Aims and Scope

'It's just our accents.'

It's a Thursday afternoon at the Meizhang school, and Miss Alice is teaching her first-grade students how to tell time. In this lesson, she is explaining the notions of 'half-past five' and 'five-thirty'. The students are arranged on the carpet facing Miss Alice, who is holding a model of a clock face, turning the hands to demonstrate various times. I am sitting behind the children, thinking to myself, 'oh, this is going to be interesting'.

I am thinking this because, while Miss Alice is from England, we are in an American classroom, and this particular lesson topic means we have a linguistic perfect storm on our hands: first, Miss Alice will pronounce each of the words in 'half past' with an 'ah' sound (indicated in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ɑ]), in contrast to the [æ] sound used in the United States. On top of that, she will pronounce 'thirty' with no [r] and with a [t] instead of the d-like flap sound (written as [ɾ]) used in American English. Let's check in to see how this lesson is going:

Example 1.1

Miss Alice: Five thirty, or could we say, h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st five.

Cynthia: H[æ]lf p[æ]st five.

Miss Alice: It's gone h[ɑ]lf the way round the clock, here's five o'clock, and it's gone h[ɑ]lf-way round, so it's h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st five.

Nicole: H[æ]lf p[æ]st five, not h[ɑ]lf p[æ]st.

Miss Alice: I say it different to you, you say h[æ]lf.

Nicole: Yeah, h[æ]lf.

Miss Alice: I say h[ɑ]lf.

Nicole: Because it's h[æ]lf.

Miss Alice: I say h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st, you'd say h[æ]lf p[æ]st. It's a—it's just our accents.

(1 minute later)

Miss Alice: What time is this one?

Ellie: H[æ]lf p[æ]st eleven.

Miss Alice: H[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st eleven, or, eleven—

Cynthia: Th[3:r]y!

Miss Alice: Eleven th[3:t]y, there's two ways to say it.

Cynthia: You say th[3:t]y and we say th[3rr]y.

Miss Alice: Yeah. You can say h[ɑ]lf p[ɑ]st eleven or eleven th[3:t]y.