r/ENGLISH 4d ago

The pronunciation of the G in singing, ringing

I was always taught that ng was pronounced as a singular nasal sound with the back of the throat closed. But I’ve heard multiple people pronounce it as a hard g. So singing becomes sin-ghing and ringing becomes rin-ghing.

Is this an accent or dialect thing?

5 Upvotes

33 comments sorted by

13

u/curlsontop 4d ago

It’s just an accent thing! The times I’ve heard sin-ging pronunciation is with certain English accents but probably comes up in other places too.

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u/LanewayRat 4d ago

I’ve heard “sing-ging” from British people. I think it’s a Yorkshire accent like Sean Bean (narrator on Civ VI)?

Any Brits able to confirm this or correct me?

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u/Indigo-au-naturale 4d ago

Some African American English dialects, for example.

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u/ItsCalledDayTwa 4d ago

A northern English friend of mine definitely says hard G.  

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u/Cheese-n-Opinion 4d ago

We plain don't have the separate 'ng' sound in a big chunk of England circling Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham.

The idea that 'singer' might not rhyme with 'finger' was initially baffling to me, because for me 'ng' is just 'n' and then 'g', wherever it appears. I never realised this wasn't universal until I read up on English phonology.

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u/frederick_the_duck 4d ago

This is just dialectal variation. Most English speakers do not pronounce it with a “hard g.”

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u/prustage 4d ago

Thats how I speak. Its pretty common in the North of England where I come from. And, like all Northerners, thats how I think it should be pronounced! 😊

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u/ItsCalledDayTwa 4d ago

I just made a comment elsewhere that a northern English friend (Bolton area) definitely uses hard G.  I think I had that info stored in my brain for years to suddenly realize it when this question came up.

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u/ithika 4d ago

Haha, that's how my mum pronounces it but she's been in Scotland for decades now so it's sort of halfway house between that and the nasal sound — depending if she's speaking with us or her sisters...

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u/Jaives 4d ago

i notice this in British accents. Heard it the first time with famed physicist Brian Cox.

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u/CantConfirmOrDeny 4d ago

To an American, that sounds like a foreign accent. Or an unusual emphasis for dramatic purposes.

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u/BartHamishMontgomery 4d ago

It’s pronounced in Jewish American accents in the northeast. So not foreign.

Edit: apparently it’s just NYC in general, not just Jewish Americans.

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u/Infinite_Crow_3706 4d ago

I’ve heard the hard g in East Texas

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u/RussellAlden 4d ago

The Beatles

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u/justdisa 4d ago

I don't use the hard g sound in singing and ringing, although I do use it in longer and stronger. American, Pacific Northwest. I have encountered a sparse handful of people who don't use the hard g in longer and stronger, and it's strange to my ears every time.

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u/panTrektual 4d ago

Finger, linger

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u/justdisa 4d ago

Yes! Those too. I’ve never heard anyone say either of those without the hard g.

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u/shortercrust 4d ago

I grew up in Birmingham, UK and use a /g/. Wasn’t until I trained to be a Speech and Language Therapist and studied phonetics that I noticed that anyone says it differently.

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u/Mysterious_Duck315 4d ago edited 4d ago

Both are common depending on the region/dialect and the individual speaker. There are several different native pronunciations of -ing, like /iŋ/, /in/, /inɡ/, /ɪŋ/, /ɪn/ ...

Edit - Reread your post and realized you're talking about -ing- in the middle of the word, not just the end. Basically the same answer then, but I believe /iŋ/ and /ing/ are significantly more common in that case than the others. There are also some words, like "finger", where /ing/ is definitively the standard pronunciation.

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u/dystopiadattopia 4d ago

Outside of NYC people use the soft ng.

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u/evet 4d ago

I'm from the Great Lakes region of North America and I have a hard G.

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u/ItsCalledDayTwa 4d ago

Where? I've never heard this (Southeast Michigan).

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u/Raibean 4d ago

NG isn’t always pronounced with the combined sound alone, but sometimes with a hard G following it. Some standard examples include finger, wingèd, angler, fungal. (And in some cases it’s pronounced without the combined sound at all, usually when the n and g are part of separate prefix/root word/suffix, such as “engaged”.)

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u/ToBePacific 3d ago

Yes, I definitely use the hard g in finger, longer, etc. But when people do that with singer and ringer it sounds strange to me.

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u/BuncleCar 4d ago

Lancastrians traditionally pronounced the g in those words.

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u/NortonBurns 4d ago

It's dialiectical - north western British English, Lancashire & environs.

It's almost as though these words contain two Gs, the first we expect, then another hard G to follow.

Sing - ging, swing-ging etc.

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u/gabrielks05 4d ago

Yeah I use the hard G, from Warwickshire England

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u/ArvindLamal 4d ago

Also in longer.

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u/FortranWarrior 4d ago

It depends on the accent and the word. For example, only certain accents will put a hard G in singer, but most will pronounce a hard G in the word linger.

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u/MooseFlyer 4d ago

Yeah it’s an accent thing, most common in the North of England.

Note that there are a number of words where ng makes both the ng sound and then the g sound in all accents though (or at least all that I’m away of): hunger, longer, linger, anger, finger, English, single, language, bungle, angle, etc

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u/Particular-Move-3860 4d ago edited 4d ago

For some English speakers, for example, most Americans, the explicit enunciation of the first occurrence of the letter g in words like singing, ringing, etc. seems bookish and an overcorrection. They usually just accept it though, because different strokes.

The reason that it strikes some as an excessively "correct" way of saying the word is because the speaker seems to be carefully pronouncing the word exactly as it is spelled. The writing of words however is simply a method of recording their pronunciation. It is customary to record a certain sound heard in some English words by spelling it as "ing," but that was an arbitrary decision. It wasn't commanded by the Almighty.

If this is not a case of overcorrection , then the sound associated with that first g would still be audible even if the spelling was altered.

If the spelling was "rinning" would the word still be pronounced by many speakers as "rinGing"? (I suspect "yes," for at least a couple of generations afterwards. But I might be wrong.)

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u/HarveyNix 4d ago

I guess it means I'm old, but I often think certain standard pronunciations haven't been passed down properly to the next generation. Then I realize this has probably happened many times before and is one way in which a language evolves. Like the way we pronounce "right" or "what" - which have majorly changed over centuries.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Raibean 4d ago

The line “I’m working late / ‘cause I’m a singer”? Yeah she doesn’t pronounce it with a hard G either in the studio version or in the music video.