The Guardian recently ran a story highlighting how errors in pronunciation can slowly change the English language. The article points out that despite the 171,476 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, the average person has a vocabulary “tens of thousands smaller” and that words we’ve “read or are vaguely familiar with” are sometimes not pronounced as they’re supposed to be. The article then points out that some common mispronunciations have actually changed the way the word is commonly pronounced, pairing some examples with a few linguistic technical terms, including disappearing sounds like in the word Wednesday; anatomical changes that affect the movement from a nasal to a non-nasal sound like in the words folk and talk; and words borrowed from other languages like crayfish, muskrat, and female.
