Thumbs up for the birds!

I personally really like the B-roll of nature that you include between the slides. It's not only a characteristically Simon Roper thing, I feel like I can process what's been said better this way. And obviously the birds are visually extremely cool.

really great video! one note about US accents: we actually have two types of TRAP/BATH splits here. the traditional boston accent has an RP-like TRAP/BATH split, with TRAP with /æ/ and BATH with /ɑː/. john f kennedy (from boston) pronounced "half" with /ɑː/ but "have" with /æ/, for example. the other TRAP/BATH split is the traditional new york city accent (and with modifications, the philadelphia accent), in which TRAP again takes /æ/ but BATH lengthens and raises and diphthongizes rather than backing, to /ɛə/, merging with the MARY vowel in those accents. as such, the NYC version of the TRAP/BATH split (which is still going strong!) is a perfect front-vowel copy of the LOT/CLOTH split (which they also have), since again in that case CLOTH raises and diphthongizes.

Bernie Sanders is from Brooklyn, New York. When I first worked for him in Vermont, his accent was very strong and very "foreign." He sounds less like a New Yorker now, but he certainly doesn't have a Vermont accent. It's just become more "standard."

As an Irish person I've always been conscious of the trap-bath split amongst southern English people, even as a child, though obviously at the time I didn't have a name for it. I never liked it because to me it epitomised the ‘posh English accent’ (just like northerners in England as pointed out in the video), even more so than non-rhoticity which I really wasn't as aware of. When I finally was able to put a name to the phenomenon, after starting casually learning about phonetics, I remember thinking, ‘oh yes, the trap-bath split, thank God I don't have *that*!’ Turns out I do have it, as do most Irish people. We just have very similar vowel qualities (/a/ vs /aː/) that aren't a stark difference like in British English. Oops lol.

I grew up in northern New Jersey and had a fairly NYC-influenced accent-that "aw" diphthong in abundance. (As I've mentioned elsewhere here, it's also stronger in my generation than my parents'.) I moved to Seattle a few years ago and largely lost my native accent. The vowels are all much flatter here, which is fine with me, but now it's incredibly hard for me to switch back to a NJ/NYC accent, partly because the "aw" sound now feels cartoonish to me, like it no longer makes sense coming out of my mouth. The accent sounds fine to me when I hear it from other people, but I can understand now when other people think it's kind of ridiculous. Saying that, I had a teacher from France who LOVES New York accents, so there are fans out there.

I worked with a woman from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and she pronounced "Don" (as in the nickname for Donald) as "Dawn" (the cot-caught merger but merged to caught rather than the normal cot). For weeks I thought there was some mythical woman named Dawn whom I hadn't met yet for some reason.

Btw, in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore trap and bath are split, the former as you pronounced it /æ/, and the latter is raised to /ɛə/. Wikipedia has a good article on the short-a raising

I remember my mother and her siblings having an argument over whether the names Don and Dawn were pronounced the same. My mother and one aunt don't have the merger, and pronounce them differently, but I and some of my aunts and uncles have the merger. They all grew up in southern Maine together, as did I about 30 years later.

Simon, please restore the Baldrick videos. Even if the old English was off, they were still very entertaining!

If you ever visit Philadelphia, you will have your mind blown. We don't fit into any of these groups -- even the eastern urban US one -- and we constantly do things in ways that make linguistics professors rip their hair out. (I wish I could record myself saying them and send it to you.) Even the classic "Mary/merry/marry/Murray" question doesn't work for us. "Which ones rhyme for you?" Um, none of them ...

I'm from New York, and I'd say our pronunciation of these words is cot=[kʰät], caught=[kʰoət], trap=[tɹæp], and bath=[beəθ]. We have the "trap-bath" split but the split also extends to words with voiced stops and the /ʃ/ sound. Our "Palm" vowel can also be distinct from "lot," "palm" being something like [pʰɒəm] though certain "lot" words use the "palm" vowel and foreign words like "Bach" are pronounced with the lot vowel and not the "palm" vowel, so "Bach's box" is pronounced the same.

