Here “bus” is pronounced like “buzz” and I didn’t realise it was weird until I went down to Devon and it was a dead giveaway that I’m a Brummie lol
It’s “Zed” not “Zee”
Fellow member of the zed crowd!! When someone says “zee” to mean zed it often sounds like they’re saying the letter c lol
Everyone knows the song goes “ex, why, zed. Now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with med”
The song was written by an American so understandable that they’d do it with the wrong pronunciation.
wait that’s supposed to rhyme with the Z? It rhymes with the ‘me’ so it seems like it doesn’t need to rhyme with the Z
I said I know my ABCs, I didn’t say I know how to structure children’s songs. Next you’re going to expect me to be able to work AND be sober at the same time, SHEESH!
“X, Y, Z, now I know my alphabet so I can keep it in my clever head”
Boston accents are funny. When my mother says, “where are the cah-keys”. My dad and I always say, “your car keys or khakis?”
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
Shades of Jeff Foxworthy and his southern words.
How do you pronounce oil?
I can never tell if my partner says gem or Jim. She had a moment the other day listening to her dad and looked at me and said holy shit this is what I sound like to you. She hadnt seen him in a bit
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.
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.
Old gen x Australian here, and pretty much everybody I know pronounces it Mel burn.
I pronounced it like “Mel-born” until an Australian person corrected me lol. it’s like Gloucestershire but in Australia!
Gloss-ter-sher?
yup like gloss ter sheer
Just guessing, is that pronounced gloushtisher?
Is there a similar “tell” with how people pronounce Darwin?
To pass as local I say the Mel part clearly and mumble bu or bun at random, depending on the mood. So MELBu
But the real test is all the mumbling variations of Straya, AUSTRAia, etc
Boston area doesn’t use “r”.
The famous: “Can’t pahk(park) your cah(car) in Havid(Harvard) Yad(yard)”.
MA has a bunch of weird ones. Worcester is pronounced Wooster. Haverhill is Haiveral. Gloucester is Glawster. Quincy is Quinzee.
It’s more Wusstah than Wooster in my experience.
It depends on if the speaker has a Boston accent or not. I don’t have a Boston accent so I say Wooster.
I don’t have a Boston accent (RI) and say Wusstah, as does everyone from the area (including surrounding MA) I’ve known.
Yah, lots.
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.
So … how else would you say it ?
El a men tree
Doc you men tree
I also hear “el a men her ee” a lot.
I’ve noticed some people say “document-tree” now that I think about it.
Where I live it’s more like as you described but not quite “terrrry” but “Tuh-ree” ?
Houston the city and Houston the street.
When I was in school, I had a teacher who insisted on pronouncing the word “across” as “acrosst”.
No thank you! That one really bothers me for some reason.
Same as “eltse” for else, “foe-ward” for forward, “warsh” for wash, and “ayggs” for eggs.
And some people say “heighth” for height and I swear it’s just to fuck with me.
Houston is not pronounced “hews-ton”, it’s “hows-ton”
Hues-ton here
The single syllable words “four” and “hour” are actually the two syllable words “fohwer” and “ower”.
The words “anything” and “nothing” are pronounced “owt” and “nowt”.
The word “the” is not pronounced “t’”, it is simply replaced with an unvoiced glottal stop. The word “t’” is thus, actually, short for “to the”.
E.g.
Goin’ t’ shop. Wan’ owt?
means
I’m going to the shop. Do you want anything?
We also pronounce “bus” as “buzz”, too.
We also use “was” and “were” the wrong way round and say “pants” instead of “trousers”. The rest of the country seems unaware of that last one, and will accuse you of talking American.
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.
Prescott gets messed up more often, but Avondale is a trap also. I couldn’t figure out what someone meant when they pronounced Avondale like it started with the name of the MLM cosmetic company.
I lived in Louisville, KY briefly, and the official pronunciation is apparently “Luuhwuuhh”. You will be mocked if you get it wrong.
Not “loovul”? I need to brush up.
I pronounce Kraken phonetically - “krayken” - but the world seems to prefer “cracken”.
