I have tended to think of myself as something of an expert on the pronunciation of the name ‘Shrewsbury’, since this was my home town from when we moved there when I was aged 5. But recently I have come to feel that my old rules of thumb (based on where the speaker came from and what their social class was) don’t seem to work any more. I used to find that people who didn’t know the place often pronounced it /ʃruːzbri/, but when it was pointed out to them that the “correct” pronunciation was /ʃrəʊzbri/ they accepted this and adopted it instead. British broadcasters would sometimes “correct” each other if one of them used the /uː/ pronunciation. People claim historical evidence in support of the /əʊ/ pronunciation: I have a copy of Christopher Saxton’s 1577 map of Shropshire where you can see that the spelling of his time was Shrowesburye, but this fact, though interesting, is of little or no use in deciding what is the contemporary pronunciation.

​I found it interesting to read the Wikipedia article on Shrewsbury. In the opening paragraph it gives the two pronunciations (citing the /əʊ/ pronunciation before the /uː/ one), but also gives a link to a very interesting article that appeared in in the Shropshire Star a few years ago – you can find it here. Apparently there was a big argument on Facebook at the time, which I clearly missed.
One factor that does still seem current is that local people at the lower end of the social scale tend to omit the /r/ in ‘Shrew-’ and pronounce the name /ʃuːzbri/. This is mentioned in the Talk page (under ‘Pronunciation') of the WP Shrewsbury article here.
Recently I have had comments, when I have used the /əʊ/ pronunciation, from people who find my version funny. When I protest that I grew up there, I find that that doesn’t cut much ice, and I’m told that “nobody says /ʃrəʊzbri/ any more”.  I realize that the situation is quite similar to that of Marlborough. Traditionally, the pronunciation of this town in Wiltshire is /mɔːlbrə/. If you look at the Wikipedia article on Marlborough you will find the two pronunciations /mɔːlbrə/ and /mɑːlbrə/. As long as I can remember, I have known that the “correct” pronunciation is the one with /ɔː/, yet I have always felt reluctant to use that because it felt to me old-fashioned and posh. I realize that /ʃrəʊzbri/ has become the old-fashioned and posh pronunciation, too. 

Just a note to say that I have edited the Wikipedia article on T-glottalization in order to improve the presentation of examples. I'm not really happy about the beginning and end of the article: this is a topic that tends to attract a lot of unscientific speculation about the origins, frequency and distribution of glottalization. Still, I hope it's now better than it was.

This is a bit of a puzzle. There is a small article on Wikipedia called Semantic Prosody which seems to be about collocation and implication, but not at all about prosody. Can anyone put me right on this - is there a different meaning of prosody used in linguistics that relates to the meanings of words rather than to prosodic aspects of speech? Otherwise, I think this article needs to be taken out.

I’ve been revisiting an old topic that interests me (it was the subject of my PhD thesis) – glottalization in general, and the pre-glottalization of /p, t, k, tʃ/ in English in particular. There is some improvement needed in the material that Wikipedia provides on the subject, though there is nothing really bad there apart from some of the examples given. There is a general article on Glottalization that gives a brief mention of English pronunciation, and a longer article on T-glottalization in English that necessarily ignores the other consonants that can be glottalized and deals only with /t/. At the moment I'm only concerned with pre-glottalization, rather than with the equally interesting phenomenon of glottal reinforcement.

Going over this material again reminds me that we ought to think about encouraging learners of English to learn appropriate glottalization if they are aiming at copying a native-speaker model. Within the time that I can remember, its use has increased greatly; as long ago as 1952 Paul Christophersen wrote “If we are to continue to use RP as a model, has the time not come to take cognizance of the glottal stop not only in our scientific analysis of English speech but in our teaching? Or are we to teach an artificial pronunciation?”, and I think the need to consider the question is now much stronger.

If you have the CD-ROM or App version of CEPD, you can listen to some examples - the actors employed to make the recordings sometimes produced glottalization and sometimes not, though of course the script they were given didn't direct them one way or the other. In the word 'witness' you can hear that both the British and the American speakers have glottalization; However, neither has in 'hateful'.  'Blackboard' seems to have no glottalization from the English speaker, but does have it in the American. In 'butcher' and 'background' British has it but American not.

One way to increase people’s awareness of glottalization would be to show it in pronunciation dictionaries. It would be perfectly possible to include a superscript glottal stop sign (NB I don't seem to be able to do superscript with this editor) as an indication of where a glottal stop may be pronounced before a fortis plosive or /tʃ/ (though it is never obligatory). Thus the word ‘extra’ might be transcribed /eʔk.strə/ and ‘nature’ as /neɪʔ.tʃə/. Of course, this is not a true phonemic transcription, but similar non-phonemic information is already used in CEPD and LPD, the most conspicuous example being the use of the voicing diacritic to indicate “flapped /t/” in American pronunciations. For example, CEPD transcribes ‘latter’ as /læt̬.ɚ/ while LPD gives /læt̬.ər/. Yet the marking of flapping is redundant information, showing something that is predictable by rule.

What I am suggesting is just a personal fancy of my own, and not a policy decision for the next edition of the CEPD!

The distribution of glottalization is, unfortunately, not easy to explain, and we need to describe not only where we find a glottal stop preceding a fortis plosive or affricate, but also where we find complete glottal replacement (almost always of /t/). The Wikipedia material needs to be set out more fully and more clearly.

I don’t know how many people reading this have signed themselves in as Wikipedia members. It only takes a minute, but it gives you a WP identity in case you want to do some editing. Editing might involve simple correction of typos or transcriptions, or more ambitious rewriting of articles; I have noticed occasionally when teachers have encouraged their students to take on the improvement of a particular topic as a project, which strikes me as a great idea if it’s done properly.

Another thing that signed-up Wikipedians can do is to mark articles for their Watchlist. This useful feature lets you “star” a particular article so that whenever someone edits it, a summary of the edit is put in your Watchlist. I have marked almost all of the phonetics articles (as well as a few related to my non-work interests), and it lets me see where there is some action going on.

Anyway, my watchlist these days is full of the increasingly heated controversy over Wikipedia’s use of diaphonemic symbols for IPA-style information on pronunciation. I mentioned recently the use of //a:// as a symbol for a vowel that could be either /æ/ or /ɑː/ in a word like ‘bath’. This is similar to the “either/or” symbols introduced in the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation – there, “barred ɪ” can stand for [ə] or [ɪ], and “barred ʊ” can stand for [ʊ] or [ə] in unstressed syllables. 

Some people in WP complain about this from a practical point of view: how can you assume that the average WP user has the phonological sophistication to interpret diaphonemic representations? Won’t they get confused by this? (Answer: probably yes). The other issue is much more a matter of WP’s own house rules, and in particular the OR principle: a WP writer must never introduce Original Research into an article. Everything written in a WP article must be capable of being backup up by published or publicly available material, but some of the proposals for adding to the WP diaphonemic scheme do seem to go beyond anything used in conventional phonetics and phonology. Some supporters of the diaphonemic scheme claim that the OR principle is not violated because it concerns a WP tool for putting in pronunciations, not a WP article making factual statements.

If you want to see the state of the argument, you can see some of it in the “Note on variable vowels” discussion. The more theological side, with a discussion of the OR issue from the WP rules point of view, can be read here. Since I am appealed to in this discussion, I shall probably have to weigh in myself, though I don’t really think I can shed any light in the diaphonemic fog.