I originally subbed because of the birds, don't you dare take them out!

Wow ok you pull off a decent Modern American accent, sir 🎉🎉🎉It’s very much how we sound here on the west coast of the US.

I clicked this video so fast as a New Yorker. Clawth, Dawg, Awfn, gawn, kawfee. Best way of talking :)

I love the birds! I love that you love animals. I do too. I live in CT and a lot of us have speech that is influenced by Boston and New York City accents. I tend to pronounce words differently than most people in CT. I tend to have a more Boston accent. I'm not sure why. I have no familiar ties there and didn't live there. I must have picked it up somehow. I love hearing different accents. It's such a beautiful thing. I love these videos that you do illustrating the differences.

I like the birds. At first I thought, "ugh, house sparrows", but then remembered that they're native in the UK.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that most American accents without the cot-caught merger do have the lot-cloth split. I’m pretty sure Luke Ranieri does. I think the stereotype about those urban East Coast accents is, in fact, their raised THOUGHT-vowel, which, in broad New York City accents, is merged with NORTH and FORCE. Also, he pronounces and transcribes the East Coast Accents as having a slightly more rounded LOT-vowel, when if their LOT-vowel's at all different from the first accent, (I think) they'd normally have a slightly more fronted vowel (though things are different in traditional Boston and New York accents.)

I like the birds and the glimmers of nature you add to your videos. It just adds to the chill vibe imo.

Always enjoy your content mate, its a pleasure

I grew up in a suburb of ATL, but my whole family is from Philly and I grew up spending summer vacations there. I feel like going back and forth made my accent more neutral, but I do use the "awf" sound a lot. Also I have some other regional things like water (worder) and the vowel sound in for, four, more, etc is a diphthong that is very hard for me to describe lol

Keep the birds! I love the editing and style choices you make on this channel.

This is really interesting! I really love these deeper digs into what differences you get among dialects. Having learned Norwegian and some Swiss German it is impressive how vowels change and differ. And I'm just an amateur and not a linguist

Of all the KZfaqrs to know about each other, you and Dr. Lindsey shouldn't be surprising, but it makes me happy.

The birds are great and I love the variety they bring to your videos.

Keep the birds!! We love them

this channel is a gem i always found it cool how malleable english is so that u can phrase one thing in lots of diff ways

One interesting aspect of vowel mergers is how they carry over into other languages, for example, here's how the vowels are usually pronounced in English loanwords adopted into Czech (my native language): COT - [o] CAUGHT - [oː] CLOTH - [o] TRAP - [ɛ] (merged with the DRESS vowel) BATH - [aː]

I concur with your view that the birds are nice.

Thank you again, Simon. One minor observation about the pronunciation of "gone": in London it used to be "gawn", in Oz it's more like "gorn". I'm from SE England and the way you pronounce "cot/ caught/ cloth/ trap/ bath" is very close to mine, despite being a full-time resident of Australia for more than three decades. [edit] 7:49 onward, the "bath/ pass/ staff" pronunciation is very SW England (esp Cornwall) when I was living there /edit

0:56 I'm impressed by how you managed to capture this difference. I'm trying to replicate it myself, but I can't seem to do it...

Great job! The correlation/parallel between the trap-bath and the lot-cloth split was news to me, but thanks to your explanation it's now so obvious. Living in NW Ohio back in the late 1990s, I noticed the lot-cloth split early on and adopted it. Only much later (looking at you, Monty Python) did it dawn on me that it used to be a thing in Britain as well.

I'm not sure about this, but what I have read has led me to believe that all varieties of North American English that have not merged the cot and caught vowels have the lot cloth split, meaning that cot is distinguished from caught AND from cloth, but cloth and caught have the same vowel. Sometimes certain words may have the cot or the caught vowel depending on region, like the word "on," but I'm not sure where the second row at 0:14, the one labeled "many parts of eastern U.S." would be spoken. Not all of them realize the caught/cloth vowel the same way, big urban centers definitely have that intense diphthong, but the distribution, I believe, is the same.

great video as always

Very interesting. I enjoy the birds

Very interesting, thank you. The birds are nice, I like that you show them.

