# pronunciation: feel, real, deal



## Poland91pl

Hey I wanted to ask about the American pronouciation of the long i: sound when it stands right before the letter L. In words such as feel, deal, real, meal etc. I pronounce them as if they were fill rill dill and mill and i have heard it many times that they were pronounced like that by the natives.  And the question is: is it a mistake to do so ? I mean pronouncing it the way I do is much more comfortable.


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## PaulQ

If you search the WR dictionary for words with an i: sound, you will find examples of them being spoken. You can listen to an American accent.

For example: feel - WordReference.com Dictionary of English


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## Poland91pl

I wanted to know the opinion of the native speakers as they can pick the changes up the best. No need for me to listen to what you suggested


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## dojibear

"Feel" and "fill" use two different English vowels, called "long E" and "short I" in basic English grammar.

That vowel difference is used to tell many word pairs apart: you give four example in #1. If somoene says "dill" instead of "deal" (and so on for other words) they will be hard to understand, and will be thought to speak American English incorrectly.

Is it difficult for you to hear the difference between "dill" and "deal"?


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## PaulQ

Poland91pl said:


> I wanted to know the opinion of the native speakers as they can pick the changes up the best. No need for me to listen to what you suggested


I am not sure what you mean by that. If you listened to *fill *and *feel *you should be able to hear the difference.


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## Poland91pl

What's more I am asking about different accents  not a standard pronunciation as I believe there's not a real difference  between the American and British long I; 

Plus for instance all the dictionaries state that words like man pan fan are pronounced  m*æn pæn when in fact they are pronounced with the schwa right after  æ*


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## Poland91pl

dojibear said:


> "Feel" and "fill" use two different English vowels, called "long E" and "short I" in basic English grammar.
> 
> That vowel difference is used to tell many word pairs apart: you give four example in #1. If somoene says "dill" instead of "deal" (and so on for other words) they will be hard to understand, and will be thought to speak American English incorrectly.
> 
> Is it difficult for you to hear the difference between "dill" and "deal"?


I can of course I can . I am asking about specific regional accents of the USA ( like in hoiston Texas) when people pronounce feel as fill. Listen to feeling myself by Nicki Minaj and Beyonce and you'll see


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## Poland91pl

Ok found it. Wiki says "Lax and tense vowels often neutralize before /l/, making pairs like _feel_/_fill_ and _fail_/_fell_ homophones for speakers in some areas of the South. Some speakers may distinguish between the two sets of words by reversing the normal vowel sound, e.g., _feel_ in Southern may sound like _fill_, and vice versa." ( southern American accent )


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## PaulQ

Poland91pl said:


> What's more I am asking about different accents


I am unsure as to why you are so unwilling to listen to the words spoken, particularly as you are asking about sound. If you listen to "feel" you can hear it said in a general US accent *and *in a Southern US accent...


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## Poland91pl

PaulQ said:


> I am unsure as to why you are so unwilling to listen to the words spoken, particularly as you are asking about sound. If you listen to "feel" you can hear it said in a general US accent *and *in a Southern US accent...


#8


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## PaulQ

#1


Poland91pl said:


> Hey I wanted to ask about the American pronouciation of the long i: sound [...] And the question is: is it a mistake to do so ?


Would the dictionary recording be a mistake?


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## Poland91pl

PaulQ said:


> #1
> Would the dictionary recording be a mistake?


Well uhm how do you know where the person pronouncing in the dictionary is from( southern accent differs among itself as the South is not a small part )? I said I wanted to ask if native American speakers heard every now and then that feel is pronounced as fill and what I get is a bunch of information of other possibilities what to do. I'm sorry it may sound rude but is it really that hard to type yes or no?
Plus I cannot hear what sound exactly the person in the dictionary pronounces.


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## sound shift

Poland91pl said:


> Hey I wanted to ask about the American pronouciation of the long i: sound when it stands right before the letter L. In words such as feel, deal, real, meal etc. I pronounce them as if they were fill rill dill and mill and i have heard it many times that they were pronounced like that by the natives.  And the question is: is it a mistake to do so ? I mean pronouncing it the way I do is much more comfortable.





Poland91pl said:


> Ok found it. Wiki says "Lax and tense vowels often neutralize before /l/, making pairs like _feel_/_fill_ and _fail_/_fell_ homophones for speakers in some areas of the South. Some speakers may distinguish between the two sets of words by reversing the normal vowel sound, e.g., _feel_ in Southern may sound like _fill_, and vice versa." ( southern American accent )


People who use this pronunciation would not regard it as a mistake if you were to adopt it in their company - but I assume that you're not in the South of the USA. The question therefore becomes: "A mistake _in whose opinion_?" Who are you trying to satisfy? If the answer is "examiners", then I'm afraid you'll just have to learn how to produce the i: sound. If you were in the company of native speakers who were not from the South of the USA, the question would be whether you could cause confusion by pronouncing "feel" as "fill", "meal" as "mill", and so on - and the answer would be that you could.


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## Poland91pl

sound shift said:


> People who use this pronunciation would not regard it as a mistake if you were to adopt it in their company - but I assume that you're not in the South of the USA. The question therefore becomes: "A mistake _in whose opinion_?" Who are you trying to satisfy? If the answer is "examiners", then I'm afraid you'll just have to learn how to produce the i: sound. If you were in the company of native speakers who were not from the South of the USA, the question would be whether you could cause confusion by pronouncing "feel" as "fill", "meal" as "mill", and so on - and the answer is that you could.


