/i/ sound before "ng" and "nk"

Question

I'm a substitute teacher and recently was teaching a kindergarten class about long i sound. They were crossing out words without long i, circling words with long i. One of the words was ink. I told them no, listen , we don't say i nk (say it with a long i to see what I mean) and they crossed it out. Later, looking at the teacher's edition, it had ink circled. I thought it was just a mistake then I saw that an ink bottle was actually used as an example in the book for the long i sound. I thought something was terribly wrong so I looked it up in the dictionary—it shows i in ink as a long i sound (I looked at many dictionaries, all were the same). This can't be right, but I'm wondering if it's one if those things that's just been accepted and not questioned. Or if it's a category that hasn't been explored yet as needing a separate sound to clarify, like words with r-controlled vowels. Any comments on this would be extremely helpful.

Edit:

I realized I made a mistake with my original post and used long I all the way through. I meant to say that in ink, think, pink, thing, ring, king, etc., in other words, words ending in "nk" and "ng", the "i" is usually pronounced more like a long e sound, like e in meet. At least, that is how I have always pronounced it and heard it pronounced. I'm from California so this could be regional, but I've never heard it pronounced with a short i like in it. Fumblefingers listed words in which a short i occurs, including ink, pink, bit, fit. I definitely hear short i in bit and fit, sounds the same. In ink and pink, i does not sound the same to me, nor have I heard people say it with the same i sound as in bit. Unless the i is getting so quickly blended into the "ng" that it is almost ignored, in which case it should have a special sound category like we teach r-controlled vowels. The pronunciation rules could be very different between the US and the UK .

Answer 1

Something funny happens to short i in some California accents; what most of us pronounce as short i (as in sit or king) turns into long e (as in seat or keen) when it's before an "nk" or an "ng". So ink would be pronounced eenk in these accents.

But this is a regional thing, established in California, Michigan, and probably several other regions of the U.S., but there are lots of regions where people don't do this. So the dictionaries are correct; except in California, pink and ring have a short i like bid.

Answer 2

• The pronunciation of the letter i before ng and nk is closer to "long e "or /i/ in Standard North American English (basically Midwest).

-The reason is coarticulation, the influence a sound can have on the other sounds around it. the /ng/ sound is present at the end of the work king but also before the /k/ in sink. To make that sound, the back of the tongue is high (you can feel it pressed against the velum, your dangly bit from the roof of your mouth). The height of the tongue causes us to not drop the tongue tip as much as we usually would to make the short I sound in kin or pin.

-while vowel sound in king is pronounced closer to where we make the ee (/i/) in keen, it is also shorter in duration in king than it would be in keen. Distinguishing long and short vowels is different when discussing pronunciation versus spelling. For kindergarteners learning to read, saying it is a "short i" (symbol /I/) better helps elicit the correct spelling with "i" rather than "ee" but another way to circumvent this is to just teach them as a class of "ing" family words. Otherwise, we'd have to develop a "bossy ng" rule like we do with "r", and really all the consonants are bossy because they change the vowels to some degree.

Answer 3

Modern neutral American English often uses the long ee sound before nk and ng. It's not regional so much as it is just the evolution of neutral American English. For example, kin and king are completely different "I" sounds. But unfortunately many English learning materials still teach it as a short sound.

Answer 4

Yes, for my money the "i" in "ink" and "ring" is pronounced long e. Like in "creak" and "leak." I don't get the short i pronunciation with these words.

Answer 5

Here in Maryland we say K-ee-ng (king) and p-ee-nk (pink). A Google search actually brought me to this thread, because I had a similar question regarding my son's Kindergarten homework.