Simon you're a gift

I see a thumbnail of Bernie Sanders speaking my ancestors' dialect, I click! Thank you, Simon, for a great video! I'm a native of New York English and definitely have the distinct "aw" sound, which I have to suppress. I'm a little surprised to see that [ɔ]-lacking West Coast vowel system as "standard"; I was taught the "eastern US" as the standard in school, which included downplaying the New York "aw" and saying [ɔ:] 'properly'. Also, we northeastern US speakers *definitely* have a trap-bath split which isn't shown here. Not the British one which involves an "ah"-like sound in "bath", but they're very different. "Marry" and "Mary" form the most famous minimal pair, and "have/halve" is another. Have, cat, clap, cadge, Al, Dad, and Gary have the 'trap' vowel and bad, mad, cash, badge, salve, slam, after, fan, stab, and Mary have the 'bath' vowel. It feels like a lot of following unvoiced consonants get the 'trap' vowel and voice consonants often get 'bath', but there are lots of exceptions so I can't figure out what the rule might be, if there is one.

Excellent video as always. It is a huge understatement to say that “cloth” being pronounced like “clawth” is a “conservative” feature of cockney and RP. It is practically extinct in both. Prince Charles doesn’t do this but the queen did. Alan sugar, who is the oldest famous cockney I can think of, also doesn’t do it.

Where I live in central England many people use both ways of saying words like "bath" because we live right on the border between those two areas. But for some reason it's more common with certain words, and less with others. For example "grass" is almost always pronounced the northern way, whereas "after" / "afternoon" is more likely to be pronounced both ways.

I love the birds 🐦

I live in Bath, and our city has a strange relationship with the 'a' vowel in the trap-bath split. Certainly, no one from Bath uses the short /a/ vowel of northern dialects, but there's a clear divide in the city between different realizations of the 'long a' in the word 'Bath'. Among native Bathonians and especially lower social class, a more conservative long, raised vowel predominates: /baːth/. But Bath is also a fairly posh city with a lot of admixture of well-to-do people from further afield, so there's also a very widespread long, lower 'a' vowel that marks the 'posh Bath' accent: /bɑːth/. Non locals, especially northerners but also southerners with SSE accents, often stereotype or mock the local accent as pronouncing something like 'barf', but I think this is largely invented pronunciation, a kind of 'mummerset' pastiche of westcountry accents by those who aren't familiar with the city, as in my experience, while the traditional Bath accent can be rhotic in a lot of cases, there is never rhoticisation in the name of the city. The more local pronunciation is /baːth/, the posh pronunciation is /bɑːth/, but short vowel /bath/ is used only by those hailing from north of the Watford gap, and any version along the lines of /bɑrth/ is probably invented (or possibly authentic for speakers from much further West, I can't say for certain.) As for me, I've lived in Bath and London so I have terrible wandering accent syndrome - my pronunciation of the name of my own city varies depending on who I'm talking to, and sounds inauthentic in both situations 😅 When I say /bɑːth/ I feel like I'm affecting a posh accent, when I say /baːth/ I feel like I'm imitating a local accent. The curse of the code-switcher: I can't remember what my authentic natural pronunciation is and so I feel like a fraud in both cases.

I love Bernie's accent

The video was very interesting as usual.

i love these!

Love this stuff!

Interesting. 1) Keep the birds!!!! 2) I am a Midwesterner (from Michigan however educated in an International school in Belgium so possibly a mixed bag), have the lot-cloth split but don’t hear a diphthong in cloth. 🤔 I’ve had three years of phonology so like to think I am quite discerning….at least enough to tell if I’m ‘diphthonging’.

We pronounce cot and caught identically (southern Ontario). None of the examples captured it, so I thought I would share.

