Contents › Section 1: Phonetics, phonology and orthography › answer 32 of 32
Why givin’ instead of giving?
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The answer is very simple. The -ing suffix is pronounced either or /in/ or .
The choice of pronunciation of the -ing suffix depends on:
- Dialect of English: There are three dialectal choices in English
a. /iŋ/ - standard English, many non-standard dialects
b. /in/ - many dialects or non-standard variants
c. /iŋg/ - some dialects in the UK (here's a nice map)
- Register: There is also variation between /iŋ/ and /in/ within dialects depending on the register. In this case, /in/ is usually a feature of lower registers. In fact, it is used as a marker of low speech.
Because of the high status of the Standard dialect, there are no dialects of English now where /in/ is the high register option even though that did not used to be the case.
As such it is often called 'g dropping' even though there is no actual g there to be dropped. The common explanation is laziness but that is not the case. It is simply a case of variation.
You can see more about that in this Language Log post.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).