966. We explore the rise and fall of the letter H: Debates over its name ("haitch" or "aitch"?) and why a once-prestigious pronunciation like "hwhat" now seems old-fashioned.
966. We explore the rise and fall of the letter H: Debates over its name ("haitch" or "aitch"?) and why a once-prestigious pronunciation like "hwhat" now seems old-fashioned.
The "haitch" segment was written by Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University, and Catherine McBride, a professor of psychology at Chinese University of Hong Kong. It originally appeared on "The Conversation" and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
This week, I have two cool segments about the letter H — it's more interesting than you think.
Also, we're now live with Grammarpalooza, the new way you can directly support my work AND get text messages from me. I'm sending fun language facts you'll want to share with your friends, behind-the-scenes glimpses into how I make the show, and a convenient link to the podcast and transcript. The first two weeks are free, and you can sign up at joinsubtext.com/grammar. That's joinsubtext.com/grammar. It's in the show notes, and I'll also put it in my email newsletter and on my social channels too.
And now, on to the show.
Here's a listener question: Hi, Grammar Girl. I have a question. It's about the letter H and how it gets pronounced. Sometimes people drop the letter H, like when they say 'human,' they say it 'uman.' Sometimes they especially emphasize the letter H, like the word 'what.' They would say 'hwhat.' What's up with that? And what's the correct way to do it? Thanks.
Well, I've had this next segment from The Conversation on my radar for a while, and decided to move it up because although it's about whether we should call the letter "aitch" or "haitch," it also talks about why people drop the H sound at the beginning of words. It is written by Kate Burridge and Catherine McBride, who as you will be able to tell, are from outside the United States.
Like Dr. Seuss’ Star-Belly Sneetches and Plain-Belly Sneetches, there are two types of creatures — haitchers with H on their 8th letter name and aitchers with “none upon thars."
[As Dr. Seuss might say,] "That H isn’t so big. It’s really so small. You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all."
But it does — the tiny H on [the letter name]“(h)aitch” divides the nation. The pronunciation has become something of a social password, a spoken shibboleth distinguishing in-groupers from out-groupers. Those with social clout set the standards for what’s “in” and what’s “out” — no H has the stamp of approval.
[In Seussian terms,] "The best kind of people are people without!"
Shibboleths die hard — the opprobrium attached to [the] "haitch" [pronunciation] probably derives from its long association with Irish Catholic Education. There’s no real evidence for this, mind, as Sue Butler points out, but never let facts get in the way of a good shibboleth.
Aitchers’ reactions are often visceral. Someone once reported to us [that] an encounter with "haitch" is like an encounter with fire ants. We’ve no doubt that psycho-physiological testing would show that "haitch" can raise goosebumps. Linguistic pinpricks are established early on in the acquisition process (“Don’t say ‘haitch’”!) and they arouse emotions like other childhood reprimands (including swearwords).
The story of the weakly articulated H is murkily entwined with the story of its name. Long gone from Old English words like "hring" “ring," "hnecca" “neck” and "hlūd" “loud," it would have disappeared entirely if writing hadn’t thrown out a lifejacket.
It was once usual for speakers to drop aspirates at the beginning of words — in fact up until the 1700s, it was fashionable to do so. But a spelling-obsessed 18th century stigmatised the loss of many consonants, including H.
R-less pronunciations of "arm" and "car" ["ahm" and "cah"] might have snuck under the radar, but H-dropping fell well and truly from grace.
In 1873, Thomas Laurence Kington-Oliphant wrote about this “revolting habit” in his chapter “Good and Bad English," advising:
"Few things will the English youth find in after-life more pro-fitable than the right use of the aforesaid letter."
And so, the English youth restored H to words like "hat," and even at the start of many French words like "humble," which had entered English H-less (the Romans pronounced their Hs, but the French dropped theirs). Spellers who weren’t quite sure whether or not to include H added a few extras along the way — "umble pie" [a pie made from entrails called "umbles"] (“offal pie”) turned into "humble pie."
