I have a linguistics question, if I may! So I noticed today that a lot of my colleagues, particularly those from southeast England, pronounce 'question' with the first consonant sound almost halfway between a qu and a ch. Do you know what's going on with that? I have no idea how to google it.
Okay so this looks like a phonetics /articulatory thing. The immediate thought with "sounds like ch" is oh! Palatalization! So like the stereotypical "chewsday innit". Ch is (basically) our palatal affricate. That is it's a combination of the dental "t" with the palatal "sh" - your tongue starts behind your teeth and moves backwards towards the roof of your mouth (hard palate) as it releases. English has vanishingly few palatal sounds so complex clusters involving the roof of your mouth tend to come out as ch. So the vowel u, which has a very high tongue position, triggers palatalization of preceding dental stops in many dialects of English (though by and large not American), so nyoo rather than noo for "new", or tyoosday which then goes one further to tshoosday if you're slow in lowering your tongue - hence "chewsday."
Okay. That's all normal and well-understood.
What you're describing is super weird because while my first instinct on hearing about an emergent ch sound is palatization, I cannot for the life of me think of what could be driving it.
If we look at "question" phonetically, we've got k, which is velar (articulated against the soft/palate or velum at the back of the mouth), then w which is labial or labiovelar (articulated at the lips with simultaneous slight velar closure), and then short e, which is a mid vowel. So your tongue bunches up against your throat, stays there while you round your lips, and then evens out into the vowel. At no point does it go anywhere near the roof of your mouth. So where is the palatalization coming from?? It can't be the surrounding phonetic context, which is where phonetic phenomena usually come from.
My next best guess is that the q sound is somehow being pulled forward in the mouth. That for whatever reason, instead of articulating the k all the way against the soft palate, your colleagues are articulating it against the back of thr hard palate. That would probably produce the sound you are describing. I am now curious to know if that forward drift is happening in any other contexts. Is it all k sounds that are becoming c-ish? All kw combos? Or only the specific instance of kweh? Or just the word question? Like how do they pronounce queen or quick? Does it happen with the word kettle?
I am toying vaguely with the notion that it might be hypercorrection away from Arabic? Arabic q is articulated even farther back in the throat, it's called a uvular sound. So if you're distinguishing the two and q is post-velar, you might make your k increasingly pre-velar for maximum contrast. But I really have no idea. Has south-eastern Enland got a particularly significant Arabic speaking population?
Tryna figure out what you could google to find out about it. Velar fronting perhaps, by analogy to th-fronting (moving the interdental th forward to become the labio-dental f). Maybe look at a dialect map of England, identify which one your colleagues belong to, and googling that? It might be a described feature of that dialect.
But yeah that's really interesting! I wish I knew!
