The "How do You Pronounce X" Thread

[Vijay]

Yeah, in some varieties of (at least American) English, that vowel is just schwa.

[Travis B.]

Before vowels here, /oʊ/ is frequently reduced to [əw] or [w] (note the pronunciation of koala as [kʰəːˈwɑːɤ̯ə(ː)]~[ˈkʰwɑːɤ̯ə(ː)] and cooperate as [kʰəːˈwɑpʁ̩ːʁeʔ~[ˈkʰwɑpʁ̩ːʁeʔ].

[linguoboy]

Somehow today I managed to reduce "children's" so radically that my coworker heard "Chun's" and was like, "Who is Chun?" #mumblecore4life

[Vlürch]

Somehow today I managed to reduce "children's" so radically that my coworker heard "Chun's" and was like, "Who is Chun?" #mumblecore4life

lol

How about ovoid and emesis?

I'd say [oʊ̯ʋʷoi̯d] and [e̞mɜsis], but I'm not sure if that's correct; I mean, I know /v/ supposed to be [v], but I've noticed in recording myself speaking (and singing) English that I tend to pronounce both /v/ and /w/ as something like [ʋʷ] in contact with rounded vowels, I guess /w/ as [ʋʷ~β̞ʷ~w] and /v/ as [ʋ~ʋʷ~β̞]...

ʁ̩ːʁ

wat

[Vijay]

Somehow today I managed to reduce "children's" so radically that my coworker heard "Chun's" and was like, "Who is Chun?" #mumblecore4life

I think we actually do that way more often than we think we do. I remember a colleague of mine in an acoustic phonetics seminar was trying to give an example of the careful enunciation of a word contrasted against a more casual enunciation and against an even more casual one. Her example involving the word anyway was something like [ˈʔɛːniːweːj] vs. [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej]. I argued that it was more like [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej] vs. just [ʔẽ], which I had actually heard her say in that same seminar before on another day. She was like " I'm insulted that you think my 'anyway' just sounds like 'eh'."

[linguoboy]

How about ovoid and emesis?

The first is easy: /ˈoːvɔɪd/. The second gives me pause. My first urge is to rhyme it with nemesis, but--like I say above--I have a tendency to favour short vowels in Graeco-Latin borrowings where the standard pronunciation has them long. So my second urge is to take thesis or centesis as a model. But I say anti-emetic with /ɛ/, not /iː/, so on balance I would go with /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ (which will come out pin-pen merged in my speech unless I'm overenunciating).

[Imralu]

Just re-iterating that /u/ in Buddha and /V/ in Muslim sound extremely American. Like saying /aI"r{k/ or /aI"r{n/..

Or /aɪˈtæljən/ ...

(Word finally, the only unstressed vowels are schwa, which lowers a lot, and /i/ but they are, of course, distinct.)

What about the “potato” vowel?

Ah, that's not fully unstressed. I think I read somewhere that English has 5 levels of stress ... emphatic stress (only suprasegmental), primary stress, secondary stress, tertiary stress (unreduced unstressed) and unstressed (reduced unstress). I say that as [pʰəˈtʰæɪ̯ɾɐʉ̯] ... if I were to jokingly say "potata", the final schwa would be much less stressed than it normally is in "potato". So, yeah, what I said about unstressed vowels, I meant only about the lowest level of stress. The final "o" in potato would I guess be the tertiary stress level. I think any full vowel or diphthong other than that requires a slightly higher level of stress in my speech.

I switched to the prestige pronunciations with /u/ (i.e. [ʊ]).

Wait ... if your /u/ is pronounced as [ʊ] ... how is your /ʊ/ pronounced?

I tend to use /u/ rather than /ʊ/ in foreign words where it is not loaned as STRUT because native /ʊ/ is too central; e.g. when pronouncing German words with /ʊ/.

Ah, that makes sense. For me it's the other way because my /ʊ/ is essentially exactly the same as the German /ʊ/ and my /u:/ is very fronted, about half-way between the German /u:/ and /y:/. When I'm pronouncing German words with my Australian accent, I would never switch a long vowel with a short vowel because I guess vowel length is a very salient thing for my with my Australian dialect, so that's why it grates when I hear an American pronounce a German word like "und" with a long /u:/ rather than a short /ʊ/. I guess for Americans, the actual flavour of the vowel may be more salient than the length, so that prompts your choices.

