Which accents have “put” and “putt” sound the same — no foot–strut split?

Birmingham / West Midlands English, Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English, South Yorkshire English, West Yorkshire English, Geordie / Tyneside English.

Which accents have “put” and “putt” have different vowels — the foot–strut split?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, Bristol / Southwest English, West Country English, London / Estuary English, Multicultural London English, Birmingham / West Midlands English, Scouse / Liverpool 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.

Which accents have the foot–strut distinction is inconsistent?

Birmingham / West Midlands English.

Pronunciation

The Foot–Strut Split: Do “Put” and “Putt” Rhyme?

Northern England is the great holdout: there, put and putt have the same vowel, and so do book and buck's first sounds in broader speech. Everywhere else in the English-speaking world, the two split apart in the seventeenth century. It is the single most reliable test for a northern English accent.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

Do “put” and “putt” have the same vowel in your natural accent?
Say both words aloud: “put” and “putt”.

The vowels sound the same
The vowels sound different
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.

The vowels sound the same

In these profiles, “put” and “putt” sound the same — no foot–strut split.

The vowels sound different

In these profiles, “put” and “putt” have different vowels — the foot–strut split.

It varies

In these profiles, the foot–strut distinction is inconsistent.

Birmingham

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.