I can't recall having heard the word 'vestige' pronounced with second-syllable stress and the long vowel [i:], until a couple of months ago when I heard it used in a podcast. I immediately wondered whether it was a dialectal variant or an 'eye-dialect' related to the more common prestige, which has these features, and which is the only other English word to end in -tige. I quickly realized, though, that prestige has two variant pronunciations, and I needed to ask about both words together.

A strong majority of you (around three-quarters) pronounce vestige as ['vɛstɪdʒ] 'VES-tidge', and this is the variant I've always heard, but over 20% of you say either ves-TEEDGE [vɛs'tidʒ] or ves-TEEZH [vɛs'tiʒ]. In contrast, second-syllable stressed pronunciations of prestige, pres-TEEDGE [pɹɛs'tidʒ] or pres-TEEZH [pɹɛs'tiʒ], are nearly universal. So what is going on?

Prestige entered English in the seventeenth century as a borrowing from French. It is first attested in Thomas Blount's Glossographia of 1656, from which my academic blog takes its name. It originally referred to a magician's illusion or trick (as in the book by Christopher Priest and its film adaptation), and only became a general term meaning influence or reputation in the mid-nineteenth century. Curiously, pronunciations of the word with first-syllable stress and the 'short' i in the second syllable were once common, and the OED notes that this may have been the earliest pronunciation, and that most nineteenth-century dictionaries listed both options. Yet the word was quite rare in this period, and used mostly to refer to magician's tricks. Today, no dictionary provides these first-syllable stressed pronunciations.

Vestige is similarly a seventeenth-century borrowing from French (ultimately from Latin vestigium 'footprint'), although an earlier form vestigy was around a century earlier. All my dictionaries provide only the commonest variant VES-tidge, even though the popularity of the second-syllable stressed variants is high enough that one might expect them to show up somewhere. The likeliest explanation is that prestige is now substantially more common than vestige (Google: 61.4 million vs. 2.01 million; Wordcount ranking: 7102 vs. 30112) and so some people are using the visual similarity of the two words to choose a second-syllable stressed variant for vestige. The fact that the words look French (and in fact are of French origin) encourages these variants, despite their lack of official acceptance.

It is worth noting the difference between the variants ending in [dʒ] 'J' and those ending in [ʒ] 'zh'. [ʒ] on its own is quite rare in English, only occurring in French loanwords, whereas [dʒ] is relatively common, and is phonemic in English - i.e., it is basically heard and understood as one sound by English speakers, even though technically one is starting with the tongue in a [d] position and then moving towards [ʒ] (similarly, 'ch' is phonetically [tʃ]). The most interesting aspect of this variability is the near-absence of VES-tizh ['vɛstɪʒ] in the poll, despite the use of ves-TEEZH. This gap confirms that ves-TEEZH and ves-TEEDGE are derived by analogy from pres-TEEZH and pres-TEEDGE, rather than by reanalyzing the stress of the first-syllable VES-tidge / VES-tizh.

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