wine-whine merger

English

Pronunciation

• (General Australian) IPA^(key): /wɑenˈwɑen ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/
• (New Zealand) IPA^(key): /wɒenˈwɒen ˌmɵːdʒɘ(ɹ)/
• (Scottish English) IPA^(key): /wəinˈʍəin ˌmɛɾdʒəɾ/
• (US, no wine-whine merger) IPA^(key): /waɪnˈʍaɪn ˌmɝdʒɚ/
• (US, wine-whine merger) IPA^(key): /waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɝdʒɚ/
• Hyphenation: wine‧whine‧mer‧ger

Noun

wine-whine merger (plural wine-whine mergers)

1. (phonology) A merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a Scottish accent or several accents in the United States) becomes [w] (the sound heard at the beginning of the word wine); in accents where this merger occurs, whine and wine are homophones.
   • 2016, Mark L. Louden, Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, page 228:

     As was the case with the wine–whine merger, date from the early twentieth century show that southeastern Pennsylvania was subject to patterns of variation in pronunciation.

   • 2019, Keiko Bridwell, “Previous Research on the Wine-Whine Merger”, in The Distribution of ʍ, page 7:

     Chambers (2002) graphs the trajectory of the wine-whine merger in four reigions preserving ʍ.

   • 2021, Zeyu Li, “The Distribution of /w/ and /ʍ/”, in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory:

     In Scottish English, the so-called wine-whine merger did not take place, in which historical Old and Middle English /hw/ was replaced by /w/[.]

See also

• labiodentalization

Further reading

• pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩ on Wikipedia.Wikipedia