Irregardless...

For some reason, people on Facebook (at least) are recently upset about irregardless existing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary of English, despite the fact that it has been around in various sources since at least 1912.  Most references to the word label it as "erroneous," or an example of substandard or dialectal English.

Some of these folks claim that irregardless is not a word, but this is clearly wrong.  Irregardless is a string of four syllables, with one prominent stress on -gard-.  This is a pretty good definition of a word in English (but not necessarily all languages!).

Furthermore, irregardless is a completely legal example of English Morphophonology, which has to do with the sound of words and smaller things (prefixes, for example) when they appear in context.

English has a Negative Prefix, /in-/, which attaches to adjectives to negate their meaning: for example inedible, indecent, etc.  This prefix is pronounced in several different ways, depending on the beginning sound of the word it attaches to:

• If the word starts with a vowel, it's pronounced in-:  inactive, inedible, inoperable, etc.
• If the words starts with a consonant, in- assimilates to the articulation of the consonant: for example, if the consonant is Labial, /m/ is used: impossible;  if the consonant is Alveolar, /n/ is used: indelible; and so on.

Now here's where it gets interesting.  If the consonant is a Liquid (/l/ or /r/) the /n/ assimilates to those consonants:

• illegal  /in-/  →  /il-/
• irrational  /in-/  →  /ir-/

So what we can conclude is that not only is irregardless a perfectly good English word, but it also follows the rules of English word-formation.

Irregardless of what some people might think of it.