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In linguistics, mispronunciation is the act of pronouncing a word incorrectly. 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.
A standard of pronunciation is the most common way to pronounce a word. Standards vary among groups. Dictionaries include pronunciations.
Languages constantly change, split up, and diverge. Diversity within languages as a natural consequence of language evolution is now acknowledged. This diversity is studied.
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.
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").
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 written as foreign words and often given their native pronunciation too.
Terms
- Spelling pronunciation: Pronouncing a word according to its infelicitous or ambiguous spelling.
- Aphesis: The loss of the sound at the start of a word.
- Aspiration: An "h" sound at the beginning of a word. For example, the "h" in honor (British: honour) is not pronounced, but it is in "happy." As with all pronunciation "rules," conventions regarding the aspirated "H" differ from region to region. In parts of the US, it is customary to pronounce "herb" without the initial "h" sound, while in the UK, the initial "h" is aspirated.
- orthoepy
- Epenthesis: The addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word (prothesis at the beginning and paragoge at the end are commonly used). Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel.
- Metathesis: The reversal of letters within a word when pronounced. For example "iron" is pronounced as "iorn."
- Shibboleth: Any practice that shows one's social or regional origin. This usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as a member of a particular group.
- Spoonerism: The exchange of letters or syllables between two words or even within a word, with comic results—especially when the result changes the speaker's intended meaning.
Automatic detection
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Using computational techniques, such as machine learning, it is possible to automatically detect mispronunciations in recorded speech.
References
- "MISPRONUNCIATION | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary". Cambridge Dictionary. Archived from the original on 24 October 2015. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
- "mispronunciation". The Free Dictionary. Archived from the original on 18 April 2005. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
- Lee, Ann; Glass, James (2012). "A comparison-based approach to mispronunciation detection" (PDF). 2012 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT). pp. 382–387. doi:10.1109/SLT.2012.6424254. hdl:1721.1/75660. ISBN 978-1-4673-5126-3. S2CID 6006518.
- Hu, Wenping; Qian, Yao; Soong, Frank K.; Wang, Yong (2015-03-01). "Improved mispronunciation detection with deep neural network trained acoustic models and transfer learning based logistic regression classifiers". Speech Communication. 67: 154–166. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2014.12.008. ISSN 0167-6393.