Pronunciation
“Graph” and “Grass”: Where the BATH Split Stops Halfway
The trap–bath split is usually described as all or nothing: southern England broadened the vowel in bath, grass, laugh and graph together, and northern England broadened none of them. Australia did neither. It took the broad vowel in “grass” and kept the short one in “graph”, and how far down that list a given speaker goes depends on which state they grew up in — Crystal found “graph” broad for 86% of Adelaide speakers and short for every speaker he recorded in Hobart. It is the reason an Australian and a Londoner can agree on every other vowel in this survey and still not sound alike.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
Say “graph” and “grass”. Do the two use the same vowel?
Say both at a normal pace. This is only about whether the two vowels match, not about which vowel it is.
- Yes — the same vowel in both
- No — a different vowel in each
- 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.
No — a different vowel in each
In these profiles, no — a different vowel in each.
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.