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. So they sounded like ‘happih’, ‘verih’, ‘anarchih.’ This pronunciation is called 'lax-HAPPY'. 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. 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. 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. This breaking can apply to other words that have an 'ee' /i/ sound in them, like "knees" /niz/ can become "knays". This is an example of diphthongization, or a vowel "breaking" into two vowels. 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". If you're not a linguist, don't worry too much about the difference between them. The IPA appears between brackets or slashes //. 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. I hope you'll join me in what is probably the most comprehensive history of "it's gonna be may" yet. This is not just a rewrite, but a totally new theory to explain just why pop singers do that thang. I first tackled this subject in 2016 (re-published in 2017) in one of my earliest articles. 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. So why does it matter which vowel happened - singers change their vowels all the time, right? Well, most linguistic changes of this sort aren't random or arbitrary - there is usually a reason that sound changes happen, and a reason that they spread as well. These two vowels have separate histories and need separate accounts. He refers to Stevie Wonder saying "thirteen month old babay," but that's not actually what Stevie Wonder is saying: he's saying "thirteen month old bab-IH," with a short 'i' and no diphthong. Moreover, it confuses the vowel in "it's gonna be may" with a different vowel entirely, which muddies the waters even further. Nosowitz's article offers an explanation for why it happens now, but it doesn't tell us who first started using it. Justin is not the only pop star to sing "me" as "may." We've all probably heard a pop star sing something like "I'm missing you like canday" or "I want to be the minoritay." The nameless but frequent phenomenon even inspired an Atlas Obscura investigation by Dan Nosowitz.īut tracing the pedigree of this feature has eluded most of the people who write about it. Your browser does not support the audio element.
"Baby, when you finally get to love somebody, guess what: it's gonna be may." - It's Gonna Be Me, N'Sync (2000).If you need a reminder or you've never heard the song before, here's a clip of the offending pronunciation: It reminds of us of both the hopeful month of May and how weird it was that pop stars used to sing like that. Only except of the expect "me," he sings "may." The meme itself dates back to 2012, but it has proven enduring as a cyclical meme.
The article has more points and citations while the video has more visual aids, so they both complement each other.Īt the end of April, you'll start seeing memes of Justin Timberlake everywhere with the text "it's gonna be may." This, of course, is a reference to the 2000 hit song "It's Gonna Be Me," where Justin sings the hook. This article is also available in video form! You can watch below.