The H wars: Aitch or haitch?

In the domain of English usage, certain issues tend to crop up again and again, causing people to get incredibly excitable for no readily apparent reason.

I've taken to referring to these as linguistic bugbears, after the ancient Welsh goblin used to incite fear in children—though the Greek hydra, with its ever-increasing number of heads, might be a better parallel.

In fact, many of the legendary beasts in the Dungeons and Dragons mythos are fitting analogies for language disputes; there is something fantastical about the capacity of people to simply believe things about language without ever checking the facts.

Examples include the idea that young women use harmful vocal fry, that common swear words have acronymical origins, and that women say the word just too much.

How one should pronounce the eighth letter of the alphabet—H—is one such point of contention. In Australia, the common line of thinking seems to be there are two ways to pronounce it—'aitch', and 'haitch'. The latter, many people believe, is disastrously wrong.

'Haitch' (the thinking goes) has no place in proper Australian English: it's a feature of some varieties of Irish English, was brought to Australia by Irish Catholic educators in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, and serves as a marker of Irish Catholic education.

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Given that Irish immigrants in Australia were predominantly working class, to say 'haitch' rather than 'aitch' (runs the folk etymology) marks you as some mixture of proletarian, Irish and Catholic-educated. This is to be avoided, lest you appear rude or—worse—poor.

There is one small problem with this theory: it may never have been true, and it certainly isn't true now. Susan Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, notes only anecdotal evidence for the Catholicism claim.

One of the problems with collecting empirical evidence on issues of pronunciation is that, unlike text, spoken words are not often written down and are very hard to search for. Complicating matters in this instance is the fact that the letter H is rarely said on its own.

But lexicographers are a hardy bunch, who shirk not the sweat of labour—and the Australian National Dictionary Centre found a novel way around this information gap.

'We conducted a survey of the television programme Wheel of Fortune over a period of some weeks,' wrote the ANDC's Frederick Ludowyk in 1998. Ludowyk measured how many contestants who asked the board for 'an aitch' against those who asked for 'a haitch'.

Finding the two roughly equal, he concluded that Australians from a wide variety of backgrounds are haitchers these days, and that any sectarian (or class-based) split on the pronunciation is long gone.

Facts aside, hating on 'haitch' is a proud, century-old Australian tradition. 'I hear young teachers sometimes teaching youngsters to say haitch for aitch,' wrote Cecil Poole in a 1910 edition of the Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate.

Poole categorises the instruction towards 'haitch' as an example of pronunciation that is either slummocky or affected. Keen mythbusters will notice no mention of religious affiliation here.

In a 1944 session of Australian Parliament, then-Senate president Gordon Brown said he had heard various members of Parliament pronounce H as 'haitch'. 'Whereas its proper pronunciation,' Brown opined, 'is aitch.'

'Proper' is a telling word in that sentence, as is the implication that high-status members of society—that is, parliamentarians—ought to know better.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly where this predilection for 'aitch' comes from. One possibility is institutional support: in 1929, the Victorian Education Department notified its teachers to cease teaching 'haitch', 'as had been the practice of some teachers'. Curiouser, and curiouser.

There is, at least, one argument for 'haitch' as the correct form we should all adopt. As any confused child learning their letters will tell you, H and W are the only members of the modern English alphabet who don't pronounce themselves when said out loud.

There is some evidence that the two pronunciations may be on equal footing in Australia today, at least in the speech patterns of younger people.  Students on the boredofstudies website, for example, are about as likely to write 'an HSC' (aitch) as they are to say 'a HSC' (haitch).