The pronunciation of controversy

The traditional pronunciation was CONtroversy, with the stress on the first syllable, but more of us Britons are now saying ConTROversy, according to British Library research. The pronunciation of other words has changed -- schedule is now often pronounced 'skedule' and patriotic pronounced 'pay-triotic'. Those two changes are in line with American pronunciation, but what is interesting about the 'controversy' shift is that ConTROversy is not the American pronunciation, so the change has nothing to do with copying an American accent.

 

Other words have resolutely maintained their British pronunciation -- Britons are showing no interest in pronouncing attitude the American way ('attitood', instead of 'attityude') and are sticking to 'garridge' (garage) rather than the American 'garaahge'. Despite the Gershwin song (You say 'eether' and I say 'eye-ther') there is no Atlantic split between the two pronunciations, with both pronunciations being popular in the US and the UK. 'Scone' is interesting; almost all Americans pronounce it to rhyme with 'bone', but there are two pronunciations in the UK -- to rhyme with 'bone' and to rhyme with 'gone' -- and, as I said in this post, we can get very excited about which is the correct version.

 

For more on this story see this Daily Telegraph article.

Comments

[John]

Great blog. I stumbled across it a few weeks ago while surfing sites and blogs doing some fairly unsuccessful research on a West Indian dialect.

Incredible timing on this piece. My wife and I (Americans, me British educated to some degree) were just watching a replay of a Premier League football match and had the "CONtroversy-conTROversy" discussion and have had similar discussions regarding other dissimilarly-pronounced words.

Thanks for the blog. It provides great relief from the acronym-laden, texting-oriented world in which we all exist.

[Jemmy Hope]

'Integral' is another tricky one for us Brits, but not, I think, for Americans.
I think we've lost the Schedule battle.

[John]

I actually use both forms of "integral". "InTAYgral to..." something and "inTEHgral" in the maths context.

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks to you both for your comments. Thanks, John, for your kind words and input, and thanks to Jemmy, who has added lots of informative and interesting comments on this blog over the months. I think Jemmy might have been referring to the difference in stress on the word 'integral', rather than a difference in the middle vowel sound. It can be pronounced INtegral (which is what the OED has), or inTEGral. Howjsay.com gives both pronunciations; see here: http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=integral&submit=Submit

[Jemmy Hope]

Yes it was the shifting stress on integral that I was thinking of.
I was wondering, John, if you had tried the word 'patois' in your search for a West Indian dialect. This seems to be used more than dialect when West Indian speech is being discussed.

[Belstaff Outlets UK]

Don't know what is wrong what is rite but i know that every one has there own point of view and same goes to this one

[Ben]

I know this is an old post, but I can't just leave this to rest.
The shifting of stress in "integral" isn't anything to do with different regional accents. It is just standard English stress movement to differentiate nominal and adjectival use of the word. The noun is "INtegral" and the adjective is "inTEgral".