Somehow today I managed to reduce "children's" so radically that my coworker heard "Chun's" and was like, "Who is Chun?" #mumblecore4life

I think we actually do that way more often than we think we do. I remember a colleague of mine in an acoustic phonetics seminar was trying to give an example of the careful enunciation of a word contrasted against a more casual enunciation and against an even more casual one. Her example involving the word anyway was something like [ˈʔɛːniːweːj] vs. [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej]. I argued that it was more like [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej] vs. just [ʔẽ], which I had actually heard her say in that same seminar before on another day. She was like " I'm insulted that you think my 'anyway' just sounds like 'eh'."

Yeah, when I worked in a drive through bottle shop (liquor store) when my accent was at peak Australian, I once heard myself say something like [wɾe̞o̯s wjaːftɐ] for "what else were you after?" and it repeated in my head as just a really weird sequence of sounds.

[Sumelic]

How about ovoid and emesis?

The first is easy: /ˈoːvɔɪd/.

Same here. As far as I know, the suffix "-oid" has no consistent effects on the pronunciation of the preceding part of the word, so it makes sense to pronounce the "ov-" as in "oval" and "ovum".

The second gives me pause. My first urge is to rhyme it with nemesis, but--like I say above--I have a tendency to favour short vowels in Graeco-Latin borrowings where the standard pronunciation has them long. So my second urge is to take thesis or centesis as a model. But I say anti-emetic with /ɛ/, not /iː/

I would say to be wary of using "-tic" words as a guide to the pronunciation of "-sis" words, because "-ic" tends to impose penult stress and "short" pronunciations of a, e, o and i. E.g. vowel shift: crisis-critic, stasis-static, prosthesis-prosthetic, neurosis-neurotic; stress shift: analysis-analytic, metastasis, metastatic. (There are exceptions to both of these tendencies, though, like catholic and psychic--exceptions to the length rule are more common than exceptions to the stress rule.)

, so on balance I would go with /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ (which will come out pin-pen merged in my speech unless I'm overenunciating).

My own tendency was to go for /ɪˈmiːsɪs/, but after checking the dictionary I see that /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ is in fact the better choice, as there is no particular reason for using penult stress in this word.

(Word finally, the only unstressed vowels are schwa, which lowers a lot, and /i/ but they are, of course, distinct.)

What about the “potato” vowel?

Ah, that's not fully unstressed. I think I read somewhere that English has 5 levels of stress ... emphatic stress (only suprasegmental), primary stress, secondary stress, tertiary stress (unreduced unstressed) and unstressed (reduced unstress). I say that as [pʰəˈtʰæɪ̯ɾɐʉ̯] ... if I were to jokingly say "potata", the final schwa would be much less stressed than it normally is in "potato". So, yeah, what I said about unstressed vowels, I meant only about the lowest level of stress. The final "o" in potato would I guess be the tertiary stress level. I think any full vowel or diphthong other than that requires a slightly higher level of stress in my speech.
.

Interesting. I'm more familar with treatments like Wells's that treat word-final -o and happY as fully unstressed even though not reduced to schwa. From what I remember, the evidence for this is based on both intuitions and t-flapping patterns (although t-flapping/voicing rules are kind of complicated and so maybe not particularly strong evidence; I think I could have voiced t in a word that pluralized from "Vtus" to "Vti" (unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any particularly common example, but e.g. in a word like "emeriti")). One vowel that often doesn't seem to be mentioned is /u/, as in "value"; I think some sources seem to indicate that it is also fully unstressed, which fits with my intuitions, but it's pretty hard to get t-flapping evidence.

[Zaarin]

Just re-iterating that /u/ in Buddha and /V/ in Muslim sound extremely American. Like saying /aI"r{k/ or /aI"r{n/..

Or /aɪˈtæljən/ ...

Specifically Southern; most Americans have /ɪˈtæljən/.

[Vijay]

I've lived in the South almost my whole life and never heard Italian with an /aɪ/. Oh, Austin.