I know excatly what I want to ask  Once again :dear Americans!  Do you ever happen to hear other people in the US pronounce the verb feel as fill? No matter where: on TV in the radio, in everyday conversation ?

To the British above: I have checked the dictionary and when it comes to US ENGLISH I heard only one person pronouncing the words I had typed. My question is rather general concerning a greater number of people not basing on one man. I believe when recording single words pronunciation is not the same as when speaking fast.


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## sound shift

With your "pronouncing it the way I do is much more comfortable" you indicate that you really want to know whether you can do without the ability to pronounce the long i:. The answer is that you can't.


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## Poland91pl

sound shift said:


> With your "pronouncing it the way I do is much more comfortable" you indicate that you really want to know whether you can do without the ability to pronounce the long i:. The answer is that you can't.


Look. I said only in the case when the the i: is followed by the letter l. Someone here even suggested I learnt how to pronounce the i: sound. Come on! The same or almost the same sound is in my language and i have used it bilion times! Of course in the UK I can't do without this ability but my question concerns only the American accent and I would like to know the Americans opinion in this one. Thank you guys for your ^input but really no need for you to help.


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## JulianStuart

Poland91pl said:


> Look. I said only in the case when the the i: is followed by the letter l. Someone here even suggested I learnt how to pronounce the i: sound. Come on! The same or almost the same sound is in my language and i have used it bilion times! Of course in the UK I can't do without this ability but my question concerns only the American accent and I would like to know the Americans opinion in this one. Thank you guys for your ^input but really no need for you to help.


#8 

It is still not clear to me what your question is.  You now know that there are some speakers of AE who pronounce your words differently from the rest of the country.  Unless your English is flawless and otherwise sounds like that of such a native southern American accent, saying fill instead of feel will mark you as a non-native English speaker who has trouble learning English vowels. 

My vowels are not American and I've been told a few times "You didn't learn your English in this country, did you?" but they know I'm from England (occasionally they aren't very savvy with accents and think I'm from Australia )  Nonetheless, I make the proper distinctions between vowels. Most of the times I hear the short where I expect the long vowels you describe it is from non-native speakers and only occasionally from AE speaker with quite a strong southern accent.


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## Poland91pl

JulianStuart said:


> #8
> 
> It is still not clear to me what your question is.  You now know that there are some speakers of AE who pronounce your words differently from the rest of the country.  Unless your English is flawless and otherwise sounds like that of such a native southern American accent, saying fill instead of feel will mark you as a non-native English speaker who has trouble learning English vowels.
> 
> My vowels are not American and I've been told a few times "You didn't learn your English in this country, did you?" but they know I'm from England (occasionally they aren't very savvy with accents and think I'm from Australia )  Nonetheless, I make the proper distinctions between vowels. Most of the times I hear the short where I expect the long vowels you describe it is from non-native speakers and only occasionally from AE speaker with quite a strong southern accent.


Thank you for your reply  can you please type in Google "feeling myself " and listen a first few 20 seconds of it and tell me if the "feeling " is filling it feeling ? I would appreciate it


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## Oddmania

Wikipedia describes the feel-fill merger as follows:

_The *fill–feel merger* is a conditioned merger of the vowels /ɪ/ and /iː/ before /l/ that occurs in some dialects of American English. The heaviest concentration of the merger is found in, but not necessarily confined to Southern American English: in North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana (but not New Orleans), and west-central Texas (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 69-73). This merger, like a lot of other features of Southern American English, can also be found in AAVE.
_​It also comes with a useful little map. My ears aren't exactly the most reliable, but for what it's worth I clearly hear _f*ee*ling _in the song you talked about, although I do think the vowel sounds somewhat longer in Nicki Minaj's verse. Nicki Minaj has quite a strong New York accent, so I don't think she would merge _feel _and _fill._ I don't know what kind of accent Beyoncé has (AAVE, possibly?), but I personally don't hear it as _filling_, even though the vowel would most certainly sound longer in someone else's speech.


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## Cenzontle

I heard the audio.  Yes, that speaker seems to use one of those dialects where "feel" and "fill" fall together.
I second the advice given above:  Don't imitate it.
With websearches—using the words "feel" and "fill"—you can find brief videos of instruction on pronouncing the contrast.
The singer/speaker in your video (Beyonce?) is probably African American—the speech has many features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
The Wikipedia article on AAVE mentions the "feel"/"fill" merger.
(Cross-posted with Oddmania's excellent contribution, #19.)
The map cited by Oddmania shows areas of the fill/feel merger in the South;
I would add that I've often heard the merger also in Pittsburgh, and it probably occurs also in the surrounding area of western Pennsylvania.


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## Poland91pl

Cenzontle said:


> I heard the audio.  Yes, that speaker seems to use one of those dialects where "feel" and "fill" fall together.
> I second the advice given above:  Don't imitate it.
> With websearches—using the words "feel" and "fill"—you can find brief videos of instruction on pronouncing the contrast.
> The singer/speaker in your video (Beyonce?) is probably African American—the speech has many features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
> The Wikipedia article on AAVE mentions the "feel"/"fill" merger.
> (Cross-posted with Oddmania's excellent contribution, #19.)
> The map cited by Oddmania shows areas of the fill/feel merger in the South;
> I would add that I've often heard the merger also in Pittsburgh, and it probably occurs also in the surrounding area of western Pennsylvania.


