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
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.
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.