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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.
Certain words are pronounced as if they contained a morpheme boundary before /r/, notably hero /ˈhiroʊ/ and zero /ˈziroʊ/. [16] Some words originally containing the /uːr/ sequence are merged with either force (see cure–force merger) or, more rarely, nurse (see cure–nurse merger) instead of foot + /r/. [17]
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
The shift causes the vowel sound in words like cot, nod and stock and the vowel sound in words like caught, gnawed and stalk to merge into a single phoneme; therefore the pairs cot and caught, stock and stalk, nod and gnawed become perfect homophones, and shock and talk, for example, become perfect rhymes.
In phonetics and historical linguistics, fusion, or coalescence, is a sound change where two or more segments with distinctive features merge into a single segment. This can occur both on consonants and in vowels. A word like educate is one that may exhibit fusion, e.g. /ˈɛdjʊkeɪt/ or /ˈɛdʒʊkeɪt/.
[a] When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the /r/ in that position (the linking R), because it is followed by a vowel. [5] The rhotic dialects of English include most of those in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and Canada.
For some English speakers in the UK, the vowels of goose and thought may be merged before dark syllable-final /l/ due to the phonetically raised pronunciation of the thought vowel in southern England (rather than [ɔː], the contemporary pronunciation of this vowel in Standard Southern British English is more accurately transcribed as [oː] or ...
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.