Thank you a lot. I really appreciate it.

Yes Nicki Minaj has a strong New York accent but in song Superbass she raps " he ill he real he might got a deal "and what I hear is "and he ill he rill he might got a dill " but maybe that's like this because the song goes so fast there's no room for the proper pronunciation


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## Poland91pl

I used to say feel and deal etc but for the last few years I've listened to a lot of music and watched a lot of interviews and stayed in touch with the accents where they merge those sounds and right now it is hard for me to get rid of it. Sometimes I try to.avoid it but when I speak quickly it just kind of comes out automatically


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## aggiesteph

I'm not a native speaker, but I went to High School in Arizona, so I lived there for a while. Later I studied linguistics and both my BA and MA theses were phonology/phonetics related, so it's a very interesting topic for me and I always listen closely (and with immense interest that my husband always finds hilarious) to the sounds that native (and non-native) speakers of English produce. Now whenever I visit the US and talk to my American friends I pay much closer attention to how they say things, and I've noticed that one of my friends does tend to shorten the long "i:" sound when it occurs before "l", so feel becomes fill, meal mill etc. We even joked about it and she said that she's just being lazy in her speech, but I think it has something to do with the fact that her family on her father's side is from Louisiana, and her dad has a stronger southern accent (eg. pin and pen sound the same when he says them). I haven't really noticed much of that speech phenomenon among other people in Arizona but then again I don't live there now and only try to visit every year or so, and when I did live in AZ I did not have enough background in both the English language and linguistics in general to notice these kinds of things. I watch a lot of American movies/series though and look out for some interesting speech patterns, but I haven't really heard this feel-fill merger in anything mainstream. But interestingly enough I've recently heard it in a YouTube video by a British speaker. She sounded like a native speaker of British English to me and it was a rather professional review of some new car. That's what made me look up a feel-fill merger again and led me to this thread, as I was interested to learn if there might be some new phonological change spreading across English. I would be really interested to find out if there's been some recorded data on that.


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## PaulQ

Posts #19 and #20 and English-language vowel changes before historic /l/ - Wikipedia all have references to recorded data.


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## sound shift

Paul, your Wikipedia link says that the _feel-fill merger _"is commonly found in Estuary English". I believe you live in the Estuary English zone. Have you noticed this merger?


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## abluter

Yes, in cockney (east end of London) speech "feel"  etc are  routinely pronounced "fill" etc.  "Ah doan fill good abaht that" for "I don't feel good about that".


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## abluter

"Ass a good dill you got on that mo'er"  for "That's a good deal you got on that motor (car)"


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## merquiades

Yes, of course, I can confirm  in Appalachian English many people make this merger:  _meals/mills_. It is the vowel in _meal_ that is pronounced _mill_.  A guy at university used to say "_I fill awful_". He then got the nickname "Falafel" which he never got rid of.  The reaction people have when they hear this is varied, depending on their tolerance, prejudices and background. 
If you want to speak with this kind of accent you have to be credible though, meaning you have to adopt the other characteristics of Appalachian English too:  accent and vocabulary.  You might also have people asking you why you learned to speak that way.


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## WordRef09

Poland91pl said:


> Ok found it. Wiki says "Lax and tense vowels often neutralize before /l/, making pairs like _feel_/_fill_ and _fail_/_fell_ homophones for speakers in some areas of the South. Some speakers may distinguish between the two sets of words by reversing the normal vowel sound, e.g., _feel_ in Southern may sound like _fill_, and vice versa." ( southern American accent )


Using that rule,  fel, del, rel, could be pronounced fill, dill, rill.  But since feel, deal, real/reel have two vowels before the l then the words should be pronounced with a hard E.  Having said that, some areas of the USA pronounce it as fill, dill and rill and as such it is a regional dialect and is also correct.


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## kentix

Those are written with two vowel letters but they aren't two sounds (in most accents). They're just one sound.

Of all those words, I think "real" is the one most likely to be pronounced that way (rill), even among speakers who don't have that specific accent. I hear that pronunciation quite a bit, but not the others, except in people with stronger accents from those areas.


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## merquiades

In college we always made fun of a student from South Carolina who said "I falafel" every time he was ill.


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## Poland91pl

merquiades said:


> In college we always made fun of a student from South Carolina who said "I falafel" every time he was ill.


What is „falafel”?


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## heypresto

A falafel is a snack popular in the Middle East. falafel - WordReference.com Dictionary of English

The student was saying 'I feel awful', but it sounded like 'I falafel.'


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## RM1(SS)

Poland91pl said:


> What is „falafel”?


Wikipedia has a good article on it.


Slowly cross-posted....


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## kentix

heypresto said:


> A falafel is a snack popular in the Middle East.


But also widely known in the US and UK.


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## pimlicodude

Poland91pl said:


> Plus for instance all the dictionaries state that words like man pan fan are pronounced  m*æn pæn when in fact they are pronounced with the schwa right after  æ*


In American English, or maybe in some forms of American English, as American English isn't monolithic either. Dictionaries don't give narrow phonetic transcriptions. They give phonemic transcriptions, where the reader is expected to know something about the phonology of the language. In southern English pronunciation (I mean in the south of England, not the south of the USA), the word "man" is /mæ:n/ with a long vowel. In northern England it can be /man/ with a short vowel. But these distinctions are not shown in detail in dictionaries.


