Same here (says another WNYer).
Canadian hijack - matt, I found it very interesting that the only person I’ve ever met who pronounced the n in Banff was from Montreal. She spoke French, English, and Yiddish. Any ideas on that? {/Canadian hijack}
Usually I pronounce the ‘n’ in “Banff”. How do you pronounce it? With a nasal ‘a’ but no actual ‘n’ sound?
As for “strength”, I probably pronounce it basically the same as matt.
Me, too! Chicago.
This is supposedly one of those words that for the most part, black and whites tend to pronounce differently- whites normally pronounce the “g”, blacks normally don’t. Or so I’ve heard.
What matt-mcl said. I’m originally from LA, now a US midwesterner.
OK, I will.
There. How was that?
Great!
I’m glad someone is co-operating with the OP!
Sorry, I’m not matt but I lived in Cowgary for a while. You don’t really say the ‘n’ so much as it’s there on your way to the ff sound. You wouldn’t say it the way you would in ‘dander’; it’s a little softer.
As an aside, I recall a Canuck comic (can’t remember who now) pronounce it ‘ban fufuff’. I still hear it that way in my head sometimes when I see it written.
Ditto. I’ve noticed that Buffalo and Chicago (as well as Cleveland) have very similar accents. According to dictionary.com, the most common pronunciation is:
stre[ng]kth (the “ng” representing a nasal sound, as in “sang”), with a “k” sound preceding the “th” sound.
It usually sounds something like “Bamff” (if you can imagine a swallowed “n” sounding more like an “m”) - it’s hard for us Anglophones to go from an “en” to an “eff” sound.
As for Banff, I say it somewhere between bãf, with a nasalized a, and bamf, like Nightcrawler teleporting.
That’s how I always hear it, too. 