Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
h-
In certain regional dialects, human is pronounced YOO-muhn rather than HYOO-muhn, and Hugh, although usually pronounced HYOO, can also be a homophone of you. Even more widespread in some regional dialects is the pronunciation of words spelled with the initial letters wh-, which many say as an hw sound cluster (as in HWICH for which, as opposed to WICH for witch), with a w sound, so that the words in each of these pairs, where/wear, wheel/weal, and whine/wine, are pronounced alike, as WER, WEEL, and WEIN, respectively. Nearly all Americans pronounce herb, honor, and heir without the initial h sound (UHRB, AHN-uhr, ER), and in words such as historic the initial h sound usually disappears when the sound accommodates to a preceding n, as in It was an historic moment (is-TOR-ik). And most Americans drop the initial h sounds from the pronouns him, her, his, and her at Casual and Impromptu levels when they are relatively unstressed: “I’ll ask ’er. “Give it to ’im.” “Tell ’im to call ’is mother.” And in a few words such as vehement, they frequently suppress a medial h sound, as in this Standard pronunciation of vehicle: VEE-ik-ul. See also A; HISTORIC.
