Which accents have no — they end in a vowel?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, West Country English, London / Estuary English, Multicultural London English, Birmingham / West Midlands English, Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English, South Yorkshire English, West Yorkshire English, Geordie / Tyneside English, Central Scottish English, Highland Scottish English, South Wales English, Northern Irish English, Cork English, East Irish English, Southern Appalachian English, New York City English, California English, Texas English, Boston / Eastern New England English, Chicago / Inland North English, Newfoundland English, Jamaican English / Patwa continuum, Bajan English, Queensland Australian English, New Zealand English, Toronto Canadian English, Johannesburg South African English, Delhi Indian English, Nigerian English, Kenyan English, Pakistani English, Philippine English, Singapore English, Hong Kong English, Melbourne / Southern Australian English, Ghanaian English, Trinidadian English, Malaysian English, Midland American English, African American English, Hawaiian English, Philadelphia English, New Orleans English, Vancouver / Western Canadian English, Perth / Western Australian English, Chennai / South Indian English, Liberian English, Sri Lankan English, Spanish-accented English, French-accented English, German-accented English, Italian-accented English, Russian-accented English, Brazilian Portuguese-accented English, Japanese-accented English, Mandarin-accented English.

Pronunciation

The Bristol L: Why “Area” Can Sound Like “Areal”

Bristol adds an L to words ending in an unstressed vowel: area becomes areal, idea becomes ideal, cinema becomes cinemal. It is the only English accent that does this, and the city's own name is the result — Bristol was Bristow until the local pronunciation stuck to it permanently.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

Do “area” and “idea” pick up an L sound at the end when you say them?
Listen for whether “idea” comes out sounding like “ideal”.

Yes — “idea” sounds like “ideal”
No — they end in a vowel
It varies
I cannot tell

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 — “idea” sounds like “ideal”

In these profiles, yes — “idea” sounds like “ideal”.

Bristol

No — they end in a vowel

In these profiles, no — they end in a vowel.

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.