Pronunciation

Bed or Bet? Final-Obstruent Devoicing

German, Russian, Polish and Dutch all harden a voiced consonant at the end of a word, so “bed” comes out as “bet” and “dog” as “dock”. English does not, though the ending is softer than most speakers realise — what really separates the pair is the length of the vowel before it.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

Do “bed” and “bet” end in the same sound?

Say each word by itself, and listen to the very end.

Answer it yourself and see where you land on the map →

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 — they end the same

In these profiles, “bed” and “bet” end alike — final-obstruent devoicing.

  • Spanish-accented English
  • German-accented English
  • Russian-accented English
  • Mandarin-accented English

No — one ends softer than the other

In these profiles, “bed” keeps its voiced ending, apart from “bet”.

It varies

In these profiles, final consonants are variably devoiced.

  • Spanish-accented English

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 five people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.