I’m listening to an audiobook and the speaker pronounces frontier in a way I’ve never heard before. I’ve always heard it pronounced frun-teer. But he pronounces it frawn-teer.
I believe the speaker is originally from North Carolina. Is this a regionalism I’ve never encountered before?
I’m from Pakistan and I say frawn-tier.
Appalachian accents in general tend to pronounce a short o more like “ah” than “uh.” I wonder if the speaker was from western North Carolina.
“Frawn-tier” for me.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the “frawn-tier” pronunciation.
I have heard people say “frahn-tier”, but that’s rare. It’s almost universally “frun-tier” IME.
Ken Jennings from Jeopardy! fame (and the Omnibus podcast) pronounces it “FRAWN-teer.” He’s originally from Washington (state) and grew up in Korea, so it may just be an affectation.
I always heard and said it (Canada) with the "O’ like in God or Bob or bonbon. (shorter and more abrupt than “dawg”)
Some people yes, but I have never heard it as frun-teer which I interpret to have the first syllable pronounced the same as “front”.
Yes, people in “Ammurca” tend to degenerate some vowels into “uh”, prticulalry when that’s not the syllable (“syll-uh-bull”?) with the emphasis. Fur sure.
Unusual pronunciations or varied emphasis are usually regional or ethnic characteristics. Y’all be thinkin’ so too?
Fruhn-teer is how it is given on dictionary.com, with the only variation listed as whether the first or second syllable is stressed (second in US English.) It’s the only pronunciation I’m familiar with, but different dialects say things differently.
And M-W has a different take. At least they have both pronunciations. Yours first and mine second.
Listening to the first one (which I think corresponds to what you are showing as fruhn-teer I concede that it sounds very familiar.
I’m not a linguist so I might not be using the correct phonetics.
I’m talking about this pronunciation.
This Briton seems to be pronouncing the first syllable the same although the second syllable is a little different.
And I’m hearing two different pronunciations of the first syllable!
The speaker I referred to in the OP had a much more different vowel sound in the first syllable. His pronunciation of fron rhymed with dawn.
I think we are finding out that saying that something rhymes with something else isn’t as definitive as it seems!
I’d like to provide an example but I just went through over twenty-five youtube videos on pronouncing the word frontier and I couldn’t find any of them that did it the way this speaker does.
Dawn like this. And now think of it with an fr instead of a d.
We are going in circles.
“surr-kulls”?
I’m not sure what you mean. We’re discussing the pronunciation of a word and I linked to a video of somebody pronouncing it. That seems more like a line for point a to point b.