A long time ago in a land far far away I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged American who assured me that some of the older folks in his community still pronounced the K-sound in the word knife. I happened to be on the island of Roanoke, in North Carolina, and my interlocutor was a local resident. I never got to hear that unusual pronunciation, but I don't question the man's account. Some pronunciation habits die hard and Roanoke was, after all, the site of a colony that once attempted to be the first permanent English settlement in what is today U. S. soil. Their dialect is, in many ways, a direct descendant from the region of Devonshire in England. Still, people's perceptions of their own language are often unreliable. I have encountered many a Spaniard who decried the loss of the labiodental [v] in Spanish, even though it was never a phoneme in standard Castilian. It does make sense, though, that some of the characteristics of the English variety spoken in Roanoke should be old. Still, I have no proof that the medieval consonant cluster [kn] has really survived into the 21st century. In European English it faded away around 1650. Did it manage to survive in the Outer Banks of North Carolina for over three hundred years? Who "K-nows"?
I sometimes use that anecdote to illustrate the fact that there was a time in the English language when the K-sound was actually pronounced in words such as knight, know, knee and knife. Unfortunately for foreign learners, the pronunciation of English evolved quite a bit while its spelling remained essentially unchanged. And that is the reason for the chaotic orthographic system we all enjoy today. Over the course of a few centuries, however, some of the consonant sounds that ceased to be articulated are still represented by the so-called "silent letters". Here's a brief sample of letters that represent no sounds:
- L in palm, balm, calm, half, salmon
- B in climb, bomb, thumb, comb
- W in write, sword, wrong
This is, of course, the cause of untold headaches. There are many other surprising examples. Just think of the "p" in words such as corps, cupboard or receipt. Nevertheless, I suspect that you'd rather watch a video about silent letters than read a wordy explanation of their origins, which is why I suggest you take some minutes of your time and enjoy the following clip:
So, does that happen overnight? Clearly not. The process whereby a sound is lost may go on for decades or even centuries, but it is always identifiable. Right now, in 2026, we have two pronunciations for the word human: with and without the H-sound. That means that the word human might be in the process of losing its initial consonant. It is not an isolated case of phonetic change. Some older speakers on the East Coast still pronounce the word whale as [hweil] and white as [hwaIt]. Alas, their children have already abandoned that pronunciation. Without any young speakers pronouncing the [h] in whale. we can safely say that the sound is virtually defunct. Similarly we can see now that some speakers articulate a [d] or a [t] in the word handsome. Most don't. Sooner of later those exceptional productions will vanish altogether and the "d" in handsome, pretty much like the [h] in whale, will be officially silent.
The main takeaway from this post should be that languages are always changing. Different pronunciations may compete for a while, but eventually one becomes mainstream and the other falls by the wayside. Silent letters remind us all of this very process. In a way, they are the headstone next to the grave where nonexistent sounds lie. Your duty as an English learner is to know which sounds are gone and which are still around. You don't want to pronounce phonetic cadavers or create zombie phonemes. If you do you may one day mention the U. S. Marine "Corpse".
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N. B. Should you be interested in listening to a reconstructed evolution of English you may want to check out the first three minutes of this fascinating video.
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