I discovered your channel a bit more than a month ago and i'm loving your videos so much! As a non-native english speaker they bring so much insight into why I speak with the accent I speak with without me realizing all the phonetic processes that go behind all of that. It's such a mind-blowing feeling to have something that you've been doing unconciously for years finally explained. It's incredible how well put together your videos are; they can be easily understood even by a complete phonetics layman like me! Not even to mention the great humor that just glue the whole video together in such a seamless manner. Keep doing what you're doing! big love

I love how you provide *examples* of where sounds occur. Makes it much easier to grasp the relevance/application as I don't have to sit around thinking of words for 5 minutes every time you mention a sound.

Not only enlightening but also increasingly hilarious! I lost it at BoJo saying "dyude".

I enjoyed this program.

Gotta love this guy. Lots of positive features in the channel: presentation is clean, without distracting background noises, useless previous chat, he knows whats he's talking about, copious on the spot examples, etc. However, one that's underrated is that he is not lazy. The sheer amount of time he uses for gleaning from zillions of videos, choosing the precise moments and emphasizing them. Pure gold. Already subscribed...

I speak English as a foreign language and I've been using it in my job(s) for two decades, so there's a lot of things I do with my speech without noticing. Occasionally, I catch myself saying things like "Youchube", and I start second-guessing myself: is it something native speakers actually do, or is it just some weird mannerism I've aqcuired due to some misguided attempt at being hypercorrect? It's great to find a clear explanation of what's going on here that basically tells me not to worry too much since pronounciation isn't particularly standardized anyway.

Watching this video made me feel so much better as a non-native speaker. Living proof that you can do literally you want as long as people understand what you are trying to say

I'm absolutely thrilled to find this. As an expat in America I've been unable to explain why I pronounce 'dune' as 'june' and 'tube' as 'chube'. I've received a lot of ribbing from my coworkers but now I have validation! hahaha!

This explains the confusing conversation with my American colleague from Dook university, who denied any knowledge of a place called Juke University

Here in Sri Lanka, we got our English from the old RP which was spoken until the 40s and 50s. Sri Lankan English (SLE) still retains some features of RP, which have gone out of use in Standard British English at present. Pronunciations and even vocabulary considered old fashioned or posh in the UK are still widely used in SLE.

Glad you mentioned Wales' pronunciation as well. I pronounce Dune, KZfaq and Tuesday as such; Dewn, YewTewb and Tewsday. A lot of people here will pronounce "situation" as "sit-ewation" and "statue" as "statew." Very interesting video!

English is my second language and I noticed it in phrases like "What did you do?" or "Would you?" where the "d" turns into "j" and quickly adopted it, because I like how it sounds. It may be partly because in my native language there's a lot of fricatives and affricates, so it sounds more natural to me :)

I like not only your videos Dr. Lindsey, I also like your humour as it shows through your collection of speech samples. Your videos are made with a lot of care and I very much appreciate that.

I’m glad you mentioned the few of us who don’t drop the yod or chew the tuna. I’ve lived in the US for sixteen years now and it’s a daily fight to not bend to other people’s preferences, but I am resolute.

I think the most surprising thing that I have been learning from these videos, is just how dynamic the English language is, *right now*. It might seem logical that social media and entertainment would be homogenizing the language more and more. Or that certain familiar accents would be "frozen" by their depictions in popular media. But no, instead stuff is changing all over the place, it seems like an ESPECIALLY interesting time for linguists. Thanks for another video full of insights!

There are very few people who can communicate with the general public about these phenomenons to begin with. Let alone being able to make the video to such a high quality. This is such a blessing for people like me who has a great interest in linguistics and particularly phonetics. Thank you so much Dr. Geoff Lindsey, from the bottom of my heart.

As a Brazilian living in Argentina, this Ty>Ch mutation was the first thing I learned to recognize when speaking Spanish. Brazilians have it, while Spanish speakers afaik always pronounce the T very clearly. I've heard my fair share of [friend mocking my accent by speaking Spanish slowly with a Ch replacing every other consonant] banter

I always have this instinct to say "duke box" instead of "juke box" because my subconscious must think I'm doing that yod coalescence thing...😅 (Thank-you for the video, it was really interesting having it explained so thoroughlly.)

