wine-whine merger
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English
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]- (General Australian) IPA(key): /wɑenˈwɑen ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/
- (New Zealand) IPA(key): /wɒenˈwɒen ˌmɵːdʒɘ(ɹ)/
- (Scotland) IPA(key): /wəinˈʍəin ˌmɛɾdʒəɾ/
- (US, without the wine–whine merger) IPA(key): /waɪnˈʍaɪn ˌmɝdʒɚ/
- (US, wine-whine merger) IPA(key): /waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɝdʒɚ/
- Hyphenation: wine‧whine‧mer‧ger
Noun
[edit]wine-whine merger (plural wine-whine mergers)
- (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
[edit]Further reading
[edit]pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩ on Wikipedia.Wikipedia