and “hem,” as in “Aardvark needs to hem his tuxedo because the legs are too long.”
But the “pin/pen” merger doesn’t completely level the distinction between short I and short E. It happens only before a nasal consonant—that is, an /m/ or an /n/. Speakers with the “pin/pen” merger will still hear the difference between words like “pit” and “pet,” “fill” and “fell,” and “miss” and “mess.”
Anne suspects that this merger is a Southern thing, and she’s right! Although dialect features can be associated with race, gender, class, or other demographic traits, some of the best-known features are associated with particular geographic regions. According to the “Atlas of North American English,” by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, the “pin/pen” merger is a feature of the English spoken in the southern United States. Furthermore, just as Anne observed, the vowel that these speakers use in words such as “pin” and “pen” really is in between a short I and a short E. The “Atlas of North American English” even has a graph showing the measurable acoustic difference between the ordinary short I and short E vowels and the merged vowel.
Another vowel merger in American English is much more widespread than the “pin/pen” merger. It’s known as the “cot/caught” merger. In dialects with this merger, the word “caught” [k?t], the past tense of “catch,” has the same vowel as “cot" [k?t], the kind of uncomfortable bed you might have slept on at summer camp.
Now in my dialect, the vowels in “cot” and “caught” are still distinct. Did they sound different to you when I said them just now? They did to me. In the word “cot,” as in “Squiggly tossed and turned so much that he fell out of his cot,” I used the short O vowel, in phonics terminology. As for “caught,” as in “Aardvark caught Fenster red-handed,” I used a vowel that doesn’t have an easily pronounceable name in the phonics system. It’s sometimes written as an O with a pointed symbol called a circumflex over it. For most speakers with the “cot/caught" merger, both words have a short O sound.
It’s actually somewhat surprising that my dialect doesn’t have the “cot/caught” merger, because I grew up in Seattle, and according to the “Atlas of North American English,” the “cot/caught” merger’s territory covers the western United States. I won’t try to solve that mystery today. The “cot/caught” merger is also prevalent in Canada, New England, and a swath of land stretching from western Pennsylvania south through West Virginia and into Kentucky.
Not only does the “cot/caught” merger cover more geographic area than the “pin/pen” merger; it also covers more phonetic area. Whereas the “pin/pen” merger happens only before nasal consonants, the “cot/caught” merger takes places in a much wider variety of phonetic environments. This opens up many more possibilities for confusion between speakers who do have the merger and those who don’t. For example, it just so happens that Squiggly’s dialect—but not Aardvark’s—has the “cot/caught” merger, and they can tell you a funny story about this one time when Squiggly was talking about a male acquaintance named Don, but Aardvark thought he was talking about a mutual female friend named Dawn. It took about 10 minutes before they got that straightened out. And then there was the time that Aardvark was complaining about a stocker in their local supermarket. Eventually, Squiggly realized that Aardvark was talking about an employee who puts merchandise on the shelves—he stocks the shelves—but only after he’d told Aardvark that he should have called the police about this stalker. Then Aardvark was like, “Why would I do that? I don’t like how he always puts the chocolate-covered ants on the highest shelf, but it’s not a crime!”
You can see how it can cause confusion when words sound alike.
Even with ambiguities like “cot” and “caught,” “Don” and “Dawn,” and “stocker” and “stalker,” there are a few words where even speakers with the “cot/caught” merger distinguish between the two vowels. In particular, the interjection “ah,” which you might utter as you relax into a comfortable bed, still sounds different from “aw,” which you might say when looking at pictures of your friend’s newborn baby.
There are other vowel mergers in addition to the “pin/pen” and “cot/caught” mergers. There is also such a thing as a vowel split. There are even chains of vowel changes, where one vowel starts to be pronounced like another one, which then begins to be pronounced like yet another, in a domino-like sequence. We might talk about some of these other changes in a future episode, but if you can’t wait that long, you can find out more about them in the “Atlas of North American English.” I also recommend the most recent episode of the podcast Lingthusiasm—the podcast that’s “enthusiastic about linguistics,” which talks about chain shifts. It’s episode number 17, called “Vowel Gymnastics,” and I’ll put a link in the show notes. If you have funny stories about vowel variations leading to misunderstandings, I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment.
Neal Whitman blogs about linguistics at literalminded.wordpress.com and is a regular columnist for the online resource Visual Thesaurus.