[Travis B.]

Somehow today I managed to reduce "children's" so radically that my coworker heard "Chun's" and was like, "Who is Chun?" #mumblecore4life

I think we actually do that way more often than we think we do. I remember a colleague of mine in an acoustic phonetics seminar was trying to give an example of the careful enunciation of a word contrasted against a more casual enunciation and against an even more casual one. Her example involving the word anyway was something like [ˈʔɛːniːweːj] vs. [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej]. I argued that it was more like [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej] vs. just [ʔẽ], which I had actually heard her say in that same seminar before on another day. She was like " I'm insulted that you think my 'anyway' just sounds like 'eh'."

As you all know, and much to my Indian coworkers' chagrin (these days they seem to have a harder time understanding me than me them), I take this to an extreme; just about every /t d n nt nd/ between two vowels where the second is unstressed and where similar elision did not occur on the other side of one of the adjacent vowels is fair game for elision. So yes, I say [ˈɜ̃ːi̯we(ː)].

[Travis B.]

I've lived in the South almost my whole life and never heard Italian with an /aɪ/. Oh, Austin.

Austin really is not part of the South, though.

[Travis B.]

ʁ̩ːʁ

wat

It is called a long syllabic bunched R, followed by a non-syllabic bunched R in the onset of the following syllable. (It is long because there is no fortis obstruent between it and the next vowel.)

[Travis B.]

Somehow today I managed to reduce "children's" so radically that my coworker heard "Chun's" and was like, "Who is Chun?" #mumblecore4life

lol

How about ovoid and emesis?

ovoid: [ˈoːvɔːɪ̯t], before a vowel [ˈoːvɔːɪ̯d]
emesis: [ə̃ːˈmisɘs] (but I say emetic: [ə̃ːˈmɜɾɘʔk]~[ə̃ːˈmɜɘ̯ʔk]).

[Travis B.]

(Word finally, the only unstressed vowels are schwa, which lowers a lot, and /i/ but they are, of course, distinct.)

What about the “potato” vowel?

Ah, that's not fully unstressed. I think I read somewhere that English has 5 levels of stress ... emphatic stress (only suprasegmental), primary stress, secondary stress, tertiary stress (unreduced unstressed) and unstressed (reduced unstress). I say that as [pʰəˈtʰæɪ̯ɾɐʉ̯] ... if I were to jokingly say "potata", the final schwa would be much less stressed than it normally is in "potato". So, yeah, what I said about unstressed vowels, I meant only about the lowest level of stress. The final "o" in potato would I guess be the tertiary stress level. I think any full vowel or diphthong other than that requires a slightly higher level of stress in my speech.

Five or four levels of stress sounds right, depending on whether you consider unstressed full vowels as fully unstressed or not (as mentioned above).

I tend to use /u/ rather than /ʊ/ in foreign words where it is not loaned as STRUT because native /ʊ/ is too central; e.g. when pronouncing German words with /ʊ/.

Ah, that makes sense. For me it's the other way because my /ʊ/ is essentially exactly the same as the German /ʊ/ and my /u:/ is very fronted, about half-way between the German /u:/ and /y:/. When I'm pronouncing German words with my Australian accent, I would never switch a long vowel with a short vowel because I guess vowel length is a very salient thing for my with my Australian dialect, so that's why it grates when I hear an American pronounce a German word like "und" with a long /u:/ rather than a short /ʊ/. I guess for Americans, the actual flavour of the vowel may be more salient than the length, so that prompts your choices.

People here are not conscious of vowel length - we do not think of vowels in modern-day English as being actually short or long, aside from elementary school's "short e" versus "long e" and whatnot, and in fact our vowels lack phonemic length to begin with. So when attempting to pronounce foreign languages we try to map our vowels onto their vowels' qualities rather than lengths (which explains why for me vowel length distinctions that do not have a corresponding vowel quality distinction are so troublesome).

