📖 The English language has its roots in Old Norse and Germanic languages. The English (or Englishes) we speak today has been built up over centuries like layers of sediment, borrowing and incorporating words from French, Greek, Indian languages and others.

📖 The Great Vowel Shift (c. 1400-1700) changed the pronunciation of all the long vowels and gave us the eight diphthongs that we have today. These do not exist in many other languages and are challenging to pronounce for speakers of those languages.

📖 Then there is the long and complex history of linguistic splits and mergers, which leads to English having many words with similar spellings that are pronounced completely differently from each other!

If you ever struggle to understand someone speaking English as a second language, give a thought to the centuries of change that have gone into creating these irregularities and challenges…

Pronounceme
www.pronounceme.co.uk

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