Shtraight Talk on S-Backing

I believe peak s-backing was reached on August 1, 2018. In a segment of NPR’s All Things Considered that day, the host, Audie Cornish; the NPR correspondent she was speaking with, Ayesha Rascoe; and the news figure being discussed, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, all engaged in s-backing, which is a term for pronouncing the s in a word as if it were sh. It’s called s-backing because you move your tongue toward the back of your mouth in order to do it. Some linguists refer to the phenomenon as “retracted (str).”

Here’s the segment. Rascoe says “shtrongly” at the 0:35 and 2:01 marks, Cornish says “obshtruction” at 1:27, and Sanders says “obshtruction” at 1:46.

The piece was no fluke. I feel that I cannot go more than a couple of hours before hearing someone say shtrength, shtreet, or shtructure.

As the NPR examples suggest, s-backing seems to occur most frequently in words with the “str” consonant cluster. But not exclusively: The Ohio State linguists Brian Joseph and Richard Janda encountered it in the words understand, disrespect, screen, sprinkler, still, school, and small. (A separate phenomenon, surely, accounts for the bizarre fact that roughly half of Americans pronounce grocery as if it were spelled groshery.)

The phenomenon was first observed, among Philadelphia residents, by the University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov in a 1984 study. It has subsequently been reported in Georgia, southern Louisiana, and Columbus, Ohio, and outside the United States in Cockney and Estuary English and in New Zealand.

I became aware of s-backing through Michelle Obama, a big user. The Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten once described her speaking style:

Here she is in London, talking about all the “ekshtraordinary” women she has met, and her father’s “shtruggle” with illness. Here she is as a commencement speaker, discussing “shtrategic choices.” Here she is talking about people being “stopped on the shtreet” because of the color of their skin. She says “frushtrated.” She says “shtructural.”

Obama is an African-American woman, as are Audie Cornish and Ayesha Rascoe. It would seem a reasonable hypothesis that s-backing is a feature of that language community. Or perhaps the former first lady, having been seen and heard so frequently, influenced the way they, and possibly also Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others, speak. But Brian Joseph, in personal correspondence, cautioned me against jumping to that conclusion: “Despite what many people think, there is much less overt ‘modeling’ of speech on popular figures. … I think that Labov has shown pretty convincingly that the people you interact with on a daily basis have more of an impact on your speech.”

OK, fine. But my admittedly less than comprehensive survey of the literature on this subject leaves me unsatisfied. Several scholars, including David Durian and Duna Gylfadottir (her paper is called “Shtreets of Philadelphia”), chart an increase in s-backing in particular cities and regions, especially among younger people, but I haven’t found anything that measures what seems to me a big increase on a national level.

And why do people do it? Durian’s paper, focusing on Columbus, Ohio, reports that s-backing is linked with an urban identity. And a 2011 paper by Kathryn Campbell-Kibler has some interesting findings regarding male speakers. Avoiding s-backing, she found, “carries strong social meaning across multiple speakers and other linguistic cues, making speakers sound less masculine, more gay and less competent”; conversely, s-backing increases “perceptions of the complex style ‘masculine, unintelligent, straight man.’”

But that’s kind of it. I would love to see national research on how many people s-back, who they are, and (I know I’m asking for the moon here) why they do it. If such a study were to come down the pike, I would be exshtremely grateful.