Thursday, January 25, 2007

American dialects

This overview of U.S. dialects was generated by a survey of pronunciation patterns in some 30,000 participants across the U.S. The results are broken down by survey word and state...if you click on the word "aunt," you'll be presented with a map of the U.S. showing the pronunciation distribution of "aunt," covering a range of sounds from "ah" to "ant" to "caught." Regrettably, small enclaves in Arizona and Tennessee also pronounce it as "ain't." If on the other hand you'd like to click to see how things are said in a certain state, you click on survey results/breakdown by state/Oklahoma, for example, and you'll see how all the survey words are pronounced in the Sooner state. Fascinating!

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