Fandom Grammar

Last year, Guardian opinion desk editor David Shariatmadari, who often writes about language and communication, considered some of the ways that pronunciation of the English language has changed with time. His article examined eight specific types of changes, some of which are quite recent. I already knew about some of these shifts— for example, that "adder" and "apron" used to start with "n" (nadder and napron)—but others were new to me. In general, I enjoyed the article.

It turns out that each of the "errors" mentioned in the title are, more accurately, linguistic phenomena or processes. For example, the process by which the n at the beginning of the antique nouns "nadder" (a small venemous snake) and "napron" (a protective garment worn over the front of one's clothes) detatched itself from the noun and instead attached itself to the indefinite article "a"— becoming "an adder" and "an apron"—is known as rebracketing (or reanalysis).

I hesitate to identify these as "eight errors in pronunciation" because in some cases, Shariatmadari is grouping multiple mispronunciations under a single term. For instance, metathesis is the phenomenon of switching two adjacent sounds, causing the earlier "waps" to become "wasp" and the older word "brid" to become "bird." I am sure that Shariatmadari knows that there are far more than eight mispronunciations here, and in fact, the snappy title may be the work of another Guardian editor, who wanted something clickworthy at the top of the article.

Another thing that occurred to me as I was reading is that Shariatmadari is British, and so some of the examples probably worked better for him than they do for me, a lifelong speaker of the U.S. "East Midland" dialect (basically, the educated white upperclass speech used by most well-known newscasters in the U.S.; see this map). He mentions affrication, the process by which "tune" can become "chune" and "duke" can become "juke," a switch from older pronunciations that inserted a bit of a consonant y sound into these words: "tyune" and "dyuke." In fact, my own pronunciation of these words is more like "toon" and "dook" than it is like either of Shariatmadari's examples.

Of course, to people raised with one dialect, the pronunciations typical of another dialect can be considered mispronunciations. As Shariatmadari observes, the shifts that he describes are part of the evolution of languages, and dialects are yet another aspect of this same natural process.

Quibbles aside, this is an interesting article. I recommend it!