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## pimlicodude

sound shift said:


> Paul, your Wikipedia link says that the _feel-fill merger _"is commonly found in Estuary English". I believe you live in the Estuary English zone. Have you noticed this merger?


Yes, many people in England do pronounce these identically much of the time. There is often not an "L" there either, but a "W. fill = fih-ooh
feel = feeh-ooh
In rapid speech these are hard to distinguish anyway.
In "I feel awful", the L of feel is before a vowel, and so less likely to become a W.
It's the real deal: ri-oo di-oo.


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## Keith Bradford

I'm sure that it's a fascinating topic, the way in which native speakers still manage to make themselves understood when they don't really give a damn about the distinctions between limiting pairs.  It seems to me very similar to a study in delinquency, or research into poor driving habits.

Prescriptive?  No, just an objective comment on the fact that feel/fill/fell or deal/dill/dell are totally different words, with totally different meanings.  And if the pronunciation doesn't distinguish that, it's disfunctional.  It destroys meaning.  And that is the death of language.


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## JillN

I didn't read this whole argument, but as a Texan I can confirm that yes, some people do have this accent in Texas. My mother-in-law sometimes asks for a "pin" when she means a "pen." And when I was little, my neighbor called me "Jeel."


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## pimlicodude

Keith Bradford said:


> I'm sure that it's a fascinating topic, the way in which native speakers still manage to make themselves understood when they don't really give a damn about the distinctions between limiting pairs.  It seems to me very similar to a study in delinquency, or research into poor driving habits.
> 
> Prescriptive?  No, just an objective comment on the fact that feel/fill/fell or deal/dill/dell are totally different words, with totally different meanings.  And if the pronunciation doesn't distinguish that, it's disfunctional.  It destroys meaning.  And that is the death of language.


No. There are many mergers in English dialects. In America, many people say "Mary" and "merry" identically. That is their dialect.


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## JillN

merquiades said:


> In college we always made fun of a student from South Carolina who said "I falafel" every time he was ill.


Some Turkish friends raised a lot of eyebrows when they asked someone to take their photo with their camera and used their pronunciation of "You have to _focus!"_


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## Keith Bradford

pimlicodude said:


> ...There are many mergers in English dialects. In America, many people say "Mary" and "merry" identically. That is their dialect...


I know.  But it makes them very difficult to understand outside (and maybe within) their small circle.  The accents that are most meaningful on the larger (= national or international) scale are the ones that do not merge limiting pairs.


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## Roxxxannne

Keith Bradford said:


> I know.  But it makes them very difficult to understand outside (and maybe within) their small circle.  The accents that are most meaningful on the larger (= national or international) scale are the ones that do not merge limiting pairs.


The merry-Mary merge is widespread and common enough in the US that one might well consider it part of the national accent. I differentiate them, but that's my New England 'dialect.'  And I lived in the Midwest for several years, where everyone could understand me 99.4% of the time.


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## dojibear

pimlicodude said:


> In America, many people say "Mary" and "merry" identically. That is their dialect.


True, but it rarely causes any misunderstanding. English speakers (language speakers in general) use context, not just the sounds that they hear.  Nobody says "Have a Mary holiday!"

In fact, understanding solely by the sounds you hear doesn't work -- in any language. Computer recognition of human speech failed for decades (it was heavily-funded since the 1950s) as long as it relied on sounds. I did an MA thesis in 1980 about computer recognition of human speech. The sounds simply aren't there. When computer programs started pattern-matching (match the sounds to a huge database of words and phrases) they became successful.

Humans do that too. We don't break the sound-stream down into individual sounds. We match patterns in the language. That is why language-learners often hear missing sounds. The sounds really are missing, but fluent listeners automatically correct.


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## kentix

Roxxxannne said:


> The merry-Mary merge is widespread and common enough in the US that one might well consider it part of the national accent.


That Rubicon was crossed long ago. There is no going back. Marry = Mary = Merry for most AE speakers. Click to enlarge.


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## dojibear

It ain't just English. 

In spoken Mandarin, _tā_ means "he" or "she" or "it". Those are different words: they are written differently (他, 她, 它). It's just like "Mary" and "merry" and "marry" in American English. Same sounds, different spellings, different meanings.


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## merquiades

Roxxxannne said:


> The merry-Mary merge is widespread and common enough in the US that one might well consider it part of the national accent. I differentiate them, but that's my New England 'dialect.'  And I lived in the Midwest for several years, where everyone could understand me 99.4% of the time.


One of my pet peeves is how westerners pronounce my name. It has the AR vowel as in Cary which they pronounce Kerry.  They look at me like I'm crazy when they ask for Kerry and I say no, I'm Cary. For that reason alone I couldn't live in California.

My name is not Cary but features AR


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## Keith Bradford

dojibear said:


> ...Nobody says "Have a Mary holiday!"...


True, but they say "My name is Merry/Mary".



dojibear said:


> ...We don't break the sound-stream down into individual sounds. We match patterns in the language. That is why language-learners often hear missing sounds. The sounds really are missing, but fluent listeners automatically correct.


