The spread of 'may' and 'babay' doesn't seem to be caused by random innovation - it's a daisy chain of influence from disparate genres and peoples all reaching their zenith in the massive pop moment of the 90s. I first tackled this subject in 2016 (re-published in 2017) in one of my earliest articles. This is not just a rewrite, but a totally new theory to explain just why pop singers do that thang. I hope you'll join me in what is probably the most comprehensive history of 'it's gonna be may' yet. Setting the boundaries If you don't know the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or the notation I'm using here, don't worry about it - I will give you transcriptions using the Latin alphabet as well as sound clips to help. The IPA appears between brackets or slashes //. If you're not a linguist, don't worry too much about the difference between them. I'm only going to be using a handful of IPA symbols, though, so you may even be able to recognize them yourself!įirst, let's talk about 'it's gonna be may.' What’s happening is the 'ee' vowel is being converted to 'ay'. This is an example of diphthongization, or a vowel 'breaking' into two vowels. This breaking can apply to other words that have an 'ee' /i/ sound in them, like 'knees' /niz/ can become 'knays'. We’ll call this pattern ‘ME-breaking.’ There some dialects that have ME-breaking commonly, like Southern American English (Lee, 2012 McDorman) and London English. Words like ‘happy’ and ‘sadly’ have an ‘ee’ sound in them, but the stress doesn’t fall on the ‘ee.’ This puts them in a separate category, called ‘HAPPY’ words. Nowadays, most dialects of English have an ‘ee’ sound in these words: this is called tense-HAPPY.īut in the 1800s, these HAPPY words were pronounced with a short 'i' sound. So they sounded like ‘happih’, ‘verih’, ‘anarchih.’ This pronunciation is called 'lax-HAPPY'. While lax-HAPPY isn’t popular nowadays, older speakers of conservative Received Pronunciation (Wells, 1980), Southern American English (Thomas, 2006), and African American English still use it.

Pour some sugar on may memes