'Breksit' or 'bregzit'? The question that divides a nation

Britain is divided. With the clock ticking on negotiations in Brussels, neither national leaders nor the wider public can agree on one of the most fundamental questions arising from the vote to leave the European Union: is it pronounced “breksit” or “bregzit”?

Linguistic differences are crucial when we form impressions of others. A funeral planning business recently set up a call centre in South Wales, at least partly because the accent was considered friendly. Less positively, survey after survey has demonstrated that a Birmingham or Liverpool accent can make British people think the speaker is unintelligent.

The impulse to correlate differences is so strong that speakers can seize on any speech difference they hear, and connect it to some social difference. This duly happened with Brexit.

Both “breksit” and “bregzit” make sense in linguistic terms. British speakers who say “breksit” are likely to have a vocabulary-related (lexical) explanation: the word is made up of Br(itish)- + exit, and they pronounce the last part “eksit”. The explanation for “bregzit”, on the other hand, is phonetic and phonological (to do with the way sounds are produced and arranged). In English, voiceless sounds (where the vocal cords don’t vibrate) can become voiced when they occur between two voiced sounds (in which the vocal cords vibrate). The voiceless “ks” becomes a voiced “gz” in the case of “Brexit”, since the sound falls between two vowels in the word “exit”.

So either of these two pronunciations could be naturally produced by a native speaker of English. Neither one is intrinsically more correct than the other. Nor is there an obvious social reason why any given speaker would produce one or the other. Presence or lack of intervocalic voicing of voiceless consonants doesn’t differentiate UK accents, social classes or the sexes. And yet the difference between “breksit” and “bregzit” is very prominent, as Twitter polls by historian Greg Jenner and I demonstrate.