The bonus Boris near the end was chef’s kiss

"Tuna chewing" in English reminds me of a somewhat similar trend in Slavic languages. Polish language is notorious for amount of hissing sounds, up to the point when most palatilized consonants, which are preserved in other slavic languages, like Russian, turn into some form hiss in Polish. It has always been a source for jokes about Polish, at least here in Russia. Still, Polish is a really beautiful language, something very comforting about this intricacy of it's sound

It never ceases to amaze me when I watch videos like this that I've spoken English for 40 years and never thought about this. It's all just unconscious.

This is probably one of the best channels in YouTyube!

you're too funny! not only is this video very informative but you linked the road stewart costume in the description! brilliant video, greetings from somerset.

You mentioned that, in some Japanese words, we don't add the yod (Sudoku being the given example). What I find interesting, as 10-year resident of Japan, is that English speakers do change the sounds that should have yod to be an extra vowel instead. The most famous cities in Japan, Tokyo and Kyoto both have a yod-type sound in the Japanese pronunciation, and you would expect them to be 2 syllable words for English speakers (even though they're 4 and 3 mora in Japanese, respectively). However, the kyo sound gets changed to ki-o and both become 3-syllable words in both American and British pronunciations. In fact, when I said Kyoto to my parents with the original Japanese pronunciation, they didn't know what I was talking about! Perhaps we have more trouble with yod before o sound than before u sound?

I’ve been speaking my entire life and I’ve never noticed these little things. This channel is mind blowing. I’ve always hated languages but this channel makes them actually fascinating. I’m naming my next dog Yod.

That opening joke with the D rotating was great.

This is fascinating. I grew up in the US and moved to the UK as an adult, and I've always wondered why British people take the Chube on Chuesdays. Thank you for explaining. And thank you to the YouChube algorithm for suggesting this video. Subscribed!

The Boris "dyude" is hysterical.

This is quite interesting as my language (Bahasa Indonesia) used to have the old spelling inspired by the Dutch which was "DJ" for "Juh" and "TJ" for "Chuh" sound and at this time "J" was for "Yuh". It was basically combining the "Duh" and "Yuh" sound to make "Juh" and also "Tuh" and Yuh" sound to make "Chuh".

👍 for the bonus lesson on how to pronounce the French U. I’ve been struggling with that and this was the best tutorial I’ve encountered.

I'm a band educator in America and people always find it funny how I say "Chooba" instead of "Tooba"

I find yod-coalescence especially cool when it occurs between two different words: as you = "azhu" miss you = "misshu"

As a non native English speaker but with advanced English skills, this is very interesting and answers a lot of questions about differences in how people pronounce words.

I'm originally from the South East of England, that bit where you circled - but I've mostly lost my accent now in favour of 'neutral' (southern) English. The yod dropping is a huge factor and I never realised! As soon as you said it I immediately went 'BOO'IFUL' 🤣 Now to binge the rest of your videos...

experiencing good free teaching is such an honour

I studied English linguistics but am now working as an elementary school teacher, teaching English as a foreign language here in Germany, and this reminds me of last year. I was teaching absolutel beginners, and our topic was "days of the week". The kids (without my prompting or anything) compared "Tuesday" to "cheese", claiming that it sounds alomost the same, like "Cheeseday".

Yod Coalescence is pretty prevalent in Ireland and The Irish Language has palatalised constonants, which result from a similar phenomenon, and probably reinforced the tendancy towards yod coalescence in accents of Irish English.

There's a very funny passage in the Alan Partridge podcast in which Alan describes how he set about suppressing his East Anglian yod-dropping in order to become a DJ and how he tried (and failed) to correct Bernard Matthews' pronunciation of "beautiful".

I love your videos! I teach English as a second language to Hebrew speakers. I know where the word "YOD" comes from. I'm a native Hebrew speaker and YOD is the name of 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet . Some people call this letter YOD and some say YUD. In Hebrew, Jerusalem is YERUSHALAYIM ירושלים with the letter YOD twice.

The amount of digging it must have taken to find a video example for every single one of your points is astonishing

I've found this channel some days ago and have been hooked ever since! This phenomenon is also very typical of Brazilian Portuguese, I believe they call it the "hissed t". For instance, if the last diphthong of an word is the syllable "-te", as in parte or presidente (part/piece or president, resp.), it becomes a "ch" sound, making way for a prolonged "ee" vowel-sound. Whereas in other variants, more akin to the European pronunciation, these words end in a hard "t", as they would in English.

