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The rule that I usually use in such cases is that *an* precedes a vowel sound, while *a* is used before a consonant sound. I understand sound as different from letter - conventionally u would be called a vowel, but in unitary it actually sounds as [yu] ([ju], if we use IPA).

The question is:

  • do we deal here with a simple misuse (confusing the latter and the sound that it corresponds to, but possibly also me using the incorrect rule)?

OR

  • is there a dialectal difference involved here, so that some people would pronounce u of unitary as [u], in which case using an would actually make sense? If this is the case, is this difference characteristic of a geographic region, social origin or something else?

Update
I think the proposed duplicates do not really answer the question: some of them assume that [ju] is the "correct" pronunciation, whereas the other discuss the phonetic value of [j] as semivowel, that is conceivably perceptible as vowel - hence either a or an can be used. For background: my first language is Russian, which does have a separate letter й corresponding to consonant/semivowel [j], and a double set of vowel symbols: а/я ~ [a]/[ja], о/ё ~ [o]/[jo], etc. So for me [u] and [ju] are two distinct possibilities. Thus the question remains: are these indistinguishable to an English speaker OR does using one or the other is a matter of one's dialect/sociolect?

Update 2
The question has been now answered in the Linguistics community (and migrated back to English language and usage) with the reference to article A Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Indefinite Article Forms in London English. I cite below the abstract:

This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed interviews, combining methodologies from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. The authors find a relatively high frequency of a before words beginning with a vowel, where Standard English will have an. Social factors, in particular speakers’ age, ethnicity, and place of residence, are more important than linguistic factors affecting the use of a before vowels. The authors argue that the indefinite article a before vowels forms part of Multicultural London English, along with other phonological and grammatical features that have previously been documented. The indefinite article a before vowels seems to have undergone a process of reallocation in which its status has been realigned, possibly because of an increase in social acceptance of nonstandard forms.

(emphasis is mine)

