Pronunciation
Mary, Marry, Merry: One Sound, Two or Three?
Most of the United States and Canada pronounce all three identically and cannot hear a difference at all. New York, Philadelphia and Boston keep two or three apart. England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand keep all three distinct, which is why British listeners find the American merger so striking.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
How do “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry” compare in your natural accent?
Say all three at a normal pace.
- All three sound the same
- Two match and one differs
- All three 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.
All three sound the same
In these profiles, “Mary”, “marry” and “merry” all sound the same.
Two match and one differs
In these profiles, two of “Mary”, “marry” and “merry” match and one differs.
All three sound different
In these profiles, “Mary”, “marry” and “merry” all sound different.
It varies
In these profiles, the “Mary–marry–merry” distinction 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.