Babbsagg wrote:I'm no specialist on AmE, but I think it's less common there. Maybe because those T's are usually pronounced like D's already? When listening to AmE, I always hear "bedder" instead of "better", "buddon" instead of "button" etc.
Those aren't d's. You're talking about a well-studied phenomenon known as "tapping" or "flapping":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapping. The sound in question is actually [ɾ], but it probably sounds like [d] to you since that's the closest equivalent in most varieties of German.
In allegro speech, [ɾ] is optionally deleted. So a word like
lettuce may occur as [ˈlɛ.ɪs] in some contexts.
T-glottalisation is also present in American English, and not just in a few dialects either. I believe a glottal stop is what I ordinarily have in
written and
important (and before unstressed final /n/ generally) rather than the [ɾ] I have elsewhere.
LifeDeath wrote:Yes. Since I'm interested in American English, I'd like to know how it is actually is in AmE. When I said that I might have heard it in movies, I meant American films. That's why I think it is not uncommon for American English. I've watched the video and I think that it can be the same with some words in AmE (like in those that I asked about, where "t" does not typically becomes "d"). I just caught myself thinking - maybe that's how African-Americans pronounce them. I don't know howwhat this type of accent is called, I'd really like to read about that, but usually African-Americans[*] have sort of their own accent. For example, when I hear it in movies or songs, I instantly realize that the speaker is African-American.
The term in linguistics is
African-American vernacular English, abbreviated to "AAVE". This refers not just to the accent but to the associated dialect as well. Popular terms include "Ebonics", "Black English", and "Blaccent".
This accent is typical only of certain socioeconomic subgroups of African-Americans. Most middle-class African Americans sound identical to their peers from other racial backgrounds. In additions, non-African-Americans raised in certain communities will grow up speaking AAVE. (Eminem, for instance, grew up in Detroit's East Side, which is predominately Black and lower-class. So unlike some White rappers, he speaks AAVE with near-native fluency.)
LifeDeath wrote:For example, in this another song of Eminem's when the refrain starts at 1:43, I know that the singer is African-American. In other parts of the song I know that the singer has this different skin colour. There's something about his accent that makes me feel like that. Maybe it's how he pronounces "leg" with the too soft and long "e" sound alongside with others attributes. So I mean maybe that's where I heard those "important"s and "written"s from? Or is it widespread and common among others American English speakers?
*How do we call people with the black skin colour? I don't want to be racistic at all. But I wanted to use "black people" and when I checked it in Google it said that it does sound racistic.
It really depends on context. In certain contexts, "you people" sounds racist.
It also depends how precise you want to be. "Black" and "African-American" are not synonyms, for instance, because there are Black people everywhere in the world and some of the Black people in the USA are not African.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons