DialectGuessr

Pronunciation

The Trap–Bath Split: Does “Bath” Rhyme With “Cat” or “Father”?

In southern England, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, words like bath, grass, dance and laugh use the broad vowel of father. In northern England, Ireland, Scotland and almost all of North America, they use the short vowel of cat. The split happened in southern England in the eighteenth century and never reached the north.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

In your natural accent, does “bath” use the vowel in “cat” or “father”?

Say “bath” aloud normally. Choose the closer vowel, not the spelling.

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.

Like “cat” — a short vowel

In these profiles, “bath” takes the short vowel of “cat”.

Like “father” — a broad/long vowel

In these profiles, “bath” takes the broad vowel of “father”.

It varies by word or situation

In these profiles, the “bath” vowel varies from word to word.

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.