Peter Bleackley wrote:
> staving R A Brown:
>
>>>>
>>> To British English speakers, glo'al stops sound uneducated.
>>
>> While this was certainly true in the 1950s and 1960s, I don't think it's
>> universally true today.
>>
>> I've become more more aware since, I think the 1980s, and certainly
>> since the 1990s of more and more *clearly educated speakers*, both on
>> radio and television and among people I meet in everyday life who use
>> the glo'al stop as an allophone of /t/ in medial and final positions.
>> Personally, I still don't like it - but that's a prejudice of my
>> upbringing. I would be very surprised if none of the Brits on this list
>> in generations younger me did not in fact regularly use the glo'al stop
>> in everyday speech.
>>
>
> At least some of those speakers are clearly affecting the speech of the
> less well educated so as to appear cool. I'm sure that Jonathan Ross
> (for example) is quite capable of pronouncing his medial /t/s if he so
> chooses.

I'm sure even the poorly educated _can_ also pronounce [t]
between vowels - and probably would do so if imitating
(either in mockery or by being pretentious) the speech of a
"toff."

What you write may well be true of Jonathan Ross - but I
wasn't thinking of him (he's not a person I'd normally be
listening to), but to younger people I've heard who are
clearly educated but retain this feature.

I was thinking also of colleagues I've worked with who were
quite certainly educated and whose speech generally
exhibited what one would expect from educated people - but
they did (and presumably still do) pronounce medial and
final /t/ as [?].

It does seem to me to be partly regional and also a
generational thing. Maybe I'm more sensitive to it than many
others because, being brought up in south east England in
the 1940s & 50s, it was deemed to very much a mark of the
"uneducated" and associated particularly with 'low-class
Londoners.'

When I moved to Newport in South Wales in 1968, I discovered
it was not confined to London! I had to get used to, for
example, _party_ being pronounce [p_h&:?i] or even, in the
dockland areas of Cardiff as [p_hE:?i]. But such
pronunciations were definitely "uneducated."

As I wrote, its mainly in the last 20 to 30 years I've
noticed a gradual spread of this use of the glottal stop
among peoples whom one could not otherwise classify as
uneducated.

--
Ray
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Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
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[WELSH PROVERB]