In linguistics, mispronunciation is the act of pronouncing a word incorrectly.[1] [2] Languages are pronounced in different ways by different people, depending on factors like the area they grew up in, their level of education, and their social class. Even within groups of the same area and class, people can pronounce words differently.
A standard of pronunciation is the most common way to pronounce a word. Standards vary among groups. Dictionaries include pronunciations.
Languages constantly change, split up, and diverge. Diversity within languages as a natural consequence of language evolution is now acknowledged. This diversity is studied.
Early dictionaries, such as that by Samuel Johnson in England and later Noah Webster in the United States played a large role in making spelling more uniform. When dictionaries began to add pronunciation guides, they played a similar role there. At first, American dictionaries (at least) tended to avoid listing pronunciations that they considered non-standard, and thus they played a prescriptive role (the British tradition is far more descriptive). However, following the general trend in linguistics, American dictionaries are now becoming more descriptive while British dictionaries are becoming less so (with Australian ones remaining in between); this is the case in other respects as well as with pronunciation. For example, the pronunciation of the word nuclear as if it were spelled nucular is one that is frowned upon by some, but the pronunciation is listed in some dictionaries. However, to take this to mean that the pronunciation is considered either "correct" or "incorrect" is to misunderstand the role that these dictionaries are playing. They are simply reporting current usage.
The following are some of the processes by which pronunciation can change.
Many words have lost phonemes (consonant or vowel sounds) somewhere in their histories. Sometimes, this changes the standard of pronunciation. For example, the silent k at the start of many words in the English language was originally pronounced. However, a word is mispronounced if a phoneme is omitted when it is not normally pronounced that way. For example, some speakers omit the first c sound from Antarctic, resulting in a pronunciation ("ant-AR-tik").
Words and names that are adopted from one language to another can be mispronounced because the phonology of the source language is different from that in the destination language.
Proper nouns such as names of people and places are written as foreign words and often given their native pronunciation too.
Using computational techniques, such as machine learning, it is possible to automatically detect mispronunciations in recorded speech.[3] [4]