Ask LLOG: Alternative standard pronunciations?
« previous post | next post »
In an email, Coby Lubliner observed that many English words have more than one standard pronunciation. He asked whether there has been any academic discussion of this general issue, and noted that he isn't familiar with any other language with as much variety in its standard pronunciations.
From his email:
What I am referring to involves mainly loanwords, both fully naturalized ones and those that are still perceived as foreign, but there are some native words (those going back to OE) as well, e.g. (n)either, roof and others.
In naturalized loanwords, as in these examples, it's mainly a matter of vowels. In stressed vowels, it's whether it's "long" or "short", as in fecund, privacy, hologram, culinary and hundreds of others. In unstressed vowels, whether it's given its full value or reduced, as in fatality, financial, direct etc.
Consonant ambivalence is relatively rare (Celtic).
But there is also a matter of stress. With Anglo-Latin words (borrowed directly from Latin, not via French) there is a tradition that however the vowels may have shifted, the original stress is kept. But this is often replaced by a default stress for unfamiliar words, which is that (1) consonant-ending words of three or more syllables are proparoxytone (e.g. acumen, tinnitus), (2) vowel-ending words (other than ending in -y) are paroxytone (e.g. patina).
This stress variation is especially common with non-naturalized loanwords (those still perceived as foreign), including foreign place and personal names, and seems to depends on one's relative familiarity with the original language (not necessarily knowing the language but exposure to people speaking it), with words like, for example, paprika, mandala, basmati either proparoxytone as in the original or paroxytone by default.
There are certainly academic discussion of various different aspects of this issue, for example whether loanword stress in English retains the original patterns or adapts to local quasi-generalizations — see e.g. Ellen Broselow's 2009 chapter "Stress adaptation in loanword phonology: perception and learnability". And there are certainly academic discussions of variable adaptation in loanword vowels and consonants in English.
But I think the broader issue is how important standardization is to the culture (that sees itself as) in charge of a given language, how univocal and official the resulting standards are, and how those (putative) standards are enforced, if they're enforced at all. Every major language has regional, social, temporal, and idiosyncratic variation. Is there one central authority that chooses among the variants? Or does the "standard" only emerge from social convergence rather than from an official committee? And are multiple speech communities and/or multiple official committees involved? Whatever the standardization mechanisms are, how committed are they to the idea that each word should have just one pronunciation?
As a non-English case where many words have multiple "standard" pronunciations, consider Japanese accentuation. Different regional and social dialects have different accent systems, as well as different treatments of cognate words. Even speakers of "standard" Tokyo-region Japanese often disagree among themselves about the accentuation of a given word, and as a result the NHK broadcasting system has for many years produced an accent dictionary, which announcers are supposed to rely on in order to create consistency in pronunciation.
For a different sort of situation, we could look at Italian, where there are multiple regional varieties forming either a dialect continuum or a set of different languages, depending on how you want to look at it — but where there are also locally-accented varieties of the Tuscan standard, differing in things like the existence of geminate consonants. Or Spanish, where a similar situation has coalesced into different "standard" varieties in different countries. Or Portuguese, or French, or Turkish, or …
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 8:25 am
"there are some native words (those going back to OE) as well, e.g. (n)either, roof and others" — (n)either I understand (/ˈ(n)iː ðə/ vs /ˈ(n)aɪ ðə/) but what pronunciation exists for "roof" other then /ruːf/ ?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 21, 2025 @ 8:31 am
Another factor to consider is the messiness of English G2P rules. Even within the same dialect, two speakers encountering the same new word in writing may reach different conclusions on its pronunciation. This adds to the variability in ways that are simply not there in languages with a more regular G2P situation.
James said,
November 21, 2025 @ 8:34 am
/rʊf/
(As in 'book'.)
The OED says that's a standard alternative in both British and U.S. English.
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 8:45 am
/rʊf/ in British English must (I think) be regional. Having spent the first 70 years of my life in the home counties, and the latter 8 years in the South-West, I have never heard /rʊf/ to the very best of my recollection.
