Pronouncing Aunt: Ant Versus Ahnt

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Evan from Falmouth, Maine.

Hello, Evan. What’s going on in Maine?

Not a whole lot right now. I’m just home for a break and enjoying it very much.

And you said you’re home temporarily. Where are you otherwise?

I go to school at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.

Okay. What are you calling us about?

Well, my question is about the woman who is your mother or your father’s sister.

Now, the way I pronounce it is very, very different from the way that my friends in Canada pronounce it.

I pronounce it how I think it should be pronounced, is aunt.

Now, my friends up at school, they seem to mistake their relative for an insect on the ground, and they pronounce it aunt.

Now.

And so I was just wondering, is one of us more right than the other?

Is it simply a geographical thing?

Or, you know, what’s the deal?

And so do you stop them in conversation and talk about insects?

I do sometimes.

I do.

I said, are you related to ants?

I didn’t realize that.

I didn’t know I would call them my aunt.

And they, of course, said, oh, you’re just being pretentious.

And I argue that, well, what other words beginning with AU do you pronounce with just an A?

Well, applying logic to English, though, that’s always a trap, isn’t it?

Yeah well you know what in your part of the country in Maine in New England and and also in Eastern Virginia you would you would generally say aunt throughout most of the rest of the United States though you hear aunt really yep yes yes in in standard English there is a there is in African-American vernacular English, you hear aunt a lot.

But in what we call standard English, the general pronunciation in this country is aunt.

Oh, that’s unfortunate.

Why? Because now you’ve got to take it back?

All these things that you’ve said?

Oh, no, no. I will never go back on what I’ve said.

I stick very, very firmly to the ideology that it’s aunt and not aunt.

You know, I do have to tell you, Evan, though, that I have one of my mother’s sisters is named Anne, and I do call her Aunt Anne.

But everybody else I call Aunt Margaret and Aunt Mary Garnet.

Well, it may be.

I’ve seen Grant.

It’s suggested that maybe Noah Webster had something to do with that, just sort of.

What, promoting the aunt pronunciation?

No, promoting the aunt.

The aunt pronunciation.

You know, Rava and Ask what you would do for.

It’s a messy, tangled thing that I don’t want to get into too far, but we do have a history, somewhat, in American English, of sometimes being more learned from our books than from our experience.

And sometimes when we’re learned from our books, we tend to take what looks like the obvious pronunciation, but isn’t the one that’s widely used.

And sometimes those pronunciations become dominant.

But I would say overall here, the thing is, Evan, this is a matter of dialect.

And if you start throwing around the word wrong to apply to somebody else’s dialect, you soon get into a trap because you’re going to find out sooner or later that you have a few dialect features that make you a minority, and actually you found one here.

That is true.

But, you know, you can just blame them as Canadians and be done with it.

Excellent. Well, thank you very much.

And I might not share this information with my friends back up in Canada, but we’ll see.

Well, I just think maybe the insect talk probably best be kept quiet from here on out.

Yeah, I will bring that up again.

Yeah.

All right.

I hope everything works out well for you there.

Well, thank you very much.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you very much, guys.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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