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Some do! Some don't. I said these words to myself just now to see what I do, and wouldn't you know it, I do put a teensy tiny "h" in front of these. Kind of like "hWat?" It's barely discernable, even to me.
Amazing to learn after all these years that I pronounce some words in a way I would never have imagined. Wow! Or is that hWow?
I'm originally from Southern California, and probably had an original "O.C" accent, but since age 15 I've been all over: Toronto, Canada; Cheltenham, England; Germany for 3 years and Yes I speak it fairly fluently; Washington state, USA, for the past 30 years. My accent is probably so muddled up by now there's no way to tell what I sound like.
First of all, I wish to remind that the letter "H" is more acceptably pronounced "age" or "eij" not "heige"/"heij".
There, the pronunciation of "H" itself does not involve the sound of "H. I've been to parts of Asia and US where they pronounced it "heige" - somewhat coincident in places where they also pronounce "pronounciation" rather than "pronunciation".
The way I've been brought up, which may not agree with others
Elision of h to before w to emphasize the presence of an "h". Therefore we pronounce "hwen", "hwat",etc.
In the US, people pronounce "herb" as "erb", "homage" as "omage"/"ormarj". I think the Queen of England would not coincide with such pronunciation. Neither does the Oxford dict. I am more comfortable pronouncing them with the non-silent "H". I think US pronunciation standardization efforts are simply too zealous.
Regardless of dialect, the "H" mostly becomes silent when paired with a prior word that ends with a consonant:
green herb = green'erbHowever, if the prior word ends with "T", I would encourage people to pronounce "herb" rather than "erb". e.g, "fragrant herb" rather than "fragrant 'erb". Could be misheard as "fragrant turd".
Regardless of dialect, the elided "H" in "when", "where", etc, is not silent, even when paired with a prior word ending with a consonant. e.g.
- he says hwen
- tell him hwere
First of all I'm not confused about how this letter is pronounced. I've been taught it's the former pronunciation all along and none of the dictionaries recognise the latter. But I observed there has been an increasing surge of people, many YouTubers included, that adopted the /heɪtʃ/ pronunciation, which vexed me to no end. I even saw some teachers of English pronounced the letter like that, which is alarming to say the least.
[Edited:] My advice would be not to pronounce the h after an. This what I have always heard style books recommend.
I assumed that most people, if not all, who use an did not pronounce the h. I certainly can't remember ever hearing h pronounced after an; but it is always very dangerous to predict whether something is always or never the case. Wait, let me rephrase that: it is nearly always very dangerous... The main cause of this danger is that there will nearly always (see, I am learning) be exceptions. Even so, I believe they are exceptions; if someone disagrees and provides a decent argument or evidence, I will edit this answer again.
The use of a versus an in English is almost entirely based on whether the next word is pronounced as a vowel or not. The way it is spelled usually does not matter; compare a user, an honour. Based on this pattern, the advice of style books, and what I suspect is the pronunciation of a large majority, pronouncing the h with an seems like a bad idea. The fact that some people on this very page and elsewhere perceive it as "affected", and that it will displease traditionalists, would seem reason enough to drop either the h or an. A traditionalist might think, "hey, that guy is trying to sound cool, but he fails miserably, because he doesn't quite understand how it works", even if the speaker did in fact understand, but simply made a different choice. Such is snobbery.
The NOAD I had on my Mac Mini had a note similar to the following one, which Oxford Living Dictionaries reports about an and its usage with words starting with h.
Is it "a historical document" or "an historical document"? "A hotel" or "an hotel"?
There is still some divergence of opinion over which form of the indefinite article should be used before words that begin with h and have an unstressed first syllable. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people often did not pronounce the initial h for these words, and so an was commonly used. Today the h is pronounced, and so it is logical to use a rather than an. However, the indefinite article an is still encountered before the h in both British and American English, particularly with historical: in the Oxford English Corpus around a quarter of examples of historical are preceded with an rather than a.
The pronunciation reported by the Oxford Living Dictionaries for hotel is /hoʊˈtɛl/, and for historical is /hɪˈstɔrək(ə)l/; similarly, the pronunciation of historian is /hɪˈstɔriən/.