DialectGuessr

Pronunciation

Three, Free or Tree? What Happens to Your TH

TH is rare across the world's languages and unstable even within English. London and much of urban England front it to F — “free” for “three”. Ireland, the Caribbean, New York and India stop it to T — “tree” for “three”. Both changes are spreading, and both are heavily judged.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

What does the first sound of “three” resemble in your relaxed speech?

Say “three things” naturally rather than carefully reading it.

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.

A TH sound

In these profiles, “three” starts with a TH sound, with the tongue against the teeth.

An F-like sound — “free”

In these profiles, “three” sounds like “free”, starting with F.

A T-like sound — “tree”

In these profiles, “three” sounds like “tree”, starting with T.

An S-like sound — “sree”

In these profiles, “three” sounds like “sree”, starting with S.

  • Spanish-accented English
  • French-accented English
  • German-accented English
  • Russian-accented English
  • Japanese-accented English
  • Mandarin-accented English

I use more than one

In these profiles, the first sound of “three” 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 two people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.