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Nothing raises purist hackles so fiercely as des haricots 'beans' pronounced with a /z/ liaison or un haricot 'one bean' with a linking /n/. In Reference French, it is stigmatized as uneducated, like dropping aitches in English or pronouncing them in hour or honour. Every orthographic h- is silent in Modern French, but some act like consonants to prevent elision and liaison. So-called 'aspirate h' is conventionally traced to fifth-century loanwords from Frankish whose initial /h-/ persisted till the late Renaissance but was then lost leaving consequences that are now opaque, hard for French children to acquire or foreigners to learn. This study identifies far more 'aspirate' words than can be attributed to Frankish, and much variability in their pronunciation. It re-examines their history and brings forward systematic evidence from dialect atlases and educational practice to detect how and when /h/ became a sociolinguistic variable.
John N Green is Emeritus Professor of Romance Linguistics in the University of Bradford. Marie-Anne Hintze was formerly Senior Lecturer in French Studies in the University of Leeds.
