Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 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.
Some editions of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary have offered a method for teachers to indicate pronunciation without respelling as a supplement to the respelling scheme used in the dictionary. Pronunciation without respelling is also sometimes used in texts with many unusual words, such as Bibles, [19] [20] [21] when it is desirable to show ...
The unusual pronunciation versus spelling of who is because the vowel was formerly /aː/, and thus it did not undergo the sound change in Old English, but in Middle English (following spelling change) the vowel changed to /uː/ and it followed the same sound change as how before it, but with the Middle English spelling unchanged. [5]
Homographs are words with the same spelling but having more than one meaning. Homographs may be pronounced the same ( homophones ), or they may be pronounced differently ( heteronyms , also known as heterophones).
In many dialects, /r/ occurs only before a vowel; if you speak such a dialect, simply ignore /r/ in the pronunciation guides where you would not pronounce it, as in cart /kɑːrt/. In other dialects, /j/ ( y es) cannot occur after /t, d, n/ , etc., within the same syllable; if you speak such a dialect, then ignore the /j/ in transcriptions such ...
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language.. These charts give a diaphoneme for each sound, followed by its realization in different dialects.
In modern slang, some native speakers may pronounce w more closely to the origin of the loanword than the official /v/ pronunciation. Multiple dialects of Swedish and Danish use the sound, however. In Denmark, notably in Jutland, the northern half uses it extensively in traditional dialect, and in multiple places in Sweden.