I am what most of the world considers a "non-native" speaker of English. I, however, consider myself a "native" speaker of English because:
- I grew up speaking English since birth,
- English is the language that I am most fluent at,
- I have never formally studied English, I just picked it up as a child as the first language that I acquired.
Recently, a "non-native" friend of mine asked me whether it is "a helicopter" or , "an helicopter", and I realised that I would personally say "a helicopter" when the stress in the sentence was on the noun helicopter, but when the stress was elsewhere, I would say "an helicopter".
Is this correct in the main standard dialects of English or is this some bad habit I have picked up?