Yes, and it's the language-learners I feel sorry for.  Not that they find it hard to understand what they hear, but that they then try to reproduce unreliable pronunciation.  With their native accent overlaid onto it, they can become incomprehensible.

I've just counted - there are twenty vowels ("pure" and dipthong) in non-rhotic English which are distinct and which distinguish meaning, and not all can be resolved by recourse to context.  _Dill/deal_ is only one, as in: "That fresh dill/deal is very tempting".  There's also: "What's that shit/sheet doing on the bed?"  "Don't lose the ship/sheep for a ha'p'orth of tar." And so forth.

If you place these vowels in the middle of the word *b*d*, they make eighteen different words with different meanings: _bid _is different from _bead_, for instance.  If foreign learners of English aren't taught these distinctions, they're heading for trouble, whatever folks in Delaware or Dagenham get away with between themselves.


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## Forero

I speak what I call Southern urban, and I distinguish "fill" and "feel" the same way I distinguish "fit" and "feet".

I associate pronouncing "fill" as if it were "feel" with what I call Southern rural, but I associate pronouncing "feel" as if it were "fill" with New Jersey.

However, I have noticed the conflation of "fill" and "feel", and the conflation of "deli" and "daily", spreading all over the U.S.

In my dialect, I count 14 different *b*d* words, including "bird", which has no vowel except the syllabic "r" sound. Including one-syllable *b*rd* words too, I get a total of 19. Some of these words are kind of "creative": "bod", short for "body"; "bade" when it doesn't sound like "bad", "boored" rhyming with "moored".

I agree with Keith Bradford's advice to learners, but I still do not know how "Mary" is meant to sound different from "merry". Is it with the "a" sound of "maybe"? (I have a cousin from the deep South who uses that vowel in "Sarah".)


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## heypresto

For me, (and I assume Keith Bradford), in 'Mary' the vowel sound is slightly longer, and rhymes with 'dairy', 'hairy', 'nary' and 'wary.' In 'merry' the vowel sound is shorter, like 'very', 'ferry', 'Jerry', 'berry' (and 'bury'), 'Perry' and 'Derry.'


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## kentix

And every last one of those is a perfect rhyme for me.


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## kentix

I don't say it that way but I can distinguish the way some people say _marry_ differently because there was an old TV series where one of the characters did. At the time, I just thought it was a quirk. I didn't know it was significant.


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## heypresto

kentix said:


> And every last one of those is a perfect rhyme for me.


Interesting. For you, does 'fairy' rhyme perfectly with 'ferry'? And 'vary' with 'very'? Context aside, would they be indistinguishable in speech?


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## kentix

Yes, all the same. That's basically what the red on the chart I posted above means. I have lived in (different) red* areas all my life. For other people, some are different. And not necessarily in the same consistent ways, I think. It can vary by word as well.

A good example is bury.

Bury rhymes with berry for me. But for some people, bury is very different, even if the others are the same. It's like the word _burr + y_, not _bear + y._

* majority red, other colors are mixed in underneath


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## Myridon

Keith Bradford said:


> True, but they say "My name is Merry/Mary".


Depends on who "they" is. I have known one person in my lifetime named Merry. She was born in 1917.  She went by her middle name which was Frances.  I didn't find out her name was Merry till I read her obituary.


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## kentix

Yes, Merry is not a common name here at all. Nor is Pippin (autocorrected to Poop in ). (Nor is Pippa.)


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## dojibear

Keith Bradford said:


> If foreign learners of English aren't taught these distinctions, they're heading for trouble, whatever folks in Delaware or Dagenham get away with between themselves.


Absolutely. In my opinion, a foreign learner of English should stick with one dialect (as much as possible), then pick up other dialects later, like native speakers do. At age 14, I couldn't understand BE. I could barely understand Texan.


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## Forero

heypresto said:


> For me, (and I assume Keith Bradford), in 'Mary' the vowel sound is slightly longer, and rhymes with 'dairy', 'hairy', 'nary' and 'wary.' In 'merry' the vowel sound is shorter, like 'very', 'ferry', 'Jerry', 'berry' (and 'bury'), 'Perry' and 'Derry.'


Is it the same sound but longer, or a different sound?


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## JulianStuart

Forero said:


> Is it the same sound but longer, or a different sound?


For me it's (very close to) just longer, but very distinctly so.


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## heypresto

Forero said:


> Is it the same sound but longer, or a different sound?



I think the easiest way to hear what I'm trying to describe is to listen to fairy, ferry, Mary and merry in the WR Dictionary. Set the 'Listen' to UK: fairy - WordReference.com Dictionary of English


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## merquiades

Forero said:


> I agree with Keith Bradford's advice to learners, but I still do not know how "Mary" is meant to sound different from "merry". Is it with the "a" sound of "maybe"? (I have a cousin from the deep South who uses that vowel in "Sarah".)


Imagine you replace the r with any other consonant:  Macy, Kaly, Amy  and Messy, Kelly, Emmy....  Now you hear two distinct vowels... extend that to Mary, Cary and Merry, Kerry.
You can try also maybe  daily dairy,  deli derry...  haley hairy,  jelly jerry keeping the vowels the same.

Using the map Kentix put up I'm from an area where there is absolute no merger.  Thank goodness!


