Mispronunciation

A mispronunciation of "polyglot", as if it were spelled "polyflot"

In linguistics, mispronunciation is the act of pronouncing a word incorrectly.^[1]^[2] Languages are pronounced in different ways by different people, depending on factors like the area they grew up in, their level of education, and their social class. Even within groups of the same area and class, people can pronounce words differently.^{[citation needed]}

A standard of pronunciation is the most common way to pronounce a word. Standards vary among groups. Dictionaries include pronunciations. ^{[citation needed]}

Prescription versus description

Almost every area of linguistics can be treated in either a prescriptive or a descriptive way. Prescription is the formulation of rules explaining how things should be done, while description is the formulation of rules explaining how things actually are done.

Applied to pronunciation, a prescriptive approach involves telling people that this word should be pronounced in this way, that word should be pronounced in that way, and so on. For example, one might say that the word nuclear should be pronounced ['njuːklɪəɹ] or ['nuːklɪəɹ]. Applied to pronunciation, a descriptive approach involves telling people that some people pronounce a word in this way, while others pronounce a word in that way. For example, one might say that the word nuclear is pronounced ['njuːklɪəɹ] by some people, and ['nuːkjələɹ] by some other people. (See nucular)

At its simplest, the prescriptive approach requires less work, since it does not necessarily depend on how words are actually spoken; one could simply write down one's own pronunciation rules, and add a note saying that this is what everyone else should do too. In practice, it is more complicated, since the prescriber will usually add further constraints relating to orthography (the way words are written), etymology (the way words originated), and other factors. On the other hand, the descriptive approach depends on fieldwork in which the differences in pronunciation systems used in day-to-day life among different people are researched and catalogued.^{[citation needed]}

The move from prescription to description

Before the advent of the modern scientific method, scholars in Europe largely looked to the Ancient Greek philosophers for the ways to do things. Aristotle was still regarded as the foremost authority in many areas of knowledge. His laws of logic were intended as prescriptions for (rather than descriptions of) thought, and a similar ethos was applied to other areas of life. There was a prevailing attitude that the route to knowledge was through studying ancient texts and reasoning about them in a detached way. After the birth of science, careful observations of how things actually worked began to be advocated instead. However, this methodology took a long time to be applied to language.

In England, scholars were unaware of how languages actually developed, and saw the modern tongues as mere corruptions of the old ones. They attempted to remodel English along the lines of Latin, resulting in the invention of such arbitrary rules as the rejection of the split infinitive. However, in the 18th century, William Jones did a detailed comparison of several languages, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and the Germanic languages, and proposed that they may have evolved from a common root language, perhaps extinct. (See Indo-European language.)

This study is often considered to have been the birth of modern linguistics. After that, more attention was paid to detailed comparisons of languages, and many of the mechanisms by which languages evolve were worked out. It became clear that languages have been constantly changing, splitting up, and diverging, ever since language began. Largely as a result of this, in the 20th and 21st centuries, there has been a trend towards acknowledging diversity within languages as a natural consequence of language evolution, and more effort has been put into studying the diversity than in actively trying to reduce it.

However, this is not to say that linguistic uniformity is not without its advantages. If everyone agreed to a single common standard of grammar, vocabulary, orthography, and pronunciation, then communication would be made easier. On the other hand, much diversity would be lost, and the study of linguistics would lose a lot of its subject material. Which is more important is debatable.^{[citation needed]}

Treatment of pronunciation in dictionaries

Early dictionaries, such as that by Samuel Johnson in England and later Noah Webster in the United States played a large role in making spelling more uniform. When dictionaries began to add pronunciation guides, they played a similar role there. At first, American dictionaries (at least) tended to avoid listing pronunciations that they considered non-standard, and thus they played a prescriptive role (the British tradition is far more descriptive). However, following the general trend in linguistics, American dictionaries are now becoming more descriptive while British dictionaries are becoming less so (with Australian ones remaining in between); this is the case in other respects as well as with pronunciation. For example, the pronunciation of the word nuclear as if it were spelled nucular is one that is frowned upon by some, but the pronunciation is listed in some dictionaries. However, to take this to mean that the pronunciation is considered either "correct" or "incorrect" is to misunderstand the role that these dictionaries are playing. They are simply reporting current usage.^{[citation needed]}

Pronunciation change

The following are some of the processes by which pronunciation can change.

Omission of phonemes

Many words have lost phonemes (consonant or vowel sounds) somewhere in their histories. Sometimes, this changes the standard of pronunciation. For example, the silent k at the start of many words in the English language was originally pronounced. However, a word is mispronounced if a phoneme is omitted when it is not normally pronounced that way. For example, some speakers omit the first c sound from Antarctic, resulting in a pronunciation ("ant-AR-tik"). ^{[citation needed]}

Adaptation to a different language

Words and names that are adopted from one language to another can be mispronounced because the phonology of the source language is different from that in the destination language.

Proper nouns such as names of people and places, are not only written as foreign words, but often given their native pronunciation too.