144 thoughts on “Pronunciation Nation”

  1. Highway, Freeway…but no Turnpike? Hero, Sub, Hoagie….but no Grinder? I don’t think this mapmaker has spent much time in New England, or at least not CT and MA.Report

    1. Turnpike (or just Pike) is common in most of New England. Grinder is definitely a SE CT thing – (if you ask for a sub, they’ll point you to General Dynamics or the Submarine Base).Report

      1. Hoagies and grinders, hoagies and grinders… sloppy joe, sloppy sloppy joe.

        That is the only time I’ve ever heard “grinder.” Hoagies, on the other hand, I occasionally heard in Tennessee.

        Also, it’s the interstate.Report

        1. Well, it depends on if we call it the interstate or not – I-395 is, ostensibly ‘Interstate 395’ – but we’d call it the turnpike. Then there’s the Mass Pike (or just, THE PIKE) which is actually Interstate 90.

          You get up into New Hampshire, and you’ve got the Spaulding Turnpike (Route 16) which runs along the old ‘interstate’ Route 125.Report

              1. I use that line all the time, in part because it still amuses me, and in part because it drives my girlfriend insane.

                I also have to say “disco pants and haircuts” any time I see a Pier 1.Report

              3. I will vouch for “submarine samwich” being something that people say.

                (For a brief time, I thought it was samwich and when I was confronted with the word “sandwich” I was confused.

                Also, breakfast confused me, then I learned that it meant breckfust.Report

    2. When I moved to Denver 25 years ago, most people referred to the stretch of US Highway 36 between I-25 and Boulder as “the turnpike” or “the Boulder turnpike” because it was originally a toll road. My perception is that while most people still know what you’re talking about when you use it, the term is slowly disappearing in favor of just “36”.Report

        1. As far as I know, using “the” with highway numbers is just a SoCal thing — everywhere else I’ve gone, I’ve gotten curious looks when I do that (except in the Bay Area, where I got hostile stares, having thereby outed myself as an Angeleno).Report

            1. That’s us! Only it’s become a quite extended visit.

              Our kids (now grown, sort of) were born and raised here in CT, and it’s been quite distressing to see them adopt some of the local speech oddities. We try to remind them that they’re really Californians and so they should be true to their heritage and speak properly. The results have been mixed, but at least we managed to keep them from using a glottal stop in words like “button”, “kitten”, etc. (although they pull that out when they want to irritate us).Report

              1. Aaah.. the glottal stop.

                Groton, button, kitten, cotton…

                You could always tell who was born and raised in SE CT by how they pronounced the town names, and whether or not the glottal stop was there.Report

          2. Yes, it’s just southern Californians who preface roads with “the.” My wife does this, and I mock her for it. But having lived there for a while, and with her for a much longer while, I sometimes do it, too, and she mocks me for that.Report

        1. More proof my locale is confused about our identity. We have a freeway, a highway and an expressway all in the same town.

          My wife and I prefer ‘rotary’ because it just sounds cool to us. A Coke means any cola beverage, but my wife also likes ‘soda’ and for some reason I’ve always said ‘pop’.

          One favorite variation of mine is the thing on top of your house. We say roof like most people do. My wife’s Ohio relatives pronounce it ‘ruff’.Report

      2. Having grown up in the prairie and Great Plains states, I was taken aback the first time I visited “back east”. One of my responses to the problem of directions was, “This would be a lot easier if you would just do away with the trees and hills and lay the roads out in nice straight lines…”Report

  2. It’s like how Arnold’s Austrian-influenced “Kahl-ee-forn-ee-a” is much closer to the original than what the rest of us say.Report

  3. I apparently grew up right at the boundary of the major Lowland South salient into the Inland South dialect in Tennessee.

    When I was in high school, my school colors were maroon and white, which the cheerleaders loudly pronounced, “muh-rewn! waaaaht!” I dunno if that’s Inland or Lowland.

    Also, saying “pop” was libel to get you an ass kickin’.Report

  4. Things I learned from that map:

    1. Tiny lobsters are tearing this country apart.
    2. My version of American English is a mutt. I’d thought it was midwestern.
    3. I called it “pop” as a kid but started calling it “soda” as an adult. I figured, wrongly, that it was an age thing.

