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It’s a long-argued debate here in the City of Trees: Do you pronounce the “T” when you say Sacramento?
In the last several years, that discussion has grown — as many things do, thanks to the rise of TikTok — to include a much larger audience. In recent years, I’ve seen videos with hundreds of thousands of likes accusing Californians of dropping the “T” when pronouncing many words: Sacramento, Santa Ana, Monterey, outfit, mountain, the list goes on.
But it turns out it’s not just a California thing. UC Berkeley linguist and phonetician Keith Johnson told me that this is a process called flapping, and it’s a pretty common occurrence in American English.
“The flapping process is a reduction of the amount of force on that ‘T,’” he said. “It occurs in these words after nasal sounds — like that ‘N’ in Sacramento or the ‘N’ in Santa Cruz — and before what we call an unstressed vowel, so the vowel following the ‘T’ is kind of less heavy.”
Johnson added that shortening words in this way involves “a little less pressure of the tongue on the roof of the mouth,” which can reduce the effort that speaking takes.
Californians don’t have an obvious speech style, Johnson said, in part due to the state’s diverse population. A 2021 study from the Migration Policy Institute found that roughly 46% of Californians speak a language other than English at home. About 33% of people in Sacramento County do the same, according to 2023 demographics from the county.
However, there are regional differences that can appear in speech patterns of some Californians, he told me. One example of this: Something Johnson calls “San Francisco Smart.”
“I think of Scott Weiner, the politician in San Francisco, as a really good example of this, where in order to sound smart, you say things really carefully,” he said. “Sounding smart by sounding careful.”
That’s why non-Californians may be shocked when they hear us drop the “T” in words like Sacramento.
“When you hear this dropping, it's sort of like, you know, ‘That doesn't fit the stereotype of California, what's going on? This is different,’” he said. “That may be a reason why we notice that the ‘T’ is dropped, is partly because it's an expectation that Californians are going to sound really smart.”
Editor’s note: This story initially ran in the SacramenKnow newsletter on June 13, 2023.
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