Purple Solle (purple_solle) wrote in linguaphiles,
Purple Solle
purple_solle
linguaphiles

Glottal stops, the UK, and Monty Python

I spent this weekend in London and very quickly found myself imitating the British tendency to use [ʔ] as an allophone of /t/. When I got home and looked it up on Wikipedia, I was very surprised to see that most of the examples mentioned on the site are of Monty Python phrases - my weekend trip had been literally a Monty Python holiday (incl. buying half a dozen rare Python novels, seeing Spamalot, and meeting Eric Idle), but I had no idea the glottal stops instead of [t]s were so strongly associated with Python.

So, a few questions:
- Is the glottal stop really primarily a Monty Python thing (that is, used primarily as comedy/satire), or has Wikipedia been edited by overly zealous fanboys?
- How many regional accents in English feature [ʔ] instead of [t]?
- Which languages/dialects specifically use the glottal stop to replace plosives?
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