When someone with a Received Pronunciation accent pronounces the word duke, as in The Duke of York, he doesn't pronounce it with a "hard" 'd', as one might pronounce the word duh, but a softer type 'd', which I can only spell phonetically as "dj", so as to pronounce duke somewhat like "djuke."
My question is composed of two parts:
- What would a linguist call this phoneme?
- What is the difference in articulation between it and a "regular" /d/?
Best Answer
This is called palatalization of the /d/ sound: under influence of a /u/ sound ("oo" as in moon), the preceding consonant sometimes gets the palatal glide /ʲ/, pronounced like "y" in yoke. This results in /dʲuːk/, also rendered /djuːk/.
I believe this palatalization can occur with any /u/ sound, as in news, /nʲuːz/, but it is much less common with short /ʊ/ as in book or put, that is, I can't think of any example. It generally depends on the word and the dialect whether the consonant is always, sometimes, or never palatalized. There appears to be less palatalization in America and in Estuary English (middle-class South-East England) than in Received Pronunciation. This pronunciation /duːk/ is sometimes called yod dropping, from the name of the semi-vowel y in linguistics. There may be rules behind this, but I don't have the full picture, especially not on the elusive pronunciation of lu-.