[General] Pronunciations of "white" and "thought"

[GoesStation]

I've watched more of the Bob Ross video. Listening for his accent, I can hear it easily enough; but he really sounds much like a large number of people in my area. Hearing him say brown reminded me of my maternal grandmother criticizing my sister, who was around nine at the time, for adding a syllable to a word with that vowel. My sister, growing up in southwest Ohio, said something like bray-own. I don't think I stretch out the vowel to that extent. Ask me again after a couple of beers and I might change my mind.

The funny part is that my grandmother had a thick Polish accent, to the point that some native speakers probably had trouble understanding her. She was nevertheless able to hear the Appalachian-influenced accent my sister was acquiring. My family moved to southern California that year, and my sister now speaks with a typical accent for that region. I remember a clerk at a movie theater asking me, soon after we moved, if I was from England — and when I returned to my original home town ten years later, for a brief while I thought some of the locals had an English-like accent. Now it just sounds like home.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

Imdb.com tells me he's from Daytona Beach, Florida, which is midway up Florida's Atlantic coast. I'm afraid I don't know much about the local accent, but when I listened to a bit of the video, he sounded like he could have grown up across the street from me in southwest Ohio. His pronunciation of "white" just sounded normal to me, meaning he probably aspirated the /wh/ phoneme as many people around here do. This applies to all instances of /wh/ except for the word "who".

The aspirated /wh/ is typical of Appalachian and southeastern US pronunciation.

And Florida English has its quirks. I've met people born and raised in Florida who talk like they're from Queens. Ethnicity matters!