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Pronunciation of voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ as ʃ (/sh/) in slang?

My understanding was that the cluster "str", for example in "stress", is usually pronounced /stɹɛs/, just like Wiktionary mentions. Their audio sample confirms this.

However, I sometimes hear a different kind of pronunciation, namely "shtress" or something like /ʃtɹɛs/ (forgive my IPA knowledge).

As an example, Jay Z is rapping about the "New York city shtreets" (here at ~ 0:30), not "streets". The actors from the Jersey Shore seem to do it as well, so I'm starting to believe this is an East Coast / New York thing?

So, regarding this oddity:

  • Where in the English world do people speak like this? Is this even localized to a certain area?
  • Is this a recent development? I didn't hear about this back when I was learning English at school.
  • More formally, is this a "mistake"?

My naive explanation would be that it's simply a natural development because the "sh" forms automatically when you pull back your tongue from forming an "s" to "r".

Community
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slhck
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    Don't Scots have a similar, possibly not as pronounced, affectation? I'm thinking of "Shawn" Connery here. P.S. That Jay Z link is pointing to the wrong place. – coleopterist Oct 05 '12 at 13:16
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    Not an answer, but an expansion: I hear a similar pronunciation amongst northwestern Ontario Ojibway and Oji-Cree first-language speakers, speaking English: "stress" is often pronounced "shtchress," "strange" as "shtchrange," etc. And this morning, my first-language-English, seven-year-old son found it strange that "tree" begins with a T, when, to his ear, it should begin with a CH ("chree"). – JAM Oct 05 '12 at 13:48
  • Interesting. No wonder I didn't find it though – even searching for "shtr" only returns my post. @reg – slhck Oct 05 '12 at 15:17
  • @slhck I wish we had a palatalization tag. In fact I started by tagging your question thus. The problem is, all our questions on palatalization (arguably including yours) have it as the answer. And we are generally very cautious about not tagging questions with their answers. – RegDwigнt Oct 05 '12 at 15:22
  • this is one mispronunciation that really annoys me, much like pronouncing "ask" like "ax", or "supposedly" as "supposably". – MrOBrian Oct 05 '12 at 17:10
  • @MrOBrian, it is not a mispronunciation -- it is an accent. Same with "ax" for "ask." I don't know about "supposably" which I've never heard. – JAM Oct 05 '12 at 17:37
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    I have a hard time regarding "ax" in place of "ask" as an accent. It's a rearrangement of consonants to make a different word. I mean, the person knows how to say "k" and how to say "s", but is just mixing their order. – Kaz Oct 05 '12 at 18:37
  • Whenever I do "shtr" instead of "str", it's usually because I don't want my "s" to whistle – Izkata Oct 05 '12 at 21:21
  • @Kaz: Let me ax you a querstion... don't you think that pronouncing "ask" as "ax" would be more of an "ask-ent" instead of an "accent"? – Justin ᚅᚔᚈᚄᚒᚔ Oct 06 '12 at 03:52
  • @Justinᚅᚔᚈᚄᚒᚔ Lol. By the way, the Japanese call Mexico "mekishiko" (メキシコ). Unfortunately "shiko" gets shortened to "shko" in speech, so it comes out sounding like "mekishko". – Kaz Oct 06 '12 at 04:29

2 Answers2

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After digging for a while, I found the answer in a paper called Assimilation at a Distance by Wayne P. Lawrence.1 It's a little dated (2000), but also cites studies from 1993 and earlier describing this phenomenon.

The recent history of American English includes a sound change that seems to have gone unattested in the scholarly literature.1 This is the change of /s/ to /ʃ/ before /tr/ (i.e., a PHONEMIC CHANGE), which involves a palatalization of the initial sound in the cluster /str/, typically in initial position but not exclusively.

The author further mentions that "this phonemic change seems to be neither dialectal nor regional." However, it's definitely an American English peculiarity. It seems that it was first heard on television or radio broadcasts and became popular over these channels. Of course, the internet helps spreading such a linguistic "oddity" – and even I know I picked it up from television shows and continue to (subconciously) use this pronunciation.

Regarding the phonetic principles behind this change, Lawrence summarizes:

More concretely, this pronunciation is an implicit "assertion" on their part that in their grammar /r/, being [+ interrupted], is marked with respect to the opposition INTERRUPTED versus CONTINUOUS - exactly the same way that [ʃ], being [+ compact], is marked with respect to the opposition COMPACT versus DIFFUSE. The marked character of /r/ is prompted and confirmed phonetically, of course, by its high degree of retroflection in American English.7

This would explain the fact that we only hear this in American English. What's interesting is that the same does not appear to happen to "spr", which can be explained by the phonetic differences in "t" and "p":

I would surmise, therefore, that /str/ lends itself to realization as [ʃtr] while /spr/ remains unaltered also due to the phonological value of /t/ and /p/.

Another more recent paper was written by David Durian.2 It goes into the details of social background and "shtr" as well as providing some more explanations for its development.

1 – Lawrence, Wayne P. (2000) "Assimilation at a Distance," American Speech Vol. 75: Iss. 1: 82-87; doi:10.1215/00031283-75-1-82
2 – Durian, David (2007) "Getting [ʃ]tronger Every Day?: More on Urbanization and the Socio-geographic Diffusion of (str) in Columbus, OH," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 13: Iss. 2, Article 6

slhck
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  • A very informed comment, far beyond my areas of expertise. But I know that when I do this, I am copying the laid-back tones of Humphrey Bogart from the move Casablanca. It seems to me that it is related to an exaggerated casualness, deliberately using laziness of mouth to convey a sense of control over a situation. "Shtreets" and "Shweetheart" are done in similar vein. Any comments on this idea would be appreciated. – shipr Oct 05 '12 at 15:20
  • It is encouraged to accept your own answers on the SE network, in case you don't know ;). – terdon Jun 09 '13 at 20:43
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The phenomenon has been studied by sociolinguists, beginning with Labov. This isn’t my area, so I can’t give you up-to-date references.

The same, or a similar, phenomenon is found in Sydney, Australia, where I grew up. I hasten to add though, the pronunciation isn’t /ʃtɹɛs/(*) , but /çtɹɛs/: i.e., a voiceless palatal fricative (as in German ich), not a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative (as in English wish).

There are certainly good articulatory foundations for this behaviour, along the lines you suggest, to do with preparing the tongue to produce sounds in the same (articulatory) vicinity. (For which reason, /s/ tends to be preserved in /spr/ and, especially, /skr/: the tongue does not stay near the alveolar ridge in these cases.)

Whether this is a “mistake” depends on how normative you are. The Queen doesn’t speak that way. If everything the Queen doesn’t do is a mistake, then this is too. Otherwise, it’s just another legitimate form of dialect variation.

(*) I assume your omission of /t/ here is accidental, given its non-omission in the title of the question.

Daniel Harbour
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