A pronunciation guide
Since I was going on and on in my comments about regional pronunciations.
How to pronounce where I live:
MUN-tree-awl. It’s just the first syllable everyone gets wrong. Well, not people from Quebec or parts of Ontario.
And it’s kuh-BECK. Not KWEE-beck. Pronounce the w if you must, but don’t make that first syllable long.
You’re also always welcome to pronounce either of them as if they’re French, but it’s a little weird. It’s normal to pronounce every other city in Quebec as if you were speaking French, though.
I have been told that, when reading data from other languages, I have a French accent. This is possibly why.
How to recognise people from Montreal:
Incidentally, you can tell someone’s from Montreal if they pronounce the word bilingual with 4 syllables (bye-lin-GHYOO-ul) instead of 3 (bye-lin-GWUL). This is unlikely to be useful knowledge to you. Also, I get marks, not grades, we mark things, not grade them, and the marks are (for instance) 3 on 10, not 3 out of 10. If someone drinks a soft drink, they’re from Quebec.
Other places with specific pronunciations:
Orry-gun? I thought Oreh-gun. (I need IPA now.)
Canadian vs. American pronunciations:
Only Americans turn all the a’s in foreign words into awh. You eat pawh-stah, we eat pah-stah. Etc. This is usually one of the first things Canadians living in the US lose. I started to overgeneralise around the same time I started saying “eh” more and was more consistent with Canadian raising.
Sociolinguistics, how much pointless fun you can be.
April 15th, 2004 at 6:59 pm
Yeesh. It is indeed OReh-gun.
Typing phonetically is hard!
(It’d be so cool if we could include schwas and things.)
April 15th, 2004 at 11:59 pm
Typing phonetically is easy when you have IPA. I could use ARPAbet (http://www.billnet.org/phon/arpabet.html), but it annoys me.