    Certain older southern members of my husband’s side of the family will tell you that “pop” means “fart.” I certainly never heard that growing up in Cincinnati.Report

  5. I’ll admit that after my two years of graduate school in Texas, “y’all” as a convenience contraction for “all of you” did stay in my vocabulary for a long time. Usually when giving instructions to a group: “Y’all need to pay close attention to this next part.” Not stretched out like a drawl, just a useful plural form.Report

        1. Ain’t is acceptable as an unformal substitute for “am not”.

          So “I ain’t” is okay, but “you ain’t” is bad grammar.Report

              1. You can get them aftermarket, that attach to the back and slide out – if I ever break down and get an iPad for my own sole use I am gonna get one there, virtual keyboards kinda suck for typing.Report

              2. Drat, alchemy!

                Actually, thanks for the heads up. Somehow I’d missed this. My experience with covers and cases is that it makes device charging more difficult on my S3 (the charging connector is the weakest part of the design of the device). But it may be worth a shot. And as a guy who still builds his own computer, I can’t very well complain about what would be required here.Report

    2. I use it that way too, and for the same reason. But even though I don’t drawl, people are wondering why I’m talking Southern. Then I have to explain that I’m clearly not using it in the Southern way, because in that case I would’ve said “all y’all”.Report

      1. Real story… My first semester in grad school at UT I was the teaching assistant for an introductory calculus class, which meant I got the 80-student class twice each week (UT did the big mandatory calculus classes in blocks of 80 students, each class with a professor and one graduate student). After the second week, a small group of students stopped afterwards to ask me to speak more slowly. One of them actually said, “You speak very clearly, we can hear you all the way to the back of the hall, and your accent is no problem, but we’re not used to listening that fast.”

        I’ve always wondered how big the differences in regional “pace” are, not just pronunciation.Report

              1. As someone who is making that drive in the morning I could not agree more. The only thing more boring than driving across north Texas is driving across south Texas.Report

              2. Fact: The drive on I-10 from Santa Monica to Palm Springs on Friday afternoon is just as long as the drive on I-10 from Beaumont to El Paso.Report

              1. True story:

                My son, raised in Central Texas, and I were traveling through Arkansas between Tennessee and Texas when he was about 6, and he began to be grumpy around Texarkana, so I decided to stop and get a hotel room while still on the Arkansas side. He was half awake as we walked into the lobby, where I got a room from the two nice local women behind the counter. As we were walking back to the car to drive around to our room, my son said to me, “Daddy, I think those ladies were speaking French.”

                Moral of the story: the difference between a Central Texas and Texarkana accent is so great that one might be mistaken for a foreign language when heard by speakers of the other.Report

              2. After the two years at UT in Austin, I was beginning to get fairly good about identifying which part of Texas someone was from based on the regional accents. Men speaking with a Houston-area accent were okay, but women with a Houston accent were like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Enough so that my housemate with the peculiar sense of humor took to trying to set up blind dates for me with women from Houston, because he knew I was too polite to just walk out and would sit there and suffer through it.Report

              4. McAllen is an interesting place. I’ve never been there and don’t know people from there. But the wife was contacted about several jobs down there that paid in excess of three times what she currently makes. So McAllen had our attention from that (though we subsequently discovered that they have an infamously bad medical culture down there).

                Anyway, what’s interesting about it is this: It’s dirt poor, but rapidly growing. How often does that happen?Report

              5. Will, I don’t know if that happens often, but I bet it happens in border towns more than it does elsewhere, particularly when the area across the border is significantly poorer.

                McAllen is a neat little town. It almost feels like it’s several small towns placed on end, and vascillating between now and the early 60s. And I’m not kidding when I say the people are super nice, either. A lot of them have no desire to stay when they’re young, and end up in school or working in San Antonio or Austin. I used to meet a lot of them at alt country shows by Texas artists (Robert Earl Keen in particular; he must be really big down there… the road goes on forever). I’m still friends with a couple, and fondly remember others.Report

              6. Our neighbors down in Texas live in San Antonio, but she’s originally from east of there, and he’s originally from west of there. One day while we were helping them plaster their house, she mentioned how crazy some of those “west Texans” talk (all this spoken in a super-thick Texan accent). She started giving examples, “oil” being one of them. Here’s what it sounded like to me: “We both grew up in Texas, but he says “ole” and I say “ole”. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, he says “ole”, not “ole”.” She thought this was absolutely hysterical. So did my wife and I.Report

              7. In some places here, it’s pronounced closer to “owl” than the way you probably say “oil.” In others, more like “all.”

                My favorite Texas words: “Piller” = “pillow,” “ruff” = roof,” “winder” = “window.” Also, some Texans can’t help but pronounce the “h” in words beginning with “wh.” You know that commercial for Wheat Thins in which Stewie from family guy keeps pronouncing “wheat” wrong? Just like that. Though apparently the accents from West and East Texas are both dying off over generations.Report

              8. I struggled with the spelling. As a Yank I know how to phonetically spell “oil”: something like (oy-el) with the accent on the first syllable.