As a non-native English speaker, this is highly enlightening. It's an entertaining video but it also shows you very well what makes the difference between mostly American and English accents, I feel like this is a treasure trove for actors trying to sound believable doing an accent not native to them. Thank you for how in-depth you make these videos, Dr. Lindsey!

My recent fascination with accent, linguistics, and etymology channels like yours have shown me just how much of my adopted pronunciations are nativized and technically break the rules of English. And sincerely appreciate that!

That dude sequence at the end proper tickled me, great edit.

I am non-native English (originally Dutch) but am totally fluent in English. This video has funnily enough taught me that I think my accent is literally all over the place xD. I don't really have a Dutch accent when speaking English, so my English accent is from everywhere.

As someone who could never wrap their head around numbers and math, but instead was always drawn to words and language, I am very grateful for your channel😁 Even as a kid I've been mimicking voices and accents so these types of videos are right up my alley. Thank you!

Just the number of times Ali says dude! Haha, you got the perfect example.

In the book Borstal Boy, there was a Cockney character who was either named Tulips or Chewlips. No one was certain as to which was right. The book was a memoir of 1940s events written in the 1950s, so "Tuna Chewing" was going on even then.

I am a long-long time English learner and there are not so many things left that can make me ‘day one’ excited. Your videos and explanations made me feel exactly like this! Binge watched all of your videos first, got your book as a current read, and some other great volumes on phonetics and transcription that you referenced are waiting to be thoroughly examined. I was never particularly interested in studying sounds, just seemed to listen carefully and adopt the patterns which I could identify, so it’s a new and exciting beginning for me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart 🎉

Phenomenal explanation. I wish all my professors were able to explain things in a clear, precise way like you do.

I first began to notice the soft CH sound in TV weather forecasting: 'For Chewsday, more rain I'm afraid...' often following a modern drift in pronunciation from an e to more of an a sound: '...In the Wast of England and Wast Wäyles...' As an aside: Modern English speakers seem to have added an e in coast as 'coe'st', keeping the mouth open in an Australian pronunuciation rather than narrowing the lips. Being older and originating from the South of England, I've kept the strong T, and have been picked up many times when I've said 'Illyustration' rather than using the u in bus!

Wow, I never realized how different accents say the same word so differently.

I love you dude! You're educational about pronunciation without being judgemental! I like this approach to language learning. I'm learning Norweigan and want a similar approach.

I'm a native speaker (Northeaster US), and find your videos fascinating. These are things I would otherwise never think about or even notice at all, and I really enjoy learning about them. Thanks for making them!

It's wonderful to watch a video about a relatively niche thing you researched ages ago. I'm from Berkshire and you do hear age and regional differences, like me and most my friends DON'T coalesce in words like assume, presume etc, but we do coalesce in every other place, and some people take on the Cockney yod-dropping in words like new

For non-native speakers, your videos give a lot of explanation. Thanks!

Just wanted to comment on “Dude” that there are also many ways of pronouncing this with an American accent. You get the typical Italian-American Doood with no softness to the u, but then some accents will have essentially a Di-Ude where a soft i almost makes it sound like an ü. And as that word has entered for example Australian it has adopted essentially Düde as standard pronunciation there. Language is always evolving, even such a simple word! :)

I discovered your channel a few months ago and I am so glad I did. As a native English speaker, I am amazed by how much I conCHinue to learn from your videos. Thank you!

This channel is pure gold.

I love the humour! I laugh so much watching your videos!

I love how you circled the area in England where yod dropping happens all the time. the whole video up till now I was thinking about my elderly grandma (95!) from Suffolk says 'Toosday' rather than Tuesday. the day is said differently too, more like 'Toosdee'

slowly becoming obsessed with this channel, not only do I get to learn fun phonetics stuff but the editing makes me laugh every time xD

I love this channel. Awesome knowledge dropping mixed with great editing and humor.

I REALLY ENJOY THIS GUY & HIS CONTENT/PRESENTATION!

Excellent! I'll be showing this to some of my students who like to focus on pronunciation. Thanks for so thoroughly documenting what i call "the hidden Y sound." I've been impressed with your phonetic analysis ever since I saw your video about how the schwa sound and the /^/ sound are actually the same thing.

