| Comment | One point that may be useful for learners of English is that even 'gonna' isn't really a completely phonetic spelling. The vowel isn't a short O as in 'gone' but a short U as in 'gun.' If we were really logical, we'd spell it 'gunna.' (And I think someone actually has, maybe an early 20th-c. British writer like Joyce or Lawrence, can't remember who exactly, but you notice it because it never became a standard convention.) Or even just 'g'na,' since it's usually so quick the vowel is more like a schwa.
JGMcI's point about different meanings is well taken. When 'go' is the main verb and 'to' is a preposition showing direction, 'going to' is not pronounced 'gonna':
I'm going to the store.
(not pronounced *'I'm gonna the store.')
It's pronounced 'gonna' only when 'going to' is used like a modal, to form the future tense:
I'm going to go. (= I will go.)
(usually pronounced 'I'm gonna go.')
As for usage, students of English should definitely learn to _say_ 'gonna,' but speech and writing are two different things. Sometimes I see German speakers actually write 'gonna,' thinking that they're just being colloquial, when in fact it just looks wrong. It's one of those areas where it's hard for non-natives to get a feel for which colloquial usages are acceptable in which contexts, and which ones can make you appear less educated in the foreign language than you obviously are in your native language.
Even when 'going to' is pronounced 'gonna,' it's usually not written with the simplified phonetic spelling except in certain kinds of dialogue. Comic books are the most common example; the other is modern commercial scripts for movies and TV shows, where specifying the pronunciation helps show an actor how to play the character. But in older plays, and most novels, no one would write 'gonna' unless there was an unusual emphasis on a character's strong rural or regional accent; it's usually just taken for granted that 'going to' is often pronounced 'gonna' in casual speech. The same is true in journalism -- even if President Bush, for example, said 'gonna' (as he often does), it would be quoted, quite correctly, as 'going to' in newspapers and magazines. In fact, making his regional accent too prominent would normally be interpreted as disrespectful.
So non-native speakers should take care to avoid such forms in writing, even casual writing such as e-mails. Contractions with an apostrophe (can't, there're, would've) are fine in both spoken and written English, but contractions with a spelling change and no apostrophe (kinda, sorta, wanna, etc.) are nonstandard. Learn to say them and to recognize them, just don't get into the habit of writing them yourself. |
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