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H-dropping and h-adding

H-dropping

H-dropping is a linguistic term used to describe the omission of initial in words like house, heat, and hangover in many dialects of English, such as Cockney and Estuary English. 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 [1] in mediæval times, but these were later lost in both languages in a "second round" of h-dropping (however it should be noted that some dialects of Spanish re-acquired /h/ from Spanish /x/). Many dialects of Dutch also feature h-dropping, particularly the south western variants. It is also known from several Scandinavian dialects, for instance Älvdalsmål and the dialect of Roslagen where it is found already in Runic Swedish. Read full entry

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