As a telephone support agent, i receive calls from different people with different accents. I must have heard all types of american accent there is if not most of them, that is. Well quite a lot of people i speak with pronounce the word "YOU" as "yuh-ow", instead of just "yu". Most of the times they sound southern but i'm not sure, of course (including the race). I don't know if it's just my ears or some of americans really pronounce this word in such a way.
i hope to know english phonetics
thank
you
I've noticed a lot of younger speakers (at least here in California) have a distinct diphthong in the [u] of "you", which sometimes does seem to have a mid-starting point [..] or maybe a fronted [o] and ends somewhere around [u]. I think I've even heard [j..o]. I've also heard it in "do". I first noticed it while I was working at Jamba Juice (a juice/smoothie place) for several months and noticed that my coworkers and I were using this diphthongized [u] especially in the phrase "thank you", which we must've said hundreds of times a shift to customers, so I had plenty of chances to observe. I think I hear it most often in a phrase like "thank you" when there's a pause after it--if "you" is said in the middle of the normal stream of conversation it still seems like [ju] is the norm.
It's an interesting development because [u] here is usually high, fronted, generally unrounded, and a monophthong, but maybe in such high frequency words ending in [u] like "you" and "do" before a pause this new trend to diphthongize it is popping up.
While songs aren't always the best representation of true speech, try listening to the Avril Lavigne song "Don't tell me", which has plenty instances of "you" and "do" ("Did you think that I was gonna give it up to you, did you think that it was something I was gonna do") and she highly diphthongizes them before a pause, when she's really emphasizing "you" and "do", as I assume is the case in spoken "thank you" here. The fact that she's Canadian may also mean this is a wider North American phenomenon as you've noticed, Nick. Anyone else noticed this?
"is popping up", not "it is".
Thanks, Kirk. I thought I was the only one noticing that. I doesn't sound right though. Because the first time i heard that kind of pronunciation of YOU, i thought the person was saying "YO ALL", hehehe.
Some dialects of American English use "you all" ("y'all") in place of "you," particularly in plural constructions. Maybe you're hearing that.