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I've probably pretended to speak most of these dialects at some point (with varying degrees of failure, natch). I've only been outside the US twice, (and both of those places were basically English-speaking), but I've been all over the US. As a kid raised in the midwest/South by parents from the NY metro area, who grew up with not much of a discernible accent at all (in that I don't say "warsh" or "JC Pinney", or "cawfee" or "tawk", at least), I am fascinated by this. Posted by ootandaboot at 5:43 PM on Decem As you can see on the map, the dialects where "on" rhymes with "Don" are to the north of what we call "the ON line" (which runs through the middle of New Jersey) and the dialects where "on" rhymes with "Dawn" are to the south of the ON line. Now, within the dialects that have distinct vowels for "Don" and "Dawn", there is a difference between dialects where the word "on" has the same vowel as "Don" and dialects where the word "on" has the same vowel as "Dawn". A majority of the US population still pronounces "Don" and "Dawn" differently, although the geographic distribution of the low-back merger is extensive. A merger is when two vowels that used to be distinct come to be pronounced identically.

If you speak a dialect where they're the same, it can seem quite mysterious-I know because I speak one of these dialects! The phenomenon where these words are pronounced the same is called the "cot-caught merger" (because "cot" and "caught" is another typical pair of words containing the same vowels as "Don" and "Dawn") or the "low-back merger" (because both vowels involved are pronounced with the tongue low in the back of the mouth). One of the major divisions in North American dialects is between those dialects where "Don" and "Dawn" are pronounced the same, and those were they aren't. Posted by Slothrop at 4:35 PM on Decem[ 1 small_ruminant: In my experience with the Appalachian region for instance, I find that the pronunciation of the word "right" marks off different boundaries, on a continuum from "rat" to "rot." Again, I imagine the researcher did lots of work for this, but perhaps he or she needs more data for some of these areas.Īs I read the map more, I see that there are subdialects listed such as Central Midland Cincinnati, which makes it seem a bit more nuanced, but I still would be interested in a finer grain of distinction between some places.

Having grown up in Louisville and now living in Charlotte, I don't see the accents between the two places as being entirely the same as they are indicated on this map either. My Northern Appalachian Kentucky relatives even spoke differently than my Southern Kentucky Appalachian students and colleagues at my former school. However, as someone with family from Appalachian Kentucky (and who lived there from 2007-early 2010), I don't see how all of Appalachian Kentucky can be lumped with a region that extends all the way to New Mexico. I imagine that this was a considerable amount of work and the researcher probably considered many fine nuances.