Language desk
< July 3	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	July 5 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 4

English long a; why do people classify it as a monophthong??

Technically, the sound of English long a is a diphthong, pronounced eh+ee. But the majority of sources before 1990 classify it as a monophthong. Any reason?? (Perhaps it was a monophthong in many areas until the mid-1960's.) Georgia guy (talk) 11:39, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It was probably a diphthong in most quasi-standard English accents from roughly the 17th century on, when the originally separate sounds spelled as long "a" (a monophthong) and "ai" (a diphthong) merged. It's certainly shown as a diphthong in the 1937 edition of Daniel Jones' pronouncing dictionary, which is pretty much the definition of "classic" RP. The [eɪ] pronunciation was the basis for further developments such as [ʌɪ] in working-class urban accents, Australian etc (the Australian English phonology article says "[ɐ̟ɪ]"). In many forms of Scottish English it's a monophthong, and even in quasi-standard accents, it can tend towards a monophthong in special cases (when unstressed, or before a vowel, or before "r")... AnonMoos (talk) 12:02, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note that the vowel chart in English phonology#Vowels lists the long "a" as a "potential diphthong", in between the "full diphthongs" and the "full monopthongs". My understanding is that the difference between the potential and full diphthongs is that the potential ones require less tongue movement from the initial to the second component (and maybe can be either a monophthong or a diphthong depending on the dialect?). Loraof (talk) 22:50, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]