Scotland.
And what are those pronunciations?
They all rhyme to me. I’m 58 and Californian, although I lived for awhile in Ohio. If it’s part of a Californian accent, then Hollywood is spreading it.
And they all rhyme with Mork from Ork.
Would this be pork with two syllables?
Whooosh…
I thought my last line would make it obvious that I was kidding.
You can’t really take the OED as a definitive guide to pronunciation, nor any other dictionary. It can only serve as a general guide.
As a subset of English speakers, Scots probably are a “microcosm”, I guess - there are only 5 or 6 million of us, but we speak the way we speak and this isn’t something that some random Wiki editor made up.
As I said above, I’m not competent in using the IPA and any explanation I give is going to be inadequate. But roughly speaking, “pork” has the same vowel sound to me as “oar” or “board”, while “fork” is more like “clock”.
I’d speak the words, but I don’t really know how to post sound files online in a wa that they can be easily accessed.
The better dictionaries are quite good at including alternate, lesser and archaic pronunciations; see “niche” in almost any of them for an example.
But okay. Ork and ork and ork all have different pronunciations. Kind of like “Zathras.”
bork?
Yes, I was aware, thanks. Been aware of that for quite some time now.
However with many people already having tried to do that on there (apparently) and the discussion about it (three times) on the talk page–where it was apparently overruled that “pork” had rhymes–I figured I’d get a third opinion first.
I really don’t know what else to say. Yes, in Scottish English, “pork” and “fork” are pronounced differently. I find this fact completely unremarkable and entirely believable.
It isn’t, though. GA pronounces hot as [hɑt]. The RP sound for that is [ɒ], a sound which doesn’t exist in American, and because it’s rounded, it more closely resembles [ɔ]. To say [hɔt] would be dialectal for Americans; it’s how a stereotypical Noo Yawka would tawk.
British English has one more vowel sound than American does, that “short o” sound of [ɒ]. To use it at all is instantly a marker of England to American ears.
I too have noticed Wikipedia, and even more so, Wiktionary, sticking that schwa in between the [ɔ] and [r]. I added pronunciation to the article on Victoria: [vɪkˈtɔriə], and later someone came along and diphthongized it with the schwa… [vɪkˈtɔəriə]. I left it alone, figuring she was your queen, yous get dibs on how to pronounce her name. But the extra schwa seems strange to me. I’m just not hearing it.
I agree, and I am British, southern, and certainly not of the younger generation. (Actually, maybe I do very faintly pronounce the L in “chalk,” but you’d scarcely notice.)
Exactly. You can’t say anything on Wikipedia without a cite and expect it to stick around. It’s actually more strict than our GQ in that way. Not even information about the or/oar merger combined with proving that “pork” uses one phoneme while all other “-ork” words use the other would work. To put it on Wikipedia, you need a citation saying specifically that pork does not have a rhyme.
It may seem a high bar, but it shouldn’t be. If this peculiarity exists, there should be some source that has noted it.
It exists. However, I can’t really think of the right search terms to use to provide a cite.
That is true…however: 1. It’s still there, listed on the rhyming page and
2. I’m not about to get into a possible edit war with another (more experienced) editor over it.
I figure someone who is more used to editing Wikipedia than I might sometime get around to it…
So far the vote is 159-0, with three people saying “I’ve heard it.” The people who allegedly think pork doesn’t rhyme with anything sure aren’t showing up here.
Ha ha, and “Max Torque” rhymes too!
PaulParkhead: Am I correct in understanding you to say that the “r” in “pork” is said kind of like a pirate, whereas the “r” in “fork” is a little more like a British “r”? Because that kind of makes sense to me, although I can’t explain why.
I’m one of the three. I didn’t answer that I’ve never heard the words rhyme, because I have heard them rhyme - I know that they rhyme in most English and RP accents. Of the three choices in the poll, the third best suited me.
Is there no such thing as a Scots-English dictionary that includes regional pronunciations? (I mean “Scottish English” there, not “Scots to English”…)
Or should I say, “Isthar nae sech thang…” 
Not really, if by “British R” you mean something like the non-rhotic r that you can hear in many English accents (for now at least, we Scots are British too). I pronounce the “r” rhotically in both words.
As I said, I don’t know IPA, but the difference is like “poark” vs “fork”.