The Trouble With The Trouble With Sloths
Among all the YouTube comments from young American males full of testosterone and ignorance abusing me for my non-American pronunciation in The Trouble With Sloths—ironic, given that it warns against exactly such abuse—a young Australian has challenged my claim that “sloath” is the only Aussie pronunciation (in response to a question about the British, who use both):
i live in australia and we all call them sloths not slowths, i’d never even heard anyone call it a slowth till i watched this video.
Fair enough, I replied, accents change over time. I saw from his profile that he’s couple of decades younger than me, which would explain our different perceptions if there’s been a shift in the word’s pronunciation. He responded:
Australians don’t pronounce excess consonants our accents have been the same for generations as you would know. I merely brought this up as an error in your video because i don’t see why you would make that claim when it doesn’t even approach the way an Australian would pronounce a word which ends in “oth”
Although I’ve tried not to comment there much since posting the video, I couldn’t let that slide. YouTube made me split my reply into three to meet its 500-character comment limit, so here’s the fuller version:
Get back to me in twenty years on the subject of Australian accents not changing. Watch a Dad and Dave movie from the ’30s or a Barry Mackenzie from the ’70s and you’ll see that they change over time like any other. It’s especially obvious when you live outside the country (like me for the past nine years) and come back to visit every other year, rather than being immersed in it all the time. In the past decade I’ve watched the shift to saying uh-STRAY-uh rather than uhs-TRAIL-yuh and many other small changes. Over time they start to add up, which is how accents evolve.
The “slowth” pronunciation is the only one given in the two Australian print dictionaries I own, both from the early 1980s (Macquarie and Collins), and for anyone whose accent was formed then there’s a good chance they’ll still say it that way. I don’t doubt that among your peers you’ve never heard anything except sloth-rhymes-with-moth, but all that shows is that for this word the Australian pronunciation is shifting from the old British one to the American one. There’s nothing unusual about that; it happens all the time.
The original poem was written in 2003 and recorded in 2006. If the Australian pronunciation of that word has been shifting, as it seems it has been, the video is going to sound more and more of a relic as time goes on. But I’m okay with that. Language evolution is fascinating, especially once you’re old enough to have seen it in action during your own lifetime. This is just one small example of it.
By the way, you might want to rethink your claim that “it doesn’t even approach the way an Australian would pronounce a word which ends in ‘oth’”. Do you rhyme “both” with “moth”?
13 May 2010