Yet at the same time, I have found that vowel length, despite being allophonic for us, is critical for proper word recognition, because vowel length is a big part of how we distinguish fortis obstruents from lenis obstruents, especially since actual voicing does not reliably distinguish them for us. So pronounce a word with the wrong vowel length, and we may not have a clue of what you just said. This is why I for the longest time had a very hard time understanding Indian people speaking English, because they would speak English entirely without allophonic vowel length (or preglottalization, or aspiration, for that matter, which only made things harder); it took me about a year of working at where I work now, where I have many Indian coworkers, before I really could understand them.

Somehow today I managed to reduce "children's" so radically that my coworker heard "Chun's" and was like, "Who is Chun?" #mumblecore4life

I think we actually do that way more often than we think we do. I remember a colleague of mine in an acoustic phonetics seminar was trying to give an example of the careful enunciation of a word contrasted against a more casual enunciation and against an even more casual one. Her example involving the word anyway was something like [ˈʔɛːniːweːj] vs. [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej]. I argued that it was more like [ˈʔɛniwej] vs. [ˈʔejwej] vs. just [ʔẽ], which I had actually heard her say in that same seminar before on another day. She was like " I'm insulted that you think my 'anyway' just sounds like 'eh'."

Yeah, when I worked in a drive through bottle shop (liquor store) when my accent was at peak Australian, I once heard myself say something like [wɾe̞o̯s wjaːftɐ] for "what else were you after?" and it repeated in my head as just a really weird sequence of sounds.

For me that'd come out as [wʌɜɯ̯sʁ̩ːjɛːftʁ̩ː].

[Vlürch]

[ʔẽ]

And then that gets reduced to [ʕ̩̃]...

How about ovoid and emesis?

The first is easy: /ˈoːvɔɪd/.

Same here. As far as I know, the suffix "-oid" has no consistent effects on the pronunciation of the preceding part of the word, so it makes sense to pronounce the "ov-" as in "oval" and "ovum".

Isn't "oval" pronounced with [oʊ̯]? That's why I thought "ovoid" would have [oʊ̯].

The second gives me pause. My first urge is to rhyme it with nemesis, but--like I say above--I have a tendency to favour short vowels in Graeco-Latin borrowings where the standard pronunciation has them long. So my second urge is to take thesis or centesis as a model. But I say anti-emetic with /ɛ/, not /iː/, so on balance I would go with /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ (which will come out pin-pen merged in my speech unless I'm overenunciating).

Long vowels in Latin sound weird to begin with, as does <c> as /k/ in all contexts... but then again, my exposure to Latin has been pretty much entirely from Christianity-related stuff, so of course the "proper" pronunciation sounds off.

But really, what other context is there where one can hear Latin these days?

Also, it bothers me a little that Wikipedia's regional pronunciation of Latin page lumps German and Uralic together. I'm 90% sure that's not how Finnish priests pronounce Latin, at least; IIRC at least <c> is pronounced as if it was /s/ before front vowels, and <ae~æ> and <oe~œ> are [ɑe̞] and [o̞e̞] just like they would be in Finnish. A huge one is <xc>, because I'm pretty sure that probably not a single Finn would ever pronounce it [ksts], only [ksk] or [ks] depending on whether it's before a back vowel or a front vowel. I can't be arsed to search for any recordings, though.

I would say to be wary of using "-tic" words as a guide to the pronunciation of "-sis" words, because "-ic" tends to impose penult stress and "short" pronunciations of a, e, o and i. E.g. vowel shift: crisis-critic, stasis-static, prosthesis-prosthetic, neurosis-neurotic;

[kɾɑi̯sis], [kɾit̪ik], [st̪ei̯sis], [st̪æt̪ik], [pɾost̪ʰe̞sis], [pɾɔst̪ʰe̞tik], [nʲjeʊ̯ɾɔsis], [nʲjəʊ̯ɾɔt̪ik]

stress shift: analysis-analytic, metastasis, metastatic.

[ænɐlɑi̯sis], [ænɐlit̪ik], [me̞t̪ɑst̪ei̯sis], [me̞t̪ɑst̪æt̪ik]



Sorry, I have no idea about stress...

My own tendency was to go for /ɪˈmiːsɪs/, but after checking the dictionary I see that /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ is in fact the better choice, as there is no particular reason for using penult stress in this word.

Does that mean [e̞mɜsis] would be mistaken for some other word, or would it be understood?