I love how clearly you explain all this. Now I finally understand the Dune, Dyune, June error in my head. Turns out Englisch is a hot mess. Subscribed!

This may be one of my favorite videos ever!

Illuminating! Thanks for sharing 👍

This was so great! Your dude edit was hilarious. I'm not a native speaker, but I've been studying for really long and I can mimick accents somewhat, but I'm amazed how I'm still only just scratching the surface of phonetics and it's lovely.

I am German and I love this channel so much! 😇 It is very informative and so entertaining and humorous at the same time!

Terrific video. May I add the example of "assume" (or maybe I missed it?), where British speakers seem to say "ashoom" (yod coalescence) while American speakers say "assoom" (yod dropping). Also, regarding Boris Johnson's yod-retaining pronunciation of "dude" (he probably says "assyoom"), the stereotypical California surfer, from whose speech this term has acquired its currency, would say something that almost resembles Johnson's pronunciation. The southern California version of the U vowel (or, at least, one of the U vowels) seems to be about halfway between "oo" and the "ü" (u-umlaut) sound at which this video begins.

This coalescence is very common in Australian indigenous languages and unusually common in most varieties of Australian English... it always makes me wonder if there might have been influence there, or just a happy coincidence.

Thank you, Dr. Geoff. These lecture videos you release are quite different from others just because it is very engaging and entertaining. I might ascend as an English professor from watching these. 😅

Thank you for this, these are probably the most informative videos about English I've ever seen! Very nice editing, too!

Back in grad school I had a math prof from Ireland who pronounced "dual" as "jewel." I had him for linear algebra, and for the longest time I thought he was talking about "jewel spaces"...until I finally figured out that he meant "dual spaces" :D

This is fascinating. I love these explanations - thank you so much!

This reminded me that when I was learning English at school, I always thought "new" and "knew" were pronounced differently. I always thought "new" was "nyu" and "knew" was "nu", later I realized that they're pronounced the same, but that "same" pronunciation varies from person to person.

I am currently struggling with RP and your videos are great help to understand the depths of English phonetics... and they are enjoyable too! Thank you, Dr Lindsey!

This is such an awesome video! It looks I've been looking for this video without knowing what I was looking for. One of the curious phonetic phenomena in the Korean language (my native language) is the switching of the consonant ㅅ(fricative alveolar) to the "sh" sound when combined with vowels like ㅑ, ㅕ, ㅛ, ㅠ, etc. (all having the yod component) and even with ㅞ, which does not have a yod at the beginning. It's the same yod merging strategy that Dr. Lindsey is talking about! Also curious in some English loanwords in Korean is that the phoneme su is often transliterated as shu. As in 슈퍼마켓(shupeomaket) for supermarket, 슈퍼맨 (shupeomaen) for Superman, etc. I have always wondered why this happened. My hypothesis now, after watching this video, is that when these foreign words were first introduced or popularized in Korea (probably towards the late 18th century or early 19th century) or more likely when it was first introduced to Japan a lot earlier (many English loanwords were introduced into the Korean language in a roundabout way via the Japanese language during the Japanese colonization period of the early 20th century), whoever brought those words to Korea and Japan (likely the British, or early Americans) were pronouncing words without dropping the yod, like siuper. That's why the Japanese (and by extension the Koreans) later used their own coalescing strategy to turn siuper into shuper! Had the word "super" first introduced to Korea and Japan by the modern Americans who have already dropped the yod (su-per), then the Korean and Japanese loanword for super would have been just su-peo or su-pah instead of shu-peo or shu-pah! This is awesome! I feel like I've made the biggest discovery of my life (at least related to linguistics). In the Korean language itself, both yod dropping and yod merging phenomena can be observed. As mentioned above, when ㅅ(similar to S) is combined with yod vowels ㅑ (ya), ㅕ (yeo), ㅛ (yo), ㅠ (yu) (and also curiously ㅣ (i) for some reason), yod merging happens and "s" becomes "sh." But when ㅈ (similar to J) or ㅊ (ch) is combined with those vowels, yod dropping happens and just becomes ja, jeo, jo, ju, cha, cheo, cho, chu, etc. I'm learning so much about my own language by watching his video on English pronunciation. Thank you, Dr. Lindsey!

