Hi!!
Can anybody tell me which pronounciation of "demand" is used more often:
"dɪˈmɑːnd" or "dɪˈmænd" ?
Also, can anybody PM me for a recording of a related word?
Thanks for your time!
This is fairly easy.
[dɪˈmɑːnd] is mostly British English
[dɪˈmænd] - American English
Also: /dəˈmɑ:nd/, BrE.
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But it's not as simple as that. The English spoken by the Pilgrim Fathers was regional (not RP). So they used words like 'fall' [=autumn] and 'gotten' [=got] not because they were Am English (which didn't exist as a concept at the time!) but because they were the sort of English they used. 'Demand' is widely pronounced with an /æ/ in many parts of England; during my Teaching Practice I was known as 'the teacher who talks posh' because my accent is not too far removed from RP. (Many schoolchildren, say about fifty years ago, acquired an RP accent for use in front of teachers and reverted to a regional variety at other times. With me it just stuck
)
And as 5jj pointed out, the unstressed syllable if often pronounced with a schwa.
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