Pronunciation
The Cot–Caught Merger: Do “Cot” and “Caught” Sound the Same?
All of Canada, all of Scotland, and a steadily growing share of the western and northern United States merge cot with caught. The American South, the Northeast, New York, Chicago and all of England, Ireland and Australia keep them apart. The merger is spreading fast, which makes it a good indicator of a speaker's age as well as region.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
Do “cot” and “caught” rhyme in your natural accent?
Say the two words aloud without exaggerating them.
- Yes — they sound the same
- No — they sound 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 — they sound the same
In these profiles, “cot” and “caught” rhyme — the cot–caught merger.
No — they sound different
In these profiles, “cot” and “caught” stay distinct.
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.