There’s an ironic wrinkle to this story. The name "aitch" might be a sign of high education in some circles, but is itself an example of H-dropping. Deriving from medieval French "hache" or “axe” ("hatchet" and "hashtag" are relatives), it also arrived in English H-less (like "humble" and "herb").
It’s a curious letter name being, as the Oxford English Dictionary describes, “so remote from any connection with the sound." In fact there’s solid evidence supporting "haitch" as the better option. To understand why, we need to appreciate the primacy of initial letter sounds in words.
English speakers find it easiest to attend to and manipulate the beginning sounds of words. For example, it’s easier for us (orally, that is — by sound, not spelling) to take away the “b” sound in "beat" (to make it "eat") or to replace the “b” with a “p” to make it "Pete" than it is to take away the “t” sound in "beat" (to make it "be") or to replace it with a “k” to make it "beak."
It’s more natural for us to focus on initial sounds, especially for children.
We often make use of alliteration in names and tongue twisters. Dr. Seuss (think Aunt Annie’s Alligator or The Butter Battle Book), Walt Disney (such as Donald Duck; [and] Mickey Mouse), and J.K. Rowling (Godric Gryffindor; Helga Hufflepuff; Rowena Ravenclaw; [and] Salazar Slytherin) all [those authors] capitalised on this phenomenon.
Tongue twisters highlight the special quality of alliteration for learning as well; who can forget Peter Piper and his pickled peppers, Silly Sally and her sheep, or Betty Botter and her butter?
Many letters of the alphabet are phonetically iconic; their names represent the sound they make. In places where letter names are learned before letter sounds, such as Australia and the US, these letter names can facilitate children in learning letter sounds and, ultimately, word reading. The letter sounds that are easiest to remember are those that begin with their corresponding letter, such as B, D, J, K, P, or T.
Research shows it’s more difficult to learn sounds made by letters that end with their letter sound, such as F, L, and M. Those that have no correspondences to the letter sound are the most difficult. Logically, W should make the “d” sound (or change its name to "wubble-u").
Whatever your visceral reaction to pronouncing H one way or the other, "haitch" has definite benefits for letter sound learning.
So it’s not surprising it’s taking off in some parts of the English-speaking world. When the letter H is pronounced beginning with the letter sound it makes, children have an easier time learning its correspondence as they learn to read.
Dr. Seuss implicitly understood this. We suggest that a follow-up primer for young readers will one day include Horton hearing a Haitch.
That segment was written by Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University, and Catherine McBride, a professor of psychology at Chinese University of Hong Kong. It originally appeared on "The Conversation" and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
And if you're interested in where we get the name "shibboleth" for a word that shows someone is part of a group, I covered that back in 2021 in episode 852.
Finally, thank you for the question. And, you may have noticed that the segment didn't answer your question exactly about why people sometimes pronounce the word "what" like it has an H at the beginning, like "hwhat." So I have more about that.
First, you certainly aren't the only person to notice this pronunciation. There's a popular scene in the TV show "The Family Guy" in which Stewie pronounces "Cool Whip" with an H to annoy Brian. [Play segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzoQgg04_oY]
According to the Family Guy fan wiki, Stewie pronouncing things strangely is a running gag in the show, and in the same episode, Meg has Brian tied to a chair, and then says, "We're gonna be here for a hwhile," and later says "Brian you're acting hweird."
The word "what" did originally have an H at the beginning in Old English, and you may remember from our episode about discourse markers how the old epic poem Beowulf begins with the word "hwat" that's used to call attention, (H-W-A-T) like the word "Bro!" in especially modern translations.
But the same is true of the regular questioning form of "what," as in "What will you do?" It also started with an H. Even though the spelling dropped the H, people still mostly pronounced it until the late 1700s when it started going away. Linguists call this dropping of formerly pronounced H's the "wine-whine merger," — "wine" W-I-N-E and "whine" W-H-I-N-E — because when people stop pronouncing the H, these two words sound the same. They've merged.
But the merger wasn't complete. The "W-H" pronunciations still exist in some regions like Scotland and parts of Ireland, and among white speakers in the southern, especially southeastern, United States, with pockets elsewhere.
