An interesting American dialect

[Radius Solis]

The whales-Wales distinction is not entirely dialectal - there are random people from everywhere in the USA who preserve it, some natively and some learnedly, but it's not possible to definitively pin the feature down to any particular region. Just to add a couple more examples to the pile: my aunt consistently has it, and she's from western Minnesota, but her sister doesn't have it; and a friend I had in junior high and high school had it, and he was born and raised mainly in Hawaii, but his parents had it too and they were from the mainland, though I forget where.

Also I like calling it "the wine-whine distinction" better because it avoids needing to invoke a proper noun, but that's just pedantry on my part. For additional possible minimal pairs, see wear-where, wet-whet, woe-whoa, and there's a minimal triplet wore-hoar-whore for the few folks who contrast /ʍ/ from both segments everyone else merged it into. (The regular merger rule is: /ʍ/ > /h/ before orthographic <o> and /ʍ/ > /w/ elsewhere.)

I myself preserve /ʍ/ is exactly one word, whorl. I merge it into /h/ before <o> in all other words like normal, but every time I use "whorl" I'm at least dimly conscious of an internal conflict about how to pronounce it, as both /w/ and /h/ are possible (for some people it's a homophone for "whirl" while others have the more regular outcome "horl"). The [ʍ] tends to be what I compromise on, but there's no conscious deliberation about it, it just happens.

[Ia-Itundhoar]

*Unlike any other American I've ever heard, he does not have the Wales/whales merger.

I was born in Philadelphia in 1968, & wouldn't be caught dead pronouncing "whales" like Wales. FWIW.

OTOH, I don't distinguish between "caught" and "cot" & for me, "father" rhymes with "bother" ... but speakers of my conlang would make a clear distinction between those vowels.