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H, or h, is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch (pronounced , plural aitches), or regionally haitch (pronounced , plural haitches) ."H" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "aitch" or "haitch", op. cit.
The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before beginning with H: for example "an H-bomb" or "a H-bomb". The pronunciation may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.Todd, L. & Hancock I.: "International English Ipod", page 254. Routledge, 1990.
The haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982,John C. Wells, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, page 360, Pearson, Harlow, 2008 and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, the pronunciation without the sound is still considered standard in England, although the pronunciation with is also attested as a legitimate variant. In Northern Ireland, the pronunciation of the letter has been used as a shibboleth, with Catholics typically pronouncing it with the and Protestants pronouncing the letter without it.
Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was in Latin; this became in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French , and by Middle English was pronounced . The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic. Anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of two obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any K: reciting the former's ..., H, K, L,... as when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a pronunciation of for H.
The Greek alphabet Eta 'Η' in archaic Greek alphabets, before coming to represent a long vowel, , still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative . In this context, the letter eta is also known as Heta. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets, the letter Heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value .
While Etruscan and Latin had as a phoneme, almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish language developed a secondary from , before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed as an allophone of or in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of . 'H' is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch', which represents in Spanish, Galician, and Old Portuguese; in French language and modern Portuguese; in Italian language and French.
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In English, the pronunciation of as /h/ can be analyzed as a voiceless vowel. That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example, the word , /hɪt/ is realized as ɪ̥ɪt.
H is the letter frequency in the English language (after S, N, I, O, A, T, and E), with a frequency of about 6.1% in words.
In Spanish language and Portuguese, is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo ('son') and húngaro ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound . In words where the is derived from a Latin , it is still sometimes pronounced with the value in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canary Islands, Cantabria, and the Americas. Some words beginning with or , such as and , were given an initial to avoid confusion between their initial semivowels and the consonants and . This is because and used to be considered variants of and respectively. also appears in the digraph , which represents in Spanish and northern Portugal, and in varieties that have merged both sounds (the latter originally represented by instead), such as most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish dialects, prominently Chilean Spanish.
French language orthography classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, even though it is a silent letter either way. The H muet, or "mute" , is considered as though the letter were not there at all. For example, the singular definite article le or la, which is elided to l' before a vowel, elides before an H muet followed by a vowel. For example, le + hébergement becomes l'hébergement ('the accommodation'). The other kind of is called h aspiré ("aspirated h", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or liaison. For example, in le homard ('the lobster') the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an H muet come from Latin (honneur , homme ) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe ), whereas most words beginning with an H aspiré come from Germanic (harpe , hareng ) or non-Indo-European languages (harem , hamac , haricot ); in some cases, an orthographic was added to disambiguate the and semivowel pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters and : huit (from uit , ultimately from Latin octo ), huître (from uistre , ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea'').
In Italian, has no phonology value. Its most important uses are in the digraphs 'ch' and 'gh' , as well as to differentiate the spellings of certain short words that are , for example, some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to have') (such as hanno, 'they have', vs. anno, 'year'), and in short interjections ( oh, ehi).
Some languages, including Czech language, Slovak language, Hungarian, Finnish language, and Estonian, use as a breathy voiced glottal fricative , often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless in a voiced environment.
In Hungarian, the letter represents a phoneme with four allophones: before vowels, between two vowels, after , and word-finally after . It can also be a silent word-finally after back vowels. It is when geminated. In archaic spelling, the digraph represents (as in the name Széchenyi) and (as in pech, which is pronounced ); in certain environments it breaks palatalization of a consonant, as in the name Beöthy, which is pronounced (without the intervening h, the name Beöty could be pronounced ); and finally, it acts as a silent component of a digraph, as in the name Vargha, pronounced .
In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, is also commonly used for , which is otherwise written with the Cyrillic letter .
In Irish language, is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words; however, placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates the lenition of that consonant; began to replace the original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters.
In most dialects of Polish, both and the digraph always represent .
In Basque language, during the 20th century, it was not used in the orthography of the Basque dialects in Spain but it marked an aspiration in the North-Eastern dialects. During the Standard Basque in the 1970s, a compromise was reached that h would be accepted if it were the first consonant in a syllable. Hence, herri ("people") and etorri ("to come") were accepted instead of erri (Biscayan Basque) and ethorri (Souletin).
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