ʁ̩ːʁ

wat

It is called a long syllabic bunched R, followed by a non-syllabic bunched R in the onset of the following syllable. (It is long because there is no fortis obstruent between it and the next vowel.)

For some reason I just can't imagine a long fricative or approximant followed by the same fricative/approximant, since it's basically a fricative that lasts for three times the usual length. I mean, of course I can imagine how it sounds, but the thought of hearing it in a conversation is about as WTF as hearing something like [b͡ʙ].

[Sumelic]

Isn't "oval" pronounced with [oʊ̯]? That's why I thought "ovoid" would have [oʊ̯].

In this context, /oʊ̯/ and /oː/ are different ways of writing the same phoneme. The level of dipthongization is allophonic and varies based on things like the speaker and the phonetic environent. I usually use /oʊ/ or /o/ in my transcriptions, but since I was just agreeing with linguoboy I didn't feel the need to re-transcribe with my own conventions.

The second gives me pause. My first urge is to rhyme it with nemesis, but--like I say above--I have a tendency to favour short vowels in Graeco-Latin borrowings where the standard pronunciation has them long. So my second urge is to take thesis or centesis as a model. But I say anti-emetic with /ɛ/, not /iː/, so on balance I would go with /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ (which will come out pin-pen merged in my speech unless I'm overenunciating).

Long vowels in Latin sound weird to begin with, as does <c> as /k/ in all contexts... but then again, my exposure to Latin has been pretty much entirely from Christianity-related stuff, so of course the "proper" pronunciation sounds off.

I think Linguoboy was referring to the traditional English "long vowel" pronunciations like /aɪ/ for "i", /eɪ/ for "a" etc, which are not generally considered "proper" pronunciation anymore when speaking Latin (due to the rise of "Restored" pronunciation in Latin classes), but which are somewhat established in many English words taken from Latin where the stress falls on an open penult syllable (although there are countervailing trends, unfortunate in my view, but actually pretty old, towards using more "Continental" values like "i" = /i(ː)/ and "a" = /æ/ or /ɑ(ː)/ in some words/suffixes).

[kɾɑi̯sis], [kɾit̪ik], [st̪ei̯sis], [st̪æt̪ik], [pɾost̪ʰe̞sis], [pɾɔst̪ʰe̞tik], [nʲjeʊ̯ɾɔsis], [nʲjəʊ̯ɾɔt̪ik] ... [ænɐlɑi̯sis], [ænɐlit̪ik], [me̞t̪ɑst̪ei̯sis], [me̞t̪ɑst̪æt̪ik]

Lol. Well, I think your pronunciations of these words do still show the tendency towards using a "short" vowel before -ic, even if they don't show the tendency about stress.

My own tendency was to go for /ɪˈmiːsɪs/, but after checking the dictionary I see that /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ is in fact the better choice, as there is no particular reason for using penult stress in this word.

Does that mean [e̞mɜsis] would be mistaken for some other word, or would it be understood?

I can't think of any other word that would sound like, but at the same time, I don't usually particularly expect to hear the word "emesis" (it's not in my working vocabulary, which was why I had to look up how I want to pronounce it) so I might not understand it anyway. The quality of the vowel in the second syllable (I'm talking about the pronunciation with stress on the antepenult) is not particularly important for comprehension, I would say.

[Travis B.]

How about ovoid and emesis?

The first is easy: /ˈoːvɔɪd/.

Same here. As far as I know, the suffix "-oid" has no consistent effects on the pronunciation of the preceding part of the word, so it makes sense to pronounce the "ov-" as in "oval" and "ovum".

Isn't "oval" pronounced with [oʊ̯]? That's why I thought "ovoid" would have [oʊ̯].

That is just a detail of transcription; some people think that transcribing GOAT as /oʊ̯/ is overly narrow, especially since there are English dialects in which it is a monophthong, and there are other English dialects when it is some other (usually fronted and/or partially unrounded) diphthong. I personally still favor /oʊ/ because it fits my dialect well; while in my dialect it is normally a clear, rounded monophthong [o] before consonants, it is normally a diphthong [ow] or, when reduced, [əw], and is sometimes reduced further to just [w], before vowels, and varies depending on the person as to whether it is a diphthong or not finally.

