Someone I know who comes from eastern Washington state pronounces 'Seattle' with a glottal stop for the /t/ followed by a syllabic /l/, and it strikes me as odd every time she does so (the 'Scranton'-type examples that Damien mentions don't, though the occasional glottalling of /t/ in intervocalic contexts that you can hear in songs by American artists such as Macy Gray is hard for me to hear as anything other than British-sounding). To my knowledge this Washingtonian friend of mine hasn't lived anywhere other than in the area round the Tri-Cities and in Bellingham, WA, between Seattle and Vancouver. Is this normal for that part of the US, does anyone know? I've spent enough time in the Pacific Northwest to have had ample opportunities to hear it from other people, but most of that time has been in the Puget Sound area rather than over the other side of the Cascades. It could well be limited just to that one place name, but it seems a little unlikely.

Peter's comment about the asymmetry between US and UK practice in terms of how Britishisms and Americanisms are translated rings true with me. I had a fair few American books as a child (Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, Jack London, Mark Twain, etc.) and they were imported without any tinkering with the language, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure this is still largely the case, and that publishers will assume that British kids won't be too bewildered by the differences. Many of my own kids' books are US imports and when reading them aloud I've had to explain unfamiliar Americanisms to them as we go along, but I see it as a good way to get them used to variation in usage at an early age, and of course it makes understanding what's going on in American films and TV shows a lot easier too. It works in the opposite direction too - their lifelong diet of American cinema and TV can only help when they tackle reading matter such as the Lemony Snicket books or the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which they're big fans of.

Dom

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Dominic Watt
Department of Language & Linguistic Science
University of York
Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK
tel 01904 322671 fax 01904 322673
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