Editing H-dropping (section)

====Description====
H-dropping, in certain accents and dialects of [[Modern English]], causes words like ''harm'', ''heat'', ''home'' and ''behind'' to be pronounced ''arm'', ''eat'', ''ome'' and ''be-ind'' (though in some dialects an [h] may appear in ''behind'' to prevent hiatus &ndash; see below).

Cases of H-dropping occur in all English dialects in the [[weak and strong forms in English|weak form]]s of [[function word]]s like ''he'', ''him'', ''her'', ''his'', ''had'', and ''have''. The [[it (pronoun)|pronoun ''it'']] is a product of historical H-dropping – the older ''hit'' survives as an emphatic form in a few dialects such as [[Southern American English]], and in the [[Scots language]].<ref>David D. Murison, ''The Guid Scots Tongue'', Blackwodd 1977, p. 39.</ref> Because the {{IPA|/h/}} of  unstressed ''have'' is usually dropped, the word is usually pronounced {{IPA|/əv/}} in phrases like ''should have'', ''would have'', and ''could have''. These can be spelled out in informal writing as "should've", "would've", and "could've". Because {{IPA|/əv/}} is also the weak form of the word ''of'', these words are often erroneously spelled as ''should of'', ''would of'' and ''could of''.<ref>{{cite book | last=van Ostade | first=I.T.B. | title=Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English | publisher=Taylor & Francis | year=2019 | isbn=978-0-429-55814-6 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gvqzDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT112 | access-date=2020-02-23}}</ref>