I pronounce England and all derived words as Anglend, the a being long, and the e being a schwa sound. I live in the southern US, and have lived here for all of my life, but the only other person whom I’ve heard pronounce it that way was a German exchange student. I make it a point to always pronounce the as thee, and never thuh, no matter how clumsy it sounds. Same with (n)either, being pronounced (n)eye-thur. I always pronounce angst as ahngst, the ‘ah’ being the same a in father.
My friends make fun of me for this all the time, and I’m beginning to wonder whether or not to drop my hifalutin’ accent, and adopt the local…
The only obvious Southernism in my speech is that I pronounce “naked” as “nekkid”. (This is not, by the way, the standard pronounciation throughout the South, only in some regions.) Everyone in my family says it the same way. In fact, I was 15 years old and living in the Midwest before I realized that there even was another way to pronounce the world. I might never have realized it at all if a friend hadn’t burst out laughing at me when I said the word and asked me to “Say ‘naked’, come on, say ‘naked’!” about a dozen times.
My girlfriend finds it most funny that I use the phrase “I have ever…”, meaning that, although it isn’t a commonplace occurrence, there has existed at least one instance of me doing something-or-other. e.g., –
She says the first time I said “I have ever…”, she had to analyze the sentence to figure out what it meant.
::shrugs::
Seems self-explanatory to me. Opposite of “I have never”. If it ain’t true that “I have never”, then I must have ever, even if only once.
I know it really isn’t an oddity, but my friends find it absolutley hilarious that I say “Pardon?” or “I beg your pardon?” instead of “What?”. It gets really annoying, I’m just trying to be polite! Oh well…
Where I come from, if someone is “crowding you”, they are invading your personal space. When I moved to my current locale, I noticed that a lot of my students were very picky about their personal space, as they often complained about someone “crowding them”. It took awhile for me to realize that what “Bob crowded me” meant “Bob got in line in front of me”. That would have been called “cutting” where I come from.
My students make fun of my pronunciation of certain words most notably route (pronounced like root); the prefix anti, (me: an-tie; them: an-tee); and the word aunt (me: ant; them ont).
I have also discovered that there is a difference between a skillet and a frying pan, between a bag and a sack (although I can’t quite figure out what the difference is), and that the rules for the use of “could” are a bit different here. For example, “might could” and “used to could” are considered correct usage.
Dialect puzzle: What is being said in the following conversation?
I say “ah-range” instead of “orange” and “Flah-ri-da” instead of “Floor-da”. No matter how many times my friends have heard these, they still have to make fun of me every time I say them. It’s getting old, guys…just let it rest.