Which accents have yes — “singer” has a hard g?

Birmingham / West Midlands English, Scouse / Liverpool English, Mancunian English, South Yorkshire English, Spanish-accented English, Italian-accented English, Russian-accented English.

Which accents have no — they sound different?

Modern RP / Standard Southern British, Bristol / Southwest English, West Country English, London / Estuary English, Multicultural London 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, French-accented English, German-accented English, Brazilian Portuguese-accented English, Japanese-accented English, Mandarin-accented English.

Pronunciation

Do “Singer” and “Finger” Rhyme? The Velar Nasal Plus

Across the West Midlands, Manchester, Liverpool and South Yorkshire, “singer” keeps a hard G and rhymes with “finger”. The Our Dialects survey found the two rhyming for about 97 per cent of speakers in that band and around 54 per cent further south, making it one of the best-evidenced north–south lines in England.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

Do “singer” and “finger” rhyme in your natural accent?
Listen for whether “singer” has a hard G in the middle.

Yes — “singer” has a hard G
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 — “singer” has a hard G

In these profiles, yes — “singer” has a hard g.

Birmingham
Scouse
Mancunian
South Yorkshire
Spanish-accented English
Italian-accented English
Russian-accented English

No — they sound different

In these profiles, no — they sound different.

It varies

In these profiles, it varies.

West Yorkshire

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.