pronunciation - Waiteen for waiting


While it's reasonably common for people to drop the g in words such as waiting, hating, and dating, I seem to be stumbling upon a number of Americans additionally drawing out the final syllable of these words. Id est, they pronounce waiting (/weɪtɪŋ/) as waiteen (/weɪtiːn/). I find it oddly pleasant and easy on the ear. While I initially suspected this form to be particular to teenagers, I've since also encountered adults employing it.


Is this affectation particular to a region or class of society in the US?



Answer



There is a duplicate question. There really hasn't been much study of this phenomenon, but other people have noticed it, and it seems like it should be a feature of Californian and southwestern U.S. accents. One thing this duplicate question doesn't answer is how this process developed. I suspect it was a two-step process.




  1. People started using /iː/ as an allophone of /ɪ/ before /ŋ/ and /ŋk/. This phenomenon is well-documented in California—see the links in the duplicate question. Since there are no English words with the phoneme sequence /iːŋ/, it doesn't create any ambiguity in language. These people would say waiteeng and waitin', because after dropping the 'g', the phoneme would still be /ɪ/, and since there's now an /n/ after it, the pronunciation would revert to /ɪn/. Having lived in California (several decades ago), I don't think I even notice this pronunciation as being unusual.




  2. People internalized /iː/ as the actual phoneme in words like pink, king, and waiting. (This phenomenon has also been well-documented—again, see the links in the duplicate question.) Now, presumably, when these people drop the 'g', some of them keep the /iː/ phoneme, yielding the pronunciation waiteen'. This pronunciation sounds quite strange to me.




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