If I’m talking, they’re berried. If Mrs Piper is talking, they’re burried.
NOpe, that’s different. Mrs P and I both talk about berries: blue-, straw-, etc.
Weirdly, I say berry-al at sea, but burry-al in the ground.
Eh? Which BE speakers say strawberry like strawburry? Straw-bry with no vowel in the second part is common (it’s how I say it - I’m a mix of RP/estuary, the kind of accent you probably hear most on TV these days), but I can’t think of anywhere that would say strawburry.
We don’t say burry-all either, except I could imagine maybe it coming out that way in some NI accents perhaps.
I have heard it on American true crime shows though. Rural areas, not deep South, but I’m not sure I could say whereabouts other than that.
(Bur as in bɜːr, like in bird)
BEAR-ē-əl
Barry Uhl.
Nobody burried nothing.
(Floridian. As were my parents. And it was the part of Florida that doesn’t have the southern accents.)
It seems to me that some of the people who say strawb’ry hold our the R long enough that it can sound like a separate syllable. And, in the US at least, we usually parse a long [ɹ] sound as if it were actually /ər/.
There’s often a very quick, almost swallowed schwa sound there, so it can sound like “straw-burry” a bit. Wiktionary lists the RP IPA as /ˈstɹɔːb(ə)ɹi//
That still isn’t strawburry, not even really very close. I mean, US accents use the schwa too - it’s not going to be an unfamiliar sound.
My point is that I, as an American, can see how another American could render it as such when they don’t use something like IPA or don’t distinguish the schwa and the /ɜ/ sound very well. To me, a schwa and an /ɜ/ (as in “furry”) are pretty darned close when I hear them. Like in this example. I understand to a British speaker, it may not sound like that, but to me, I can totally understand how somebody interprets that as “straw-burry.”
@lobotomyboy63 can chime in and say whether this is what he’s talking about or not.
/ɜ/ is rarely used a short vowel, though - it’s pretty much always long (I’m sure there are some exceptions). Long or short vowels is something native English speakers are generally pretty aware of.
I think you overestimate how many speakers are aware of vowel length, like /ɜ/ vs /ɜ:/ when describing sounds they hear.
The truth is, if I were writing down what I hear in the pronunciation I linked to as close as I can to explain to an American English speaker, I probably would opt for something like “straw-burry.” “Straw-berry” obviously doesn’t work, as that’s another pronunciation. No other vowel really works there in the ham-fisted attempt to explain to a lay person what I hear.
And clearly, I’m not the only one, from an American expats in the UK website
I do love the way my son and husband say “strawberry” pronounced like “strawburry”. I wish I could get away with that.
Yes, I know you don’t actually say it that way. That is how it sounds to many of us, or the best way we can represent that pronunciation in our accent.
We do the same with Canadian English here. Lots of people here “about” with Canadian raising as “aboot.” I personally think that’s nuts, as I’ve never heard a Canadian say “aboot.” “Aboat” is closer to my ears, and I could actually pronounce it with the proper raising. I have no idea how people hear “aboot,” yet many, many do, as that is the stereotype of the accent.
I don’t expect everyone to be able to describe the sounds precisely, and definitely not using IPA. But I do expect native speakers to be able to hear the difference. It’s like saying you can’t hear the difference between ship and sheep.
I would disagree. People hear what they think they hear – which is not necessarily exactly what they hear. I’ve discovered this time and time again. Note the Canadian English example I’ve given. It drives me nuts when I hear people describe it as “aboot,” but that’s what it is. Similarly, when people hear foreign words, they often reproduce them with the completely wrong vowel, even if the vowel exists in their native tongue.
I’ve had this conversation before, and honestly it’s slightly annoying to be told I’m wrong about my own pronunciation. If someone can’t hear a long vowel - which genuinely would be pretty unusual - that doesn’t mean the long vowel is not being said, and vice versa.
Nobody is saying you’re wrong about your accent. Or at least I’m not. That is part of my point. I’m saying that’s what others hear (mistakenly.) Once again, like my Canadian accent example. People who say it’s “aboot” are objectively wrong. But that is what they think they hear, and that is how they describe the sound.
Note that in this whole conversation I’ve been saying that I can see how someone else would describe that sound in that particular way. I am not saying your accent or your description of your accent is wrong by any stretch of the imagination. Or better yet: you ARE correct with your description of your accent. I would never say otherwise.
But what I said was that British people don’t say “strawburry.” I am aware people can mishear things - that’s sort of a given in life, isn’t it? So why spend three posts arguing with me if you don’t actually disagree with what I said?
It seems to me that BURR-ee-ul would be a northeast, New England pronunciation.
Yep. I think they deemphasize that syllable, making it a schwa.
I had a high school teacher who taught us phonetics. He happened to announce at a lot of our games and when visiting teams came in, he rewrote their names in phonetics so he’d pronounce them correctly. He said the tricky part was usually vowels. Some people say Laura as it would rhyme with aura; some say it like it rhymes with aria (minus the i).
I’ve found people who can’t hear a difference between pull and pool, bet and bat, tire and torr. My SIL makes fun of my bro (her hubs) because he says egg like it rhymes with plague instead of peg. And then there was the one in “More Jokes” about why the Irish stop at 239 beans in their soup…one more would be “too farty.”
The term “about” comes up in this video around 1:30.
IIRC that sound comes from combining ah and oo. They sound less well blended when the Canadian says them.
Yep, and I find it quite interesting how different people hear accents. Like I, growing up in a place with the Mary-merry-marry merger, cannot for the life of me hear the difference between those vowels (in those and similar words) when someone from outside the merger talks unless I’m actively looking for it. To me, it’s all the same vowel (it literally is in my accent, but I still hear it as the same vowel when distinguished in other accents). Similarly, I’m not part of the cot-caught merger, so it took me by surprise that about half of America pronounces them with the same vowel, and when I pronounce it with my different vowels, they can’t hear the difference (usually) unless I over-enunciate it to the nth degree. To me it’s like, they’re two totally different vowels! But to them, their head rounds it off to the vowel they’re familiar with, just like I do with Mary-merry-marry. And then when, say, UK speakers do imitations of what they think Americans sound like or how Americans sound, I find it fascinating, because, to me, they’ll get the vowels or even consonants wrong (but sometimes notice something that actually is there, but we don’t notice), but that is how American English comes across to them. I find it pretty cool how we perceive each other’s accents and pronunciation based on what we’re familiar with.