Am I all alone?

Question

0 Do any of you have some or all of these features as well, or are they peculiar to my dialect?  Here's how I pronounce some words compared to a General American accent:02br00when and win sound identical; pin and pen do not02br00Windy and wendy sound the same; wind and wend do not02br00I pronounce 'set' as 'sat'02br00sat as sot02br00sot as sought02br00tomorrow as tomohrrow02br00get as git (hard "g" /g/ ); but set is not sit02br00guest as gist "02br00guess as gis "02br00again as agin "02br00milk is malk; silk is not salk, it is silk02br00vanilla is vanalla02br00hull, cult, and culture have 3 different vowels (first syllable)02br00bag, bad, and ban have 3 different vowels02br00bang-bay-bag-beg-vague all have identical vowels02br00bother-father-don-dawn-cot-caught all have the same vowel02br00Length is lingth02br00shopping is shoppeen; but king is not keen or keeng02br00dull and dole have different vowels0-

Kooyeen · Accepted Answer

0Hi Marvin, my reaction is: 05002br
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00I noticed your particular pronunciation in your previous posts, the way you described your accent was so strange that I had to ask where you were from. You sure have an interesting accent, a lot of mergers and some vowel-shifts, but also a lot of exceptions. I really don't know what to say (as I already told you, I'm not an expert on accents), but I think that if I had to talk with you, I don't know if I would be able to understand you most of the times 05100(but of course you should consider that I'm not a native speaker of English).02br
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00Do people around your area speak that way too, or in a similar way? Are there a great variety of accents in that part of Canada?010id311id4

Englishuser · Answer

0Hi,01blockquote

00dull and dole have different vowels12blockquote

10This is true for most accents of English, I should think. 01blockquote

00bag-beg have identical vowels12blockquote

10In the past, some speakers of URP had the land-lend merger just like you do.02br
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00Englishuser0-

Marvin A. · Answer

0What's funny is that the shifts mergers and other processes in my dialect are quite insignificant, and in general not noticed by most people. In fact, most North Americans have said that I have no accent at all. After going on a trip last year to several cities including Calgary, Toronto, New York, Boston, St. Louis, Miami, Minneapolis, Fargo, Denver, and San Diego, just for kicks, I asked people whether they thought I had an accent or not. Invariably, the response was that I had absolutely no accent whatsoever, and spoke like a newscaster. Not even 01b00one02b00 person thought that I had an accent. Most of them also insisted that I sounded just like them, and were surprised that I perceived them to have a noticeable accent. When I asked people to guess where I was from, it seemed like everyone guessed a different place, and they were usually not even remotely close. Incidentally, I detected quite a strong regional accent in each of the cities listed above. Most of the people in those places had quite a few divergent features from General American than my own accent.02br
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00>> >> but I think that if I had to talk with you, I don't know if I would be able to understand you most of the times <<02br
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00Hmm. I'm pretty darn sure you would be able to understand me just fine. If you ever travel to North America, you'll find that most regions, including regions usually thought to be "accentless" such as the Inland North, or California, have accents that are quite divergent from General American, usually quite a bit more than my own accent. My accent only looks scary-01del~~00it's really not. lol. If I wrote out a list of unusual features for a different accent02del~~00-say a Wisconsin accent, or a California accent, it would most likely be much longer.02br
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00@Englishuser02br
00>> dull and dole have different vowels02br
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00This is true for most accents of English, I should think. <<02br
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00I've heard lots of Southwesterners merge these two.02br
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00>> bag-beg have identical vowels02br
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00In the past, some speakers of URP had the land-lend merger just like you do. <<02br
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00Actually I don't merge the words "land" and "lend" because the /æ/ is followed by a "n". Before nasals (except for "ng") /æ/ is realised as [ e@ ] and /E/ is realized as [ æ ] . Thus although lend is [ lænd ] in progressive speakers of my dialect, "land" becomes [ le@nd ] so they remain distinct. "Leg" and "lag" however are merged to [ leg ], as would be "lang" and "leng" to [ le- ] if they were real words.0-

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