Southeastern US. The only person I’ve ever heard pronounce it as “reely” was my father, also from the same area, but I suspect he picked up some pronunciations from his father, who in turn might have picked them up from his father, a Cornish miner.
Aside from that, I’ve rarely heard anything other that ‘rilly.’
Really?
Come to think of it, my grandmother says “reely” even though I say “rilly.” My grandmother is solidly middle class, but she grew up in a villa (orphanage) so maybe she picked it up there.
She always says it in response to something outrageous.
“And then she said she’d take off my shoes and throw them in the river!”
“Reely!”
As an English native speaker, having learnt English in an English colony, and with an English teacher for a mother…
My family pronounce it “rare-ly”, as in a lightly cooked steak.
“Reely” is reserved for sarcasm.
As a native English speaker:
‘Standard’ pronounciation would contain the ‘e-ar’ dipthong, as in ‘nearly’.
The nearest US soundalike might be close to ‘ear’, ‘near’, or something like ‘fear-ly’, ie 3 syllables. Even in rapid speech, or exclamations, the sliding e-ar is retained.
Christie is undoubtedly hinting of lower-class origins with ‘Reely’. Another couple of hints used in authors’ dialogue are demonstrated in ‘nuffink’.
There certainly were/are ‘posh’ affectations like ‘rahly’ or ‘rilly’ (please don’t do that at home).
Regional differences in the UK are much greater that US variations. My origins are South Cambridgeshire, middle-class academic family.
This the region that formed the template for standard English, adopted centuries later by the BBC.
There are 16th-century writings (in English) from the Cambridge Fenlands which are entirely intelligible. There are also no dialect terms in this region around Ely, but there are in every surrounding county. I blame the monks.
In my examples, don’t sound the ‘r’ in ‘ear’ or ‘fear’, it isn’t in ‘really’ of course.
I just thought about my pronunciation, and while I don’t have recordings of myself, I suspect that I pronounce the weak form “rilly” and the strong form “reely”. By weak and strong form I mean like the “thee” vs “thuh” pronunciations of “the”. Use as an intensifier is often weak, but use as a interrogatory is much more likely to be strong.
It also appears in The Hollow (a/k/a Murder After Hours) from another low class character. Note that in the same sentence the word is used twice, once misspelled–I thought for emphasis, though it was also italicized–and once spelled correctly.
“It was ever such a nice bracelet, Miss Savernake, reely quite lovely–and of course, I dare say the poor fellow couldn’t really afford it, but I do think it was nice of him, and I certainly wasn’t going to give it back!”
Interesting how authors have these little ticks that would go unnoticed until all their books were available and people could spot the repetition.
You folks who pronounce “really” as “rilly”, how do you pronounce “real”?
REEL.
I say “rilly” and I also usually say “rill.” As in, “In rill life I grew up in Chicago, and it’s rilly interesting that I did not change my speech patterns in this regard when I moved to New York State as a young adult.”
So long. It’s been rill.
Interesting - I don’t know that I’ve ever hear that pronunciation. I probably have, but just didn’t pick up on it.
As a reader it’s hard for me to know whether it’s the author who’s a snob or the characters themselves. I don’t get the impression these well-to-do women are meant to be emulated. They’re depicted as disingenuous busybodies. It seems to me nobody is safe from the author’s pen.
Christie was consistent in her portrayal of lower-class characters across her books. She was better than many of her contemporaries, but that’s an extremely low bar.
I did just read A Body in the Library and I think its treatment of the low-class victim, barely an adult, was pretty brutal. So I can see what you’re saying. But sometimes it’s hard for me to tell the difference between the author’s feelings and the characters’. (I did have the feeling, with The Moving Finger, “I don’t like any of these people.” And I presume at least some of them were meant to be likable.)
My first exposure to “reely” was the Ed Sullivan Show. Ed would come on and intone, “Tonight we’re going to have a reeely big shoe ( or shoo) …” with a talking rat or the Beatles or some such.
I rilly don’t say rilly the same way as I say ree-al. I suppose logically I ought to, but I don’t.
You don’t say “dickey” for lunch? Because my relatives-in-law in Haddenham do, and that’s on the Isle.
It’s “rilly” in my Cape Flats birth dialect, but I pronounce it like RP /ˈɹɪə.li/