An Irish Diary

Haitch-Block Breakout – Frank McNally on the relentless rise of the Irish ‘H’

“Haitches” are a particular source of anxiety in England. Even in these phonetically egalitarian days, the dropping of H-bombs on BBC can still trigger would-be champions of the Queen’s English. Photograph: Thoth Adan/IStock

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Frank McNally
Fri Feb 21 2020 - 18:30

As revealed on her Twitter account, the British Labour MP Jess Phillips received a ticking off this week for something she said in a BBC interview.

No, it wasn’t anything to do with her political views. It was – for some English people, anyway – a touchier subject than that.

The critical email read: “Regarding your interview on the BBC Radio 4 today programme this morning, your accent shouldn’t necessarily be taken as an indication of stupidity, but your pronunciation of the letter H as ‘haitch’ is a pretty clear indication of a poor education”.

Snobbery about accents in general has long bedevilled British life, with those of the “regions” (including Phillips’s Birmingham) traditionally looked down upon in favour of the supposedly more prestigious kind, usually to be found in the southeast.

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But “haitches” are a particular source of anxiety in England. Even in these phonetically egalitarian days, the dropping of H-bombs on BBC can still trigger would-be champions of the Queen’s English.  Alas for them, the usage now seems to be advancing on the Home Counties from all sides.

Whether it remains a sign of “poor education” is debateable. A Little Sisters of the Poor education, perhaps, because haitching is more or less standard in this country (south of the Border anyway), even among the well-schooled.

Indeed, we usually get the blame for exporting the habit to the rest of the English-speaking world, or at least we did before Jamaicans – whose culture has been especially influential on pop music, and therefore on the young – carried on the work.

In Australia, for example, the relentless rise of haitching has been attributed to the "linguistically subversive" Sisters of Mercy and other Irish teaching orders.

This also tended to emphasise a link between the pronunciation and a poor immigrant background.

But there too, the connection is no longer clear.

For a neat experiment some years ago, the Australian National Dictionary Centre surveyed the TV programme Wheel of Fortune, part of which involves contestants asking for letters. When choosing Hs, the split was roughly 50-50 between those who said “aitch” and “haitch”, and surveyors concluded there was no obvious ethnic or class element in the division.

The increased global popularity of haitching aide, is there any justification for those who still insist it's wrong? Well, in his Hiberno-English Dictionary, the late Terry Dolan did suggest the Irish haitch might be "due to the phenomenon of hypercorrection (where a word is made more 'proper' than it actually is)".

On the other hand, he also said it could mark the survival of an earlier pronunciation. So maybe, if you go far enough back in English, our H is the authentic one.

Shakespeare doesn’t help much, although his plays do contain at least two jokes on the letter H, suggesting another change in intervening centuries. In one, a character laments: “I had a wound here that was like a T, but now ‘Tis made an H”. The pun there is on the word “ache” which, before it came to a hard end, used to be pronounced “aitch”.

The hypercorrecting haitchers, if that’s what they are, can at least claim some logic on their side. Pronounced as “aitch”, after all, the letter would be the only one in the English alphabet that does not start with the sound it confers on words (unless you drop your aitches, the ultimate phonetic sin in England).

In a follow-up to her Tweet, by the way, Phillips mentioned the “charming” habit of her French sister-in-law who, in keeping with that country’s phonetics, tended to drop the H from English names like “Arry”, but then overcompensated elsewhere, for instance when eating “happles”.

As the now chief supplier of English to the EU, Ireland may have a responsibility to clear up such confusions on mainland Europe. In the process, I predict we will eventually make haitching standard from Hilversum to Hungary. Our agents in Britain and elsewhere will do the rest.

By the time Boris Johnson’s HS2 is running, even his children may be pronouncing it with a haitch.

There is an interesting precedent for such developments. Time was when another Irish habit, the rolled R, was a minority pronunciation in the English-speaking world, including the US, where Irish and Scots emigrants helped introduce it.

The flat R of New England remained politically dominant there, well into the 19th century. Then the centre of power shifted southwards, accelerated by the civil war.  And gradually the rolled R became standard in America and, via America, the Anglophone world generally, outside of London and the Antipodes.  Linguists call it the “Rhotic” accent. The “h” there, ironically, is silent.

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