Pronunciation means saying a word aloud. The degree of distinctness of pronunciation is called enunciation. Sometimes words may have more than one acceptable pronunciation. Dictionaries list all the acceptable pronunciations.
The variations in pronunciation are called dialect differences. Most languages have them. Dialect differences may come from variations in speakers’ geographic location, social status, ethnic background, education, age, and occupation. Most people can understand dialect differences within their native language. But people of different backgrounds may have difficulty understanding each other if their pronunciations differ too greatly.
The people of some countries recognize a certain method of pronunciation as the standard spoken form of their language. In some countries, the standard form is the one spoken in its capital. For example, the people of Japan consider the Japanese spoken in Tokyo to be the standard form of their language. In the United States, one standard pronunciation does not exist. People may use many different pronunciations that are considered correct.
A foreign language can seem hard to pronounce because some of its sounds may not be found in a person’s native language. For example, the pronunciation of r and th sounds in English is hard for native speakers of German, French, and Spanish because the sounds are not used in these languages. The German oe, the French u, and the Spanish x have sounds that are not found in English. People must learn how to place their mouth and tongue to make the new sounds of a foreign language.
Pronunciation problems in English.
English words follow a number of complicated pronunciation rules. The majority of words follow these rules. However, English has more irregular pronunciations than many other languages have and many occur among the most frequently used words. Largely for this reason, many people consider English a difficult language to pronounce.
Letters and combinations of letters in English often have more than one pronunciation. One reason for this is that there are only 26 letters to represent about 40 different sounds. For example, the digraph (two letters representing one sound) gh is silent in dough, but sounds like f in cough, a hard g in ghost, and a p in hiccough. In Spanish and Italian, the letter a is always pronounced using the broad a (ah, as in father). However, the English words fat, fate, fare, and far each have a different a sound. People must memorize pronunciations that do not follow set rules.
Another reason rules do not apply simply and regularly to the pronunciation of English is that the language has borrowed so much from other languages. Many borrowed words follow the pronunciation rules of the language from which they came rather than the rules for native English words. For example, in most cases an e added to the end of a word in English is silent. Its only purpose is to make the vowel before it long. Thus, in cape << kayp >> the e is silent, while the a is long. But in the word cafe the e is pronounced ay, while the a is short and almost slurred over. Cafe is one of the words that we have taken from the French. The final e of the French word cafe has an acute accent over it, which gives it the sound of a long a. In English, we usually drop the accent marks of other languages but keep much the same pronunciation.
English also has irregular pronunciations because over a period of years the sounds of many words have changed but the spellings have remained the same. In the 1300’s, for example, the words sane and sanity were both pronounced with a short a (as in hat). The sound of the a in sane soon changed to a long a, but the original spelling had already been established as the standard in printed materials. In another case, the original pronunciation of the digraph oo in all words was a long o (oh). During the 1700’s, the pronunciation of oo changed. Some of the variations included the oo of food, the short u of wood, and the uh of flood.
English dialects in the United States.
There are three major regional dialects in the United States: (1) Northern, also called Eastern or New England; (2) Southern; and (3) Midland, also known as Western or Midwestern. Many local dialects exist within the major ones.
The Northern dialect occurs mainly in New York and New England. Some characteristics of Northern pronunciation include using the broad a in words that could use a short a ( lava << LAH vuh >> for lava << LA vuh >> ), dropping the r sound ( car << cah >> ), and using the short o instead of the open o ( fog << fog >> for fog (fawg).
The Southern dialect occurs mainly in the Southern States. Some of the features of this dialect include the loss of the r sound ( southern << SUH thuhn >> for southern << SUHTH uhrn >> ), the use of the broad a for a long i ( time << tahm >> for tym in the word time), and the use of a short i for an e before a nasal sound ( pen << pihn >> ).
The Midland dialect is spoken in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and most states west of the Appalachian Mountains. This dialect is sometimes considered the standard form of American English because it is spoken over the largest geographic region. Pronunciation characteristics of the Midland dialect include the use of the r sound in all word positions, the use of the open o for a short o ( fog << fawg >> for fog (fog)), and the use of a long i ( time << tym >> ).
Since the early 1900’s, pronunciation in the United States has become more standardized because people throughout the country have become more and more exposed to each other’s speech patterns. This exposure occurs through such means as movies, radio, television, and travel.
Learning pronunciation
must start with learning about syllables. Syllables are the natural divisions of a word according to pronunciation. A new syllable is formed around each new vowel sound. Each syllable stands by itself in pronunciation.
Where two vowels are separated by a consonant, the consonant is usually pronounced with the second vowel. Genus is broken up as ge-nus, the n belonging to the second syllable. The consonant is pronounced with the first vowel when that vowel is short but stressed. Thus, general becomes gen-er-al.
Two consonants that come together in a word are pronounced separately and belong in separate syllables. Garden is broken up as gar-den. Among the consonants which cannot be separated are ph, th, sh, ch, and others that are pronounced as a single sound.
Most difficult-to-pronounce article titles in World Book are followed by their pronunciations. In the pronunciations, the words are divided into syllables and respelled according to the way in which each syllable sounds. Accents are indicated by syllables set in capital letters (main or primary accent) and small capitals (secondary accent). See also Pronunciation key.
Any long word can be broken up into parts that are already familiar. The word incantation is long and looks hard. But it can be broken up into familiar parts—in-can-ta-tion. The first part is the same as the first syllable of invade. The second part is the same as a tin can. The third and fourth parts look like nation, beginning with t instead of n. Thus, incantation is pronounced IHN kan TAY shuhn. Many persons already know the word plantation and find it easy to substitute inc for pl in learning to say incantation.