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## kentix

Well, I didn't create it. All props to Joshua Katz, who I believe was still a graduate student at the time he did that work.


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## Keith Bradford

kentix said:


> And every last one of those is a perfect rhyme for me.



Really!  We send you on a simple errand to colonise the Americas and buy a fairy costume for your cousin Mary.  And what do you come back with?  A ferry costume for cousin Merry.  You've lost two whole vowels there!  I'm not going to trust you to go shopping again!

I think the vowel that AE has really lost is /æ/ (as in _black cat_) which has become assimilated to /e/ (as in _red bed_) and pronounced /eə/.  In a non-rhotic accent, as many in Britain are, this is so similar to /eəʳ/ (as in _rare fare_) that two whole vowels go by the wayside.


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## kentix

I think you are wrong on that. I have read that BE has one more vowel sound than AE, but it's not /æ/. We're all in on /æ/. After all, we still believe in taking a bath, not a bahhhhth. 

Cat hat sat pat - all /æ/.

You might be thinking of Canadians, where bag (for some) turns into something like beg (or beig?).

Added:

I think the one we don't have is this one, but I don't even know what it sounds like. /ɒ/


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## RM1(SS)

Some years back I posted a link to a recording of a man saying "Mary dear, make me merry; say you'll marry me."  If anybody is bored enough to go searching for it.... 

It sounded to me like he was using the 'cat' (AE "short A") vowel for _marry_, the 'bed' (AE "short E") vowel for _merry_, and the vowel from mare (AE "long A") for _Mary_.


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## JillN

Poland91pl said:


> Hey I wanted to ask about the American pronouciation of the long i: sound when it stands right before the letter L. In words such as feel, deal, real, meal etc. I pronounce them as if they were fill rill dill and mill and i have heard it many times that they were pronounced like that by the natives.  And the question is: is it a mistake to do so ? I mean pronouncing it the way I do is much more comfortable.


By the way, if you look up these words on WordReference and use the "listen" button next to them, you can hear it in a wide range of accents including US Southern.


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## kentix

With the caution that that's one Southern accent by one guy. And it's a pretty strong one. There are a whole range of others as well.


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## balzar

Does a simple change in pronunciation constitute a dialect?  Are no grammatical changes involved?


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## Forero

balzar said:


> Does a simple change in pronunciation constitute a dialect?  Are no grammatical changes involved?


We are not just talking about different realizations of one phoneme but about the merging of phonemes, which leads to confusion for speakers unfamiliar with the merger. Even for speakers with a particular merger, vocabulary often has to be adjusted.

Where I live, _pin_ and _pen_ are merged even though _pit_ and _pet_ are not. We tend to say things like "straight pin", "ink pen", etc., instead of simply _pin_ or _pen_ because otherwise even we can misunderstand one another.

And I have certainly been confused by speakers with different mergers than mine saying, for example, "wail" when they meant "whale", "deli bread" instead of "daily bread", or "selling" for "sailing".

If a foreign learner of English assumes all the mergers from all over the English speaking world represent equivalent phonemes, they will probably not be understandable anywhere.


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## reformed lurker

pimlicodude said:


> Yes, many people in England do pronounce these identically much of the time. There is often not an "L" there either, but a "W. fill = fih-ooh
> feel = feeh-ooh
> In rapid speech these are hard to distinguish anyway.
> In "I feel awful", the L of feel is before a vowel, and so less likely to become a W.
> It's the real deal: ri-oo di-oo.


Very underrated observation. A lot of people (self included) speak a mix of RP and Estuary English and I got "pulled up" by an ESL student the other day for pronouncing the verb "feel" in the way indicated above. (This phenomenom can be described as L-vocalization: “bell” > “bew”). My response was that I felt glad that I was doing a good job in spontaneously providing him with diverse, real (as against "rew") language models and left it at that. 

Mind you, I also tend to say pants more than trousers these days. What is the world coming to? 

Great forum, chaps!


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## dojibear

Forero said:


> Where I live, _pin_ and _pen_ are merged even though _pit_ and _pet_ are not. We tend to say things like "straight pin", "ink pen", etc., instead of simply _pin_ or _pen_ because otherwise even we can misunderstand one another.


Very interesting observation. I probably do similar things in my dialect -- I just don't notice.

In this forum, students of English sometimes ask "can I omit this word?" You usually can, in writing. Sometimes that extra word (in speaking) helps prevent misunderstandings.


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## Wordy McWordface

dojibear said:


> True, but it rarely causes any misunderstanding. English speakers (language speakers in general) use context, not just the sounds that they hear.




Very true. Misunderstandings are rare. In the real world, there is nearly always context and - failing that - common sense.

For example, I recently hear an American guest on a British chat show utter the sounds _Hairy Padder _during a discussion about popular film franchises. I'd never heard those four syllables combined in that way before, but I understood immediately. Context, common sense, and in this case, shared knowledge, all help us interpret what we hear. Our brains are remarkably flexible when it comes to making sense of what our ears tell us.


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## JLP222

Poland91pl said:


> Hey I wanted to ask about the American pronouciation of the long i: sound when it stands right before the letter L. In words such as feel, deal, real, meal etc. I pronounce them as if they were fill rill dill and mill and i have heard it many times that they were pronounced like that by the natives.  And the question is: is it a mistake to do so ? I mean pronouncing it the way I do is much more comfortable.


