h

h

1. The sound of h (aitch) at the beginning of words such as have and house and in the middle of words such as ahead and behave is known technically as a voiceless glottal fricative. In Britain, the presence or absence of this sound in speech is one of the key factors in the social evaluation of an individual's use of language or, as the OED expressed it, it ‘has come to be regarded as a kind of shibboleth of social position’. Dropping initial h, in particular, is associated with the working-class and poorly educated speech of East London, so that there is no difference between the sounds of (for example) hedge and edge, hill and ill, and high and eye.

2. Dropping one's aitches may be a sign of uneducated speech, but standard speakers do not always notice that certain function words (e.g. has, have, had), pronouns, and possessives tend to lose their initial h sounds when these occur in unstressed positions in rapid speech, e.g. She shoved him into her car, in which him is articulated as im and her as er. Until the beginning of the 20c, words containing the letters wh (e.g. what, whistle, nowhere) were regularly pronounced with the h sound intact by most RP (received pronunciation) speakers in England as well as other parts of Britain and America. But the Concise Oxford Dictionary and most other dictionaries of current English, when they give a pronunciation at all, give an unaspirated w sound in their phonetics for all this class of words, reflecting the fact that the aspiration of wh has largely disappeared from spoken standard English in England, so that there is no audible difference between the sounds of (for example) whales and Wales, where and wear, and whit and wit.

3. The use of an instead of a as the form of the indefinite article before words beginning with an unstressed but lightly aspirated h (e.g. an habitual complaint / an historic occasion) is in decline: see a, an ².