I’m listening to an audio book and the narrator pronounces the H in WH words like white, when, whisper, etc. I can’t explain how it’s pronounced but I can definitely hear the H sound. Is this a regional thing? Do most people pronounce the W and then the vowel after the H, like me?
Is it like how Stewie pronounces the “h” in “Cool Whip” in this Family Guy clip?
It’s not entirely unusual.
You can see a map of the US regions that do this here: Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩ - Wikipedia
Basically originally it was more like “hwo” where there was a Voiceless labial–velar fricative “hw” (ʍ in IPA) at the beginning of these words. At some point that merged with the “w” sound almost everywhere English is spoken. The “wh” spelling was retained, because English spelling sucks.
When I was a young fella, many years ago, I was taught that “hw” was the proper pronunciation of the digraph “wh”. So “whale” was to be pronounce “hwale,” for example. Pronouncing it as “wale” would have been considered incorrect.
I don’t hear it done that way very much anymore, and probably don’t actually do it myself. But it is deeply ingrained in me that this is how “wh” is supposed to be pronounced, even if most people don’t do it.
I was taught that here in Chicago in the 1980s. I honestly don’t know of a single native Chicagoan who pronounces it that way. You might have gotten punched in the nose on the playground for “putting on airs” if you said “hwat.” (Only slightly joking.) None of us kids retained that lesson. I’ve always associated it with parts of the South, and that map above reflects that.
For me (as I probably should have specified), it would have been Indiana in the 1970s. No one around here seems to do it, as I say, including me. But I do remember learning it.
It was taught to us as part of the group of digraphs: ch, sh, th, and wh. In all of them, we were taught, the presence of the “h” changes the pronunciation of the preceding consonant in some way. Otherwise it wouldn’t be there.
As if English orthography was ever that logical.
I should add that you can see at least one word where the merger went in the other direction (towards “h” instead of “w”) - “who” and it’s forms. This was probably pronounced with the same initial consonant as “what” in Old English (but with a different vowel sound), but because the vowel sound was different “who” went to “hu” but “what” went to “wat”.
And of course “how” (which also followed a similar pattern from “hw” to “h”) got its spelling changed, because it changed to the plain “h” sound much earlier than “who” and “what” did (so those retained the “wh” spelling).
Yeah clearly that rule is hogwash. There are plenty of words where the “h” is purely vestigial. Nobody pronounces “who” as anything other than “hu” as far as I am aware. Certainly not to the extent that “what” is sometimes “ʍʌt”.
I’ve always pronounced them e.g. “hwat”, not because I heard there was a rule, but because I picked them up that way. I think the subtle addition of the “h” has grown even less clear over time, or become lost altogether, especially in rapid speech.
Yeah, we imitate our peers.
Are you from one of the purple areas or nearby:
No. From Delaware County, PA, until age 16. Within an hour of there most of the time since.
Somewhere online is a series of pronunciation questions that purports to show whence we came. It put me only about 8 miles from home.
Interesting. This map, too, seems to put you solidly in wine-whine merger territory, but there’s always pockets. Like Chicago is supposed to be a “pop” town. But the neighborhood I grew up in was overwhelmingly “soda.” I asked on a neighborhood Facebook page with a couple thousand members, assuming that I was just some weird anomaly, and the vast majority of respondents grew up saying “soda,” not “pop,” like I did.
Or “Hweat Thins?”
I’ve only recently learned that it’s not true that everyone does. I was taught that, with rare exception, all “wh” words are pronounced as “hw”. Apparently, people outside of the south don’t do that any more and [del]mispronounce[/del] umm alternatively-pronounce “which” as if it were “witch” and “whine” as if it were “wine”.
I recall as a 1960s kid in SoCal being taught by parents and by the schools that wh- words, e.g. “whale” should be pronounced about like “hwale”. Which means the “h” sound is much less obvious than in “hwale”, but not completely absent like “wale”. So a short & slight exhale of an “h” before the voicing of the “w” kicks in.
That was viewed by our (fairly elitist) school district as correct high register speech.
Now 50+ years later some of my “wh” words still have a hint of a leading mini-“h”, but most don’t. And it’s more prevalent when I’m speaking publicly or seriously versus just shootin’ the shit over a beer.
My IMO bottom line: Not entirely regional, but definitely largely obsolete in “standard” US English. To the small degree that “standard” can be applied to the sprawling mess that is US English as actually spoken by the Unwashed Masses.
My inclination is to pronounce wh (as in “whine”) as distinctly but subtly different from w (as in “wine”). But I don’t think either pronunciation (w vs. hw) sounds wrong for “wh” words, or that I even notice the difference unless it’s exaggerated (like Stewie does).
Still, whenever someone mistypes “where” for “were” or vice versa, it really stands out to me, because the two words sound so different, mostly because of the different vowel sound, but also because of the difference between the initial “wh” vs. “w.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve grown up and lived most of my life in central Illinois, where the map that @pulykamell linked to seems to show both are common.
We often think of it as putting an /h/ in front of a /w/. But the sound is actually an unvoiced version of /w/. It’s like the difference between /s/ and /z/ or /k/ and /g/.
Personally, I find I still use it occasionally. Sometimes it will come out when I’m accenting a wh word, especially if I’m expressing exasperation and would naturally have sighed.
I just tried the following:
They put me in the red club around Philadelphia and Baltimore. I actually grew up about a third of the way from Philadelphia to Baltimore, maybe a few miles north.
I tried to paste the image, which is 500 kilobytes, but got an error message saying the maximum allowed dimension is 5 megabytes. I don’t even know what that means.
Me too. But once I identified a hoagie, it was a lead pipe cinch that I was from Philly or nearly so. I grew up in West Philly and then my parents moved to Delaware County when I was in college, but that can’t have mattered.
FWIW, I will mention that I sometimes say the hw sound, but mostly jocularly. On the other hand, it is not unfamiliar to me.
Ditto, Chicago area, 1960s.