Well, they sound different due to one being a British accent and the other is North American but as far as I can tell, the vowel sound in each is the same. The British woman has a lower voice with a more muted tone, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same vowel sound.
I may be missing the point but, as a British English speaker, I am able imagine a pronunciation that I would describe as “raing”, different from how I hear “rang”. I’m saying it right now - raing, raing - and it doesn’t sound like how I say “rang”.
Oh wait, so what you and **Johanna **are saying is that there are three sounds - the one in “ran”, the one in “rain” and the one in “rang” - and for some speakers the one in “rang” and the one in “rain” are allophones of the same phoneme? While for other speakers, the two sounds in “rang” and “ran” are considered to be the same phoneme.
(Simplifying a bit here because I guess there are more sound variations involved among different speakers, but that’s the gist, right?)
Yes, if I try and say it as “rayng” it puts me in mind of Penelope Pitstop yelling “hayulp, hayulp!”
It makes me think of Ado Annie. “Ah’m jist a gurl who raing the bell”
It makes me think of Lina Lamont in “The Singing Cavalier”.
“I caiiiin’t stand 'im.”
“Raing” for “rang” is not a Southern pronunciation, the Northeast says it too.
If you would learn the difference between “close transcription” and “broad transcription,” you’d find that the IPA is a finely tuned instrument that doesn’t always have to work on the finest tuned settings. It has various settings appropriate for different uses by linguistic professionals.
It is also useful for the general public when applied to lexicography and language instruction. Back in 9th grade my French language curriculum used IPA to teach the sounds of French, and at the time it seemed to me perfectly appropriate and very helpful. Regular English dictionaries in the UK use IPA; only Americans seem completely ignorant of it. This is a consequence of the historically poor level of language learning in America compared to most other countries in the world.
I was watching Angel the other night, and was surprised and gratified to see that clue to demonic activities was a glyph unintelligible to the Americans: ʔ When I saw it, I said: “That’s the IPA symbol for the glottal stop.” Then Wesley said, “It’s the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for the glottal stop.” How rare is it to see such learning on a TV show?! (And I’m not someone who uses the interrobang lightly.) It did my geekgirl heart a world of good. 
Once again—This is the well-studied phenomenon called allophony. However different the sounds produced in different dialects, they all share the same phonemic identity.
A phoneme is like a specific job in an organization. Various different individuals can fill that position, but the position itself has a fixed identity in the organization. Now imagine it’s like fraternal twins, triplets, or even quadruplets are hired for the same position. Their family resemblance to each other is obvious, but if you look closely you can spot the differences. Any given one of them can occupy that cubicle in the office at a given time, and still fulfill all the functions of that position.
The cubicle is the phoneme, and the fraternal sibling personnel sharing it are the allophones.
Yep, you got it. 
To extend the allegory:
To look at the phonemes is like being a businessperson or technician when you deal impersonally with that organization: you’re concerned with the functions fulfilled by the various roles within the organization. For phoneme-level studies, a broad transcription is appropriate.
To look at the allophones is like being a social worker who is concerned with the individual persons who work there and dealing with them as individual people, each with her or his own snowflakey uniqueness. For allophone-level phonetics and phonology studies, a close transcription is appropriate. One that would focus in on the differences, however minute, between similar sounds in different dialects. For phonemes, you zoom the focus out. For fun, you can look up the concepts of “emic” and “etic” in the social sciences, and find out why they cribbed off the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic.
This was a one-time, solitary activity purely for scientific purposes.
I sometimes pronounce the “g” as well, when I’m speaking carefully, but when a similar topic came up a couple months ago and I made a vocal sample of “thang/theng/thing/theeng,” it was remarked upon that it was unusual to actually enunciate the “g” at the end of a nasal like that. Read posts 146-148 here.
Huh? There is no /g/ sound in final “-ng” in English.
There is in his pronunciation of the words in the audio file!
Nobody is claiming that rang doesn’t rhyme with wang, bang, gang, etc. We pronounce all of them with the short-a sound like in ran, fan, ban. Of course they don’t rhyme anymore than “bin” rhymes with “sing”.
But if I say “rang” without the “ng” and “ran” without the “n”, they are the same sound. I can say “raing” but it sounds horribly incorrect to me, like saying “cain’t” instead of “can’t.”
There is if you come from Birmingham, England, or thereabouts! It’s one of the hallmarks of that accent, the /ŋɡ/ sound where other English speakers would use just /ŋ/.
So he did, but his addition of velar stop [g] at the ends of the words is not standard English pronunciation. It is a feature of Indian English basilect, though; most Indian languages never have -[ŋ] in final position.
To recap:
What we spell as “ng” can have two different pronunciations:
[ŋ] as in singer;
or [ŋg] as in finger.
In English orthography, a learner can’t know offhand which pronunciation “ng” has in the middle of a word. But in English, at the end of a word, -“ng” is always pronounced with final -/ŋ/.
In Malay, to clear up this ambiguity, whenever they write just “ng” they mean [ŋ], and to show the pronunciation [ŋg], they write an extra g, as in ringgit.
Thanks. I didn’t know about that. It sounds weird to my ears.
I agree. As I mentioned in this post and the post in the last thread, it was a matter of me over-enunciating for that audio file. My response to DrDeth was meant to counter his assertion that the “g” sound at the end of “ng” combinations was usual English as, as this thread and the previous one illustrates, it stuck out to several native speakers of English as being unusual.
ETA: Actually, I’m wondering if it is a quirk of my accent. To me, “finger” and “singer” have the same pronunciation for the “ng” in the middle of it. So perhaps I have a quirk where I do pronounce the “g” in “ng” combinations.
Whoops. Wrong thread. Too many tabs open.
FWIW (not much) I say rain and rang very differently. Just for the record, it is closest to the vowel in the modal can, except the n is nasalized. The vowel in the noun and ordinary verb can is different, more like the vowel in fairy. And the vowel in rain is yet another variation. I would say that had a y in it.
Born and raised in Philadelphia.
Aussie.
Rang like Bang, as in Bang a Boomerang.
Bugger trying to explain how it’s pronounced, listen for yourself.