So, Copenhagen is the European equivalent of Louisville?
Growing up on a farm, our mailing address was Route 2, Box 14. Route rhymed with ‘out’.
And every other usage of the word is the same, rhyming with ‘out’. Except when it’s followed by ‘66’, then it’s ‘root’.
Except that throws up another question. I suspect the way I pronounce “root” is different than yours, as it is not a homonym for “route” as in “route 66” the song. My “root” has the “oo” /ʊ/ as in “book.” (Though I will sometimes do the /u/ as in “boo” sound, as well. “Roof” is similar. Usually, I say it to have the same vowel as “book.” But it can be a /ʊ/ or a /u/.)
I flip-flop between kar-mel and kare-a-mel for caramel, depending on who I’m talking to.
I also flip-flop on how I pronounce Caribbean, depending on whether or not I’m discussing the Johnny Depp movie.
QU is pronounced “kw-”
So, I say queue “kwee-wee.”
I say quinoa “kwi-no-uh.”
If you insist on spelling it “cheque,” I will pronounce it “che-kwee.”
Don’t try to convince me otherwise.
Not “Chawklit”, but all the others, yeah. It always sounds very weird and fake to hear someone referring to a female relative as “awnt” versus “ant”. I only ever heard one person pronounce the word “often” with the T.
I grew up saying “cumfterble” as well. Never outgrew that - though I did manage to outgrow “warsh” and “warshington”.
How about the second month of the year. Where did that first R come from. We always called it “Feb-you-ary” and I never did quite outgrow that.
Fortunately I never did fall into the habit of saying “Noo-kyou-lar”.
I’ve had to scrub particularly out of my public speaking because I can’t enunciate it well in front of people. Sounds fine in my head, but my tongue doesn’t get the message.
Got two, “buteo” [as in hawk] & “fungi” [as in mushroom].
As a birder, I get stabby when I hear the former said as “BEAUT-e-oh”. Nope, sorry, it’s not a feminine hygiene product slash breakfast cereal, it’s a bad mofo bird of prey, it’s a “Byu-TEH-oh”.
I have the rule on my side for the second one, “fun guy” just sounds very lame. Gotta be “Fun-jee”
I sort of weasel out and sort de-enunciate the vowels and gloss over the “ru”, so it comes out something like a monosyllabic “Febyerry”.
“Noo-kyou-ler” drives me batty. I can think of no possible way ‘nuclear’ can be pronounced “Noo-kou-ler” without transposing letters.
I have pronounced “lien” as “LEE-en” in the past. I had a lien on my house (in error) and I stood there like a dolt saying “LEE-en” to my friend’s lawyer friend while discussing the situation.
I know it’s “LEEN” but like…that’s a dumb spelling, man.
Oh you remind me about a former colleague named Lee Rubel, whose wife was Danish. Since L and R are essentially silent in Danish and any consonant between two vowels is replaced by a glottal stop, his name came out roughly as Ee U’uh.
Well, thtat is essentially what happens. It’s more analogizing with -ular words like molecular, circular, spectacular (funicular? 
). And, add to that, switching around the order of letters isn’t all that odd a phenomenon. We have “farv” for “favre” and “or derv” for “hors d’oevres,” for instance. There’s a name for it: metathesis. (“brid” became “bird” this way; lots of people say “foilage” for “foliage”; “introduce” becomes “interduce” or “innerduce,” etc.) So “nucular” for “nuclear” is probably a mix of both metathesis and apologizing with -ular ending words.
I live in central Indiana; so was Dad, and Mom was from around Columbus, Ohio. That’s for accent background.
I don’t recall hearing anyone say aunt as awnt until I was past 30. Always ant and anty, except for Aint Bee on the Andy Griffith Show.
I’ve always said Kabul as KAHB-ul. Afghan demonstrators throw “cobblestones.”
In my mouth, caramel is 3 syllables, unless I’m tired. However, I say CAR-mel-ized onions. Complicating it further, the Indy suburb Carmel is CAR-mel, unlike the California town of car-MEL.
Some folks around here “warsh and wrench” clothes, but for me it’s always been wash and rinse. In my mouth, the “th” in “clothes” is silent.
I do exactly the same thing, although I never thought about it until I read this thread.
I also pronounce “clothes” as “close,” but if I was acting in a play (which I do occasionally) I’d make a point of pronouncing the “th.”
When my son was very young (like 4 or 5 years old) he thought the singular of “clothes” was “clo”—which was reasonable given the way I pronounced it. If I was taking laundry out of the dryer and a sock landed on the floor, he would inform me that I had dropped a clo.
I can’t really articulate how my pronunciation of the word drawers is different than draws, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it is different and also wrong.
I also have difficulty with borrowers, but most people I know (i.e. New England natives) also pronounce both words wrong too, so I don’t feel too badly about it.
That’s the UK pronunciation, according to the sources I checked after hearing it pronounced that way. It was an older American lawyer saying it that way. I assume he learned it as the “correct” way to pronounce it, way back when, in certain circles. Law can be extra stodgy and “special.” No one else I know pronounces it that way, though.
Nuclear and powerful are two that I have trouble with. GW Bush caught hell from the intelligentsia for his pronunciation of the former; I’m pretty sure JFK pronounced the same way. There were things to get on Bush’s case about, but IMHO that isn’t one of them. I don’t like casting aspersions on a person’s intelligence based on whether or not they use “correct” pronunciations. I’ll nucelar, pareful, chocklit, drorr (for drawer) etc. as much as I please.
A co-worker and I had a friendly debate over the word “finance.” (“Financing” was being used in a commercial we were producing.) I would say it “fin-ANCE.” He would say “FY-nance.” We agreed to disagree. I don’t know if one is preferable to the other. (Or is it “PREFF-erable” or “PREEFER-able?”
I had a boss eons ago who said FEBBY-airy - he was an idiot in other ways, too.