While living in Conception Bay South for the last twelve years, I have heard some weird traits about the language in the area. The most common one would have to be the saying "you drop your h in 'Olyrood and pick it up in H'avondale." The process of h dropping and adding is very common in Newfoundland, and has some roots in the history of the English language and its progression throughout time. 

What got me thinking about this phrase was over the weekend, when I ran into a friend of mine while running some errands around town. She has lived in Holyrood her entire life, and while she isn't someone I talk to often, I have always noticed this little quirk about her speech. No matter if it is in a formal conversation, like a presentation in a classroom, or something more casual like the encounter I experienced, she always has a tendency to drop the H from her words that begin with this consonant. Even in the five minutes or so I was chatting with her, she displayed this feature countless times.

H dropping and adding are example of the many phonological aspects of the English language. The first is described as being the omission of the initial h-sound in a word, and the other being the opposite. Many people add this phoneme to the beginning of words which are not spelled with it, or do not typically have it. While these two processes do not change the meaning of a word in any way and most people still fully understand what is meant, they just make them sound a little funny. These process of h-dropping and adding seem to carry their roots in the history of the English language. To begin, we will first look at h-dropping.

This is seen as being a cross between the new and old dialects of the English language, and a feature which is common in the Newfoundland dialect. Linguists often debate which words initially had a beginning h consonant and which ones picked up on it later, so it seems as though this is peoples way of holding on to a more old style of English. Everyone knows this language has undergone many changes, and almost seems as though it is a completely different language altogether (most of us would not be able to read pure old English), but some of it's features have stuck around in dropping the h consonant from words that did not have it in the beginning. 

On the opposite end, we have the process of h-adding. This is said to be a hyper correction of English, mostly found in areas which are common for h dropping. Maybe trying to make up for what they miss in other words? Not so much, as it is mostly a stylistic feature of the language, depending on the speaker of the utterance and what is being spoken. While this is not quite so historic as h-dropping, it is still a very common feature in the Newfoundland English variety.

The phrase I mentioned above are only two small places which show both of these features. We can hear this all over the province, as well in many other places in the world (h-dropping is apparently common in places like Serbia and Sweden). To me, this is very noteworthy because it shows the progression of the English language and how some people make steps to keep it back to it's older roots, especially in Newfoundland. So, next time you are out for a Sunday drive, head up the shore to Olyrood and H'avondale and talk to some of the locals, you may see more people than you think displaying this feature of language.