Yup, this one is about local pronunciations or Shibboleths. In our neck of the woods whore was pronounced Who -er. Yup, we are a hick western town. Coyotes rhymed with pye goats, Coteau was pronounced Caught-O and we can always tell a ferriner by how they say Saskatchewan (I can’t figure out how to get the phonetic pronunciation of that one written correctly).
In Burtish (British) Columbia the largest city is Vang- couver (Vancouver)
In Cali we say “whore” like “hor”, one syllable.Coyote is said like “kay-yo-tee”. If you want to be understood by Spanish speakers you have to say it like “co-yo-tay”. How about “yucca”? Here it’s said like “yuck-uh”. Any variations where y’all live?
In Montreal… um… We don’t really have regional pronunciations, but we have dialect words influenced by Quebecois French. “Dep” is a convenience store (from dépanneur); Montrealers ride the metro and go to cégep (junior pre-university college); they do stages (pronounced stazhes) instead of internships at companies in their chosen field, and their telephones have locals, not extensions. Oh yes, and we have autoroutes, not superhighways. There are probably lots of others that I’m forgetting.
In Manitoba, the one I remember was that “granary” was pronounced “grenree”. Also, they had a word unique to Manitoba: “snard lumps”, those awful stalactites of brown clumpy snow that hang underneath your car in Winnipeg winters and which make a satisfying thump when kicked off.
Yes, it’s true - coyote is pronounced “Ci-o-tee” in Califoria. They pronounce it “Ci-oat” in the Midwest.
I’m from Los Angeles - old-timers (people maybe over 60) pronounce it “Los An-guh-leez”. Damn - it’s hard to spell out pronounciations!
They say insurance in the Midwest - in California they say insureance.
Another regional thing: Angelenos call all the freeways “The”. Like “The 405” “The 5”. It’s rarely “I-5”, it’s simply “The 5” or “The 5 freeway” (or “The Golden State Freeway”, but let’s not get things confusing here.) We have so many freeways, highways, interstates - we just call them all “The” instead of trying to remember which ones are interstates, local highways, what have you.
I’m from the midwest and I always pronounce coyote kie-oh-tee. People from out west make fun of me and pronounce it kie-oat because they think that’s the Spanish pronunciation.
Odieman, I grew up Bengough (rhymes with cough), and I always thought your hick town was the big city. Saskatchewan can be pronounced Skatch-one, and even people in Taranna will know what you mean.
Actually up here in Monterey county, in my area, we also say “the 101” or “the 5”. Though we dont call all highways and freeways “the …”. For instance we sometimes say “To get to San hJose, you can take the 101 or 17”, or just “highway 1”. Usually it’s numbers only (like “156”, which is highway 156).
