The SED fieldworker Peter Wright found it in areas of Lancashire and said, 'It is considered a lazy habit, but may have been in some dialects for hundreds of years.'
Peter Trudgill has argued that it began in Norfolk, based on studies of rural dialects of those born in the 1870s. The earliest mentions of the process are in Scotland during the 19th century, when Henry Sweet commented on the phenomenon. Apparently, glottal reinforcement, which is quite common in English, is a stage preceding full replacement of the stop, and indeed, reinforcement and replacement can be in free variation. The pronunciation that it results in is called glottalization. Īs a sound change, it is a subtype of debuccalization. It is never universal, especially in careful speech, and it most often alternates with other allophones of /t/ such as ⓘ,, (before a nasal), (before a lateral), or. In English phonology, t-glottalization or t-glottalling is a sound change in certain English dialects and accents, particularly in the United Kingdom, that causes the phoneme / t/ to be pronounced as the glottal stop ⓘ in certain positions. For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
