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Hi everyone, I have a question for native speakers of British English or any other non-rhotic varieties. When I'm reading Harry Potter my inner voice switches to a traditional RP pronunciation for obvious reasons. However, I had a hard time trying to guess the pronunciation of 'where're'. How would you say that? Thanks
Hi, everyone. I can't hear the differences of these words. Can you explain it to me with the phonetic alphabet, please?
The dictionaries give [we(ə)ʹrın] for 'wherein', so I guess it's [we(ə)ʹrız] for 'where is' (both pronunciations are possible).
Both are common and correct. The pronunciation, especially that of vowels, varies from dialect to dialect; however in contemporary RP, it's usually pronounced [wɛːɹɪz] (or [weːɹɪz]). In British English, /e/ is halfway between [e] and [ɛ], but then again, it depends on the speaker.
I'm an American English speaker.
At the end of where, my mouth is already in the right shape to say the /r/ sound for 're. So I just keep my mouth in the same position and keep making the same /r/ sound.
There may also be a brief dip in intensity marking the boundary between the two /r/ sounds. In other words, my voice may very briefly get quieter in the middle, separating the sound into where and 're. This is called rearticulation.
I'm a native speaker with an amalgamation of American, Canadian, and slightly British accents (due to my upbringing). I say the word where first, with my tongue slightly pulled back at the end of the word then I slightly emphasise the 're — not particularly louder but to show it as separate from the word where and do so by pulling my tongue back a little more.
I do that or just emphasise and slightly lengthen the end of the word where to show I'm asking about the location of something.
Here are some links from Forvo (a great online pronunciation dictionary) to the words "where" and "where're". I'd compare the male American pronunciations of the word where to the sole pronunciation of the word where're to differentiate the entries best.
- where: http://forvo.com/word/where/#en
- where're: http://forvo.com/word/where%27re/#en