Ask Lemmy

It's "Zed" not "Zee"

Crayon: crown

Caramel: CAR-mul

Pecan: peh-CAWN

I haven't lived there in a while and I don't pronounce it that way anymore, but where I grew up, water is universally pronounced "wooder".

As I live in the south I hear my "how are you all doing" morphing into "howya'lldoin" and there's nothing I can do to stop it

Charlottesville Virginia has a road spelled Rio but locals pronounce it with a long I (rhy-oh). Bonus points, the name originated from the road being route 10, marked with signs that said R10, which eventually became Rio.

My kid got a worksheet on the long A sound. She got through most of them but was stumped on the "lobster". I looked at it - Lobster, Crawfish, neither of those have a long A sound, what the heck?

Hours later it occurs to me.

OH, Craaay-fish? Who in the world calls them that? Nobody here. Where was this printed?

Elemen-tary or documen-tary

The tary pronounced like Terry. Apparently this is unusual outside of this region.

Boston accents are funny. When my mother says, "where are the cah-keys". My dad and I always say, "your car keys or khakis?"

We recently moved to a new area and there is a nearby town called Monticello. The locals all pronounce it mon-tee-sell-oh and will correct you if you say mon-teh-chel-oh. Doesn't quite fit the question cause I think the locals are insane for that 😅

Melbourne.

Now most will read that and go Mel bourn. But in Australia we say Mel Bin.

A really easy way to tell if someone isn't an Aussie while there.

I'm told there are differences between "merry", "marry", and "Mary", but I don't believe it.

Boston area doesn't use "r".

The famous: "Can't pahk(park) your cah(car) in Havid(Harvard) Yad(yard)".

Bavarians pronounce Chemie, China, Chlor, and others with CH starting, with a K! KEMIE, KINA, KLOR!

Bavarians there is so much go hate about you!

North-East Netherlands. Besides the dialect, every sentence is ended with the word "ja", which means yes/yeah. It's like saying "It rains, yeah", or "Let's take a look, yeah". It's also drawn long, like jaaaa. Also, a lot of nouns are ended with "gie" in the dialect, making it a diminutive.

When I was in school, I had a teacher who insisted on pronouncing the word "across" as "acrosst".

I lived in Louisville, KY briefly, and the official pronunciation is apparently “Luuhwuuhh”. You will be mocked if you get it wrong.

I moved to AZ and I can now tell who is from here and who moved in from out of state by how they pronounce the town name Prescott.

Do the British and Irish dialect quiz. It's really interesting to find out what words you use and how you pronounce them pinpoint where you grew up and where your family is from. I've got a mixture of London, Midlands and Devon and it's bang on!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/british-irish-dialect-quiz.html

I pronounce Kraken phonetically - "krayken" - but the world seems to prefer "cracken".

Houston is not pronounced "hews-ton", it's "hows-ton"