Southerners, what words do other regions of the US say differently?

18 comments

1. Hearing someone from Minnesota pronounce “bag” and “wagon” as “bayg” and “waygon” took a second to get used to.

2. When I moved to Pennsylvania from Texas I discovered that I don’t say Iron and Oil the same as Northerners.

   Iron= arn

   Oil= ohl

3. boudin, étoufée, graton, beignet, mais, canaille, couillon, lagniappe

   These are, of course, French words, but they’re commonly used in Louisiana. I don’t mind how they’re pronounced by other Americans, but they are pronounced differently by people from other regions.

4. Coke is pop in the Midwest. I realized I was copying my fiancé when I said “Get me a pop why dontcha”.

5. The list could be quite long, but what pops to mind…

   Other > South:

   * boiled > bold (or bolt)

   * tire > tahr

   * dog > dawg

   * pretty > purty

   * oyull > ohl

   For that last one, my Minnesotan girlfriend insists my pronunciation is wrong and that “oil” has two syllables, but she never can answer where the hyphen would go. 😉

6. It’s probably easier to just say most vowel sounds. And then there’s those who completely remove letters Bah Habah, Maine. Pahking lot.

   And then there’s wooder instead of water. You know who you are!

7. Pecan. Northerners put a lot more emphasis on the vowels.

8. When people pronounce Appalachian as App-a-lay-shin rather than App-a-latch-in

9. People in Maryland pronounce wash -warsh

10. When people pronounce it pee-can instead of peh-cahn.

11. Are you asking about accents? Or coke vs pop vs soda. Actually using different words for the same thing.

12. My partner was born and raised in GA. There are plenty of things that I could document but the biggest one that I give him shit about all the time is:

    Thow.

    Just thow it over there.

    How far do you think I could thow that?

    Did you just thow that towel on the floor?

    I told him I was going to buy him a case of “R”s for Christmas one year. 🙂

13. “Orange” from a New Yorker sounds like “Ahrange.” Lots of other words are different but that one comes to mind, along with the usual ones like “coffee” and “sweater.”

    Also the vowel sound in “straw” and “dawn” as spoken by people from the northeast is unnatural for me but fun to imitate because it sounds so different.

    Some people from the Upper Midwest sound like their pitch is swooping up and down as they speak.

    They way people from the Dakotas say “Dakota” is pretty different; it’s like each syllable is super-distinct.

14. The funny ones are always local place names (which is not something limited to the south). Like down here where I live, you can always spot a transplant by how they say Pearland (we say it like two words, Pear Land) or Humble (umble, no h). Bizarrely people who moved here will often say Sugar Land like it’s all one word and turn the vowel in land into a schwa, which is weird because like… it’s two words! Sugar Land! not Sugarlund. I’ve also heard some very funny attempts at Atascocita. But these are all unique to Houston, I wouldn’t really expect someone from Alabama to know how to say any of these names. Why would they?

15. Caramel is a three syllable word, and we pronounce all three. Some parts of the country only pronounce two of them, leaving the middle “a” silent.

16. I’ve heard cord pronounced almost like car

17. My (good ol’ southern boy) former boss made fun of the way I said “poem” with two syllables. The way he said it rhymed with foam.

18. One of my friends is from near Chicago, and she says “root” as if it rhymes with “foot.”