I can't find the Baldric video; where a modern day interviewer is interviewing Simon as Baldric, an old English speaker. It is now listed as Private. It was so useful for my lesson 'Why is English so difficult to spell?', which I regularly teach to Year 4 & 5 students at my local state primary school. Please, please bring it back, your other videos are not so much fun for younger children.

Some parts of the near-new york area has a trap-bath split in addition to a cot-caught split.

Learning English as a teenager and trying to imitate the American accent meant that I ended up with the cot-caught merger, even though I could swear they were different :')

Great video. Big fan of the birds.

As other commenters point out, North American accents that don't have the merger always have CLOTH with THOUGHT (i.e. I am not sure about your Many parts of the eastern US). And also, TRAP and BATH definitely do not have the same vowel in Eastern urban centres such as New York (and Philadelphia), as most BATH words have the /æ/ raising.

In my youth in Noo Yawk "after", "bath" and "glass" consisted of a broad "a" something like "bay-th".

Thanks for the birds, they work well together with some linguistic info that goes beyond my non-english brain. Still nice to hear how geo-location, social class and time influence how we change language.

Will you ever do an updated video on the evolution of English pronunciation?

I have noticed that the Irish accent on Ryanair flights coming through the PA system uses /o:f/ for “Objects may fall /o:/ff. Is that a normal pronuncation of “off” in Irish English? Do (some) Irish people have a lot/cloth split of the New York, U-RP type? Great video. Very informative.

I'm from Wisconsin and my caught and cloth vowels are the same but cot is different. I'd transcribe these phonemically the same as what you have in the third row, but phonetically caught/cloth might be closer to /ɑ/ and cot is probably closer to /a/. Not an expert but this is how I hear it! I lot of other Americans hear that midwestern cot vowel as an /æ/ but it definitely isn't the same!

There are just so many English language accents today. Cape Town here. Really shocked when I was in the UK recently at just how great the differences are over a matter of tens of km.

In my accent (West Central Scotland) cot, caught and cloth have identical vowel sounds, as do trap and bath. In both cases it's a short, mid-placed vowel.

In some English TV programmes from the 60s/70s, I’ve heard people pronounce “hospital” with the “aw” sound, almost as if they were saying “horse-pital”. These speakers weren’t particularly RP and certainly not cockney. Perhaps that pronunciation of the word had hung on longer than with other “cross” sounds. Off topic, but I’ve always wondered why the cockney pronunciation of “transport” doesn’t use the same vowel sound as “dance”, but instead a longer “trap” vowel sound. Hope I’ve explained that OK.

That raised front vowel in car is also still around in Newfoundland.

i love the tiny central vowel dipthong in the ny accent

It's not my own accent, but I find myself saying "coffee" as if I were from New Jersey. Just a fun way of saying it!

I'm pretty sure the lot-cloth split is nearly universal in North America. It's just less pronounced outside of northeast cities. Also, I wonder if the short-a split in the northeast US is a divergent manifestation of the trap-bath split

I was curious, Simon; do you have any observations about musical cultures and the different emotional associations of musical sounds like rhythms, chords, scales, etc., among different cultures? I’m interested because I’m an experimental contemporary composer and a writer on musical topics. Plus, your channel is quickly becoming one of my favorite KZfaq channels of all time. Your interdisciplinary intelligence, rigorous critical thinking skills, and broad curiosity are very inspiring. (By the way, if you didn’t know this already, you might be interested to learn that there is an American “bath-trap” split here in Boston among older speakers… “bath” and “can’t” have something more like the “father” vowel instead of the “cat” vowel).

This guy could be reading his shopping list and I’d enjoy hearing it ❤

Your channel appeared in my suggested list and I found it so interesting. I’m not a linguist but I find languages and accents a captivating subject. I’m not an English native speaker, I was born in Latin America and have an Italian background, but I moved to Australia in 2009. I love and enjoy the English language as well as the mindset that comes with it. I discovered that languages also bring a mindset. We tend to think about languages as just words that we can learn and repeat but not f we immerse in it enough, it also changes our thinking process, which I find fascinating. My only issue is that despite all my efforts I will never sound like a local. I have an accent, quite strong, and I wonder if I ever will be able to soften it. What’s your take on that , can a strong accent be less noticeable? If so , how? Is there specific exercises?

