<p>Don and Dawn are the same to me. And it’s soda. Mary/marry/merry are the same too, although I don’t really use ‘merry’ outside of Merry Christmas.</p>
<p>kelsmom - I LOVE Boston accents!</p>
<p>From Youngstown to Baltimore, people have jawbs, not jobs or jahbs.</p>
<p>Don and Dawn are the same in those areas, because they are both Dawn. And a towel and a tile are awfully close.</p>
<p>Don & Dawn are the same. So is Mary/merry/marry. Mehri, however is different.
Cot & caught , stock & stalk, collar & caller are the same.
Feel & fill, pen & pin,are different.
Whales and Wales are the same.</p>
<p>I’m trying to figure out how “cot” and “cat” and “caught” all sound similar. What do they sound like? </p>
<p>cat is like hat
cot is like cod
caught is like taught lol</p>
<p>Which one morphs into the other?</p>
<p>CA here… all I know about the “accent” is that we speak very far back in our throats. NO valley girl though haha.</p>
<p>Caught=cot
Feel=fill
Pin=pen
etc.</p>
<p>SoCal here.
Yes to caught cot
Big no the feel fill. First is long other short.
Pin is not pen. Short i vs short e.
Total valley girl uptalk. In my defense I come by that naturally; literally grew up in THE Valley (San Fernando for those who don’t know what that means) in the seventies.</p>
<p>I am guilty of most of these, especially merry, Mary, marry.
Pin and pen are essentially the same. Feel and fill are meant to sound different, but DH agrees that I pronounce them both the same. I do live in the great lakes region now, but my Hoosier accent has always sounded more Kentucky than Chicago to learned ears. Living in CA did eliminate “warsh” in place of wash and the nation’s capitol is not Warshington DC.</p>
<p>I love this discussion! I was born in Alabama, went to grad school in Michigan (Detroit). Before moving to MI, I literally thought everyone I spoke to in Michigan on the phone was angry or having a bad day. The intonation was so clipped, the tempo of speech so much faster, the vowels so very nasal-sounding to me! After living there a while, I found my own speech patterns shifting-----</p>
<p>Several years later, we moved back south to Alabama and started our family. Then 6 years after that we moved to the Atlanta area, where true southern accents are not all that common (sadly, IMO) any more. We have some videos of DH and I when we were living in Alabama, though, and we sounded SO very southern back then! It’s amazing how much we tended to adapt our speech patterns to our environment! </p>
<p>A few years ago, I attended a music conference in NYC and spent a lot of time there with a group from England. Their director was actually a Texas native who had moved to England as an adult. But her english accent (at least to my ears) was complete and authentic. She did say that if she spent a week or so in Texas, she would quickly morph back to that dialect. </p>
<p>Isn’t the human capacity for language acquisition and adaptation just amazing???</p>
<p>What’s all this about soda and pop? We grew up drinking coke, and when I cashiered in a fast food place, the standard question of someone ordering a coke was “what kind?” Might be orange coke, sprite, or co-cola.</p>
<p>It’s soda.</p>
<p>Don/Dawn not the same. Merry/marry. Definitely not the same. My D’s name rhymes with one of them and I despise when she’s called by the other. I don’t get it–the sounds are so different. I do tend to rhyme Mary with Merry, though (my mom always says there’s a difference – Mary is more like Mayry, i think?)</p>
<p>Cot is like cod. caught is like taught, cat is like hat. just like Romani said.</p>
<p>I grew up in central Jersey–not a real discernible accent compared to North Jersey which is what is usually satirized when Jersey accents are talked about.</p>
<p>I now live part-time in South Jersey, where they have a weird (to my ears) kind of southern/English accent which I’ve also heard in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Hard to believe we come from the same small state; it’s so different.</p>
<p>Here’s a slightly different take on it, from a Chicago perspective:</p>
<p>[Where</a> the Chicago Accent Comes From and How Politics is Changing It - The 312 - March 2012 - Chicago](<a href=“http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/March-2012/Where-the-Chicago-Accent-Comes-From-and-How-Politics-is-Changing-It/]Where”>http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/March-2012/Where-the-Chicago-Accent-Comes-From-and-How-Politics-is-Changing-It/)</p>
<p>I found the map especially interesting. It explains a lot, not only about language, but more broadly about culture: why Chicago is so different from downstate Illinois, why northern Ohio and southern Ohio are like different worlds, why central Pennsylvania is culturally closer to Alabama than it is to, say Buffalo, just a hundred or two hundred miles away.</p>