Roger V.
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  • See Words starting with vowel "Y"? You can certainly speak/write about a solution of an yttrium* salt.* – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 10:15
  • ...there's some very obscure stuff to do with *an historic occasion*, but I'm sure that's been fully covered here before. Besides, it's practically moribund. – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 10:21
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    @FumbleFingers You are confusing y, the letter, and y as sound, that is, jod, otherwise and more generaly written "j". So yttrium is /itr …/. – LPH Apr 20 '23 at 11:06
  • @StuartF I think the suggested duplicates do not answer the question, even though they deal with the same phenomenon. See the Update above. – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 11:32
  • @FumbleFingers I think the suggested duplicates do not answer the question, even though they deal with the same phenomenon. See the Update above. – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 11:33
  • Have you found evidence of the alternative pronunciation you suggest in dictionaries, Roger? – Edwin Ashworth Apr 20 '23 at 11:46
  • @EdwinAshworth I am asking about such evidence - that the question (see the sentence in bold.) There is evidence of different spelling, which is probably indicative of how people hear/pronounce this. – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 11:48
  • I don't really see the point of this question. It seems to be asking whether there are any actual native speaker dialects where people speak like non-native speakers. Why would they? – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 12:16
  • @FumbleFingers there are almost 400 million native English speakers - it would be really amazing, if they all spoke the same: Americans, Canadians, British, Australians, Indians... I am a non-native English speaker, and people still comment on my New York pronunciation. – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 14:16
  • Though the question has apparently been closed on 'duplicate' grounds (and like you I'm not so sure), a statement such as 'I have found no evidence of such a pronunciation in OALD, Collins, M-W or AHD' shows reasonable research (lack of such evidence being another CV reason). – Edwin Ashworth Apr 20 '23 at 14:44
  • @EdwinAshworth I agree that it is agood diea to check, and I will certainly do so... but to what extent can consider dictionaries as a reflection of a living language, rather than its "prestigious" variety? See Prescriptive linguistics. – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 14:52
  • As pointed out (with different examples) by @Lambie, for native Anglophones it's always *a used car* and *an oozing sore, never the other way around. There's always the possibility of non-native Anglophones not being clear about this, but I just can't see any reason to ask whether any native* Anglophones might speak differently in this respect. – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 16:00
  • @FumbleFingers I do believe to have seen an + u... in texts written by native anglophones... but I suppose at this point it becomes my statements without evidence against your and Lambie's statements without evidence. – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 16:07
  • @FumbleFingers also: a unitary/uniform is not necessarily the same sound as in a used car. – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 16:16
  • Things are occasionally written incorrectly that would simply never occur in a spoken context. For example, you initioally wrote that someone is an oozing* sore on the perfect skin of society*, then decided that was a bit ott, so you toned it down to *a useless parasite*. in your old word processor. And you forgot to edit the article as well as the adjective. – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 16:19
  • unitary, uniform, and used all start with the same (semi)vowel for all Anglophones – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 16:20
  • @RogerVadim Something like an urticarial rash would be correct, because the u in urticarial is not the same u as in uniform. Is that what you have seen? – Andrew Leach Apr 20 '23 at 16:21
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    Roger - I know we're supposed to back up everything we say with "evidence", but there's simply no comparison between myself and Lambie as competent native speakers claiming that "All Anglophones do this", and you claiming that we might be wrong! – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 16:25
  • @FumbleFingers I don't think anyone can speak for hundreds of millions of people on any matter, including English. Also, native speaker is a theoretical concept, which like many terms have meaning somewhat different from what laymen might think. A teacher of mine used to say that native speaker implies the level of knowledge and language proficiency in every domain of life that actual people never have ;) – Roger V. Apr 20 '23 at 16:55
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    Yes, pronouncing unitary without the initial glide is indeed a clear marker of non-nativeness or a speech impediment. It is not a feature of any representative dialect of English. Of course, no one can speak categorically for all native speakers of a language. But imagine I asked whether the Russian word for ‘I’ is я or а based on a theoretical assumption that there may be some dialect that pronounces it as [a] instead of [ja]. If a bunch of Russians told me that there aren’t, and I then rejected that because no one can speak for all Russian-speakers, would you take me seriously? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 20 '23 at 19:53
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    @FumbleFingers “For native Anglophones it's always *a used* car and *an oozing* sore, never the other way around” — Not necessarily the full truth. It will never the actual opposite, no, but don’t forget that there are many dialects where an has all but disappeared and it would be a oozing sore as well as a used car. But absolutely never an used car, you’re quite right there. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 20 '23 at 19:57
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: I stand corrected - you're quite right. Increasing numbers of Americans in particular articulate a kind of [schwa] + "glottal stop" + oooh instead of "n" in the middle. But as a more-or-less Cockney, I'm a fully-signed-up user of gloʔal stops, and it always rattles me that the American version isn't quite a glottal stop to my ear! – FumbleFingers Apr 20 '23 at 20:24
  • @JanusBahsJacquet First of all, thank you for taking my question seriously and providing some relevant information. Regarding the opinion of native speakers: I trust them to make authentic utterances, but I take their judgements about the language with a grain of salt. Indeed, a bunch of native French would likely tell you that their language has only five vowels: a, o, u, e, i. Likewise, Moskovites would likely argue that the only Russians speaking correct Russian live in their city (about 10% of all the Russian speakers.) [contd.] – Roger V. Apr 21 '23 at 07:19
  • @JanusBahsJacquet [contd.] see the comments below this answer for the examples of different realizations of [ju] vs [iu] in Russian rendering of names like Judas and Jonas. – Roger V. Apr 21 '23 at 07:22
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    There are certainly cases where I’ve been made aware of a dialectal feature that I’d never heard before, and which sounded very odd to me – this was the case the first time someone drew my attention to /ɪ/-lowering before /l/ (‘melk, pellow’) as part of the Northern Cities sound shift, for example. But despite the fact that yod-dropping is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon, nobody here has been able to identify any dialect where it applies in absolute onset. → – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 21 '23 at 10:42
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    → Not even the most extremely yod-dropping dialects mentioned in the Wikipedia article (e.g., Norfolk) extend their yod-dropping to initial position – that is in fact the only place where they consistently retain the /j/. Short of individually asking 400 million people, we can’t rule out that there may be some obscure speech community in a village somewhere that exhibits initial yod-dropping – you can’t prove a negative – but we can certainly say, based on several native speakers and the Wikipedia article, that no representative dialect does so. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 21 '23 at 10:42
  • @JanusBahsJacquet these are relevant and well-argued comments. I see that you are a high-reputation user here and probably do not care for extra points, but I think writing your comments as an answer would benefit the community - since the questions about initial "u" seem to pop up regularly. – Roger V. Apr 21 '23 at 11:12
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    Most dictionaries have real people, plural, reasonable linguists, forming usage panels that judge acceptability of constructions / candidate words / candidate meanings. They do a far better job than 99+% of Joe Opinions (each of whom is singular, and who knows how reasonable a linguist) would. //As per Janus's comments, I'd expect "AHD, CD, OALD ... provide no support for the 'an unitary' usage". But that's valuable (and reasonable) research. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 21 '23 at 11:21

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