Very interesting. There are some weird hypercorrections you’ll hear from some Northerners trying to sound posh like ‘plahstic’, ‘sahndwich’ and ‘bandahna’ instead of ‘plastic’, ‘sandwich’ and ‘bandana’, occasionally you’ll hear them said by actual Southerners but it’s certainly not part of standard RP or cockney. I hadn’t thought about ‘chaff’, or for that matter ‘gaff(e)’ vs. ‘staff’ - perhaps irregular and hypercorrect versions exist for these too? Also interesting is the way ‘lather’ can be said like ‘gather’ or like ‘father/rather’ depending on the speaker. Despite that, the word ‘gather’ itself very very rarely ever rhymes with ‘father’/‘rather’.

Love the birds. Very interesting stuff

I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and I have a different pronunciation of bath. It's a diphthong with a mid front e followed by a schwah

Wells' Accents of English treats the æ-tensing before voiceless fricatives/nasals in NYC-Philadephia area as part of the TRAP-BATH split (he refers to it as "BATH-raising"). Wikipedia otoh borrows its terminology from the Atlas of North American English and insists it's a seperate phenomena called the "Split-a system".

The birds are wonderful. More birds! 🐦 Great video, mate.

5:48 did you mean a velar consonant?

A word that I find interesting- pronounced in different regions is "Poor".

I particularly liked the clip of the collared dove.

Do you know Simon, the ornitholinguist? yep, I am a subscriber.

wow, never knew how all these accents are different with these (i pronounce the vowels in LOT and CLOTH and THOUGHT the same way, and i pronounce the ones in BATH and TRAP the same way too)

I love your videos. I feel like we never got to why the eastern us accents differentiate the way we do- was it meant to be understood that they have evolved along similar lines or that American accents are impacted by changes to British speech in past centuries? I’ve always (Boston native) heard this sound change the most on words like “orange” (aranage) or Florida (flarida.) I thought you’d end up saying this is from the influence of Italian and Yiddish speech, which is where I’ve assumed it comes from as it seems to be most prevalent (anecdotally) with NY Jewish and New Jersey and Rhode Island italain-Americans. Thanks again for your work!

You even got the odd Birdie Sanders in 👌🏼

The birds are cool.

The rounded almost ''NORTH" merged ''cot'' and or ''caught'' vowel tends to be most prevalent in the Northeastern American accents which are mostly non-rhotic, that is, the ones in which R gets dropped much of the time after vowels.

My accent is quite different in comparison, I'm also from Britain but I'm from the west country and speech wise, I've had influence from both central and west sides of the country. This is how I pronounce the words first presented in this video 0:08 : [kʰɔʔ] cot [kʰoːʔ] caught [kʰlɔf] cloth [t͡ʃɹʷap] trap [ba(ː)f] bath

Interestingly enough, Im a SE US speaker with the cot-caught merger. Though in some words like "gone" or "on" in your examples, I often switch between my cot vowel and a goat vowel. Though my normal goat vowel is fronted, towards the center/frontish part of my mouth, whenever I pronounce words words like "gone" with the goat vowel, it is pronounced in the back of my mouth.

@11:25 I remember thinking the same thing as a kid but in reverse… I thought English people were pronouncing the /æ/ vowel closer to "ah"! I never noticed until recently that British people usually pronounce "pasta" with their trap vowel instead of their palm/bath vowel since to my American ears that sounds similar to how I say it--even though I use the palm/lot vowel in that word.

I confess that I don't hear the distinction between some of the vowels here. I'm an American from southern California. In my speech, the vowels in "cot" and "caught" are different, but the vowels in "caught" and "cloth" are nearly identical. The vowels in "trap" and "bath" are identical. The words "merry," "marry," and "Mary" are identical. The words "Harry" and "hairy" are identical ("Harry" is my middle name). The vowels in "pen" and "pin" are different. Some online studies allege that the merger of "cot" and "caught" is universal in California. If so, then I'm the odd one out.

