BG3 obsessed

First, one thing to settle before we get going:

Accent refers to pronunciation. Dialect is the combination of accent and associated vocabulary. Idiolect is an individual's realisation of their dialect, unique to them.

For example, a common Cockney feature that most won't even notice is the substitution of /th/ with an /f/ sound. There will be Cockney speakers who do this consistently, never, occasionally, only in certain words, and so on. Idiolects can be hard to pin down, but they're what we're interested in here. Second, dialect features can range from obvious to so extremely subtle that you'll be listening to the same isolated fraction of a second on repeat for half an hour to determine if it occurs or not. Close listening takes training and practice, which I have, and a good ear, which I do not. My hearing has worsened from when I did this daily, so I had to get untrained backup on some features. Basically, as always, this shit's not peer-reviewed, it's a hobby project. Method was headphones on for a thirty-minute compilation video, with as much repeat close listening as necessary.

Finally, my interest is pretty much only in Gale. Saying that, after reading this stunner from the wonderful @lemonwoodwrites I do have some general observations to pass on. RP is not a dialect. It is an artificial accent valued and perpetuated by the BBC, intended to be neutral. Not posh. Neutral. The problems with RP, in practice rather than intent, are many, and complicated, and not the point of this post, but colonialism is a good place to start. You could also say that it's the assumed default accent because of what dialects the BBC will and will not export, which has everything to do with perceived class and status, and yeah, there's that colonialism again. Anyway. The point is, the whole cast sounds 'incredibly British,' because they are. And most of them? They speak with the exact same dialect, Gale included. Estuary English is the more common but less known dialect of London and the South. It emerged naturally, not through media training, and is potentially on track to replace RP entirely. EE is pretty much a hybrid between Cockney and RP, consisting of features from both that are realised on a spectrum. The accent you're hearing from the companions are EE, just different ends of it. Karlach is the most Cockney, and yet she uses almost no Cockney-EE features. It's all in her vowels. Neil Newbon, likewise, has pointed out himself that his diphthongs have become Americanised; diphthongs being the movement across multiple vowel sounds, like [bear]. Still an EE speaker, leaning heavily to the RP end, but the vowels obscure it. Without doing close listening for her, I'd put money on Shadowheart actually being the most RP of the bunch rather than Gale. Gale's idiolect is baffling. We'll get there in a sec. If Dave Jones hadn't tapped into EE a fair bit, some of you would not have understood a word of his Bolton accent, and while Theo Solomon did a banging job on emulating EE, there are parts where I can clearly hear Multicultural London English sneak through, just slowed down more than what is typical. And with all that out of the fucking way? Here are the EE things Tim Downie did, ranging from mildly surprising to utterly bonkers. h-drop; not pronouncing the initial /h/ in function words, like ‘ave instead of have. Ha, I was sure Gale was better than this! It’s not often, mind, and it’s never a full drop, more a case of ‘does not always release enough air to technically produce a proper /h/,’ but still. Gotcha.

t-glottalisation; absurdly common in both ends of EE, the glottal stop is that ‘pop’ you’ll hear Brits do instead of /t/ in words like ‘bottle’ and ‘water’, to the point that it’s a go-to for mimicking the accents. Now Gale is out here making all of us look bad by never fucking glottalising in the middle of words. Fair play, I really didn’t think he would. Syllable final /t/ is a different story, however. Words like ‘thought,’ and others that end in a hard /t/ sound, will often, not always, but often be glottalised. happY-tensing; LOTS of happY-tensing, oh my god, so much happY-tensing. Wait, what the fuck is happY-tensing? Err, right, okay. This will not be a perfect explanation. Every vowel sound in English is categorised into sets, described here, It's worth a look, it's fun, promise. Anyway, these vowel sets are characterised by being (typically) indicative of how all vowels in a set are realised in a given idiolect. Depending on how you pronounce that final /y/, you'll likely do the same for the others in that set. And that /y/ is supposed to be unstressed. No emphasis, no elongating, just a sound (see schwa below, same sound). What I said about EE encroaching on RP? This is where it started, the happY set, specifically. Now sets merge and divide plenty over time, that's not the point. The point is, that that syllable final vowel sound, that's supposed to just be a short mumble, Gale will consistently put force into, AND stretch out, resulting in more of a 'happeeeeee' than 'happy'. Does that make sense? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's hard to be concise for this one, or point to why it matters. All I can say is that it's not considered all that 'proper,' I really wasn't expecting to hear it, and he does it a lot.

Yod-coalescence; The biggest tell that it's EE, not RP, and coincidentally, what I did my final phonetics research on. Yay. Yod is the /j/ sound you'll consistently hear in 'Tuesday,' 'cure', 'duel', and so on. RP does not require Yod-dropping, but EE has a wider Yod usage, for one, and EE idiolects will, unlike RP, sometimes make up their own Yod-coalescence entirely. I've heard atypical/unobserved Yods from my sister-in-law, and now I've heard them from Gale. 'Music' comes to mind as one, and no matter what, his level of Yod-coalescence is frequent and broad enough to mark him firmly as EE.

Schwa; Or rather, no schwa, as it were. This is where Tim decided Gale is actually mental, and we didn't even notice. /Ə/, the schwa, is an unstressed vowel sound present in all English variations, and essential to the British ones. For Gale, we'll just focus on the schwa in function words. When you say 'to,' 'of,' 'at,' and the like, in naturally flowing speech, you are actually producing a schwa, not a true vowel. It's a bit of an undefined blob of a sound, that sounds more like the Scandinavian 'Ø' than anything English. This is a product of where we place spoken stress - on the important parts. Function words? Literally not important, blob them, get on with it. Purposefully stressing them, in natural speech, is actually remarkably difficult; it's so contrary to how we process and produce language. And whaddya know, Gale Defuckingkarios said 'challenge accepted.' And that's not a posh thing, either, to be clear. Ditching the schwa is not characteristic of any accent. The only people who would are oddballs and comedians. Literally. There is nothing to be gained from overenunciating 'going tO.' Gale, my dude, wtf. Your emphasis is all over the place now. I wanted to put my head in my hands when I caught it, and then it turns out, he does it all the bloody time, just not quite always. And not just in function words, either, because of course not. His stress patterns are a fucking mess all around. On purpose. Because Tim, unlike Gale, is not insane. And kudos to him. Messing around with intonation and expectation is a comedian's instinct, and he pulled it off gloriously, and slipped it in between enough natural-sounding speech acts that it barely even registers, at least in a way where you can put your finger on what's off. Bravo. Love that for him, sincerely, so fucking much.