If you come and stay with us we will offer as much tea as you like.

But that’s all there is: variation and other people who you can speak more or less like

Actually there is something else: there are the assumptions people make about you based on how you speak. The reason I didn’t mention this is that it’s implied by the “people who you can speak more or less like”. If you talk like someone from Boston, people will assume you’re from Boston. And it is true that people associate certain pronunciations (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) with individuals who have less education. The reason is that educational establishments promote certain pronunciation variants over others, so people who don’t use these variants are assumed to be less educated.

So when you pays your money, you makes a choice with consequences about what people associate you with. But that’s not the same as mispronunciations. There’s the rub.

Mumbling and diction are rather different matters, however, and really fall into a quite different category.

Richard Wade is right that the way we use words influences what they achieve, but this is not a matter of there being a right and a wrong prounciation. It’s a matter of pronouncing things in the most effective way for the context, and the social forces influencing this are subtle.

Mayonnaise = MAY-nays instead of MAY-o-nays

My grandmother says MAY-nays and my grandfather says MAN-nays. They argue about it sometimes, but they don’t get mad. More of a friendly thing.

I say it normally as do my parents.

Still correcting myself as I read it.

There seems to be this idea that somewhere there’s a big stone tablet with a list of how to pronounce words in English; deviating from the pronunciations on this tablet is wrong.

Actually, it’s not a stone tablet, it’s a dictionary.

There is a difference between regional accents and poor diction. It is not fair, but you are judged much more quickly by how you speak than by what you say. It takes at least a brief conversation to leave the impression that you are intelligent and sophisticated. It takes only one sentence to give the impression that you are a hick. Poor enunciation or mispronunciations that are associated with ignorant, backward stereotypes can seriously harm your credibility, and you have to work harder to compensate for that. It is like a handicap. George Bernard Shaw’s Professor Henry Higgens had a point: “It’s ‘aoww’ and ‘gaww’ that keep her in her place, not her wretched clothes and dirty face.”

I had a colleague who was a bright and knowledgeable man with a PhD in Psychology. He pronounced his words in the manner of the inner city ghettos, from which he had heroically emancipated himself. He said things like “ax” for “ask,” and “def” for “death,” and in general he mumbled. It was an impediment, a constant distraction that immediately produced a subtle negative reaction in people whom he was just meeting. He then had to get past that setback that he otherwise would not have faced.

It should not be enough to just be understood. Your speech has potential power. More than just apes grunting at each other to get a point across, speech, conversation and communication is an art. In any art there is an aspect called craftsmanship. Poor craftsmanship can cancel out the beauty and impact that the art could otherwise have. You don’t have to put on airs and have contrived speech affectations as if you’re an Oxford upper cruster. Just a little practice can remove a handicap to the power of your speech.

That, of course, is nonsense. Pronunciations vary; you may speak more or less like the majority of English speakers, or more or less like the majority of American/US/Iowan etc. speakers, or more or less like the richest people you know, or the celebrities you admire the most, or your teachers, or your students, or your fellow students, and so on.

But that’s all there is: variation and other people who you can speak more or less like. You pays your money and you makes your choice!

Over here in the western US, we have a lot of pronunciations that migrated in from the south. Really aggravating ones:

Treasure becomes TRAY-zhur and pleasure becomes PLAY-zhur. Since these words appear a lot in the Bible, I hear them pronounced that way a *lot*.

“This year” gets blurred into “thishyeer”.

Across becomes acrossed (pronounced uh-KROST).

My dad doesn’t pronounce “wash” as “warsh” – he just says “wush”, rhyming with “whoosh”.

They also do SUN-dee, MUN-dee, etc. Drives me bonkers.

And some non-regional ones:

Question = KWESH-chun instead of KWES-chun

Mayonnaise = MAY-nays instead of MAY-o-nays

Exactly = Exackly

And anyone who cannot pronounce a T as a T drives me up the wall. It’s “tree”, not “chree”. It’s “try”, not “chry”. Etc.