youneedacat:
codeman38:
lingllama:
[An image of a pushpin piercing a ballpoint pen. Text: “PIN-PEN MERGER: UR DOIN IT RITE”]
*giggles* I’m originally from Georgia. I have this vowel merger. How did I not think of this visual pun myself?!
Where does that merger generally come from? My mom has it. And her parents are basically… well her mom’s family is kind of Sweden -> Minnesota -> Oregon. And then her dad is from all over the place, the only two I remember are Arkansas and Kansas, and eventually Oregon with my grandma, which is where my mom was raised. And my mom’s accent has all of these elements to it. (My dad’s accent doesn’t have it and his family was Oklahoma/Arkansas -> California. His accent is a blend of Southern and Californian, with the level of each varying by context.)
ETA: Weird. I just looked it up and my dad really should have it. His relatives were exactly the ones they talk about, going from the Ozarks to the Bakersfield area. Weird. Or maybe he has it and I never noticed as much as with my mom? I don’t know.
I know several people who do this but offhand can’t recall where they’re from. One of them I am *pretty* sure was born and raised in sort of a rural part of California, though, and she says she literally hears no difference between the vowel sounds in “pin” and “pen”.
On a related note, my SO (who was born and raised in the same suburb of San Jose we now reside in) does a similar thing where he pronounces “windowsill” like “windowSEAL” and can’t hear the difference even when I say it both ways one after another. His mom is Portuguese and his dad is from Iowa but I have no idea if that factors in.
As for me personally, Matt (the SO) says that I pronounce “wasn’t” in a weird way. Like with a very flat a-sound, i.e., “wah-znt”. Not sure if that’s an East Coast thing (I lived in CT until age 17) or a leftover British thing (my mom was English and a lot of my early speech was, in addition to being echolalic, mildly accented). But the lead singer in Muse seems to pronounce it like I do, which amused me to no end when I heard it in a song.
Yeah my dad pronounces a lot of “ill” words like “eal”. Or more specifically like… kill might sound like “kyill” (the y is a consonant there) or “kee-uhl” or “keeyill” or various variations on that. If you’ve ever listened to Tony Carey or Planet P Project, you’ll hear something similar sometimes. They’re from the same broad geographic region, the Central Valley in California. Which is where a lot of people from the Ozarks and people from that general region moved into. But Tony Carey is from Fresno and my dad’s from Wasco (also Porterville and a bunch of other places, they moved around a lot). The Central Valley is a very different region culturally from other parts of California and I grew up hearing my dad wasn’t a real Californian.