[General] Shall I call the doctor?

[beachboy]

If I'm not mistaken, the auxiliary verb "shall" is mostly used in British English. Anyway, I 'd like to know what the most common pronunciation of this verb is. Can it rhyme with either "all", "how" or "tell"?

 

[GoesStation]

We do use "shall" occasionally in American English. Some people say "shall I/we", and it's common in contracts and other legal documents.

It doesn't rhyme with any of the words you've listed. I pronounce it approximately /ʃæl/, using the vowel in hat. Sometimes it shifts towards the vowel in hot.

 

[jutfrank]

Along with the strong form as transcribed in post #2 above, it is very often pronounced in its weak form, with a schwa: /[FONT=&quot]ʃəl[/FONT]/.

 

[Tdol]

I think that very posh accents of the past might have rhymed it with tell.

 

[emsr2d2]

I had never realised how few one-syllable rhymes there are for "shall". In fact, I can think of only two commonly used words: pal and gal.

 

[Phaedrus]

Along with the strong form as transcribed in post #2 above, it is very often pronounced in its weak form, with a schwa: /ʃəl/.

I think this schwa pronunciation is very rare in American English. When AmE speakers use "shall," we tend to do so deliberately, and the deliberateness manifests itself in somewhat emphatic, un-schwa-like pronunciation.

I have wondered if BrE speakers tend to use the schwa pronunciation when using "shall" as a run-of-the-mill future auxiliary. Would anyone care to answer that, even if only speculatively? I'm not looking for statistics.

My "theory" is that one of the reasons almost no AmE speakers use "shall" as a run-of-the-mill future auxiliary is that we do not naturally use it in a casual, de-emphasized manner. We pronounce in"shall" a stilted way, so it seems stilted to most of us.

For most AmE speakers, saying something like "I shall be home shortly" carries a level of formality analogous to going to the beach in a tuxedo.

 

[emsr2d2]

We don't use it all that often in BrE except in the interrogative.

Shall I go and get some bread?
Shall I make tea?
Shall I wear my new dress on Saturday evening?
Shall we go to the cinema tonight?
Shall we have curry for dinner?

We only use it for the first person singular and plural.

 

[jutfrank]

I have wondered if BrE speakers tend to use the schwa pronunciation when using "shall" as a run-of-the-mill future auxiliary. Would anyone care to answer that, even if only speculatively? I'm not looking for statistics.

Yes, but only in its unemphasised use, of course.

As post #9 points out, shall is most commonly used in interrogative forms, where it tends often to be pronounced in its weak form.

To go further, for various reasons of prosody, whereas the auxiliary in a closed question is pronounced in its strong form as well as its weak form (e.g. Shall I come?), when used in an open question (What shall I do?) it's more likely to have the weak form than the strong. I don't believe it differs from other auxiliaries (can/could) in this respect.

 

[Tdol]

I notice that Jacob Rees-Mogg still uses I should for I would. You can find examples of past things being used in BrE, but that doesn't mean they're standard,