                But how the eff do you spell some of the Texas pronunciations? Oil is a good example. It’s somewhere between “ahll”, “erl”, “owl” and “ole”.

                Ohwl. The ohwl bidness.Report

              9. And I hope that West Texan never dies off. I fell in love with that accent right when I got down there (“Usetashould.” You can’t beat that.) though where I’m at is a sorta jumble from all over the state.Report

              10. I say “oil” like that; sorta like “awl,” but with more of a long O.
                I grew up fishing the Pecos River. I say it PAYK – us.
                When I went north, and heard people refer to the PEE – coas, I thought it was one of the stupidest things I’d ever heard.

                Most of what accent I have is that of West to Northern Texas (though I’m actually from Eastern New Mexico); but they would think I talk like a Yankee were I to go there, because I’ve learned to enunciate clearly.
                Or more clearly, depending on your view.Report

        2. There are some Southern words that have an extra “dip” in the middle just because they take so long. In Michigan, on the other hand, no air is wasted between the beginning of a word and its ending.Report

          1. She told me man I come from way down South
            I’ve got a picket fence with a picket house
            And I don’t need no fast talking Northern man
            Like you aroundReport

  7. You notice the deep blue color on the “What is ‘the City'” around California’s Bay Area? “The City” is San Francisco. They’re serious about that up there; you can hear the capital letters when they use the phrase.Report

      1. It’s rather sad, really. The place has less than a million people, and is a geographic flyspeck, yet they so desperately want to think of themselves as a city, rather than just a big town.Report

          1. Boston’s not a “The City,” either. Really, in SF the phrase always struck me as just part of the place’s phenomenal self-absorption and provincialism. I’m just a farm town kid myself, but I’d spent enough time in Chicago to know what a city is.Report

            1. I know James is mostly teasing, but it’s kind of silly. The City has a first-class opera, ballet, and symphony, major-league baseball and football teams, and and a government which can match anyplace when it comes to corruption, graft, and gridlock.Report

              1. When I moved to San Francisco it didn’t even have a library as big as that of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Even though it built a new one about 20 years, it still doesn’t.

                I’m not joking.Report

              4. My buddies and I used to hang out there, back when I lived in SLC in the late 80s. It was a beer bar, meaning it could serve 3.2 only. I think it’s closed and re-opened a few times since.Report

              6. Fort Wayne’s main library is almost exactly the same size as the main branch of the SF public library, though the latter is in some very expensive and crowded real estate.

                The SF Public library has nearly twice as many branches, a larger collection, a significantly larger circulation, and serves more people.

                On this survey, both the Allen County and San Francisco Public Libraries rank 4/5 stars, but the former in a lower expenditure category and the latter in the highest category.

                Salt Lake City is a five star.

                http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/11/industry-news/lj-index-2012-the-star-libraries/Report

              7. Shazbot,

                Fort Wayne has 1/3 of San Fran’s population. And San Francisco’s library was built on already publicly owned land with space available (civic center area) so the real estate cost is a misdirection. And based on population you might expect San Francisco to have more than twice as many branches (but that’s probably not fair to say, since SF is more dense and people can get to branches via public transit, while Fort Wayne’s has branches in widely scattered small towns out in the county).

                But comparing Fort Wayne to San Francisco, Fort Wayne’s not supposed to be comparable on these things, eh? Nobody ever sings, “Are you going to Fort Wane, Indiana…” and precious few people ever left their heart there.Report

              8. Well, also Fort Wayne doesn’t have anything but a library, apparently.

                SF has an excellent library (4/5 stars) for its size. It is very densely populated with a reasonably large downtown and is quite heavily populated and surrounded by a very large metropolitan population. It is in the center of a major metropolitan area. It has major landmarks and tourist attractions. It has major museums and fairly decent public transportation. It has world class restaurants and multiple colleges and universities. It is also the home of Star Fleet Academy (and possibly Star Fleet Headquarters).