As a native English speaker (UK not USA) It seems the American sound you mention is the same as we use here. I have never heard anyone say dill, mill, fill when meaning deal, meal, feel. If you speak this way we would find it difficult to understand you as those words mean something different.


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## Wordy McWordface

JLP222 said:


> As a native English speaker (UK not USA) It seems the American sound you mention is the same as we use here. I have never heard anyone say dill, mill, fill when meaning deal, meal, feel.


That's very surprising, JLP222.  Where exactly do you live in UK? Here in the southeast of England, almost everyone you meet in the streets says those words as 'dill', 'mill' and 'fill'.  Many even say 'diw', 'miw' and 'fiw' - classic sounds of Estuary English


JLP222 said:


> If you speak this way we would find it difficult to understand you as those words mean something different.


Really? The tens of millions of people living in London and the southeast don't have much trouble making themselves understood.


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## dojibear

JLP222 said:


> I have never heard anyone say dill, mill, fill when meaning deal, meal, feel.


It's like that in the US (AE). We use different vowels (/i/, /ɪ/) in mill/meal, dill/deal, fill/feel.



Wordy McWordface said:


> Here in the southeast of England, almost everyone you meet in the streets says 'dill', 'mill' and 'fill'.


For both dill and deal, mill and meal, fill and feel?


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## JulianStuart

dojibear said:


> It's like that in the US (AE). We use different vowels (/i/, /ɪ/) in mill/meal, dill/deal, fill/feel.
> 
> 
> For both dill and deal, mill and meal, fill and feel?


Many in the UK distinguish the pairs quite clearly.  However, there is some interesting information on vowel difference/changes in Estuary English - Wikipedia


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## Wordy McWordface

dojibear said:


> For both dill and deal, mill and meal, fill and feel?


Yes.  In Estuary English, the words in each pair are virtually indistinguishable.

If you heard a London window-cleaner say _"Fiw the bucket"_, you wouldn't know whether he was saying 'Fill the bucket' or 'Feel the bucket'.


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## romanette

sound shift said:


> People who use this pronunciation would not regard it as a mistake if you were to adopt it in their company - but I assume that you're not in the South of the USA. The question therefore becomes: "A mistake _in whose opinion_?" Who are you trying to satisfy? If the answer is "examiners", then I'm afraid you'll just have to learn how to produce the i: sound. If you were in the company of native speakers who were not from the South of the USA, the question would be whether you could cause confusion by pronouncing "feel" as "fill", "meal" as "mill", and so on - and the answer would be that you could.


@Poland -- There are many highly localized accents in the US, particularly in the South (so that if you used this one feature, you would be expected to use all the local features), many are racialized (so as a Pole, people would consider it an affectation for you to be talking like Nicky Minaj). This long-e/short-i distinction is very noticeable to English speakers, failure to pronounce it correctly is considered foreign, particularly Central European. Just listen to all the villains in James Bond films.


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## Elle Paris

Poland91pl said:


> Hey I wanted to ask about the American pronouciation of the long i: sound when it stands right before the letter L. In words such as feel, deal, real, meal etc. I pronounce them as if they were fill rill dill and mill and i have heard it many times that they were pronounced like that by the natives.  And the question is: is it a mistake to do so ? I mean pronouncing it the way I do is much more comfortable.


No, it's closed/tight, like ee-ee : need, kneel; meat = meet and meal.  Maybe it's the "L" causing the difficulty. In fact it's "me" and then a little tiny "uh" just before the "L". Try : "Mee-uhl" "Fee uhl" Pronounce a VERY TINY "uh" just before the "L".  I don't know how YOU are pronouncing fill rill dill and mill, but you could you be pronouncing them too "tight"/ not "open" enough?


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## Elle Paris

Wordy McWordface said:


> Yes.  In Estuary English, the words in each pair are virtually indistinguishable.
> 
> If you heard a London window-cleaner say _"Fiw the bucket"_, you wouldn't know whether he was saying 'Fill the bucket' or 'Feel the bucket'.


They say "W" for "LL" and/or "F" for "TH" in South-East Boston too...and Elmer Fudd in "Bugs Bunny" cartoons and Barry Kripke in the TV series "The Big Bang Theory" but the window cleaner would not use the same vowel sound: He would say; "I fee-ouw good." for "I feel good." and "I'm gonna fi-ouw my bucket wiff water." for "I'm gonna fill my bucket with water."


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## dojibear

Elle Paris said:


> Try : "Mee-uhl" "Fee uhl" Pronounce a VERY TINY "uh" just before the "L".


A slow, careful pronunciation of "feel" is "feeyuhl". But a slow, careful pronunciation of "fill" is "fill". There is no added "uh".

Yesterday I watched a video made by UK pronunciation teacher Dr. Geoff Lindsey. He says that the normal IPA symbols for English vowels are misleading. In his preferred notation, *iː *becomes *ɪj*. So "feel" is /fɪjl/ (a diphthong), while "fill" is /fɪl/.
Note that /j/ is IPA notation for the Y sound.

No links here. The video is on Youtube, with the title "Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG".

