pronunciation of 'hegemony'

How do you pronounce 'hegemony'? Where do you put the stress? Do you pronounce a [dzh] sound or a simple [g]?

Personally, I would go for /həˈgeməni/ but I'm no native English speaker.

Heh-JEM-o-nee. Regular soft G, accent on the second syllable.

I say it as Uriel does. In X-SAMPA I say it [h@"dZEm@ni] .

Soft G is US only; hard G elsewhere, with stress on the second syllable.

It's not US only. The "soft G" pronunciation is universal since, as a Latin derived word, the "g" is followed by an "e".

I myself pronounce "hegemony" in X-SAMPA as ["hE:dZ@~:%mo~:ni:]. This specifically differs from Kirk and Uriel's pronunciations in the placement of stress and the pattern of vowel reduction resulting from such.

@ Guest: 'hegemony' is actually derived from ancient Greek, not from Latin.

I always pronounce it with a hard g. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, this is one of three acceptable pronunciations.

I pronounce it [h@"dZEm@ni], like Kirk.

Hard g.

I am a Linguist and there are 9 possible ways to pronouce this word, they vary based upon dialects

>> I myself pronounce "hegemony" in X-SAMPA as ["hE:dZ@~:%mo~:ni:]. This specifically differs from Kirk and Uriel's pronunciations in the placement of stress and the pattern of vowel reduction resulting from such. <<

Is that just you personally, or is that part of your dialect?

zzz, I can't say for certain, because I really don't hear the word "hegemony" much in Real Life. However, I would not be surprised if it applied to my dialect in general, as I have *never* heard "hegemony" with the stress on the second syllable *ever* in Real Life.

pronunciation of 'hegemony'

Since you’re so inclined (tongue-in-cheek), let’s perhaps throw some theoretical aspects into the consideration. Shall we?

Of course we’re talking about phonology and sprasegmental (not a wrong spelling, mind you) features in particular.

From what I can see, all of us do agree there’re 4 syllables in this word, i.e. he-ge-mo-ny, not necessarily divided correctly according to any principle. If you’ve any faith in the Sonority Principle (which I don’t necessarily), it does agree with you all. Or we could count the # of vowels too. We could invoke the generalization that the # of syllables in a word can be less but not more than the # of vowels (including the semi-vowel “y”) it contains. We get the same ans.

I guess according to our instinct, most of us prefer to stress the 2nd rather than the 1st syllable like in the word “hoMOlogy”. But some beg to differ like in the word “HElicopter”. I think both are acceptable as we shall see.

Don't forget if you place primary (tonic) stress on the 1st, you might’ve a secondary (post-tonic) stress on the 3rd. This is the nature of English.

Now let’s apply a device what linguists called Noun Extrametricality (Ask Linguist. He knows). As a noun, you disregard the last syllable for this purpose, you look at the final syllable ‘mo’ and since vowel ‘o’ pronounced as /ou/ (the long ‘o’ as in “shallow”) routinely behaves like a short vowel (a light syllable as opp to a heavy or branching one), we should place the stress on the next syllable to the right, i.e. ‘ge’. But ‘ge’ is not necessarily a heavy syllable here unless we include the following
‘m’ in that syllable hence ‘gem’ or pronounce the ‘e’ with its long sound /i:/ hence /gi:/. We could therefore in principle choose the 2nd syllable to stress. We would then pronounce this syllable in isolation as
/gi:/ (with the long ‘i) or /gem/ (with the short ‘e’), or /dzi:/ or /dzem/.

Let say we don’t. We wish to see if we could theoretically stress the 1st. We’ve the same problem. We either have to include the following ‘g’ in that syllable hence ‘heg’ or pronounce the 1st ‘e’ with its long sound /i:/ or /I/ sound ( the short ‘i’ as in “it”) by the concept of “the privilege of occurrence.” This concept basically says this /I/ along with the short ‘u’ sound as in “could” and the schwa sound can stand alone without a following consonant & if a consonant starts the next syllable. So we could stress this syllable if we utter it as /hI/, or /heg/, or/hedz/ or
/hi:/.

Ah the ‘g’. Most of us remember the phonic rule: soft ‘g’ after ‘e’ and hence /dze/ as in “gender”. Indeed my dictionaries (Gage and Webster’s) seem to permit only this soft sound while British permits both! I think Guess has a point.

I think we begin to see how many possible (or 'impossible') ways this word can really be uttered. My pronunciation dictionary lists 5 for the British dialect and 2 for US. My Canadian dictionary lists 2 which are the
not exactly the same as the 2 for the US. Linguist is probably right.

My preference and the way I pronounce it: I stress the 1st syllable & utter /hedz/ (in compliance with English stress rule, a phonic generalization and English phonotactic constraint). I reduce the 2nd to a bare schwa (A unique English feature & allowing the concept of the privilege of occurrence to stand. Hey even the Queen of England does it). I utter the 3rd syllable either as a full quality long ‘o’ sound /mo/ or again a schwa (as an open syllable or complying with the stated Concept). The 4th would be a long ‘e’ /i:/as all of us can agree).