By Vowels, Dialects

Some people will even get a sort of neutral accent that has all of the unusual parts removed. The Western US accent was actually formed like that, because speakers from the North, Midlands, and South, all moved to the West, and their accents intermingled and the Western accent was sort of a...

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 coming to rhyme with Craig, Hague, plague and...

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 vowels, so that I could transcribe them in IPA. I still have a great deal of trouble distinguishing...

General Canadian English is extremely similar to General American English. However, there are a number of differences between the two dialects. Firstly, GCE (General Canadian English) exhibits a linguistic phenomenon called Canadian Raising. Basically, the diphthong “ai”--as in "by" or "lie"--is...

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 other variations. Some dialects (such as my own) pronounce "ay" differently depending on the...

Well, that phenomenon is very common in North America. Pronouncing /æ/ like that before /m/ and /n/ is also a feauture of Northern cities vowel shifted accents, where /æ/ is always pronounced like that, as well as many other 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 sound exactly the same, in the same way that...

/ɛ/ and /e/ (or /eI/ or other variations depending on dialect and position), generally contrast. Bet /bɛt/ and bait /bet/ are distinguished. However, before certain consonants such as /r\/, the distinction between tense and lax vowels is neutralized. Therefore any tense or lax vowel before...

>> My understanding is that /O/ is the au in author. I don't think either Americans or Brits use that, do they (in "shopping")? << Well, in my dialect, the vowels in cot, caught, father, bother, don, and dawn, and author are all the same. I do not produce nor perceive a distinction...

Kooyeen, I thought I remembered that when you took the American dialect test, you came out as a Westerner. You also said that you are normally cot . I've noticed that overall, it is a feature in my accent that almost no one comments on.