Schedule (sk-/sh-?)

[Stephen Roti]

Dear all:

as Margery Fee (a Canadian linguist) has it:
"The competing pronunciations for [the word schedule]
are SKEH jool, SKEH joo ul (favoured by Americans)
and SHEH jool (favoured by the British).
Sociolinguistic studies indicate that the 'sk'
pronunciations are by far preferred by Canadian
speakers of all ages and backgrounds, and that
SHEH jool is on the decline."

 In his Pronouncing Dictionary of 1990, J.C. Wells
says under "schedule": "The AmE pronunciation with
-sk is starting to be heard in BrE." It would be
interesting to see what the second edition has to
say about this change in progress, as further polls
were conducted to determine which pronunciations are
the ones currently preferred among Britons.

 I think another query that should be raised is how
the ending of the word is generally pronounced by
British, Canadian, or American speakers of English.
There seems to be a good deal of variability on that
as well, especially in Britain and Canada.

 Wells, for instance, provides the following (here
adapted) phonetic transcriptions {the mark ||
separates British preferences from American ones}:

SCHEDULE  'shed ju:l  'shej u:l  'sked ju:l,  'skej
u:l || 'skej u:l  'skej u:@l  [where "@" stands here
for an optionally inserted schwa]

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998) indicates the
following four variants: /'skeju at l/, /'skeju:l/,
/'shedju:l/, /'sheju:l/

[PLEASE NOTE: /u/ = short 'u';  /u:/ = long 'u'; @ =
the schwa sound]

 Interestingly, a forty-one-year-old woman who I
interviewed about three years ago in St.
Andrews-by-the-sea, New Brunswick (Atlantic Canada)
(born in the same region, and having mostly Irish
background), said she normally says /'shedu at l/, which
sort of blends the first part of the typical British
form with the second part of the most common
(non-palatalized) American variant.

 This did not strike me as peculiar at all, given
Canadians' acceptance of the bi-modal tradition
of British and US forms in several areas. Such
(uniform) alternation, occasionally even in the
same word, is in fact one of the principal standards
underlying Canadian English.


(Dr.) S. Roti

Lexical Researcher

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