Concept

Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩

The pronunciation of the digraph in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents. It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial , although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as ʍ, a voiceless "w" sound. The process by which the historical /hw/ has become /w/ in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger. It is also referred to as glide cluster reduction. Before rounded vowels, a different reduction process took place in Middle English, as a result of which the in words like who and whom is now pronounced /h/. (A similar sound change occurred earlier in the word how.) What is now English originated as the Proto-Indo-European consonant *kw (whose reflexes came to be written in Latin and the Romance languages). In the Germanic languages, in accordance with Grimm's Law, Indo-European voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives in most environments. Thus the labialized velar stop *kw initially became presumably a labialized velar fricative *xw in pre-Proto-Germanic, then probably becoming *[ʍ] – a voiceless labio-velar approximant – in Proto-Germanic proper. The sound was used in Gothic and represented by the letter hwair. In Old High German, it was written as , a spelling also used in Old English along with (using the letter wynn). In Middle English the spelling was changed to (with the development of the letter ) and then , but the pronunciation remained [ʍ]. Because Proto-Indo-European interrogative words typically began with *kw, English interrogative words (such as who, which, what, when, where) typically begin with (for the word how, see below). As a result, such words are often called wh-words, and questions formed from them are called wh-questions. In reference to this English order, a common cross-lingual grammatical phenomenon affecting interrogative words is called wh-movement.

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