wine-whine merger

plural wine-whine mergers

1. human sciencesA merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a Scottish accent or several accents in the United States) becomes [w] (the sound heard at the beginning of the word wine); in accents where this merger occurs, whine and wine are homophones.

   Chambers (2002) graphs the trajectory of the wine-whine merger in four reigions preserving ʍ.

   2019, Keiko Bridwell, “Previous Research on the Wine-Whine Merger”, in The Distribution of ʍ, page 7

   2 more examples

   As was the case with the wine–whine merger, date from the early twentieth century show that southeastern Pennsylvania was subject to patterns of variation in pronunciation.

   2016, Mark L. Louden, Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, page 228

   In Scottish English, the so-called wine-whine merger did not take place, in which historical Old and Middle English /hw/ was replaced by /w/[.]

   2021, Zeyu Li, “The Distribution of /w/ and /ʍ/”, in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory