The Tee in Often

[Sisyphus_Stone]

I was taught by the nuns at Christ the King Convent school that the ‘t’ in often is silent. My habit is to pronounce the word, offen.

Yet, I hear many colleagues, mostly tertiary educated and professional people, clearly pronounce the ‘t’. Is this a product of the natural evolution of the English language and the pronounced ‘t’ is more accepted or am I mixing with a buncha dunces and dunderheads?

[straykat23]

At Sacred Heart Grammar School in Oakland, California, the pronounciation was “offen.”

On the other hand, “helicopter” was pronounced “heel-i-copter” because “hell-i-copter” was somehow indecent.

[Larry_Mudd]

So, the nuns endorsed poor enunciation?

There’s a joke in there, somewhere.

“Often” is oft pronounced off’n. Seven hundred years of use have worn the edges off for some folks.

Pronouncing the “t” is preferable, in my opinion, and acceptable in any case.

[Loopus]

According to my history of the English language professor, the word was originally pronounced offen. She says that pronouncing the T in “often” is an example of a phenomenon that comes with increasing literacy: in attempting to pronounce words correctly we judge by how they are written, but this can be misleading.

In any case, either pronunciation is perfectly acceptable today.

[Ross]

Kinda nice really. I’ve heard people talk about someone being “nave” - mispronouncing “naive”. But they know what the word means, it’s just that they’ve been reading a lot more than before. Which is good.

Until I was about 11 I believed it was possible to “misle” someone, because I read so often about people being “misled”.

[zut]

From dictionary.com:

Usage Note: During the 15th century English experienced a widespread loss of certain consonant sounds within consonant clusters, as the (d) in handsome and handkerchief, the § in consumption and raspberry, and the (t) in chestnut and often. In this way the consonant clusters were simplified and made easier to articulate. With the rise of public education and literacy and, consequently, people’s awareness of spelling in the 19th century, sounds that had become silent sometimes were restored, as is the case with the t in often, which is now frequently pronounced. In other similar words, such as soften and listen, the t generally remains silent.

Note that the same source lists both pronunciations as acceptable.

[mhendo]

Here’s what some usage experts have to say on the issue:

Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Third Edition, is probably the standard work for English usage. It says:

The OED commented that te pronunciation with medial /t/, “which is not recognized in the dictionaries, is now frequent in the south of England, and is often used in singing.” Nowadays many standard speaker use both /of-fen/* and /off-ten/*, but the former pronunciation is the more common of the two.

*Note: the pronunciations are spelled differently in the book, but i don’t have the International Phonetic Alphabet font on my computer, and i couldn’t find html codes for it

The best work on English usage in America (IMO) is Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which says:

The educated pronunciation os /of-en/, but the less adept say /of-ten/. To put it another way, the silent-t pronunciation is U; the spoken-t pronunciation is distinctly non-U.

The terms U and non-U, as Garner explains elsewhere in the book, come from a famous essay by Alan S.C. Ross, in which he:

divided [linguistic] traits in England into U (upper-class) and non-U (not upper-class–meaning “vulgar” or sometimes “typical of social climbers who put on airs”)

Ouch.

Garner does point out, however, that

Of course, Ross listed these items as an anthropologist might–not to prescribe what people should do, but to describe the way in which speech and writing were class indicators in the England of the 1950s.

Garner also goes on to say:

Among AmE speakers, there is perhaps greater fluidity between classes than among BrE speakers. But T.H. Pear’s observations about the process in England apply equally to the United States: “As soon as members of the lwoer classes rise socially, they tend to adopt, and when ‘middle-middles’ become ‘upper-middles’ they, in turn, drop, middle-class euphemisms; for unless they do, they may find their ascent of the social ladder hindered by people at both ends of it.”

In the same entry, Garner specifically lists the word “often” (among others) as one of American English’s vocabulary markers; those who pronounce the “t” are non-U, and those who do not are U.

[Captain_Amazing]

Part of a conversation between the Major-General and the Pirate King, from the operetta The Pirates of Penzance:

GENERAL: I ask you, have you ever known what it is to be an orphan?

KING: Often!

GENERAL: Yes, orphan. Have you ever known what it is to be one?

KING: I say, often.

ALL: (disgusted) Often, often, often. (Turning away)

GENERAL: I don’t think we quite understand one another. I ask you, have you ever known what it is to be an orphan, and you say “orphan”. As I understand you, you are merely repeating the word “orphan” to show that you understand me.

KING: I didn’t repeat the word often.

GENERAL: Pardon me, you did indeed.

KING: I only repeated it once.

GENERAL: True, but you repeated it.

KING: But not often.

GENERAL: Stop! I think I see where we are getting confused. When you said “orphan”, did you mean “orphan”,a person who has lost his parents, or “often”, frequently?

[Mathochist]

From the O.E.D.:

Often is less commonly used than oft until the 16th cent. Several orthoepists of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Hart, Bullokar, Robinson, Gil, and Hodges, give a pronunciation with medial -t-. Others, including Coles, Young, Strong, and Brown, record a pronunciation without -t-, which, despite its use in the 16th cent. by Elizabeth I, seems to have been avoided by careful speakers in the 17th cent. (see E. J. Dobson Eng. Pronunc. 1500-1700 (ed. 2, 1968) II. §405). Loss of t after f occurs in other cases; cf. SOFTEN v., and also RAFT n.1, HAFT n.1, etc. The pronunciation with -t- has frequently been considered to be hypercorrection in recent times: see for example H. W. Fowler Mod. Eng. Usage (1926), s.v.

With nice further references.

[FilmGeek]

So, I’m putting on airs? Damn.

ofTen I wear cloTHes.

oh what a freak I am.

[AHunter3]

Heck, I pronounce the L in walk and salmon, the T in often, and the full X (not Z) sound at both ends of xerox.

I do draw the line at pronouncing the K and the guttural GH in knight, though.