Syllable count for apparent monosyllabic words like "child," "wild," and field"

Question

How many syllables are there in "child," "wild," and field"? If we look at the dictionary, it will tell us that these are monosyllabic words. There appear, however, to be diphthongs in each of these that lengthen the vowels to make them sound as though there are two. What do our experts say?

Answer 1

The traditional way of counting syllables is to say that file and vile are monosyllabic words, and that trial and vial are two-syllable words.

However, if you pronounce vial and vile as homonyms, and trial and file as exact rhymes, this isn't consistent—the number of syllables in a word should depend on the pronunciation and not the spelling.

I believe there used to be a difference in pronunciation between vial and vile which has now vanished for the majority of people.

Nineteenth-century poets seem to have treated trial and vial as two-syllable words, and file and vile as one-syllable words. Keats rhymes trial with phial, while rhyming smiles with isles, files with crocodiles, and vile with toil (this last must have been a near-rhyme, but probably a better one in Keats' English than it is today). Similarly, Lewis Carroll rhymes trial and denial in the poem The Mouse's Tale, while rhyming smiled and child in the poem Phantasmagorica.

Finally, Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary from 1828 pronounces vial as /ˈvɑɪ·əl/ and vile as /vɑɪl/ (here, I'm translating their phonetic notation to IPA).

Thus, it appears that in the 19th century, vial and vile really had two different pronunciations with different number of syllables.

However, today Cambridge Dictionary gives both /ˈvɑɪ·əl/ and /vɑɪl/ as pronunciations for vial, and the Merriam-Webster's dictionary gives the exact same pronunciation for them. Further, I personally cannot distinguish the pronunciations of vial from those of vile on forvo.com. The pronunciation has thus undoubtedly changed (if trial and mile had really rhymed in the 19th century, I am sure poets would have taken advantage of it, and having looked through the works of several poets, I can't find any who did).

So, I must conclude that due to a change in the English language, vial and vile are now (for most speakers, at least) homonyms. Thus, the traditional assignment of one syllable to vile and two to vial is now questionable.

I don't believe that there is a set of “experts” tasked with assigning each word in the English language with a definite number of syllables; thus, I'm not sure asking what the “experts” say has a definite answer. One reasonable thing to do is to say that both of these words are varisyllabic, and thus can be assigned either one or two syllables. People already do this with words like near and higher in British accents (see this blog entry). It is probably time to extend this analysis to field and mile.

Answer 2

This confusion is the result of a phenomenon called pre-L breaking, for which I must once again cite a Geoff Lindsey video. Essentially, when a vowel sound ending in a glide occurs before an /l/ in the same syllable, an extra /ə/ is often inserted before it, turning wild from /wɑjld/ into /wɑjəld/. This explains the possible appearance of an extra syllable when some speakers pronounce such words. (See the aforementioned video for the reason I'm transcribing that vowel with a /j/ instead of a /ɪ/.)

This paper by Jánosy goes into a bit more detail. Pre-L breaking typically occurs before "dark" /l/ (an /l/ realized as [ɫ]); for this reason, it can occur in a wider range of environments in American English than in British English. A similar phenomenon happens before /r/, as in hire and higher (as mentioned by @tchrist in the comments above), explaining the possible appearance of a second syllable in those words also.

Answer 3

The words are indeed Monosyllabic. The diphthongs only show that both vowels are pronounced as two non-identical letters, but in a gliding sense, so as to not lengthen the actual word. The words continue to hold only one syllable.