H-Dropping (Pronunciation)

In English grammar, h-dropping is a type of elision marked by the omission of the initial /h/ sound in words such as happy, hotel, and honor. Also called the dropped aitch.

H-dropping is common in many dialects of British English.

Examples and Observations

• Charles Dickens
  'I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,' said Uriah Heep, modestly; 'let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person.'
• Gilbert Cannan
  He beamed as he had never beamed, even on his stepmother."'My word,' she said, 'but you 'ave grown.'
  David did not wince at the dropped aitch.
• St. Greer John Ervine
  'I don't do much reading myself,' he said. 'Don't 'ave the time.' I was overwhelmed at the dropped aitch. Such mutilation of language was becoming, no doubt, in a grocer or an insurance agent, or some such clod, but utterly improper in one who handled books.
• Robert Hichens
  Robin opened the door, went straight up to the very dark and very thin man whom he saw sitting by the fire, and, staring at this man with intensity, lifted up his face, at the same time saying:"'Ullo, Fa!'
  There was a dropped aitch for which nurse, who was very choice in her English, would undoubtedly have rebuked him had she been present.

Read More

What Is Elision in the English Language?

By Richard Nordquist

Dropping One's Aitches in England

• John Edwards
  Writing in 1873, Thomas Kington-Oliphant referred to 'h' as 'the fatal letter': dropping it was a 'hideous barbarism.' A century later, the phonetician John Wells wrote that dropping one's aitches had become 'the single most powerful pronunciation shibboleth in England'--a 'ready marker of social difference, a symbol of the social divide,' as Lynda Mugglestone added. In My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle described the weather in three English counties: 'in 'artford, 'ereford and 'ampshire, 'urricanes 'ardly ever 'appen' ('artford = Hertford, generally pronounced as 'Hartford'). Indeed, Cockneys and others on the wrong side of the divide persist in omitting the 'h' where it 'ought' to appear, and sometimes inserting it where it shouldn't ('bring the heggs into the 'ouse, would you?'). Attempting to remedy these 'errors,' speakers may occasionally make embarrassing hypercorrections: pronouncing heir as if it were hair or hare, for example.
• Ulrike Altendorf and Dominic Watt
  London and Southeastern accents have sociolinguistically variable H dropping (see Tollfree 1999: 172-174). The zero form tends to be avoided by middle-class speakers, except in contexts in which H dropping is 'licensed' in virtually all British accents (in unstressed pronouns and verbs such as his, her, him, have, had, etc.).
• Graeme Trousdale
  [M]any speakers in the south-east [of England] are abandoning H-dropping: evidence from Milton Keynes and Reading (Williams and Kerswill 1999), and particularly from ethnic minority groups in working-class areas of inner London, suggests that (h):[h] variants are more frequently attested in contemporary urban southern British English.

The Most Contentious Letter in the Alphabet

• Michael Rosen
  Perhaps the letter H was doomed from the start: given that the sound we associate with H is so slight (a little outbreath), there has been debated since at least AD 500 whether it was a true letter or not. In England, the most up-to-date research suggests that some 13th-century dialects were h-dropping, but by the time elocution experts came along in the 18th century, they were pointing out what a crime it is. And then received wisdom shifted, again: by 1858, if I wanted to speak correctly, I should have said 'erb,' 'ospital' and 'umble.'
  The world is full of people laying down the law about the 'correct' choice: is it 'a hotel' or 'an otel'; is it 'a historian' or 'an historian'? There is no single correct version. You choose. We have no academy to rule on these matters and, even if we did, it would have only marginal effect. When people object to the way others speak, it rarely has any linguistic logic. It is nearly always because of the way that a particular linguistic feature is seen as belonging to a cluster of disliked social features.

Dropped Aitches in Words Beginning With Wh-

• R.L. Trask
  In the nineteenth century, the aitches began to disappear from all the words beginning with hw- (spelled wh-, of course), at least in England. Today even the most careful speakers in England pronounce which just like witch, whales just like Wales, and whine just like wine. There is still, however, a kind of dim folk memory that the pronunciation with h is more elegant, and I believe there are still a few teachers of elocution in England who try to teach their clients to say hwich and hwales, but such pronunciations are now a quaint affectation in England.

Dropped Aitches in American English

• James J. Kilpatrick
  The ear is likely to deceive us in this matter of aspirates. The rule in American English is that there is practically no such thing as a dropped 'aitch.' William and Mary Morris, whose authority merits respect, say that only five words with a silent aitch remain in American English: heir, honest, hour, honor, herb, and their derivatives. To that list I might add humble, but it's a close call. Some of my revisionist friends would rewrite The Book of Common Prayer so that we would confess our sins with a humble and contrite heart. To my ear, an humble is better. . . . But my ear is an inconstant ear. I would write about a hotel and a happening. John Irving, it follows, wrote an hilarious novel about a hotel in New Hampshire.