06-26-2021, 08:12 PM
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-mispronunc...eople.html
A recent survey of 2,000 adults in the UK identified the top ten "mispronunciations" people find annoying. Thankfully the majority (65 percent) of annoyed people do not feel comfortable correcting a speaker in public.
But leaving aside the fact that 2,000 is hardly a representative sample of the UK, with its population of over 66 million, this survey raises longstanding linguistic questions: why do people pronounce words differently, why does pronunciation change, and why does so-called mispronunciation upset some people to the point of making it possible (and interesting) to compile a top ten list?
I'm a phonetician—an expert in the way people make speech sounds and pronounce language. I've also written about what we can learn about a person from the way they speak.
A universal truth about language is that it is subject to constant change—and pronunciation is just as likely to change over time as aspects like grammar or vocabulary.
Yeah, I don't correct mispronunciations for the most part: I don't want to 'correct' people's regional accents, and even the non-regional ones are so well-understood that I'll just look pedantic.
There are, however, a couple of exceptions. The most common one is playful 'correcting' between friends, where we both understand that it's a joke . The other is for place names - which are so frequently mispronounced by non-locals that there's really no shame in being corrected .
What about you?
A recent survey of 2,000 adults in the UK identified the top ten "mispronunciations" people find annoying. Thankfully the majority (65 percent) of annoyed people do not feel comfortable correcting a speaker in public.
But leaving aside the fact that 2,000 is hardly a representative sample of the UK, with its population of over 66 million, this survey raises longstanding linguistic questions: why do people pronounce words differently, why does pronunciation change, and why does so-called mispronunciation upset some people to the point of making it possible (and interesting) to compile a top ten list?
I'm a phonetician—an expert in the way people make speech sounds and pronounce language. I've also written about what we can learn about a person from the way they speak.
A universal truth about language is that it is subject to constant change—and pronunciation is just as likely to change over time as aspects like grammar or vocabulary.
Yeah, I don't correct mispronunciations for the most part: I don't want to 'correct' people's regional accents, and even the non-regional ones are so well-understood that I'll just look pedantic.
There are, however, a couple of exceptions. The most common one is playful 'correcting' between friends, where we both understand that it's a joke . The other is for place names - which are so frequently mispronounced by non-locals that there's really no shame in being corrected .
What about you?
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