>> Conservative Received pronunciation used to pronounce r's between words as a flap. << Conservative Received Pronunciation is the dialect that used to be the standard, formal, educated, upper-class dialect in England. In this

Hwat for what is the original pronunciation and was the only form used in Middle English. In Modern English, many dialects lost the wine-whine distinction, and began pronouncing words spelled "wh" as simply "w", rather thn "hw". The original,

Well yes back is always /bæk/ in NAE. "Beg" is more variable. Some people have tense-lax neutralization before /g/. According to Wikipedia: "Some examples of neutralization of /ɛ/ to /eɪ/ before /ɡ/ are beg, egg, Greg, keg, leg and peg's

Nope, a complete vowel merger means that you can neither produce nor perceive a difference between two or more vowels in a certain environment or all environments. In my dialect, the vowels and are merged in all environments so I cannot produce

Hmm. Sorry for the confusion. Now I'm a little confused too. I was saying two different things: 1) The "ay" in play, is pronounced differently in different dialects. Such as a monophthong or something like or other variations. Some dialects

What I meant by there's no contrast is that there are no minimal pairs (in General American). Tense and lax vowels never contrast: /Er\/ and /er\/ both mean "air". In fact, I can't even *hear* the difference between /Er\/ and /er\/ at all. They

In General American, it is pronounced . Certain East Coast dialects do not have the very-vary merger, and still pronounce it with /æ/. Speakers with the Canadian or California vowel shifts will pronounce /E/ as however.

>> whereas the General American pronunciation is /I'moudiKa:n/. d = flapped /t/<< Interesting. I would say it with a rather than an alveolar flap. I think it's one of those words in which the /t/ is pronounced as spelt. Perhaps

>> Isn't it interesting that certain forms of American pronunciation aare older than the British ones? E.g., the short 'a' sound in "glass" and "pass" that the Americans use was the sound used in British English, till they changed it for the

Englishuser wrote: What's interesting is that these changes are led by younger female speakers. Older speakers and male speakers adopt these kind of changes later. Yes, that really is interesting. Why are the changes led by younger female