                Under what definition of a major city (in the U.S. anyway) SF isn’t a major city, is not the definition the st of us are using.Report

              11. I think Shazbot’s argument is “San Fransisco rules, Fort Wayne drools.”

                I did a job in Huntington, IN, and went to Fort Wayne whenever I could. Nice city. Very affordable. Seemed pretty safe, though I guess looks can be deceiving.Report

              12. @Will

                True, but San Jose is nothing like a city. It’s grown a lot by annexation, and has bizarre tentacles in different directions, making it largely a collection of suburbs that happen to have the same mayor.Report

              16. SJ is where all the used tire shops, small warehouses, HVAC companies etc are. All of the unsexy things that a city needs to survive, that all the worker ants use to get by. If for no other reason, SF is just too damn expensive. Much like Manhattan vs. the rest of NYC. except the really high paying jobs aren’t in the city, they are in the burbs (Google, Yahoo etc.)Report

              17. James, I was arguing this was false:

                “It’s rather sad, really. The place has less than a million people, and is a geographic flyspeck, yet they so desperately want to think of themselves as a city, rather than just a big town.”

                SF is in competition with LA for being the most important big city in the U.S. west of Chicago. Define “city” or “important” how ever you want: culture, entertainment, art, food, attractions, museums, population density, being the center of a major metropolitan area, etc.

                And neglecting that SF’s population doesn’t technically include reasonably large surrounding suburbs (not even the East Bay) can make it look like it is a smaller city than it is.

                It isn’t as big or important as NYC, but it is in a class with Boston, Chicago, maybe L.A., etc.Report

              18. My old college professor (this one) used to argue that what you describe would be the future. The cities would be places where people lived and many jobs were, but just as in yesteryear people had to go to the big city to have their big city needs met, people will have to go to the suburbs to have their car repairs or to go shopping (this was before Amazon was what it is).Report

              19. Shaz,

                It’s not in a class with Chicago or L.A. Maybe Seattle. And believe me, it’s the smug San Franciscans who ignore the rest of the Bay Area and pretend to be apart from it. But they all end up in Colma anyway.

                San Francisco is great in many ways. If only San Franciscans could be satisfied with those ways, and quit deluding themselves that they are the most important city on the west coast and the envy of the country. But, hey, I haven’t lived there in twenty years. Maybe they finally grew out of it.Report

              22. ”But they all end up in Colma anyway.”
                I would bet only one in five people in SF even know what that means at this point. Although Chris seems to.Report

              23. Aaron,

                I figured it’s kind of a test. If you don’t get the reference to Colma, you’re not qualified to talk about San Francisco. I do take Schilling’s responses seriously (the dude’s been around there a lot longer than I ever was), and I bet he gets the reference.Report

              28. Chris,

                I’ve been through it, but don’t actually know the town. It’s a beautiful area, though, especially in the fall. But being from TN, you know what I’m talking about there.Report

              30. Chris,
                The state park immediately adjacent, Brown County State Park, is one of Indiana’s true gems; one of the two by far most beloved state parks. And whenever, once upon a time, they cut the roads through its hills, they did a brilliant job–everywhere they have a pull off to look out over the area they put it where you can’t see any other roads or human structures, so it looks like you’re in the middle of a primeval forest that stretches for hundreds of miles. It’s an illusion, but a delightful one.Report

  9. My favorite part of the dialects map is the reference to the dialect in my current home:
    “Classical Southern (simple r-droppers)”.

    The lines delineated for the region of my upbringing, right on the line between ‘Inland North” and “Western North”, with the “North Central” right nearby is pretty accurate to discernible accent differences for different parts of Wisconsin.

