Flat-A Sound

More on the concept of “flat” with regards to voice and accents. Commenting on a question about the “Flat-A” sound and why even good speakers from NPR who have a Midwestern American accent often default to this, or towards this Generican "broadcast standard" accent.

This sound is very common in most American accents, including a Chicago accent, New York accents, Boston accents, and all around the US.

Here's a transcript of the video:

I want to talk about the /æ/ vowel, the ash. This /æ/ vowel, if you're writing it in the really long form of it it would be written as this /a/ followed by an /e/ that's directly connected to it. A really fast way to do is just to do something along that line accomplishes roughly the same thing, and there's nothing else that really looks like it so you can get away with that. 

This sound gets a really bad rap and in fact it's in those words BAD RAP. It's the ash sound a lot of people call it a "flat-A." They don't like the sound of it. In fact, Edith Skinner in her books, she calls it an unpleasant vowel that should be short instead of being longer, and I don't necessarily agree.

The issue comes up that what many people do in a lot of different accents is they make it a lax vowel instead of a tense vowel and if you actually tense your tongue that little bit more to purposefully do this a sound /æ/ BAD RAP, as opposed to what many of us do where we make it a little more lax, where our tongue is a little more almost indecisive, or it's in sort of a neutral-er position: BAD RAP "It's a bad rap." It tends to be like a flatter sound, a lot of people will call it.

Oftentimes it goes a little more nasal, and in fact nasals are one of the biggest problems. If you follow this, the worst case scenario is following it with an NG sound as in RANG  SANG BANG STRANGLE ANGER. That's one where it tends to become really lax because the tongue is getting ready for this NG so it becomes BANG ANGER SANG. So really indistinct.

You'll run into some problems when it's before an N or before an M, the other major nasal sounds that Americans tend to use in their speech, most English speakers use.

But it also runs into some trouble especially with the two back plosives. If it's right before a G or right before a K, so that something like BAG starts to sound a little bit more like BEG.

So what it's doing is it tends to creep up a little bit, and the sound that's just above it on the vowel quadrilateral is the /ɛ/, the epsilon. So I think what happens is that the /æ/ tends to move up a little bit, or you could say that it moves up enough that it becomes like an /ɛ/ slightly lowered so these are diacritics to say that this is happening a little bit lower than where it normally does, and this is happening a little bit higher, so those are ways to note it.

Another thing that commonly happens especially with this guy is that people start to nasalize it. That's a diacritic for nasalized. So you end up with BANG, more of it going through the nose. That happens to any vowels that are before a nasal consonant, but it's especially problematic with the ash and it tends to offend more ears than other vowels do when they get nasalized.

So there's a really quick stab at the bad rap that the ash has gotten. For more info check out AccentHelp.com.