Learn English – How common are “shooken” and “tooken” in spoken speech

speech

I've been constantly been hearing the non-standard forms "tooken" and "shooken" in many people's spoken speech (particularly in the Northeast of the USA).

Does anyone know when these forms originated and when and how they are used in place of shook or shaken or took or taken?

Best Answer

To add to rjpond's etymological answer, I thought I'd add some frequencies. I am looking for articles on "tooken" and "shooken," and whether they're common in certain AmE dialects (I don't know of any off the top of my head), or what conditions their use, but here's what I have so far and I'll come back to this answer if I find any research.

According to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), comparing across transcriptions of speech only, "tooken" is used in less than 0.05% of "taken/tooken" tokens and "shooken" is used instead of "shaken" approximately 0.5% of the time.

Now, I'd take these with a grain of salt, as not only were the low-frequency forms in the low double-digits, the COCA says:

Transcripts of unscripted conversation from more than 150 different TV and radio programs (examples: All Things Considered (NPR), Newshour (PBS), Good Morning America (ABC), Today Show (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), Hannity and Colmes (Fox), Jerry Springer, etc).

This means they are transcriptions of real speech, but not entirely naturalistic, and don't reflect stigmatized dialectic usages (as "tooken" or "shooken" is likely to be considered).

In terms of the third issue (naturalness), there is one aspect of these texts that does make them somewhat unlike completely natural conversation. That is of course the fact that the people knew that they were on a national TV or radio program, and they therefore probably altered their speech accordingly -- such as relatively little profanity and perhaps avoiding highly stigmatized words and phrases like "ain't got none". ... But no spoken corpus (even those created by linguists with tape recorders in the early 1990s) will be 100% authentic for real conversation -- as long as people know that they're being recorded.

(Emphasis added.)

COCA doesn't link very well, so to find these quotes, from the homepage, click on "large and balanced" to the right to reach the first quote and "See notes" on that page to reach the second."

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