The second gives me pause. My first urge is to rhyme it with nemesis, but--like I say above--I have a tendency to favour short vowels in Graeco-Latin borrowings where the standard pronunciation has them long. So my second urge is to take thesis or centesis as a model. But I say anti-emetic with /ɛ/, not /iː/, so on balance I would go with /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ (which will come out pin-pen merged in my speech unless I'm overenunciating).

Long vowels in Latin sound weird to begin with, as does <c> as /k/ in all contexts... but then again, my exposure to Latin has been pretty much entirely from Christianity-related stuff, so of course the "proper" pronunciation sounds off.

Another thing to remember is that English has what is known as "trisyllabic laxing", which is basically that in longer words there is a tendency for historically long and tense vowels to be shortened and laxed.

But really, what other context is there where one can hear Latin these days?

Also, it bothers me a little that Wikipedia's regional pronunciation of Latin page lumps German and Uralic together. I'm 90% sure that's not how Finnish priests pronounce Latin, at least; IIRC at least <c> is pronounced as if it was /s/ before front vowels, and <ae~æ> and <oe~œ> are [ɑe̞] and [o̞e̞] just like they would be in Finnish. A huge one is <xc>, because I'm pretty sure that probably not a single Finn would ever pronounce it [ksts], only [ksk] or [ks] depending on whether it's before a back vowel or a front vowel. I can't be arsed to search for any recordings, though.

To be honest, though, I would presume that Finnish's exposure to Latin was primarily through Swedish and Low German, and Swedish in turn probably was itself influenced by Low German...

I would say to be wary of using "-tic" words as a guide to the pronunciation of "-sis" words, because "-ic" tends to impose penult stress and "short" pronunciations of a, e, o and i. E.g. vowel shift: crisis-critic, stasis-static, prosthesis-prosthetic, neurosis-neurotic;

[kɾɑi̯sis], [kɾit̪ik], [st̪ei̯sis], [st̪æt̪ik], [pɾost̪ʰe̞sis], [pɾɔst̪ʰe̞tik], [nʲjeʊ̯ɾɔsis], [nʲjəʊ̯ɾɔt̪ik]

[ˈkʰʁəe̯sɘs], [ˈkʰʁɘɾɘʔk], [ˈsʲtʲesɘs], [ˈsʲtʲɛɾɘʔk], [pʰʁosˈθisɘs], [pʰʁosˈθɜɾɘʔk], [nʁ̩ːˈʁosɘs], [nʁ̩ːˈʁɑɾɘʔk]

stress shift: analysis-analytic, metastasis, metastatic.

[ænɐlɑi̯sis], [ænɐlit̪ik], [me̞t̪ɑst̪ei̯sis], [me̞t̪ɑst̪æt̪ik]

[ɘ̃ːˈnɛːɯ̯ɘsɘs], [ˌɛ̃ːnəːˈʟ̞ɘɾɘʔk], [mɘˈtʰɛsʲtʲɘsɘs], [ˌmɜɾɘˈsʲtʲɛɾɘʔk]

Sorry, I have no idea about stress...

My own tendency was to go for /ɪˈmiːsɪs/, but after checking the dictionary I see that /ˈɛmɪsɪs/ is in fact the better choice, as there is no particular reason for using penult stress in this word.

Does that mean [e̞mɜsis] would be mistaken for some other word, or would it be understood?

I would not understand it.

ʁ̩ːʁ

wat

It is called a long syllabic bunched R, followed by a non-syllabic bunched R in the onset of the following syllable. (It is long because there is no fortis obstruent between it and the next vowel.)

For some reason I just can't imagine a long fricative or approximant followed by the same fricative/approximant, since it's basically a fricative that lasts for three times the usual length. I mean, of course I can imagine how it sounds, but the thought of hearing it in a conversation is about as WTF as hearing something like [b͡ʙ].

For me it is an approximant, and is easily syllabified.

[Vijay]

I've lived in the South almost my whole life and never heard Italian with an /aɪ/. Oh, Austin.

Austin really is not part of the South, though.

