Pronouncing Innovative

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Randall Reed calling from Baltimore, Maryland.

Hi, Randall. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Thank you.

I’ve been curious about a sort of phenomenon I’ve recognized, which is that some individuals will pronounce the same word, spelled the same way, in different pronunciations.

So I’ll give you one example that I hear a lot, which is the word could be pronounced innovative and sometimes innovative.

So I understand, obviously, the different British and American pronunciations, but I noticed that the same person will do it in different ways on different occasions.

And I was wondering, what’s the origin of that?

Is this a particular person you have in mind? Is it yourself?

Well, many of my colleagues will sometimes pronounce it depending on how, maybe how they use it in a sentence.

Sometimes they’ll pronounce it, they’ll say this is a very innovative project.

And sometimes they will pronounce it as innovative.

Like, gee, Martha, your solution to that problem was very innovative.

And I was just wondering whether that’s a common phenomenon or what its origins may be.

I notice it happens often with words that are sort of trending, like impactful and impactful, that are sort of trending words.

And maybe people hear it in other people’s conversations and try and incorporate it into their own with a different enunciation.

You know, Randall, it’s interesting that you mentioned this because I’m thinking about the way that I talk, and I do find myself doing that kind of thing from time to time.

I’m around a lot of younger people who talk about experiments, where I grew up saying experiment, and I find myself being influenced by them, and sometimes I say experiment.

And I also have friends who say forward and others who say forward.

And I find myself going back and forth between those two pronunciations, one with the R and one without the R.

Yeah, it’s incredibly common, Randall, especially in a collaborative environment where people come from a variety of different backgrounds and where you might be consuming a lot of different media or perhaps going to conferences or having conference calls with other professionals in the field from other universities or other companies or even other continents where they speak a different variety of English or even English that’s not their first or even third or fifth language.

And so you’re going to get a lot of different nuance here, and each of us will develop our own idiolect.

With innovative or innovative, as you mentioned, there is the U.S.-U.K. divide.

Americans tend to say innovative.

The people in the U.K. tend to say innovative.

But what you often find, if someone does vary their pronunciation, they might have one pronunciation where they use the adjective before a noun, say innovative solution, and they might have a different one if it comes after a verb.

So that is innovative, something like that.

And might it have to do also with the words that surround those words?

I mean, innovative project might be something that you hear at conferences, like Grant said, talking about something else that’s innovative, like, I don’t know, a product or an idea around the house might, because you learn these phrases as phrases.

Yeah, it’s called lexicalization or idiomatization, where two or more words start to behave as a unit.

They start to become a team.

So, for example, if you went to a conference and everyone was saying innovative automatic car assembly, and they always said innovative car assembly, anytime you say innovative car assembly, you’re always going to say innovative car assembly and not innovative, because that’s how you heard it for three days at a conference in Seattle or wherever you happen to be.

Because that’s now a unit.

Those three words said that way.

And this is how language behaves.

Even well up into our 80s, we are constantly adding new words and new pronunciations and adopting the sounds and language of the people around us.

And those inconsistencies are perfectly normal.

And even a single word can have two or more pronunciations depending on our environment, who we’re with, one pronunciation at home, one pronunciation at work, formal, informal, whether it’s an adjective before a noun or adjective after a verb and so forth.

This all makes perfect sense. I’m actually a university professor.

So many of the occasions I’m thinking of in my colleagues, sometimes they’re British and sometimes a whole mix of people from all over the country.

And you’ll often hear individuals who are struggling to remember what is the pronunciation they should use in that particular scenario.

So, for example, talking about an innovative project.

You can almost hear them trying to remember to say it as innovative.

That’s very good. Try to pay attention to the content and give them a break on their pronunciation and do the same for yourself, Randall.

And I say this to everyone else to give yourself a break when something doesn’t come out right.

And they’ll feel a lot better, a lot better when you give a presentation.

That’s absolutely helpful. Yes. I’ll go back to my innovative.

All right. Take care now.

Sounds good.

OK, thank you.

Thanks, Randall.

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