I can remember my great-uncles said "awf" for off. ( Northern New South Wales in the '50s)

I like the birds.

I live in NJ, USA, and I say "trap" with the "cat" vowel sound, but "bath" with the "pail" or "after" sound (like a less nasal "can" sound).

I specially like the birds. I realise it's a 101-level question but could you say what you mean by raised and lowered vis-a-vis vowels? I struggle to distinguish some of your examples and don't know if I could understand if I raised or lowered something in my mouth. Thanks for all this.

Most Bostonians under the age of 60 have the cot (lot)-caught merger. Bernie Sanders is a New Englander (Vermont) now, but was born and raised in NYC and has a very strong NYC accent, which as you say is unmerged. Maybe people tend to think "East Coast Urban" is NYC. Philadelphia has a somewhat similar accent but the Southern New England accent, and the Boston accent, a subset, are not like NYC, especially in the "o" sounds (I don't know IPA well).

I speak General American. I made my own Phonetic Alphabet which I call 7M Phonetic English. It's just for English and uses simple characters. I assigned 'ʌ' to the 'awe' /ɑ/ sound. For me 'cot' & 'caught' are the same word. 'kʌt' (cot or caught) 'kʌr' (car) 'ker' (care) 'kut' (cut) 'er' (air) 'drt' (dirt) 'lʌt' (lot)

As a non-naive speaker I pronounce the five words naturally* as ⟨cot⟩ [kʰɔt], ⟨caught⟩ [kʰo̞ːt], ⟨cloth⟩ [kʰlɔθ], ⟨trap⟩ [t͡ɹ̝ʷæp] and ⟨bath⟩ [bɑːθ]. So the same basic vowel distribution as a modern Southeastern British accent but with a slightly different phonetic realisations. * - How I pronounce the words in natural speech.

I like the nature shots.

I LOVE the birds, thank you

I’m in northern NY state and my accent is closer to “Standard” American than it is to an NYC accent despite being in the same state. (The NYC accent sounds to my ears like people are adding unnecessary W’s to words. i.e. “Coffee” sounds like “Cwoffee”.) Some of the more “country”/“backwoods” people (especially ones who didn’t go to college/university) have a bit of a twang to their accents, they use a lot of nonstandard contractions, a lot of nonstandard glottal stops, they love to drop the G at the end of -ING suffixes even in the middle of a word (e.g. “Bloomingdale” is pronounced as “Bloomindale”.), they love to say “Yeahbud”. There are also a few French Canadian loanwords in our vocabulary that were picked up from 19th century Québécois immigrants who came south looking for work, the most common one being “toque” (pronounced “tuke”) meaning a winter hat or beanie.

Here's another vote for the birds 👍 One of my favourite words for pronunciation is "bathmat."

I love the birds.

There is of course variation within accents as well as between them. I'm from New York, but have the "General American" sound in "cot" and the "Eastern US" sound in the others. Also, the a in "bath" tends to be a bit higher than in "trap." (The distribution of these two American a sounds varies between dialects and even individuals. The higher sound varies in height, the higher values often being nasalized and followed by a schwa. An extreme version results in "Ann" being pronounced like "Ian." These variants have sometimes been stigmatized.) As regards the "trap" "bath" split, it was apparently not complete in the late nineteenth century. Some of the rhymes in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas no longer work for this reason, e.g., "Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes; bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow ye masses." "Class" has since undergone the split, but "mass" has not. I understand that there is still variation in words like "mask."

3:24 - for the Trap-bath split, presumably, you’re not including the Southwest in “Southern English” accents You could argue there’s a subtle split in some Westcountry accents, with “bath” having a slightly elongated vowel sound, but for the most part, it’s a much more similar vowel sound than the southeastern and RP versions. (the vowel being the either identical to “trap” or a slightly stretched version, rather than the more rounded southeastern version as in “bar”)