Which accents have one — “film”?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, Bristol / Southwest English, 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, 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, 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, Russian-accented English.

Which accents have two — “fill-um”?

Highland Scottish English, Kenyan English, Italian-accented English, Brazilian Portuguese-accented English, Japanese-accented English, Mandarin-accented English.

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

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.

One — “film”

In these profiles, one — “film”.

Two — “fill-um”

In these profiles, two — “fill-um”.

Highland Scottish
Kenyan
Italian-accented English
Brazilian Portuguese-accented English
Japanese-accented English
Mandarin-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 two people there have answered.

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