Integral Pronunciation: First- and Second-Syllable Stress Can Both be Correct

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey Martha, this is Jonathan Owen from Winter Haven, Florida.

Hey Jonathan.

We’re glad to have you on board.

What’s up?

Hey, I had a had a question for you about the pronunciation of a word.

I so yeah, when I when I don’t have A Way with Words, listen to I listen to other things and one of the things I listen to is a pop culture podcast from NPR and one of the reporters one time used the word integral when in her report.

She was talking about something being integral to the plot of a movie.

And at the time I thought maybe she had misspoken, because I’d always pronounce that word integral.

And so I just kind of carried on, didn’t think much about it, but she did it again and again.

And so I wondered, well, maybe is it a generational thing?

Because I know she’s in her in her late 30s and I’m in my late 50s.

So I called my my older daughter who was in her late 20s and said, how do you pronounce this word?

And she said she pronounces it integral, integral integral, like I do.

And she works at the University of Florida, and her employees are all college students.

And so I said, Well, why don’t you ask your college students how they pronounce it?

And so she did and got back with me later on.

And to a person, every one of her employees says, integral when they use that word.

So it made me wonder what’s going on.

Is it something that changed and I never heard about it or is it just people are mispronouncing it or what’s the deal?

So that’s the reason I called you guys to see if you could maybe clarify for me.

Yeah, I love the fieldwork here.

I really totally appreciate exactly what you’ve done here because it’s exactly what Martha and I would do if we encountered something new.

So the word we’re talking about I-N-T-E-G-R-A-L and generally in the use that you heard on the radio, it sounds like it meant essential or necessary.

So something is integral to the to the outcome or integral to the core product.

Correct, yes, exactly.

And there we kind of get to the nut of this that we’re kind of talking about one word with two meanings and one of those meanings is special to a particular field and that’s mathematics.

These days you mainly hear integral with the stress on the first syllable among mathematicians and specialists in and scientific fields that use a lot of math.

So I don’t know if you and your daughter work in those fields, but perhaps that’s why you have that pronunciation.

Actually we don’t.

I I was an English major.

I I work for an insurance company now, but I was actually an English major in college and she was an advertising major.

So we’re kind of pretty far off field from the from the mathses and sciences.

The second thing that you did, which I think is wonderful because you brought in the answer to your own question basically, it’s not an age thing, it’s a change thing.

And generally, in all of the English dialects, words that have previously been stressed on the first syllable are becoming stressed on the second syllable.

Okay.

So it’s not just integral becoming integral.

It’s also words like applicable becoming applicable, formidable, becoming formidable.

And the famous one which actually has a UK US divide, although usually there is no US UK divide.

It’s just it’s just a change thing, is controversy versus controversy.

Oh yeah.

But even words like exquisite, harassed, despicable, hospitable, they’re all moving that that pronunciation, that stress on the pronunciation to the second syllable.

And and there’s a reason for this is because English wants a rhythm.

We understand as native English speakers that there is a particular kind of pacing and rhythm, and there’s actually something called the principle of rhythmic alternation, which was described in 1977 by a couple of brilliant linguists and it this this metrical phonology as they call it shows how English speakers will naturally adjust word stress, the syllable stress to keep an alternating trochaic rhythm, which is basically a strong syllable followed by a weak one.

So that’s so long words are far more susceptible to this change.

Because there’s so many syllables on it, of course.

Another thing that’s happening is we’re moving away from this like this Germanic pronunciation system and we’re more developing English’s own pronunciation system where those Germanic ties that that would have preferred the stress on the first syllable are are are fading.

Partly because we have moved more towards Latin rules from Latin and French over the many centuries that English has become what it is.

I see.

Okay.

Very good.

Well that’s interesting.

Very interesting.

Yeah, but both both correct.

Just to clarify here, both correct.

But the mathematicians and and math using scientists are more likely to put say in integral with the stress on the first syllable.

My favorite change that I love to talk about when Martha and I go and do live events in the rows is the word balcony, you know, like this place on a stage that you can look down upon the seats.

Used to be pronounced balcony.

Oh wow, okay.

Yeah, which people are like, what how?

Why did that doesn’t make any sense, but yeah.

But it has completely undergone the change, whereas other words are still in transition.

That’s wild.

I’m sure there’ll be others out there.

I’ll bump into now that I’m kind of cognizant of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I will I’ll definitely do it.

I’ve got a bunch of other things I want to call you about too, so I’ll just have to put it on the list.

Take care.

Give our best to your daughter.

We’re the one with the bright yellow icon.

Okay.

I got it on the top of my list.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Thanks, guys.

Bye.

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