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The pronunciation of the digraph wh in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents.It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial w , although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as [], a voiceless "w" sound.
The English interrogative words (also known as "wh words" or "wh forms") are words in English with a central role in forming interrogative phrases and clauses and in asking questions. The main members associated with open-ended questions are how, what, when, where, which, who, whom, whose, and why, all of which also have -ever forms (e.g ...
The pronunciation of English relative words starting with the wh digraph involves a phonetic element historically pronounced as /hw/ and now variously realized as /w/ or /ʍ/. [ 30 ] : 14 Speakers with the whine - wine merger generally use /w/ , resulting in words like which , and why being pronounced with an initial /w/ sound, homophonous with ...
wh represents /hw/ in some conservative dialects; /w/ in other dialects (while); and /h/ in a few words in which it is followed by o , such as who and whole. See also Phonological history of wh . zh represents /ʒ/ in words transliterated from Slavic languages [which?], and in American dictionary pronunciation spelling.
An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as what, which, when, where, who, whom, whose, why, whether and how. They are sometimes called wh-words , because in English most of them start with wh- (compare Five Ws ).
Former pronunciations of many words are reflected in their spellings, as English orthography has generally not kept pace with phonological changes since the Middle English period. The English consonant system has been relatively stable over time, although a number of significant changes have occurred.
In the vowels chart, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, alongside the words used to name their corresponding lexical sets. The diaphonemes for the lexical sets given here are based on RP and General American; they are not sufficient to express all of the distinctions found in other dialects, such as Australian English.
Throughout Wikipedia, the pronunciation of words is indicated using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The following tables list the IPA symbols used for English words and pronunciations. Please note that several of these symbols are used in ways that are specific to Wikipedia, and differ from those used by dictionaries.