One of the best-known pre-rhotic mergers is known as the Mary-marry-merry merger, which consists of the mergers before intervocalic /r/ of /æ/ and /ɛ/ with historical /eɪ/.This merger is quite widespread in North America. A merger of Mary and merry, while keeping marry distinct, is found in the South and as far north as Baltimore, Maryland, and Wilmington, Delaware; it is also found among Anglophones in Montreal.(Yep.)
If you pronounced Mary, merry and marry differently, you are from a) New York, b) England or c) Montreal.When I moved to Toronto from Montreal when I was 14, several students at my new school pointed out that I sounded different from them, as if I had a British accent. I didn't, but they heard some subtle differences that they couldn't define very well (just as the average American still chortles at the idea of us all saying "aboot"). Of course, the first time one of them asked me for a rubber, I froze in horror before I realized she was asking to borrow my eraser, so I had a few things to learn about Toronto, too.
"In English, variations tell you where people come from," says Linguistics professor Charles Boberg. As for the above sentence, most North American English speakers pronounce the words m/ary/erry/arry the same way, save for us Montrealers, who distinguish between "merry" and "marry," and our New York cousins, who differentiate them all, just like the British. ...
Boberg [has] broken down native English speakers in Montreal into three groups: the Anglo Montrealers of British descent, who predominantly live in the West Island, Westmount or NDG, or in pockets of Verdun or Pointe St. Charles; those with an East-European Jewish background, who have Yiddish as a base; and Mediterraneans of south European extraction, "like Italians who may not be fluent in Italian, but still use it at home."
Anglo Montrealers sound mostly like English speakers in the rest of Canada, Boberg says, but if you include native English speakers of Jewish or Italian descent, Montreal English sounds quite different.
"In Montreal, English is a minority language," Boberg says. There are two factors behind the variation in Montreal's English-speaking ethnic communities, he adds. "There is a weak English model, because French is dominant, and there's self-segregation in homogenous neighbourhoods."
"A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (phonology, including prosody). Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation, the term accent is appropriate, not dialect."One can speak a Texas dialect with an RP accent (go ahead and try it, it's fun!) or a Scottish dialect with a New York accent. Or a New Jersey dialect with a Scottish accent (trilling all your shores)...and on and on. It's hilarious and slightly ridiculous, but can help you learn the distinction. Pick grammatical and lexical, etc. features of a dialect, but pronounce them with the accent of a completely different dialect.
Can we all just get along and mock those who pronounce toilet as "terlet"?
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I wish there were greater detail on Native American accents out west. I definitely heard a different accent among Blackfoot Indians than I did among white Montanans, although they were all first-language English or at least bilingual.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:32 PM on December 27, 2010