Frans said,
November 21, 2025 @ 8:52 am
From my Dutch perspective the situation seems quite similar. It's mostly north vs south and east vs west but not exclusively. Many words, both native and foreign, have at least four different pronunciations that way: Dutch with native stress (=generally first syllable), Dutch with foreign stress, foreign with native stress, foreign with foreign stress. In several cases you can also add the likes of foreign French vs foreign English for the same word.
@Philip There's also /rʊf/, although I wouldn't call that different per se, more of a minor variation.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 21, 2025 @ 8:57 am
Re "standard alternative," it may depend on what you mean by "standard." /rʊf/ is quite common in the US, at least in certain regions, but I had a prescriptivist 8th-grade English teacher who had it on her short list of shibboleths* where she believed it her bounden duty to tell the students that the /rʊf/ variant was Just Wrong, meaning at a minimum non-standard. And I don't think that was an idiosyncratic position among prescriptivist 8th-grade English teachers.
*Best as I can recall, the other prescriptivist bees in her bonnet that year involved the pronunciations of "route," "water," and maybe "wash."
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:05 am
How was she, JWB, on "conduit" and "trait" ?
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:13 am
Returning (briefly) to /rʊf/, I do remember hearing /tʊθ/, so I wonder whether they might share a geographical distribution.
Mark Liberman said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:15 am
@Philip Taylor "what pronunciation exists for "roof" other then /ruːf/ ?":
The Oxford English Dictionary's pronunciation entry for roof explains it:
As does Wiktionary:
You might want to check a source or two, before jumping in with comments that assume your memory is the only possible authority.
F said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:23 am
@JWB — what a heterogeneous list! As far as I know, the pronunciation of "water" is only in doubt within some small radius of Philadelphia. OTOH for "route" I think I pronounce it differently depending on the context (as with "niche"). A highway is typically /rut/ and a path that a rock climber takes is always a /raʊt/. What was your teacher's preference?
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:29 am
And worth noting, perhaps, that Daniel Jones makes no mention of /rʊf/ in his An English Pronouncing Dictionary of 1937.
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:38 am
"You might want to check a source or two, before jumping in with comments that assume your memory is the only possible authority" — when one asks a question, Mark, such as "what pronunciation exists for "roof" other then /ruːf/ ?", one is not " assum [ing that one's] memory is the only possible authority", one is simply asking a question of the basis of one's existing knowledge, nothing more, nothing less. You will notice from my immediately preceding comment that I had, of course, already consulted Daniel Jones An English Pronouncing Dictionary, 1937. And whilst I am willing to place a certain credence on the OED (tho' less than I was before its present online instantation), I place none whatsoever on Wiktionary, and am surprised that you cite it as if it were in any sense authoritative,
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:45 am
It's a shame the OED implies that British and US English have a difference in vowel length between /ruːf/ and /ruf/. You would think the editors would know better than that. Perhaps there is a disclaimer somewhere about different transcription conventions.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:57 am
@F: The junior high school I was attending at the time was not more than 20 miles outside the Philadelphia city limits, so that accounts for that. She was not focused on rock-climbing but that "route" in the "highway number" sense had to be homophonous with "root" rather than "rout." @PT: I don't think disfavored variant pronunciations of "conduit" or "trait" were common enough among my particular crowd of late Seventies adolescents for her to have felt a need to intervene.
Seonachan said,
November 21, 2025 @ 10:04 am
Let's call the whole thing off.
Bob Ladd said,
November 21, 2025 @ 10:06 am
If it is true that English has more such alternative standard cases than other languages (Mark's comments in the OP seem to suggest he's not convinced it's true, and I share his skepticism), then surely one of the factors is the existence of at least two distinct geographical homes each giving rise to distinct standards. Anyone who has spent substantial proportions of their life in both the UK and North America will be aware of lots of words with pretty clearly separated UK and NAm versions, especially in their stressed vowels (e.g. methane, vitamin, yogurt), their stress (e.g. debris, controversy), and the combination of stress and vowel reduction (e.g. battery, fragile, obligatory).
