Pronunciation

pronunciation, in a most inclusive sense, the form in which the elementary symbols of language, the segmental phonemes or speech sounds, appear and are arranged in patterns of pitch, loudness, and duration. In the simplest model of the communication process in language—encoding, message, decoding—pronunciation is an activity, shaping the output of the encoding stage, and a state, the external appearance of the message and input to the decoding stage. It is what the speaker does and what the hearer perceives and, so far as evaluation is called for, judges. It is so basic to language that it has to be considered in any general discussion of the topic.

In a narrower and more popular use, questions of pronunciation are raised only in connection with value judgments. Orthoepy, correct pronunciation, is parallel to orthography, correct spelling. “How do you pronounce [spell] that worddialect or has an idiosyncracy of speech. Only mispronunciations are noticeable, therefore distracting; they introduce “noise” into the communication system to reduce its efficiency.