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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 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 ...
Reduction to /w/, a development that has affected the speech of the great majority of English speakers, causing them to pronounce wh- the same as w- (sometimes called the wine–whine merger or glide cluster reduction). The distinction is maintained, however, in Scotland, most of Ireland, and some Southern American English.
In Glasgow and some other urban Scottish accents, /s/ is given an apico-alveolar articulation, which auditorily gives an impression of a retracted pronunciation similar to /ʃ/. [10] Confusion between /ʃ/ and /s/ (or /tʃ/) occurs in some African varieties of English, so ship may be pronounced like sip (or chip). [11]
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Pronunciation of wh : Most of the U.S. has completed the wine–whine merger, but, in many Southern accents, particularly inland Southern accents, the phonemes /w/ and /hw/ remain distinct, so that pairs of words like wail and whale or wield and wheeled are not homophones. [39]
"Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy" star Renée Zellweger was "sick" of hearing her own voice, which prompted her to leave Hollywood for six years in 2010. During her time outside of the spotlight ...
The following pronunciation respelling key is used in some Wikipedia articles to respell the pronunciations of English words. It does not use special symbols or diacritics apart from the schwa (ə), which is used for the first sound in the word "about". See documentation for {} for examples and instructions on using the template.