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 10:07 am
"I don't think disfavored variant pronunciations of "conduit" or "trait" were common enough among my particular crowd of late Seventies adolescents for her to have felt a need to intervene." — Interesting. At the age of ten (i.e., 1957) these were bêtes noires in my primary school class, and we were taught that (a) "conduit" was to be pronounced /ˈkʌn dɪt,/, and (b) that the final "t" it "trait" was (and always must be) silent. Oh for those blissful days of pro/prescriptive education, when things were either right or wrong. I feel genuinely sorry for those who today believe that (almost) anything goes …
CuConnacht said,
November 21, 2025 @ 10:49 am
Philip Taylor, as far as I know, /tʊθ/ does not exist anywhere in the US..
Allan from Iowa said,
November 21, 2025 @ 11:33 am
I was exposed to the Philadelphia pronunciation of water in high school when we had a student teacher from that area. Not yet knowing the IPA, I wrote down his pronunciation as "wooder" (with the PUT vowel).
J.W. Brewer said,
November 21, 2025 @ 11:47 am
"Wooder" is in fact the conventional eye-dialect way to represent that Philadelphia-region pronunciation. Having "d" rather than "t" is not meaningful as to the consonant (because of alveolar flapping), but I guess is cuing you to use the vowel from "wood" (FOOT) rather than that from "w00t" (GOOSE), although maybe that latter one arose a little bit too late to make the timeline work.
Victor Mair said,
November 21, 2025 @ 12:31 pm
From the ages of 5 to about 10, my Dallas granddaughter pronounced "water" as "wah-duh".
Charles in Toronto said,
November 21, 2025 @ 1:18 pm
Regarding /rʊf/, as a Toronto suburban kid I had never heard that pronunciation until I was watching Home Improvement in the '90s and heard Tim Allen or one of his co-stars say /rʊf/.
David L said,
November 21, 2025 @ 1:19 pm
In my English youth, pronouncing 'trait' without the final 't' would be mark the speaker as irredeemably posh, and therefore to be shunned.
ktschwarz said,
November 21, 2025 @ 1:45 pm
Chris Button: yes, the OED's vowel length marks are misleading — the eminent phoneticist Jack Windsor Lewis criticized them as "redundant", and representing only "tribal differences" between scholarly traditions, not phonetic contrasts. The OED does have pages about its transcription conventions for each variety of English (start from the main pronunciation page), but the closest it comes to acknowledging that the length mark doesn't actually signify a Br/Am difference is a brief comment on the US English pronunciation page: "Vowel length (as shown in, e.g., British English FLEECE) is considered environmentally conditioned and not marked." But that's true of both British and American English! The editors must know that, but they don't explain it. It's nerdview, in my opinion.
Other current online dictionaries, including the Longman, Cambridge Learners, and Oxford Learners, more sensibly use a consistent notation, transcribing /ruːf/ with a length mark for both British and American pronunciations.
ktschwarz said,
November 21, 2025 @ 2:07 pm
Incidentally, the audio clips in the (subscription) OED at roof do have an audible difference between the British /ruːf/ and the American /ruf/, but it's in quality, not quantity: the British speaker has a fronted GOOSE vowel (see discussion by John Wells). That's increasingly common, noticed by linguists for decades, but not yet acknowledged in dictionaries. Other online dictionaries have audio for BrE "roof" with a non-fronted vowel — indeed the OED's British audio for plural /ruːfs/ is from a different speaker, and not fronted.
Chester Draws said,
November 21, 2025 @ 2:28 pm
/rʊf/ in British English must (I think) be regional.
Class?
Certainly the posher sort of English often pronounce room, as more like /rɜːm/ than /ruːm/.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 21, 2025 @ 3:25 pm
@ Bob Ladd surely one of the factors is the existence of at least two distinct geographical homes each giving rise to distinct standards — Of course, as should be expected, but I'm not 100% sold. Do we get a similar amount of variability in other widely dispersed languages, in particular Spanish? My impression (granted, based on a very limited proficiency) is that the differences are mostly regular dialectal differences rather than multiple pronunciations of the English methane type. Also, if you consult Philip Taylor's favourite Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, there are boatloads of variability within each standard. How many forms are given for garage, for example?
David Morris said,
November 21, 2025 @ 5:32 pm
Last month Youtube suggested a series of videos with titles such as:
Do YOU Mispronounce These Common English Words?
