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The pronunciation of the vowel of the prefix di-in words such as dichotomy, digest (verb), dilate, dilemma, dilute, diluvial, dimension, direct, dissect, disyllable, divagate, diverge, diverse, divert, divest, and divulge as well as their derivational forms vary between / aɪ / and / ɪ / or / ə / in both British and American English.
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones. Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical /r/ phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but ...
Received Pronunciation has been the subject of many academic studies, [2] and is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. [ 3 ] [ page needed ] The widely repeated claim that only about two percent of Britons speak RP [ 2 ] is no more than a rough estimate and has been questioned by several writers, most notably by ...
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 ...
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk , half , calf , etc., the w in two and sword , gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though , daughter , night , brought , and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
The tradition of Received Pronunciation is usually credited to the British phonetician Daniel Jones.In the first edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), he named the accent "Public School Pronunciation"; for the second edition in 1926 he wrote: "In what follows I call it Received Pronunciation, for want of a better term."
The BBC Pronunciation Unit, also known as the BBC Pronunciation Research Unit, is an arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) comprising linguists (phoneticians) whose role is "to research and advise on the pronunciation of any words, names or phrases in any language required by anyone in the BBC". [1]
Many other words have -er in British English. These include Germanic words, such as anger, mother, timber and water, and such Romance-derived words as danger, quarter and river. The ending -cre, as in acre, [26] lucre, massacre, and mediocre, is used in both British and American English to show that the c is pronounced /k/ rather than /s/.