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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.
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.
Yod-dropping – the elision of /j/ in certain clusters, depending on dialect (for example, RP has /j/ in new, while General American and Cockney do not).; Yod-coalescence, whereby the clusters /dj/, /tj/, /sj/ and /zj/ become [dʒ], [tʃ], [ʃ] and [ʒ] respectively (for example, education is often pronounced as if it began "edge").
H-dropping or aitch-dropping is the deletion of the voiceless glottal fricative or "H-sound", [h]. The phenomenon is common in many dialects of English , and is also found in certain other languages, either as a purely historical development or as a contemporary difference between dialects.
Initial dropping is a sound change whereby the first consonants of words are dropped. Additionally, stress may shift from the first to the second syllable, and the first vowel may be shortened, reduced, or dropped, which can mean the loss of the entire first syllable of a word.
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In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase.However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. [1]
Examples of semivowels in English are y and w in yes and west, respectively. Written / j w / in IPA , y and w are near to the vowels ee and oo in seen and moon, written / iː uː / in IPA . The term glide may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel.