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.

It is from Greek and was applied only as late as the 18th century to the distinctive speech of NE Scotland.

This was very accurate for me. Southern Ireland

It came up more Highland than NE Scotland for me. But for a lot of them I had to answer "None" as my words weren't there eg fizzy drink = lemonade or grandfather = granda

So why did you start by questioning the statement that Scots pronounce “why” distinctly? You said “do they?”,not “do all of them?”. Thus appearing either not to have read or not to have believed the posts of your fellow Scots.

That NY Times thing was very accurate for me (I'm Scottish, but it got the correct part of Scotland).

Me too, even though I've lived in the North of England for over 50 years. Some words are inbuilt in my DNA I think!

The question was in response to the original blanket statement of ‘Scottish people pronounce h’.

The question ‘Do they?’ was a perfectly reasonable question in response because I don’t, nor do I know anyone else that does.

It appears that you have not read the other statements from my fellow Scots who also say they don’t recognise this.

I’m not sure why you feel the need to be quite so combative on an anonymous forum but I think we’ll leave it there.

I'm Scottish and have never come across anyone who doesn't pronounce the h in wh words. I can't imagine anyone saying wile for while or wales for whales.

Maybe there are some Scottish people who do this and I just haven't come across them.

If poster is in west end of Glasgow maybe they could go to Partick

Our fellow Scots. There was no blanket statement made. You still don’t get it.

👍

Me too. Although I lived in England for years and say eg ' playing truant ' instead of my childhood ' mitching' , it still accurately placed me in the south of Ireland.

Slightly off topic but I've noticed certain BBC presenters - Georgia Mann is one of them - say 'a quarter to' and 'a quarter past' when announcing the time. Is adding the 'a' prefix a BBC thing or just another English language quirk?

I say ‘a quarter to’. Well, both actually, but I think I use the ‘a’ version more. (I’m Irish in case it varies with location.)

A quick google indicates it’s the more grammatically complete version and ‘quarter to’ is an abbreviation.

Thankyou Inspirel.