Pronunciation

Beer and Bear: The Merger That Marks New Zealand

New Zealand is merging beer with bear, and among younger speakers the two are now often identical. It is one of the clearest ways to separate a New Zealand accent from an Australian one, which otherwise share most of their vowel system.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

Do “beer” and “bear” rhyme in your natural accent?

Say each word by itself at a normal pace.

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.

Yes — they rhyme

In these profiles, “beer” and “bear” rhyme — the near–square merger.

No — they sound different

In these profiles, “beer” and “bear” stay distinct.

It varies

In these profiles, “beer” and “bear” are variably merged.

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.