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English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
In phonetics, rhotic consonants, or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including ⟨R⟩, ⟨r⟩ in the Latin script and ⟨Р⟩, ⟨p⟩ in the Cyrillic script. They are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by upper- or lower-case variants of Roman ⟨R⟩, ⟨r⟩: ⟨r⟩, ⟨ɾ⟩, ⟨ɹ⟩, ⟨ɻ⟩, ⟨ʀ⟩, ⟨ʁ⟩, ⟨ɽ⟩, and ⟨ɺ⟩ as well as by the lower-case turned Roman ⟨a⟩ combined with the "non-syllabic" diacritic, that is ⟨ɐ̯⟩.
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds 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. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced /fɜ:s laɪt/. Many other terms are used to refer to particular cases where sounds are omitted.
A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. A homophone may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example rose (flower) and rose, or spelled differently, as in rain, reign, and rein. The term homophone may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, for example a phrase, letter, or groups of letters which are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter, or group of letters. Any unit with this property is said to be homophonous.
Œ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι and in a few non-Greek words, usages that continue in English and French. In French, it is also used in some non-learned words, representing then mid-front rounded vowel-sounds, rather than sounding the same as é or è, those being its traditional French values in the words borrowed from or via Latin.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.
Guttural R is the phenomenon whereby a rhotic consonant is produced in the back of the vocal tract rather than in the front portion thereof and thus as a guttural consonant. Speakers of languages with guttural R typically regard guttural and coronal rhotics to be alternative pronunciations of the same phoneme, despite articulatory differences. Similar consonants are found in other parts of the world, but they often have little to no cultural association or interchangeability with coronal rhotics and are (perhaps) not rhotics at all.
Linking R and intrusive R are sandhi or linking phenomena involving the appearance of the rhotic consonant between two consecutive morphemes where it would not normally be pronounced. These phenomena occur in many non-rhotic varieties of English, such as those in most of England and Wales, parts of the United States, and all of the Anglophone societies of the southern hemisphere, with the exception of South Africa. These phenomena first appeared in English sometime after the year 1700.
Eye dialect is the use of deliberately nonstandard spelling for standard pronunciation. The term was coined by George Philip Krapp to refer to a literary technique that implies the standard pronunciation of a given word that is not well-reflected by its standard spelling, such as wimmin to more accurately represent the typical English pronunciation of women. However, eye dialect is also commonly used to indicate that a character's speech is vernacular (nonstandard), foreign, or uneducated. This form of nonstandard spelling differs from others in that a difference in spelling does not indicate a difference in pronunciation of a word. That is, it is dialect to the eye, rather than to the ear.
This chart shows the most common applications of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent English language pronunciations.
In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign U+2205∅EMPTY SET. Null is an unpronounced or unwritten segment. The symbol resembles the Scandinavian letter Ø and other symbols.
In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions and so fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions of a word.
In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers.
Tweants is a group of non-standardised, closely related Westphalian, Dutch Low Saxon dialects, descending from Old Saxon. It is spoken daily by approximately 62% of the population of Twente, a region in the eastern Dutch province of Overijssel bordering on Germany.
This article describes those aspects of the phonological history of the English language which concern consonants.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which does not have a phonemic orthography.
Ough is a four-letter sequence, a tetragraph, used in English orthography and notorious for its unpredictable pronunciation. It has at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English, and no discernible patterns exist for choosing among them.
Older Southern American English is a diverse set of American English dialects of the Southern United States spoken most widely up until the American Civil War of the 1860s, before gradually transforming among its White speakers, first, by the turn of the 20th century, and, again, following the Great Depression, World War II, and, finally, the Civil Rights Movement. By the mid-20th century, among White Southerners, these local dialects had largely consolidated into, or been replaced by, a more regionally unified Southern American English. Meanwhile, among Black Southerners, these dialects transformed into a fairly stable African-American Vernacular English, now spoken nationwide among Black people. Certain features unique to older Southern U.S. English persist today, like non-rhoticity, though typically only among Black speakers or among very localized White speakers.
Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant by English speakers. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic varieties, the historical English sound is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, whereas a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound, pronouncing them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. 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 pronounce the in that position, since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
References
- Bowdre, Paul H., Jr. (1971). "Eye dialect as a literary device". In J. V. Williamson & V. M. Burke (Eds.), A various language (pp. 178–179). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
- Fine, Elizabeth. (1983). "In defense of literary dialect: A response to Dennis R. Preston". The Journal of American Folklore, 96 (381), 323–330.
- Ives, Sumner. (1950). "A theory of literary dialect". Tulane Studies in English, 2, 137–182.
- Ives, Sumner. (1971). "A theory of literary dialect". In J. V. Williamson & V. M. Burke (eds.), A various language (pp. 145–177). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
- Krapp, George P. (1926). "The psychology of dialect writing". The Bookman, 6, 522–527.
- Preston, Dennis R. (1982). "Ritin' fowklower daun 'rong: Folklorists' failures in phonology". The Journal of American Folklore, 95 (377), 304–326.
- Preston, Dennis R. (1983). "Mowr bayud spellin': A reply to Fine". The Journal of American Folklore, 96 (381), 330–339.
- Preston, Dennis R. (1985). "The Li'l Abner syndrome: Written representations of speech". American Speech, 60 (4), 328–336.