Pronunciation – Do We Ever Pronounce ‘G’ in ‘ING’ (e.g., ‘Going Out’)?

pronunciation

OK, I know that I will never pronounce "g" in "ing".

But what should I do in situations like "going out"?

When I say it, it seems that I pronounced "g". There are other situations like this but this one happens more often than others.

Best Answer

The statement that you 'never pronounce "g" in "-ing" refers to the sound /g/. The spelling ‹ng› almost never involves the sound /g/. ‹ng› is a 'digraph' (like ‹th›)—in almost all cases it represents the sound /ŋ/, the consonant at the end of sing, hang, long.

So there is no actual /g/ sound in the -ing suffix. In speech, however, pronunciation alternates between "standard" /ŋ/ and a more casual /n/. This is sometimes written with an apostrophe, singin’, hangin’, goin’, to emphasize that the pronunciation is casual or dialectal, and in non-technical discussion this is often called "dropping the g"—but it is "dropped" only from the spelling!

Either /ŋ/ or /n/ is acceptable in speech with the -ing suffix, and usually nobody will notice which you employ.

The sound /ŋ/ does transition to /g/ in a few words such as linger (/lɪŋgər/) and hunger (/hʌŋgər/). The /g/ sound is obligatory in those words. To the best of my knowledge, however, this occurs only in the middle of words, never at the end. Some dialects expand this transition to situations where a word ending in /ŋ/ takes a suffix starting with a vowel; many New Yorkers for instance, pronounce singing as /sɪŋgiŋ/. But I've never encountered this across word boundaries.

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