Phonological history of English consonant clusters

In some dialects of English the cluster /hj/ is reduced to /j/,[1] leading to pronunciations like /juːdʒ/ for huge and /ˈjuːmən/ for human, and making hew, hue, and Hugh homophones of ewe, yew, and you.

This is sometimes considered a type of glide cluster reduction, but it is much less widespread than wh-reduction, and is generally stigmatized where it is found.

[4] The diphthongs /juː/ or /ɪʊ̯/ are most commonly indicated by the spellings eu, ew, uCV (where C is any consonant and V is any vowel), ue and ui, as in feud, few, mute, cue and suit, while the historical monophthong /uː/ is commonly indicated by the spellings oo and ou, as in moon and soup.

The change of [ɪ] to [j] in these positions (as described above) produced some clusters which would have been difficult or impossible to pronounce, which led to what John Wells calls "early yod dropping" in which the [j] was elided in the following environments:[5] The previously mentioned accents that did not have the [ɪ]→[j] change were not subject to this process.

However, in a survey conducted in the Golden Horseshoe area of Southern Ontario in 1994, over 80% of respondents under the age of 40 pronounced student and news without yod.

[13] Yod-dropping after /t/, /d/, and /n/ was also a traditional feature of Cockney speech, which continues to be the case after /n/, but now, after /t/ and /d/, yod-coalescence is now more common.

[15] A well-known series of British television advertisements beginning in the 1980s featured Bernard Matthews, who was from Norfolk and described his turkeys as "bootiful" (for beautiful).

Yod-coalescence is a process that fuses the clusters /dj, tj, sj, zj/ into the sibilants [dʒ, tʃ, ʃ, ʒ] respectively (for the meanings of those symbols, see English phonology).

For example, in educate, the /dj/ cluster would not usually be subject to yod-dropping in General American, as the /d/ is assigned to the previous syllable, but it commonly coalesces to [dʒ].

That results in pronunciations such as the following: In certain varieties such as Australian, Ugandan, and some RP,[17] stressed [sj, zj] can also coalesce: That can lead to additional homophony; for instance, dew and due come to be pronounced the same as Jew.

[18] See also Old and Middle English had an initial /wr/ cluster (note that /r/ does not denote [ɹ] here), hence the spelling of words like write and wrong.

Alexander John Ellis reported distinctions between wr and r in Cumbria and in several varieties of Scots in the nineteenth century.

[22] The cluster is preserved in some Scots dialects,[23] and Alexander John Ellis recorded it in parts of the Northern English counties of Cumbria and Northumberland in the late nineteenth century.

[25] The change affected words like gnat, gnostic, gnome, etc., the spelling with gn- being retained despite the loss of the /ɡ/ sound.

In fact the g in gnu may always have been silent in English, since this loanword did not enter the language until the late 18th century.

In other cases (when it is not morpheme-final), word-internal -ng- does not show the effects of coalescence, and the pronunciation [ŋɡ] is retained, as in finger and angle.

[30] On the other hand, in some accents of the west of Scotland and Ulster, NG-coalescence is extended to morpheme-internal position, so that finger is pronounced /ˈfɪŋər/ (cf.

Dutch vinger /ˈvɪŋər/), thus rhyming with singer (although the [ɡ] is not dropped before a stressed syllable, as in engage).

The /n/ variant appears to have been fashionable generally during the 18th century, with the alternative /ɪŋ/ being adopted in educated speech around the 1820s, possibly as a spelling pronunciation.

[34] The fact that the /n/ pronunciation was formerly associated with certain upper-class speech is reflected in the phrase huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ (used in referring to country gentry who frequently engaged in such field sports).

Further evidence that this pronunciation was once standard comes from old rhymes, as in this couplet from John Gay's 1732 pastoral Acis and Galatea, set to music by Handel: which was presumably pronounced "shepherd, what art thou pursuin', heedless runnin' to thy ruin", although this would sound very odd in an opera today.

Similarly, in the poetry of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), -ing forms consistently rhyme with words ending in /ɪn/, as in this verse of A Ballad on the Game of Traffic, where "lining" rhymes with "fine in": In later Middle English, the final cluster /mb/ was reduced to just /m/ (the plum-plumb merger).

[35] Where the final cluster /mn/ occurred, this was reduced to /m/ (the him-hymn merger), as in column, autumn, damn, solemn.

[42] An earlier reduction that took place in early Middle English was the change of /ts/ to /s/ (the sent-cent merger).

The epenthesis is a natural consequence of the transition from the nasal [n] to the fricative [s]; if the raising of the soft palate (which converts a nasal to an oral sound) is completed before the release of the tongue tip (which enables a fricative sound), an intervening stop [t] naturally results.

[43] The merger of /ns/ and /nts/ is not necessarily complete, however; the duration of the epenthetic [t] in /ns/ has been found to be often shorter (and the [n] longer) than in the underlying cluster /nts/.

It can occur in RP in the same environments as those mentioned above, without the final restriction so a glottal stop may appear before the /t/, as in mattress.

S-cluster metathesis has been observed in some forms of African American Vernacular English, although it is not universal, one of the most stigmatized features of AAVE and often commented on by teachers.

[37][failed verification] Examples of possible AAVE pronunciations include: For some speakers of African American Vernacular English, the consonant cluster /str/ is pronounced as /skr/.

[52] The form has been found to occur in Gullah and in the speech of some young African Americans born in the Southern United States.