Pronunciation
“About” and “Aloud”: The Vowel That Crosses a Border
The vowel in “about” and the vowel in “aloud” are the same sound on paper. In a large part of North America they are not the same sound in the mouth: the one before a voiceless consonant starts higher, so “about” and “aloud” come apart while “loud” and “lout” do the same. The mocking spelling “aboot” is an exaggeration of it. What makes the feature worth a question is where it stops — plenty of American accents raise the vowel in “price” and “type”, including Chicago and much of the Great Lakes, but leave the “ow” words alone. Raising both is the thing that is genuinely Canadian.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
Say “about” and “aloud”. Do the “ow” vowels match?
Listen to the middle of each word rather than the end. The question is whether the two vowels are the same, not what either one is.
- Yes — the same vowel in both
- No — the one in “about” is different
- It varies
- I cannot tell
Which accents do what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
Yes — the same vowel in both
In these profiles, yes — the same vowel in both.
Why this question is in the survey
Pronunciation questions carry more weight in the scoring than vocabulary questions do, because they are much harder to change deliberately. People move house and pick up new words; the vowel system learned in childhood tends to stay. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least two people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.