He does this for some other vowels too. The picture shows his notation on the left, standard IPA on the right.
His notation (diphthong ending in -y/-w sound) explains:
- which vowels add an /ə/ sound before L ("pre-L breaking")
- which vowels use linking R
- glide insertion (foreigners adding /j/ and /w/ sounds)
- hiatus (which vowels can be followed by another vowel)
- pre-fortis vowel clipping (duration shortening): 25% (normal vowels) vs. 45% (these 7 diphthongs)


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## Elle Paris

dojibear said:


> A slow, careful pronunciation of "feel" is "feeyuhl". But a slow, careful pronunciation of "fill" is "fill". There is no added "uh".
> 
> Yesterday I watched a video made by UK pronunciation teacher Dr. Geoff Lindsey. He says that the normal IPA symbols for English vowels are misleading. In his preferred notation, *iː *becomes *ɪj*. So "feel" is /fɪjl/ (a diphthong), while "fill" is /fɪl/.
> Note that /j/ is IPA notation for the Y sound.
> 
> No links here. The video is on Youtube, with the title "Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG".
> 
> He does this for some other vowels too. The picture shows his notation on the left, standard IPA on the right.
> His notation (diphthong ending in -y/-w sound) explains:
> - which vowels add an /ə/ sound before L ("pre-L breaking")
> - which vowels use linking R
> - glide insertion (foreigners adding /j/ and /w/ sounds)
> - hiatus (which vowels can be followed by another vowel)
> - pre-fortis vowel clipping (duration shortening): 25% (normal vowels) vs. 45% (these 7 diphthongs)
> 
> View attachment 77123


EXACTLY


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## Elle Paris

dojibear said:


> A slow, careful pronunciation of "feel" is "feeyuhl". But a slow, careful pronunciation of "fill" is "fill". There is no added "uh".
> 
> Yesterday I watched a video made by UK pronunciation teacher Dr. Geoff Lindsey. He says that the normal IPA symbols for English vowels are misleading. In his preferred notation, *iː *becomes *ɪj*. So "feel" is /fɪjl/ (a diphthong), while "fill" is /fɪl/.
> Note that /j/ is IPA notation for the Y sound.
> 
> No links here. The video is on Youtube, with the title "Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG".
> 
> He does this for some other vowels too. The picture shows his notation on the left, standard IPA on the right.
> His notation (diphthong ending in -y/-w sound) explains:
> - which vowels add an /ə/ sound before L ("pre-L breaking")
> - which vowels use linking R
> - glide insertion (foreigners adding /j/ and /w/ sounds)
> - hiatus (which vowels can be followed by another vowel)
> - pre-fortis vowel clipping (duration shortening): 25% (normal vowels) vs. 45% (these 7 diphthongs)
> 
> View attachment 77123


I try not to add the "Y" when I say feel. It almost happens but it's not good when exaggerated. James Brown did a good job not saying "I fee-yull good" diphthong-almost two syllables- but "I FEE(uh)L GOOD " -one syllable: VERY VERY slight diphthong.  However in order to pronounce an "L", I have to disagree; there is always an almost imperceptible "uh" before an "L" as the tongue reaches the gums just above and behind the upper front teeth. If you try to say just the "L" by itself; it will always come out "uhLL".


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## PaulQ

dojibear said:


> n his preferred notation, *iː *becomes *ɪj*. So "feel" is /fɪjl/ (a diphthong),


That's a cogent observation. I was happily going along with /fi:l/, but /fijl/ is closer. However, I notice the stronger sound of the /j/ in the AE version and in Southern AE there is almost /fi:jəl/.


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## Elle Paris

PaulQ said:


> That's a cogent observation. I was happily going along with /fi:l/, but /fijl/ is closer. However, I notice the stronger sound of the /j/ in the AE version and in Southern AE there is almost /fi:jəl/.


LOL I speak "CNN" English.  But if you want to "talk Southern" you have to cut diphthongs and add them other places...Something lahk thiyus: Pliyuz close thayut dowah, iyutz wahd opeyun.


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## kentix

- Somethin’ lahk thiyus: Pliyuz (Puh-leez?) close thayut dowah, iyutz wahd opeyun.

Almost.


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## Elle Paris

merquiades said:


> One of my pet peeves is how westerners pronounce my name. It has the AR vowel as in Cary which they pronounce Kerry.  They look at me like I'm crazy when they ask for Kerry and I say no, I'm Cary. For that reason alone I couldn't live in California.
> 
> My name is not Cary but features AR


LOL


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## Elle Paris

heypresto said:


> For me, (and I assume Keith Bradford), in 'Mary' the vowel sound is slightly longer, and rhymes with 'dairy', 'hairy', 'nary' and 'wary.' In 'merry' the vowel sound is shorter, like 'very', 'ferry', 'Jerry', 'berry' (and 'bury'), 'Perry' and 'Derry.'


BURY !???


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## natkretep

Yes, _berry_ and _bury_ are homophones in BrE.


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## Elle Paris

natkretep said:


> Yes, _berry_ and _bury_ are homophones in BrE.


...and building is like billing with a d?


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## natkretep

Elle Paris said:


> ...and building is like billing with a d?


Yes. How do you pronounce it?


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## heypresto

Elle Paris said:


> BURY !???


Yep. In my BE it rhymes with 'cherry', 'sherry', 'skerry', and 'wherry'. (But not 'equerry.')


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## Elle Paris

natkretep said:


> Yes. How do you pronounce it?


Well, I pronounce it like you then, but I know some Brits who pronounce building somewhere between bull ding and buhl ding.


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