My favourite thing about your videos, Dr. Geoff, is the way you always present pronunciation variations across accents of english as equal variants - none of that elitist nonsense about "proper" and "incorrect" pronunciation that we got in school when I was growing up!

Fabyoolous as always. I wish there was a super cut or edited compilation of your videos to be able to share with the non linguaphiles in our lives. Never the less, great work, sir!

I am so happy to know where this 'u' to 'iu' transition come from. It is absolutely pleasant to hear someone speaking about all those details of phonetic, I dived into them a few years ago to improve my english and I love these knowledges and their impacts in my language learning. Thanks a lot !

Your way of speaking, with lots of emphasis and the 'movements' in your pronunciation really make it so interesting to keep listening! Instead of having a fairly monotone way of speaking, like so many other people on KZfaq.

I find it comforting that native English speakers are almost as confused about their Us as I am. And that there is some history behind this mess. Thank you, sir.

I'm not a native speaker, though I speak English since I was nine, but now I realize why actual native speakers consider my accent"weird", even though my pronunciation is proper. I use many different pronunciations for yod and post alveolar, and so inconsistently.

You are my new favorite linguist. I found you recently and while I have learned much from others, you cover topics that nobody else does. I really enjoyed your explanation that IPA did not really fully describe how native English speakers actually sound. Keep it up!

You have no idea how much this helps me understand how to spell words

Every single time I watch one of your videos I find myself drastically overthinking every word I pronounce for the next day or so, bravo!

As an ESL speaker myself, who gained an advanced degree of fluency even though I was past the typical age for this when I emigrated to the US, these videos are fascinating. Spanish is my 1st language but I have some skill with languages in general, including French, German and others.

All of your videos make me really think about how I talk! As far as this topic goes, I seem to mostly fall into the "yod dropping," which makes sense as I'm an Albertan with a lot of rural family and much of rural Alberta was settled from the US. And of course I preserve the yod in most of the typical places. But what's interesting is that there seem to be some words where I'm more likely to use the French "u" than anything else. I wonder if this has to do with growing up in a city founded by French Metis. Despite the population being heavily anglicised and white (though there are still a *lot* of Metis, they just tended not to advertise when I was a teenager), being able to properly pronounce the French names for streets and neighbourhoods as a marker of identity. Even today, saying "Hebert" as "HEE-burt" instead of "ee-BEAR" will single someone out as a new arrival. And of course Canadian English retains more francophone influences than most forms of English - "foyer" is "foi-YAY," not "FOI-er," for example.

I'm a native speaker of General American English, and I love English! I like you channel. Thanks for sharing this cool stuff.

your videos always make me think a lot about my own accent, i am white british born and raised with english (south london) parents but my ideolect is different to most, i've even had english people asking me where i'm from (country-wise), i say you-tube (not chewb), i pronounce my Ts deliberately, my Rs sound almost Eastern European with the "L" roll, and many common things english people do that i do not do, i'd love someone to actually study my accent and tell me what i'm doing haha, something that always stuck with me was when my Lithuanian ex noticed english people say "me-ōwk" instead of "milk" with a pronounced L, i could never explain that one.

It's great to hear Broad Norfolk accents represented in an academic rather than comedic setting

As a non-native speaker I found it really educational and useful in terms of analyzing my own pronunciation. I’ve also caught myself recalling how do I pronounce it and it’s the third way, soft as in chube but with t as in toob (closer to the American version, but with much softer t, something like tyube). And that’s why I’ll never get rid of my accent I guess 😅

I lost it at The Fly graphic example… gold! 😂

Ha ha... one of my fave films is David Lynch's 'Dune' which I saw in 1986 and ever since then my running gag has always been, "I can't wait for the sequel 'July' to come out".... (yes I have very patient and long sufferring friends and family🙄)

Some speakers of African American English render /bju/ as /bru/ (brootiful). And I knew some English speakers from the Philippines who pronounce "super" as /ʃupər/

If you want another KZfaq example of pronouncing Dune like June as you do, theres an Australian youtuber called Skill Up who did a weekly gaming news video on a recent Dune game and apparently enough of his comments thought he was saying June that he often brings jt up as a joke when he talks about Dune.

I love the extra layer this brings to the already funny final clip. Very amyusing.

All of the comments about how informative all your videos are and spot on, but I want to highlight the sick BoJo burn you slipped in there. Wonderful stuff.