HELP us understand American English!

18:40 hagagaghahahaa

I get the sense that British and American English have drawn slightly closer together in recent years. I don't blame the internet alone. I think it started with Harry Potter and how much reading of British editions American kids did. What do you think? Do Brits send more "mail" than they used to? Do Americans "queue up" more often than before?

I have given up on American (English), both written and spoken, because of often incomprehensible pronunciation, and the use of words that do not occur in English. In my own field of study, I cannot bear to hear even educated Americans talking about Ar'dic and An'ardic with no attempt to pronounce them as they are spelt. And there is more than enough written and spoken in English to last for the rest of my life, without bothering myself about what happens on the other side of the Atlantic.

I reject your analysis of what’s going on in “speech.” Yes, the /p/ is unaspirqted, but remove the “s” at the start and to me “peach” with an unaspirated /p/ DOES NOT sound like “beech.” I would accept it if you said /b/ becomes an unaspirated /p/ after “s,” but I reject the characterization that /p/ becomes /b/ after “s.”

Much of American English, my "native" language, is based on laziness. People object to having to study it. And Ebonics? I'm not a racist, but it's absolute primitive garbage.

The Mormon Later Day Saints climb ladders

No The Big Lebowski clip :(

All I know is we need a way to distinguish caulk from cock. Same exact sound where I live.

Dr. Lindsey's interest in American English makes me as an American feel so special

So would some Americans pronounce all these words the same: cat cot caught cart cad cod cord card? To me they are all distinct.

My morphology prof (I teach ESOL) was British and an RP speaker, teaching in the US, and he absolutely insisted that bah and bar had the same vowel in general American (rhotic) English (i.e., that the A was not colored by the R). It drove me nuts.

As a... Floridian. I have had many rocks on how to explain it in the survey. The U and R do weird stuff together. I put a y in pure, Europe, and security, and I skipped the u in sure, pressure and surely.

I have certainly experienced the cot/caught merger. I used to work in an American elementary school where teachers often had little rhymes for performing actions with the small children. To get them to sit still on the floor cross-legged they would all say ‘criss-cross, apple sauce’. As a Brit, I just couldn’t pull it off.

Of course it's hard it's GOD'S LANGUAGE duh

Long-time Southern-California native raised by two parents who are also long-time Southern-California natives...

All of our "r"s are extremely pronounced... to the point that if "r" follows a vowel, it always swallows it and turns into it's own vowel-sound in the process. There's around... four main variants of this "r" vowel sound that correspond with the general regular vowel-sounds. "air" as in "air", "ear" as in "ear" and "oar" as in "oar". "ir" and "ur" share sounds as in "bird" and "lure" (same pronunciation for both of those) and it's this one that is the most common out of all of them (it's how the ending "er" is pronounced most of the time). Also this weird "r" where the "r" is pronounced like the name for "r" (like in "car") This makes spelling extremely difficult to learn as there's so many different ways to write these "-r" sounds while there's so few ways to pronounce them. What is weird to describe about all off these is that the back of my tongue is preparing to make this sound almost at the same time it is pronouncing the consonant sound that comes before the vowel that the "r" is after, which leaves no space for a "clean" vowel sound without the "influence" of the "r" in it. It's possible to run through all five of these sounds with the same preceding consonant with something like... "bared", "beard", "board", "bird" and "barred". The only thing changing in those for me is that "r" vowel variant in the middle...

Southern-California accents are (in-)famous for their tendency for up-talk and vocal fry which turns a lot of the unstressed "uh" sounds into "i" as in "pit"... so long as you're talking at the normal pace and pitch. When I slow down then all those "i"s turn back into "uh"s and occasionally "a"s if they were that before they got turned into "uh"s initially. This also complicates spelling as then you've got multiple pronunciations to pick from for which vowels make the word up...

Tried to take the survey and what comedy. The letter "R" truly is a vowel, so I found myself clicking "neither of the above" way too often.

θɛəŋksfɚjɚvɪdioʊzjɚəmeɪzɪŋ

I hate these videos that say "American English" is this or that. When there can be more than 20 different accents (and different ways of pronouncing words) in the US, and probably more than 30 in all of the UK where you're including Ireland and Scotland.

You linguists have the rare gift of making simple things completely ununderstandable, sorry!

We love a good phonemics survey. So excited to see the results someday

Yank here, from the Midwest. My own pronunciations don't consistently follow any of those dictionaries' approaches, they're all over the place! I took the survey, and boy were some of those difficult to classify. Best of luck with the project!

General American English is an ideal, not a real accent but it is what we train broadcasters to use. The closest natural accent to it is midwestern city kind of. It is suppose to make the newscaster understandable for the whole country so it takes sound-bits from everywhere.

There’s a twenty one pilots song with the lyric “out of student loans and treehouse homes, we all would take the latter” which only works as a pun/double entendre because we pronounce latter and ladder the same way! How interesting. Great video!

26:35 At least in my Canadian accent, the "o" in "story" is actually an "oo" like in "moose"!

"Dictionry"

With the introduction of online dictionaries that also have British and American audio versions of pronunciation, I thankfully almost never have to decipher the written pronunciation guide 😅

I definitely have the caught/cot merger but I do have the unmerged cought vowel—or something similar that’s between a straight ah and o—in some words, like borrow or ethanol.

As an American, general American definitely has caught cot sounding the exact same

Interesting — but WAY to many ads

12:55 it sounds like /iːʑɪ/ to me

In my midwestern accent, words like Lincoln is /linkn/ with syllabic-n and murmur is /'mrmr/

Why are diphthongs counted as separate vowels in English? Spanish also has ei, ai, and others.

My brain is legitimately exhausted after that survey, like I took a difficult and important test in school. @_@

16:38 when I say ready and then a word with a t like ‘to’, it also is a flap. “Ready to go” for example has a flap on ‘ready’ and a flap on ‘to’
It’s interesting!

19:59 northeastern american here, I have the cot caught distinction but it's relatively subtle, and depending on the situation it wouldn't be super weird for me to have them sound the same.

8:53 hands down the best example/explanation of complementary distribution I've heard

i think the term “general american” is useful like ideal gas law in chemistry
it’s a very useful tool to understand how the dialects work in general, but it’s not actually accurate to how the real world works

My /d/ is always a flap, even outside of intervocalic environments. I’ve also heard a friend of mine pronounce glottalized t as a flap. It’s all over the place.