    On the whole Southern thing, it’s interested me for a while how Northerners who move to the South (like me) seem to have their accents affected by the move to a much greater extent than Southerners who relocate North.
    My not-very-well fleshed out theory is that those who speak fast feel an subconscious pressure to slow down in order to be understood when surrounded by people with a drawl, even though it’s probably not necessary. Meanwhile, Southerners surrounded by the syllable-clipping Northerners know full well speeding up isn’t going to make a difference in understanding them at all.Report

    1. I can attest to your theory. There’s something very awkward about being a Yankee in the South, clipping out those harsh quick syllables when everyone else is just … drawlin. It’s sorta disconcerting. Problem is, there’s no way for a Yankee to slow down without sounding condescending. Southerners can talk both ways, fast or slow. Us northernes are handicapped in that.Report

      1. There’s something related. When I moved to Lexington, KY for college, I got a lot of ribbing, and sometimes just straight insults, for my Tennessee accent, which was moderately heavy. More evidence that Kentucky ain’t the South. Hell, once you get north of Mumfordsville, the accents sound like Indiana or Ohio (but the southern Kentucky/Bowling Green accent is perfect). Anyway, I suspect most southerners who’ve been outside of the South have experienced this. People mock southern accents. And while I’ll occasionally make quips about how she says “quarter,” virtually no one down here or back in Tennessee makes fun of my girlfriends Queens, NY accent.

        Though I bet you, Still, and other yankees who’ve been down here have encountered this immediately upon opening your mouth: “Where you from?”Report

        1. I tend to think of my accent as relatively marginal unless I’m drunk or nervous or need to dial it up for some reason (though perhaps everybody at Leaguefest was thinking “Man, what a hick!”), so I’ve been spared the mockery.

          The speed-of-mouth thing is actually interesting. I have a tendency to talk too fast. To the extent that I do have an accent, it’s more twang than drawl and the latter is more what slows speech down. It might be a tribute to my upbringing – or simply the fact that I am hard-of-hearing – that I am not good at hearing other people when they talk fast.Report

          1. You’re from North Carolina? Or am I just making that up?

            I’ve talked slowly since I was little, with a fair amount of disfluency, but since I worked on my accent in college (which I now regret doing), I speak even slower and more deliberately. It drives my son insane, and he’s from friggin’ Texas.Report

      2. Just try being from Maine. WE sound like Ted Kennedy, but more. Downeast Ayuh. The ‘A’ in that isn’t really an ‘A’, that actually makes it sound southern to my ear, draws it out wayyy too much. It’s really more a roll in the back of the tongue as slide the ‘Y’uh off the top of your mouth. The ‘H’ on the end of lobster a similar thing; it doesn’t replace the ‘R,’ it ends ‘A’ in lobsta; not an ‘A’ like in gangsta, but an ‘A’ with an ‘R’ implied.

        I’m sure everyone here knows by now that I’m dyslexic; the way the letters in words look don’t do much for me, spelling I grapple with every day. So on my first ‘professional’ assignment as a computer programmer, not too many years off the farm in Maine, I had to write a COBOL program to generate a ‘Quaterly Report.’ That’s how I heard it; quarterly. It was so humiliating that I immediately set out to leave Maine behind.

        For a good long time, folk thought I was British. As I re-learned how to speak, I went to some of the clearest verbal memories I owned — Beatles music.

        So I agree; Southerners can talk both fast and slow. From the Northeast, it’s clipped or more clipped. Or British. A lot of the northeast coastal accent is closer to the English people spoke in England a few hundred years ago then the English spoken in the UK today.Report

          1. Wait… what???

            Isn’t it Nuh-va-duh and Col-o-ra-doe?

            Generally speaking, I’m on board with calling a place what the locals call it. But let’s not be silly.Report

  12. It’s interesting that they don’t have the actual correct pronunciation of caramel (it’s like care-amel).

    Also, since when is “ben” a “Canadian” way of saying “been”. Either “bin” or “bean” is all I’ve ever heard. (But, of course, to suggest there is one Canadian way to say things is like saying there’s one ‘Murriken way of saying things).Report

    1. I’ve known people from Alberta & Winnipeg that pretty much sound American, except for certain turns of phrasing.
      I think the “Canadian” accent is more of an Ontario thing.Report

  13. Okay, I finally got to look at all these…

    Mary/Marry/Merry are indeed vastly different words. Much the same way that you can say “Sara(h)” and “Tara” in a multitude of ways.

    I only realized the sneaker/tennis shoe thing today when my friend from MD called and asked for a pair of the latter. I told him to go fuck himself.

    My “mayonnaise” choise wasn’t listed: I say “may-naise”.

    I’ve learned that “slaw” and “y’all” are vastly superior to any Northern semi-equivalent.

    You are all wrong. I am right.Report

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