Which accents have “fur” and “fair” rhyme?

Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English.

Which accents have “fur” and “fair” stay distinct?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, Bristol / Southwest English, West Country English, London / Estuary English, Multicultural London English, Birmingham / West Midlands English, Mancunian English, South Yorkshire English, West Yorkshire English, Geordie / Tyneside 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, Nigerian English, Kenyan 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, Italian-accented English, Russian-accented English, Brazilian Portuguese-accented English, Japanese-accented English, Mandarin-accented English.

Which accents have “fur” and “fair” sometimes rhyme and sometimes do not?

Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English.

Pronunciation

Fur and Fair: The Merger That Marks Liverpool

Almost nowhere in the English-speaking world rhymes fur with fair. Liverpool and its surroundings do, which makes this the single most efficient test for a Scouse accent in the entire question bank. It is also found in a small area of northeast England.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

Do “fur” and “fair” rhyme in your natural accent?
Keep both words short and natural; listen to the vowel rather than the spelling.

Yes — they rhyme
No — they 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.

Yes — they rhyme

In these profiles, “fur” and “fair” rhyme.

No — they sound different

In these profiles, “fur” and “fair” stay distinct.

It varies

In these profiles, “fur” and “fair” sometimes rhyme and sometimes do not.

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.