Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
wine-whine merger en · NOUN
Pronunciation
- /waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɝdʒɚ/ US, wine-whine merger
- /waɪnˈʍaɪn ˌmɝdʒɚ/ (US) without the wine–whine merger
- /wəinˈʍəin ˌmɛɾdʒəɾ/ (Scotland)
- /wɒenˈwɒen ˌmɵːdʒɘ(ɹ)/ (New-Zealand)
- /wɑenˈwɑen ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/ (Australia)
- /waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/ (Received-Pronunciation)
Meanings
-
A merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a Scottish accent or several accents in the United States) becomes [w] (the sound heard at the beginning of the word wine); in accents where this merger occurs, whine and wine are homophones.
As was the case with the wine–whine merger, date from the early twentieth century show that southeastern Pennsylvania was subject to patterns of variation in pronunciation.
2016, Mark L. Louden, Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, page 228:Chambers (2002) graphs the trajectory of the wine-whine''' merger in four reigions preserving ʍ.
2019, Keiko Bridwell, “Previous Research on the Wine-Whine''' Merger”, in The Distribution of ʍ, page 7:In Scottish English, the so-called wine-whine''' merger did not take place, in which historical Old and Middle English /hw/ was replaced by /w/[.]
2021, Zeyu Li, “The Distribution of /w/ and /ʍ/”, in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory:
Forms
Relateds
labiodentalization