Why not? It's in one of the southernmost states (it's less than four hours away from Mexico and was formerly owned by Mexico), it was part of the Confederacy, country music is literally everything you ever hear playing at the airport, there are people who talk in Southern accents, and while it's the state capital of Texas and therefore...somewhat large, it's really only downtown that's particularly liberal.

[Sumelic]

I've lived in the South almost my whole life and never heard Italian with an /aɪ/. Oh, Austin.

Austin really is not part of the South, though.

Why not? It's in one of the southernmost states (it's less than four hours away from Mexico and was formerly owned by Mexico), it was part of the Confederacy, country music is literally everything you ever hear playing at the airport, there are people who talk in Southern accents, and while it's the state capital of Texas and therefore...somewhat large, it's really only downtown that's particularly liberal.

Labels like "the South" are not just about geographical location. The status of Texas as part of the South is somwhat debated: http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/why-i- ... te-6393147, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wh ... the-south/

[Zaarin]

I've lived in the South almost my whole life and never heard Italian with an /aɪ/. Oh, Austin.

Austin really is not part of the South, though.

Why not? It's in one of the southernmost states (it's less than four hours away from Mexico and was formerly owned by Mexico), it was part of the Confederacy, country music is literally everything you ever hear playing at the airport, there are people who talk in Southern accents, and while it's the state capital of Texas and therefore...somewhat large, it's really only downtown that's particularly liberal.

A Texas accent is very, very different from a Deep South accent and even pretty far removed from an Upper South accent. I suppose it's still very broadly in the continuum of "Southern accents," but it's definitely on the fringe and definitely not the archetypal Southern accent. Also I'd point out that Florida is the southernmost state but is not in the South; in fact, the overwhelming majority of residents in my city are from New York, Ontario, or Québec.

[Vijay]

I can understand debating whether Austin is part of the South. I don't understand someone who is not from there categorically denying that it is to someone who is from there.

Also, what is a "Texas accent" anyway? There is accent variation within Texas, too, y'know.

[linguoboy]

Also I'd point out that Florida is the southernmost state but is not in the South; in fact, the overwhelming majority of residents in my city are from New York, Ontario, or Québec.

Bullshit. That's your city, that's not the whole state. If Tallahassee isn't in the South, then where the hell is it?

This is the kind of nonsense that comes of viewing regions as conglomerations of states as opposed to, well, regions. Cultural diffusion doesn't respect state boundaries.

I've been to Houston. It's the South in pretty much every way that matters--including accent. Same is true of Poplar Bluff in Missouri, but St Louis is another Upper Midwestern Rustbelt city, its semitropical climate notwithstanding. It's even participating in the NCVS.

[Zaarin]

Also I'd point out that Florida is the southernmost state but is not in the South; in fact, the overwhelming majority of residents in my city are from New York, Ontario, or Québec.

Bullshit. That's your city, that's not the whole state. If Tallahassee isn't in the South, then where the hell is it?

I believe I said that some parts of northern interior Florida are Southern. (Oh, I guess I deleted that part of my comment. Well, I was going to write that anyway.) Even then, though, it's very different from Deep South as seen in Georgia/South Carolina/Alabama/Mississippi. The bulk of Florida isn't Southern; the bulk of Florida isn't even from Florida--that's not just my city, that's most of Florida south of the Panhandle.

The South isn't a single unified bloc, but the archetypal South depends on your view of the South: if it's the old-fashioned "Southern gentleman, Southern belle, aristocratic South" then it's probably Virginia/Tennessee; if it's rednecks and twang, it's probably the Deep South: Georgia/South Carolina/Alabama/Mississippi. Having lived in (a Northern enclave in) Georgia, my archetypal South is definitely the latter. Yes, Texas is a big state with a lot of variation, but it's all definitely on the fringe of the Southern continuum, whichever is your archetypal South.

[Salmoneus]

the bulk of Florida isn't even from Florida

How do you figure that?

Population of Florida, 2016: 20.6m
Total in-migration, 2005-2014: ~1.35m

And... seriously, if you drive across the Florida-Georgia border the culture is instantly "very different"? Borders don't have that sort of effect even in Europe, and here they're long-standing borders often dividing entirely different language groups!