Are YOU Saying it WRONG? 5 Common Mistakes in English.
Are YOU Pronouncing These Common English Words Wrong?
Are YOU Saying Them Wrong? 10 Mispronounced Common English Words.
Watching the first one (the only one I watched), it was apparent that the issue isn’t that you are mispronouncing these words; it’s that you are pronouncing them in standard North American English (<for the want of a better term), and the not the Modern English Received Pronunciation which the creator of these videos speaks. She even says “This is the most common pronunciation in North American English” to at least half the words. The first word was vase – /veɪs/, /veɪz/ or /vɑz/? (The pronunciation closest to the Latin original, namely /vas/, isn't even an option.) In the middle of all this huffery, she pronounces look as /luk/.)
Julian said,
November 21, 2025 @ 6:26 pm
Australian here.
roof/roof: I've never heard this variation. I do hear the same variation with 'hoof' and, rarely, with 'room'. For me, the short 'room' is strongly marked as posh. I imagine the lord of the manor in a TV documentary about British stately homes.
We should distinguish:
1. dialect differences
2. free variation in the same speech community or the same person (eether/eyether, eeconomics/eckonomics etc)
Subjectively, I've always thought that free variation in English is remarkably *rare*, and the point of interest deserving explanation is how uncommon it is, given that more free variation, I guess, would have hardly any effect on efficient communication.
There's also a question of at what point we should think of marked variants (like the posh 'room' example) as dialect differences. There's probably a gradient.
JMGN said,
November 21, 2025 @ 6:42 pm
According to the Longman Pronunc. Dict.:
Roofs: [ruːfs], [ruːvz], [rʊfs].
No [rʊvz] then?
Tom Dawkes said,
November 21, 2025 @ 6:47 pm
@Philip Taylor
I grew up in Cardiff (Wales) and have lived there for all of my 81 years except for 7. I certainly don't have the characteristic Cardiff accent nor a Welsh accent, but I have always said /tʊθ/ for 'tooth', and also 'castle' to rhyme with 'hassle', though otherwise I would be considered to have modified RP.
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2025 @ 10:08 pm
@ Tom Dawkes
I was just thinking of an old acquaintance from Wales who also said /tʊθ/
poftim said,
November 22, 2025 @ 1:26 am
@Jarek Weckwerth
I'm with you on this. I live in Romania. The Romanian language is not particularly widely dispersed, but it's dispersed enough to have regional accents, significant differences in vocabulary, and even an extra past tense that is only used in one region of Romania. However, there's nothing remotely equivalent to 'leisure' or 'methane' or 'vitamin', let alone 'garage' which by my count has five standard variant pronunciations.
David Marjanović said,
November 22, 2025 @ 2:43 pm
You've run headfirst into 21st-century ethics: the world's knowledge is at your fingertips, so it is assumed that you look everything up before you bother asking.
I'm still not used to it myself, and I'm barely half your age.
Taking my own advice, I looked it up instead of asking and found all editions before 1997 only covered RP (or what became of it later).
Why?
So there is non-rhoticity in Dollars, Taxes! :-)
Standard German has several different regional sound systems even with Germany; but, as evidently in Romanian, variable pronunciations of the same word within the same accent are much less common – there's some in where to place the stress in a few technical terms derived from Greek/Latin, but less than in English.
Stephen Goranson said,
November 22, 2025 @ 3:40 pm
One English pronunciation I don't know how to place, different than OED's two options, is ANcient, an as in and.
Philip Taylor said,
November 22, 2025 @ 5:12 pm
.
Well, for the same reason that I place little credence on Wikipedia — well-intentioned crowd sourcing can never be a complete replacement for true expertise. Dictionaries should be compiled by lexicographers and encyclopædias by encyclopædists, not by well-meaning amateurs. IMHO, of course.
