H-dropping
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H-dropping is a colloquial term used to describe the omission of initial in words like house, heat, and hangover in many dialects of English, particularly in English accents like Cockney, where it is generally stigmatized. The same phenomenon occurs in many other languages, such as Serbian, and Late Latin, the ancestor of the modern Romance languages. Interestingly, both French and Spanish acquired new initial [h] in medieval times, but these were later lost in both languages in a "second round" of h-dropping.
H-dropping in English is found in all dialects in the weak forms of function words like he, him, her, his, had, and have; and, in most dialects, in all forms of the pronoun it — the older form hit survives as the strong form in a few dialects such as Southern American English and Scots. Because the of unstressed have is usually dropped, the word is usually pronounced in phrases like should have, would have, and could have. As a result, the contractions should've, would've, and could've are often misspelled as should of, could of, and would of.
The opposite of h-dropping, so-called h-adding, is a hypercorrection found in typically h-dropping accents of English. A classist stereotype, commonly found in literature from late Victorian times to the early 20th century, holds that some lower-class people consistently drop h in words that should have it, while adding h to words that should not have it. An example from the musical My Fair Lady is, "In 'Ertford, 'Ereford, and 'Ampshire, 'urricanes 'ardly hever 'appen". In practice, however, it would appear that h-adding is more of a stylistic prosodic effect, being found on some words receiving particular emphasis, regardless of whether those words are h-initial or vowel-initial in the standard language.
Words borrowed from French frequently begin with the letter "h" but not with the sound . Examples include hour, heir, hors d'oeuvre and honest. In some cases, spelling pronunciation has introduced the sound into such words, as in humble, hotel and (for most speakers nowadays) historic. Spelling pronunciation has also added to the Commonwealth pronunciation of herb, , while American English retains the older pronunciation .