Pronunciation
“Film” or “Fillum”? The Helping Vowel in Highland and Irish English
In Highland Scottish English and much of Irish English, a helping vowel appears between the L and the M of film, giving two syllables — “fill-um”. It comes from Gaelic phonology, where such clusters are broken up as a matter of course, and it survives in speakers with no Gaelic at all.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
How many syllables are there when you say “film”?
Say it at normal speed and count the beats.
- One — “film”
- Two — “fill-um”
- 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.
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.