inverness

[unixken]

As a teen, and in my early twenties, I marveled at pronunciations I'd heard all around the country, when I was in the Coast Guard.

As a native New Englander, I'd theorized that the disappearance of the letter "R" was because New England had had 350 years of maritime history. You can not yell the sound of the letter "R" from weatherdeck to crow's nest, or from one ship to another (try yelling "lob-sterrrrr." It comes out "lob-stahhhh.") I assumed that whalers and fisherman developed this tendency to replace "R" with "AH", and then upon returning to shore would propagate this to their families.

Next, I discovered in the mid-west, some folks had a tendency to add the letter "R" where none was required. People would "warsh" their clothes in "warter."

And then there were the folks I met, in the south. When stationed in North Carolina, I was apartment hunting. While speaking with the woman who would later be my land lady, I had been asking questions such as how much to expect an average utility bill to cost each month, and so on. We were talking about the expenses, and as we'd been talking about money, she asked if I had any pay-ettes. I thought to myself "Is she asking about payroll receipts or other proof of income?" I was silent. She re-phrased the question... "You got any cats or dawgs?"

So...
In New England, letters and sounds disappear... and are replaced.

In the Midwest, letters, displaced from elsewhere, are inserted where they don't belong.

In the South, not to be out done, single-syllable words gain a syllable, are hyphenated, the short "e" sound is replaced with the sound of a long "a", and the whole thing then gets appended with a final "e".

Oh... and I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, pronounced "Quin-Zee", though I've known people from Quincy, Illinois, pronounced "Quin-See."