I got really excited when I found a cool, 150-page master's dissertation all about the "wine-whine" merger by Keiko Bridwell from the University of South Carolina. It had an extensive background section and included a small study that found people who use the H pronunciation in the South are most likely to be older, to be rural residents; to be people who didn't attend any more school after high school; and to be men.
It seems the "hwhat" pronunciation is pretty widely viewed as old-fashioned, and there was a pretty big cut off where people who were born before 1960 or so were much more likely to use the "W-H" pronunciation that people born after.
It's funny though because some older people are quite vocal that the "W-H" pronunciations like "hwhat" are correct, and there was a smaller subset of highly educated middle-aged people in the study who used the "hwhat" pronunciation. Historically in the United States, in the 1940s, people viewed as "cultured" speakers were more likely to use the "W-H" pronunciation. So for some people, it seems they may have internalized the idea that the "hwhat" pronunciation has higher status, and they use it because they are trying to show that they are correct or well educated.
And some people do describe the pronunciation as sounding pretentious, which is very unusual. It's not common AT ALL to have a pronunciation that is largely associated with rural, less educated southern people and that is also thought of in some cases as pretentious. As they might say on "The Family Guy," it's a hweird one.
OK, so that kind of describes WHAT happened, but WHY did people stop using the H sound. That's harder to answer. Often, change happens because the new pronunciation is easier to say. But the Bridwell thesis had this fascinating bit about function words and how people can change the way they pronounce them without even realizing it. Remember: function words are things that don't carry a lot of meaning like prepositions and articles, as opposed to content words that carry a lot of meaning, like "tree" and "confetti." And for the purposes of this study, they called "what" a function word.
So it says the pronunciations of function words can change in any context without losing meaning. "As an extreme example, the phrase What are you doing? can be reduced to ’cha doin’? without confusing the listener," And this is where it gets fun: After they explained the purpose of the study, several participants expressed surprise that they didn't always use the "W-H" pronunciation — they thought they did! — and they were also surprised that people around them were using it less than in past years. They didn't even notice that people weren't pronouncing it that way anymore.
So that was probably more than you ever thought there was to know about the letter H, but thanks for the question because it turned out to be really interesting!
Finally, I have a familect story from Susan. As you'll be able to tell from the intro, this came in a while ago. I've been getting the shows written and produced earlier than normal lately, which makes everyone's life easier on the team; but then sometimes by the time I get calls into the show, they reference things in the past. Still, it's still a great story.
"Hi Grammar Girl, this is Susan in Washington State. Since we are in the middle of gift giving season, this is possibly a timely introduction to a familect that came down from our paternal grandfather in the early part of the 1900s. An acquaintance of his, a Dr. Barkhosue, was known to many as someone who would greatly admire gifts he had given to others. For example, when he entered a home, especially when other people were around, he would glance over at a vase on a side table and exclaim, 'My Mrs. Kaufman, what a beautiful piece that is!' The lady of the house would look perplexed and reply, 'Why Dr. Barkhouse, you gave us that vase!' That is called 'Barkhousing.' It can be used as a verb, 'to Barkhouse,' or even a noun, 'a Barkhouser.' Though Barkhousing is a concept familiar to many people, there is no equivalent word expressing that in the English language, or maybe in any other language as far as that goes. It is quite serviceable when appropriate situations arise, and I would imagine most people are familiar with someone who Barkhouses and who deserves good-natured contempt. Now you have a word for that. Thank you. I love your podcast and have listened for years. Bye."
That's a wonderful story, Susan! I can't say I've ever known anyone who Barkhouses, but if I did, I'm sure this word would come in handy. Thanks for the call.
If you want to share the story of your familect, your family dialect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83 -321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part. And now, if you're part of Grammarpalooza, you can also text me voice messages with your familect, which I think is easier; and it's a fabulous way to support the show. I really appreciate every Grammarpaloozian. To join, visit https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876. I'll put both of those in the show notes.
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And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.