KeithB said,
November 22, 2025 @ 9:51 pm
Route can be pronounced "root" or "rout". (In one version of Bobby Troup singing Route 66, he does *both*.) Along highway 40 (essentially route 66) just outside of Holbrook (Home of the famous Teepee hotel) There was a campground called "Root 66 Campground" A few years ago they got a new sign, kept the name, but put a laughing emoji on the sign to show they know about the error.
poftim said,
November 23, 2025 @ 2:02 am
@KeithB
One of England's best cricketers is named Joe Root. A few years ago, they decided to baseball-ize international cricket by putting names and numbers on the back of players' shirts. I think players could pick any number from 1 to 99. Naturally, Root chose 66.
David Marjanović said,
November 23, 2025 @ 7:26 am
That seems obvious in theory – but in practice, and there've been studies on this for 20 years, the professionally made encyclopædias that hire professionals don't actually hire enough professionals and end up making at least as many mistakes as Wikipedia; and then they lack the ability to correct those mistakes until the next edition, unlike Wikipedia. I'd bet the same holds for Wiktionary by now.
Philip Taylor said,
November 23, 2025 @ 8:13 am
Fair enough — I am always willing to stand corrected. I shall continue to view both with a certain scepticism, but perhaps not as much as I have in the past …
Joe said,
November 23, 2025 @ 6:52 pm
One word with fun alternative pronunciations is "caramel": we don't even agree on the number of syllables.
Michael Vnuk said,
November 24, 2025 @ 1:33 am
I think that I had only ever heard a 3-syllable version of 'caramel' here in Australia, so I was surprised to hear the almost-slurred 2-syllable version in American TV programs that show how various confectionery is made.
Philip Taylor said,
November 24, 2025 @ 12:23 pm
May I ask, Michael, whether (a) you have heard a 3-syllable version of 'caramel' only in Australia (and nowhere else), or (b) whether you have heard only a 3-syllable version of 'caramel' in Australia (and no other version). From your comment it was not clear (to me, at least) which you meant.
Kenny Easwaran said,
November 24, 2025 @ 12:53 pm
I'm surprised at the placement of "tinnitus" and "patina" in that discussion! I think I give them the opposite stress pattern of what is stated here.
HS said,
November 24, 2025 @ 10:00 pm
Australian here.
roof/roof: I've never heard this variation. I do hear the same variation with 'hoof' and, rarely, with 'room'. For me, the short 'room' is strongly marked as posh. I imagine the lord of the manor in a TV documentary about British stately homes.
This agrees exactly with my experience as a New Zealander.
I pronounce the plural of "roof" as "rooves" (analogous to "hoof"/"hooves"). I wouldn't swear that this is the standard New Zealand pronunciation but since that's the way I pronounce it I assume it is. And since that's the way I pronounce it, that's the way I spell it. Spelling checkers seem to object when I do this, but I object to impertinent spelling checkers, so we're even.
We should distinguish:
1. dialect differences
2. free variation in the same speech community or the same person (eether/eyether, eeconomics/eckonomics etc)
Precisely.
There are a few dialectical differences in pronunciation in New Zealand English compared to other varieties of English (quite apart from the general New Zealand vowel shift). Most New Zealanders (including me) pronounce "known", "shown", "mown" etc as two syllables – "know-en" etc. And most (or at least many) New Zealanders pronounce "women" as "woman", i.e. the same as the singular. (I don't; I pronounce it as "wimmin", where those "i"s are New Zealand "i"s, very close to schwas.)
Michael Vnuk said,
November 24, 2025 @ 10:19 pm
Thank you, Philip Taylor, for pointing out the potential ambiguity in my comment about the pronunciation of 'caramel'. I meant what you have labelled as (b).
(I have also visited Britain and watched British TV shows in Australia, but I don't recall whether 'caramel' was even mentioned.)
Philip Taylor said,
November 25, 2025 @ 5:29 am
As you have visited Britain, Michael, you would almost certainly have at some point been offered a crème caramel as a dessert option when you dined out, but although the phrase is more-or-less naturalised (from the French), the pronunciation is rather different for the same word in the context of (e.g.,) a Cadbury['s] Dairy Milk Caramel Chocolate Bar [1] (/kæ rə ˈmel/ v/ / ˈkæ rə məl/). And thank you for your clarification — all is now clear.
——–
[1] Statutory disclaimer — Other brands of milk caramel chocolate bar are probably available.