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How do you pronounce "read receipt"--the notification that pops up once the recipient of a text message has been opened? While some pronounce it as 'reed' (present tense,) others pronounce it as 'red' (past tense.) In an era full of technology, we are reading more than ever on our tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Therefore, our words are being transmitted across the world instantly. Various pronunciations occur because we learn new words from reading, rather than listening. In the end, we cannot settle for a "proper" usage of a word because pronunciation will surely continue to change with time and technology.

This article explains a study which proved that we tend to over estimate our pronunciation skills when learning a foreign language. It explains how our familiarity with our own accent impacts how we perceive our pronunciation. Finally, the article theorizes about how our perception of our own pronunciation can lead to "fossilization".

How can mispronunciation of a word today can become tomorrow's strongly defended norm

Journalist David Shariatmadari examines mispronunciations and malapropisms and how they contribute to language change.

Language is not static but dynamic, constantly evolving to suit the fashions of the time and this results in shifts in pronunciation and pitch. In the UK, for instance, far fewer people talk with "received pronunciation" these days - and even Queen Elizabeth II's voice has lost some of the cut-glass vowels of her youth. This is thought to reflect a more general shake-up in Britain's social hierarchies, leading to a kind of linguistic cross-pollination between the classes that has even reached Her Majesty. Women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.

With 2020 being an election year, several key states along the presidential campaign trail get thrown into the spotlight. Candidates, celebrities, and the media all have been criticized for pronouncing some states' names incorrectly. States such as Nevada, Florida, Missouri, and Colorado are some controversial states with debated pronunciations. As this article investigates, although states have pronunciation from its original language, it has evolved and people today believe they're in the right. Read the article to find out whether you're pronouncing state names correctly.

Fun article! And then there's "Hah-WHY-yuh"...LOL!

Although linguists have used for many years the process of deriving pronunciations of obscure words via comparing it to related descendant languages, this method has now been expedited by being scripted into computer code. Thus, scientists can now utilize computer technology to predict pronunciations of obscure words with up to 76% accuracy, which is greatly assisting the documentation of ancient, poorly recorded, or endangered languages in India.

It's a very thorough map of North American English dialects, based on pronunciation patterns.

"American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels... Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that "haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.)" Plus a sample video.

"Pronunciation Book shows you how to say various words [454, to be precise] in American English."

It's often said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Given the fact that many of the words we use in English stem from Latin and Ancient Greek words - in common with many other European languages - what is it about English that has attracted this reputation for being so fearsomely difficult?

Learning a foreign language is hard. Learning English as a foreign language is also very hard. Words in the English language that we speak, say and write without question might not make sense to foreigners because of the many "exceptions" that comes with the English language. This article discusses what makes English so challenging for foreigners to learn. In particular, it gives examples of pronunciation and spelling, emphasis, homophones, synonyms, idioms, and dialects.

This article examines the relationship between borrowed language and bilingual speakers' grasp of their known languages. It highlights the implicit understanding of grammar rules that bilingual speakers naturally develop for their languages and debunks the misconception that loan words damage a speaker's understanding of another language. The article described a study on bilingual speakers in Ottawa-Hull who combined language (code-switching or "mish-mashing") while still following the correct grammatical structures. (i.e. "If a verb was borrowed from English, it was conjugated in strict accordance with the rules for conjugating French verbs..") It also reminded readers that pronunciation is not intrinsically tied to language proficiency.

In fear of being left behind, China wanted to modernize their language to keep up with the rest of the world. This article considers how the political climate and technological advancements impacted the modernization and simplification of characters and phonetic writing of the pronunciation.

The critical period hypothesis is one of the reasons that some adults are hesitant to take on learning their heritage language. The theory essentially argues that there's a biological window where language learning is the most automatic, somewhere between the age of 2 and puberty. This theory has entered our popular consciousness as a rule that you can't learn a second-language fluently when you're older. However, scientists disagree with this notion because although it will take more conscious effort, it is still possible to become fluent in another language past the "critical window." Specifically, second language acquisition becomes more difficult with age because it requires rewiring your brain to break certain habits that relate to language learning. For example, pronunciation and accent requires breaking habits related to the way you move your mouth to speak, making it more difficult to have native-level pronunciation as you grow older. Beyond neuroscience, though, research has shown that other factors, such as exposure and education influence language learning.

This article discusses the history of Trinidad Creole English, also known as TCE. It explains the history, sociolinguistic situation, and phonology of TCE. Published by The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, this factual page contains statistics and a detailed overview of how TCE came about and how it has evolved throughout the years. There are charts of Trinidad's population and the languages spoken in Trinidad & Tobago. The article includes lists of practice sentences and pronunciation lessons.

(the website links to a PDF file)

This article describes a linguistic experiment that took place in Antarctica in 2017-2018. Scientists going to Antarctica were surveyed on their pronunciation of specific words, and by the end of the four month trip, the team pronounced one of the words in a different way to their individual original pronunciation. This illustrates that accents form through prolonged social and geographical isolation.

Jaber George Jabbour, a Syrian banker living in the UK, has invented SaypU, an alphabet with none of the indecipherable squiggles of traditional phonetic alphabets. A simplified universal alphabet would end not only misunderstanding, he asserts, but would help foster world peace. SaypU contains 23 letters from the Roman alphabet as well as a back to front e. The article also addresses larger issues of language and phonetic standardization and utopian language plans.

This article offers brief insight into the two types of accents, 'foreign' and 'regional,' and the difference in sound pronunciation between people from different areas.

"Our online survey asking Brits which Americanisms they use has had over 650 responses... It seems that "sidewalk" and "apartment" are the two commonest adoptions, while about half of you use "vacation" and "bug". There's a bit more resistance to "I'm good" over "I'm well", and to saying Z as "zee" instead of "zed". Around two-thirds stick with the British pronunciations of "process" and "progress", which seems to confirm my suspicion that those two are real assimilation watersheds."

"Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end. ... Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students. 'It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation' [said K David Harrison] ... 'Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.'"