<p>It doesn’t entirely explain the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which I’m not sure I completely grasp. I don’t doubt the work of the linguists who are following this; they know what they’re doing, I don’t. But I do think some of the press accounts are . . .well, wildly exaggerated. I hear a lot more of these sounds in Chicago than in Detroit, and I’ve spent a lot of time in both cities. And the shift I hear is not nearly as strong as the press accounts suggest. It’s not from “pot” to “pat”, but more like “hot” to “haht”, and “for” to “fer” (or “fur”). I associate it more with the South Side than with the North Side, but there’s definitely some of it in lifelong Northsiders, too. If it’s occurring in Detroit, it’s a much milder case. To my untrained ear, anyway, Chicago is the epicenter.</p>
<p>I from the northern midwest, and I grew up saying pop. When my kids were growing up in Missouri, it was soda. They made fun of me until we went to the local convenience store, and they have it listed as “pop” on the side of the fountain machine.</p>
<p>When S1 was about 5, he was watching an episode of Lassie where a kid fell down a well and Lassie saved him by getting help. He ran excitedly in the kitchen, saying “The kid fail down the wail and hurt his haid.” My response was “No, a “wail” is a big mammal that swims in the sea. You mean ‘he fell down the well and hurt his head.’” He’s always paid attention to that and never adopted the strongest of those local pronunciations.</p>
<p>I first become aware of my Midwestern twang in college when I was asked to introduce a guest speaker, the actor Alan Arkin. After speaking with him for a few minutes, I remember standing up and hearing myself say “ehlan eharkin” (very nasal). I was horrified, and I don’t think I ever did that again.</p>
<p>P.S. I though you had a jab in Baston!</p>
<p>Oddly enough, there is also a California Vowel Shift, with vowels shifting in the opposite direction to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. So where in the Northern Cities shift, “fun” is pronounced like fawn, in the California shift “fun” is pronounced like fen.</p>
<p>[Penny</a> Eckert’s Web Page](<a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html]Penny”>Penny Eckert's Web Page)</p>
<p>I absolutely can’t stand to listen to Katie Couric. I always say “please someone give that woman a G!” because she pronounces ing as een and it squeaks on my ear. >>>></p>
<p>You have extraordinary ears! I would never catch that subtle difference.</p>
<p>There’s another thread on the parent cafe about this begun recently. See my comments there… Pop in Madison and Soda in Milwaukee when I was growing up. Da Bears still… if you’re from WI and a Packers fan. Merry Mary marry- all sounds the same to me. Indiana does have the Hoosier accent- not quite southern but not like MI/WI/MN.</p>
<p>Would someone explain the difference in merry/marry/Mary? I don’t know anyone here who says pin/pen any differently either.</p>
<p>Yes, order a “coke” and then pick which kind :)</p>
<p>There is a huge difference between northern Indiana accents (Michigan border or the Region (essentially Chicagoland) and the southern 1/4 of the state. There’s some heavy twang along parts of the Ohio River. Having grown up there, it’s music to my ears; I miss it.</p>
<p>Mary = mare (like the horse) eee
Merry = mehr (like the first syllable of terr- or) eer. </p>
<p>Marry = mah - ree </p>
<p>They are completely different to me. </p>
<p>Is it a PA Dutch-ism to say “leave go” instead of “let go”? DH makes fun of me. My mom also says “out (or outen) the light”. </p>
<p>Apparently Philadelphians pronounce “home” and “phone” with an odd ooooh sound to the middle O.</p>
<p>Concerning Mary, marry, merry, this was posted in the other thread, until then I didn’t get it either. I say them all the same.</p>
<p>[Mary</a>, marry, merry = not the same! - YouTube](<a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube)</p>
<p>Took one of those bus tours in Boston once. The tour guide’s “day job” was stand up comedian. On the bus I cackled when he complained about his Irish American father’s Boston (not New England) accent, particularly regarding the pronounciation of his aunt’s name, “LINDER” a.k.a Linda. That got me thinking about the JFK habit of “Cuber” for Cuba. And I myself have said “President Obah-mer” as a joke so many times that it’s become second nature.</p>
<p>When I was 4, we moved to St. Louis. According to my dad, we moved after a year because his allergies/asthma were so bad there. According to my mother, we moved because I started saying “fer” instead of “for” and “meer” instead of “mirror.”</p>
<p>I believe my mother!</p>