So, let's get to the bottom of it — what's the “right” way to say the letter? Speaking English today, the correct thing to do is pronounce all your opening “H” sounds — historian, hotel, hammock, hiccough, highway. The only exception? The letter “H” itself, which is correctly pronounced “aitch”.
In imitation of the French, the English name is commonly aitch, but this means the name does not contain the sound of the letter. Those who pronounce the word as haitch and spell it accordingly as haitch, are in a sense restoring its original purpose.
There is no such word as haitch
Or “eff”, or “double-you”, or “zed”, for that matter. Aitch is a noun and in the dictionary. Always thought it was haitch. I had a maths teacher who said "hitch" for h.
British English dictionaries give aytch as the standard pronunciation for the letter H. However, the pronunciation haytch is also attested as a legitimate variant.
In Britain, H owes its name to the Normans, who brought their letter "hache" with them in 1066. Hache is the source of our word "hatchet": probably because a lower-case H looks a lot like an axe. It has certainly caused a lot of trouble over the years.
While the “haitch” pronunciation is often linked to Irish Catholic education in times when Australian society was divided along sectarian lines, no research has conclusively established its true history. But whatever its origins, it continues to be regarded as a marker of “lower” segments of society.
H-dropping occurs (variably) in most of the dialects of the English language in England and Welsh English, including Cockney, West Country English, West Midlands English (including Brummie), East Midlands English, most of northern England (including Yorkshire and Lancashire), and Cardiff English.
Name in English
For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as /eɪtʃ/ and spelled "aitch" or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling "haitch" is often considered to be h-adding and is considered non-standard in England.
In Britain, H apparently owes its “haitch” pronunciation to the Catholic Normans, who brought the old French word “hache” with them when they invaded in 1066. With aitch and haitch, it still seems to be linked to the speaker's religion. According to Rosen, “haitch” is the Catholic way and “aitch” is the Protestant way.
One suggestion is that it touches on a long anxiety in English over the letter aitch. In the 19th Century, it was normal to pronounce hospital, hotel and herb without the h. Nowadays "aitch anxiety" has led to all of them acquiring a new sound, a beautifully articulated aitch at the beginning.
Silent H words
The letter H is sometimes silent when placed at the beginning of words such as hour, heir, honor, herb, homage, and honest. The letter H is silent in many words where it follows the letter C, such as anchor, archive, chaos, character, Christmas, charisma, chemical, choreography, chorus, choir, and echo.
a/an + H. The rule goes that the article 'a' is used before a consonant and 'an' is used before a vowel, so with silent H we would say “an honest” and with pronounced H we would say “a hotel”. But some posher speakers tend to treat a pronounced H as if it were not there, so they would say “an historic” and “an hotel”.
While some Australian speakers would pronounce “no” as a diphthong, starting on “oh” as in dog and ending on “oo” as in put, others begin with an unstressed “a” (the sound at the end of the word “sofa”), then move to the “oh” and then “oo”.
The most common verbal greeting is a simple “Hey”, “Hello”, or “Hi”. Some people may use Australian slang and say “G'day” or “G'day mate”.
This could occur because the word “no” is an example of what linguists call an open syllable, meaning it has no consonant at its close. This allows the speaker to lengthen the vowel and draw it out – a feature we love in different Australian accents!
The oddly named letter H is usually pronounced 'aitch' /eɪtʃ/ in British English, but in Ireland we tend to aspirate it as 'haitch' /heɪtʃ/. This haitching is a distinctive feature of Hiberno-English, one that may have originated as an a hypercorrection but is now the norm in most Irish dialects.
This has to do with the fact that in the Irish language a consonant followed in writing by the letter “h” is pronounced as what is known as a spirant, that is to say with a continuous expulsion of breath. For example, in Irish “ph” is pronounced as “f”, “bh” as “v”, and “mh” also as “v”.
In Northern Ireland the Catholic population is distinguished from the Protestant by the former saying 'haitch' and the latter 'aitch'. 'Haitch' is the way Catholic primary schools teach H in the alphabet and therefore may well have Papal authority as correct!
As you might suspect, the “hw” pronunciation is the much older one. In fact, when “what” first showed up in Old English in the 700s, the word was spelled with an “h” in front: hwaet or huaet. The British began losing the “h” sound in “what” long before Americans did, and even before the Colonies existed.