Do you pronounce the 'h' in words such as 'whip' and 'while' ?

[TheTecknician]

If you do, hwy ?

Seriously, this is something I've noticed in people's speech as I've got older. I'm fairly sure I was taught at school that the 'h' in these and other words was silent but maybe it's not necessarily so. Perhaps it's a matter of regional pronunciation or dialect.

Stevie Griffin says 'coolhwip' in Family Guy.

Elmer needed a speech therapist. Some people have trouble pronouncing the r sound, and it often comes out as a w instead.

That’s got nothing to do with the wine-whine merger or with having a rhotic accent though.

I've been doing the wile v while test with my hand in front of my mouth and can feel air for the wh ones. To me, they still sound the same but there must be some subtle difference. Or I'm now to conscious of it and don't even know if I'm pronouncing them the way I usually do.

Re the funny faces bit (hoping this doesn't spark a row...) but I notice how many French have a similar, slightly pursed, mouth (like Mitterrand) that, I've assumed comes from French pronunciation (or the other way round). When I speak French, I feel my mouth contorts to that shape.

And on the pronouncing r sound, for me it takes a lot more effort. It's like a workout for the mouth. I wonder if native Spanish speakers consider speaking English feels more slack jawed for them?

My old man pronounced it 'rarz-bury'. He didn't normally do the long 'a' so goodness knows where this came from. I'm fairly certain he didn't do the 'h before w' thing.

Accents/linguistics are so interesting. I’m Lancashire and pronounce it without a H.

Yes, Doric areas in the northeast of Scotland may have f- for hw-
https://visitabdn.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-doric

@OtterBeGood love the Doric guide!

OH is what I call posh Glasgow and he hates Doric - make me use it all the more 😀.

One of my favourites is "Ben the hoose" to describe the whereabouts of something

It might be easier to learn English as a foreign language if they just took H and R out of the alphabet altogether! There is a thing called the Great Vowel Shift which apparently happened in the Middle Ages and upon which I'm completely ignorant.
But are we living through the Great Consonant Collapse?

I tried this and it placed me as 'Way Out' but perhaps Aberystwyth 😅
Aberystwyth is over 300 miles away...

My Portuguese friend speaks fluent English and manages R pretty well because R features heavily in Portuguese with at least 3 distinct sounds. H on the other hand is a real struggle because H in Portuguese is always silent and there's no TH sound at all whereas loads of English words begin or end with it

interestingly both English and Portuguese are stress timed rather than syllable timed meaning we swallow a lot of our consonants and run words together. Add on accents depending on where you live and the speed at which we generally speak and it can be really hard to understand!

Doric sounds like a Serbian word.