Bill,

I've noticed this change together with a similar one among young people, especially young women.  In /mar?In/, the loss of the /t/ and the insertion of the /I/ go hand in hand.  In speakers who keep the /t/ it gets released velicly, simply lowering the velum so that it become a nasal.  Voicing is roughly simultaneous with this.  The glottal stop is, as you indicate, a regular feature of syllable-final fortis stops (/p, t, k/).  If the alveolar closure is absent, there's no /t/ and now way of using velic release, so when the glottis laxes to permit voicing a vowel occurs.  As for a transcription, I'd opt for something central, either a barred-i or a schwa, depending on the speaker and on the final nasal.

This similar pattern I mentioned, and maybe it isn't similar beyond the speaker population that uses it, is the use of a full vowel rather than a syllabic /n/ or /l/ in words with the suffixes -tion and -al.  The vowel that I've heard usually is the inverted <v>.  I think I've heard it more among Californians than elsewhere, but at an LSA a few years ago I heard an Australian speaker, a young man, use it.  He'd been living in the Bay area for about a year.

Herb
 
There is a pronunciation pattern common among some of my students that
seems rather new to me; I'm bringing it up because I'm curious how
widespread it is. It basically involves fully converting an unreleased
/t/ to a glottal stop before a following vowel (using ? to stand for
glottal stop):

	Martin	/mar?tn/ -->  /mar?In/

Most speakers convert the "t" in "Martin" to a kind of glottal anyway,
but it's one that's produced with the tip of the tongue in the position
where a "t" and an "n" are usually said. What some of my students are
doing is skipping that tongue movement entirely, but adding a full (if
lax) vowel before the "n". It's similar in some ways to the use of
glottal stops in stereotypes of Cockney, but not exactly. And, of
course, my students are Michiganders, not Londoners. Not even Canadian
Londoners.

Bill Spruiell

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