curious"Even more interestingly, Labov found that certain vowel sounds were more specific to one ethnic group or another. For instance the tendency to turn "bag" into something more like "be-agg" and "bad" into "be-add" was more frequent among second-generation Italians, while the tendency - and I should stress that it was no more than that - among lower class Jewish speakers was to drawl certain "o" sounds, turning "dog" into "doo-awg," "coffee" into "coo-awfee." The suggestion is that this is a kind of hypercorrection. The speakers are unconsciously trying to distance themselves from their parents' foreign accents. Yiddish speakers tended to have trouble with certain unfamiliar English vowel sounds. they tended to turn "cup of coffee" into "cop of coffee." the presumption is that their children compensated for this by overpronouncing those vowels. Hence the accent."
I find that so interesting...so now I'm curious:
a) have any of you recognized this tendency in real life? If you are the child of immigrants, do you notice it in yourself?
and
b) Has anyone noticed this tendency applied to other languages?