During my visit to Warrington last month, I was surprised to hear my sister pronounce a word in a way that I thought impossible in the dialect. The word was "knew", as in "I knew it."
I had always thought that we Warringtonians, like the vast majority of people in the country, pronounce "knew" with the phonetic /j/ after the "n" as follows:
/nju/
as opposed to our American cousins who generally pronounce it without the phonetic /j/ as follows:
/nu/
I thought that this held true for all the words with this combination of sounds: "new", "knew", "news"; apparently not!
I was surprised, nay, shocked, to hear my beloved older sister pronounce "knew" without the phonetic /j/. I listened more closely, thinking perhaps that she had been thinking of another word and had mispronounced accidentally, but no, she repeatedly pronounced it as /nu/.
The one thing I didn't do was compare her pronunciation of the other words normally pronounced with the /nj/ combination: "new" and "news" (my rationale being that there may be some interference from the present tense form of the verb "to know", which, of course, is never pronounced with /nj/).
I will report back on this topic the next time I speak to her.
How do my fellow Warringtonians pronounce "knew"? Let me know. Post a comment.
I pronounce knew as nju. I have heared it pronounced over the years in the American way by local people, but I just assumed the American way of speaking which we hear a lot on films, etc.,was catching on.
ReplyDeleteI pronounce knew as nju. I just hope that the habit of talking in questions doesn't catch on?
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