Xidnaf I checked the video and oddly enough, I don’t have it despite me being 14 (15 in 19 days). I’m not from America, But I’m from southern Ontario Canada, like the majority of Canadians so I thought I’d have merger. However my dad is from Newfoundland where the majority of the original immigrants there where from Ireland. As a result of this the people from there (including my dad) basically have what could more or less be considered an Irish accent. Then my mom is a third generation Irish/Scottish immigrant whose parents had some English friends. I also grew up watching a lot of British television programmes so that may have affected it. I’ll test my friends on monday
Looking at second generation immigrants might be a good study too, because our parents don't speak American English at all, so our parents play little role in whether or not we acquire the merger. Myself, I mostly don't have it, but there are a few words which I believe sound close. Of course, I grew up in north texas, so my region doesn't have it in general.
@@ArturoStojanoff In my (and most likely the original commenter's) dialect, people don't pronounce the "r" in words like "word", "fork", "swirl", and "court".
When I tried saying "I caught a cot," it brought out two similar-sounding but still distinct vowels. I've been lying to myself the whole time, I don't have the merger.
I would not be so sure. Remember, one of the biggest changes to English (the Great Wowel Shift) happened during another major media revolution, the printing press. I can also see changes in my own native language, Slovak, for example, in old (until the 1980s) movies, characters often pronounced every "le" syllable as "ľe" = with a soft/palatal l. Nowadays, practically nobody speaks like that, maybe some people in Central Slovakia do. Ľ in general is pronounced as L in my region of Slovakia (southwest) these days, and nationwide, the ä (/æ/) phoneme has almost completely disappeared from speech, yet we were still taught it at school, but I cannot really pronounce it properly anymore as everyone pronounces it as regular e (/ɛ/). It is however true that many of these changes were likely catalyzed by mass contact with the Czech language, many TV series are shown in Czech on our channels for example, many Slovak students go to Czechia to study, some Czech students study in Slovakia, etc... and these "dying" phonemes are those that are not present in Czech. However, even Ľudovít Štúr, the main codificator of our language in the 19th century already noted some of these changes, such as the ľ-l merger, and that was long before mass Czech media influence, so these are likely native linguistic trends that have been going on for some time, just made stronger and more rapid by contact with a very, very close language that lacks those phonemes.
my guess is no because even today people still on average listen to those around them speaking way more than they hear people talking on the internet/tv/radio. i think a greater stabilizing effect is the way people move around so much more freely today than in previous generations.
Don't forget, the "progressives" who took phonics out of the education system, along with de-emphasizing American history and civics in favor of social justice/social studies/world history classes.
3 years late, but linguistic studies show that face to face communication is extremely important for language change to occur, so while it's much easier to hear and meet other people, dialect boundaries are still definitely a thing
Niku Maybe it’s because that most of the vowels in English aren’t vowels, they are diphthongs and not pure vowels. My mother tongue is Swedish and just like German, all of the vowels aren’t diphthongs.
Something I find weird is I kind of say them the same, but in the same way its different. Whenever I say caught, I raise the ah sound so it sounds closer to the vowel sound "a:" Whenever I say cot, I lower the ah sound so it sounds closer to the vowel sound "a" I have asked people but their answers are mixed. So in a way its almost like Chinese as in it is the same vowel but the tone of how I say it changes the meaning of the word. *I AM NOT FROM THE U.S.A*
***** I have an "optional" Scottish accent I can "turn on", sort of, as I am of Scottish heritage, and while they were more similar than in my first example, they sounded different.
yeah... that feels accurate to how I'm trying to differentiate them. But I end up pronouncing them both as some sort of slur of the two, close to /kɔt/ (as in without any strong vowel lengthening)
I am an Italian, and so apparently the English taught to us at university is the British one because I was instructed to consider the two pronunciations in a distinctive way /ɔ/ vs /ɒ/.
yeah we don’t do this in most of the United Kingdom. In fact we have a distinction between /ɑ/, /ɒ/ and /ɔ/ whereas in America this is all one sound: /ɑ/
@@fatherfountain1906not in all of America. The older generation and many regional varieties still distinguish between ɔ and ɑ. The distinction is still present in most of the east coast, for example in new York and the south
The fact that "bomb" is on this list totally blows my mind. Some of those words I can group together and see how people would say them the same -- but bomb is a total outlier. Cot is like "cawht" and rock is like "rahk," and I can sort all the other words into one of those categories. I could also totally see myself sometimes saying "rock" like "cot." But bomb is like "baamm." It's a completely different sound. It hurts my head to think about saying "bomb" like "cot." It doesn't seem like you can fit that vowel between those consonants lmao... At least not in English. I feel like I'm speaking a foreign language when I try lol, not like I'm immigrating another American accent. Weeeeird.
This video would've reaaaaaally benefited from hearing the different pronunciations of the words. Explain how the people who say they differently sound, or I have absolutely no way to compare and contrast. It'd also be interesting to hear the recordings you did.
kiwilemonandlime I think he was more so was wanting to have the servery be done with recordings, and for Xidnaf share them with us. I personally would have described it differently. Caught to me would be like Cawt, either think of it as a caw with a t at the end, or c and t sounds sandwiching awe. While cot is more so like caht, either think of it as a cah ending in a t or c and t sounds sandwiching ah . That being said, if ah and aw sound the same and are fully interchangeable in speech, you have the merger.
***** Hot is a difficult word because it differs between UK and US English. (even in the dictionaries) For the UK it is "aw", and for the US "ah". And if you look at forvo, most of the people there followed their English's correct pronunciation of the word. (They tell you where the voice clip is from) I am from the US, so I personally prefer "ah", but sometimes it just seems better to say hot with an "aw". (especially when goofing with friends or using the non-temperature related definitions of hot)
AgentDRJ - it's not 'aw' - outside the US the 'o' in 'hot' is a short 'o' sound that has disappeared from most US accents/dialects - you just don't have that sound any more, so no combination of letters will indicate that sound from within your accent.
+Machiel S Heh, yeah, there were a bunch of Dutch miners who worked uphill from it and came down to get supplies, so they started calling it the "lowlands" and everyone else started picking it up.
As I said to someone else, think of the vowel in, "cot" as "Ahhh, (I see!)" and the vowel in "caught" as "Aww, (that's cute!)" That might help slightly. :P
unfortunately that will only help you if you are unmerged. but if you are merged and want to hear the differernce there is literally no written way to help tell them apart because by definition all of the examples you can give will be merged to the asker.
+SuperIby As an (Eastern) Aussie, I tend to say Caught/Court, like Bought, Fought, Naught, Sort/Short, Rort/Wrought, Tort/Taught, Thought, War/Wart... Though if I'm speaking with an accent everything's up for grabs as to how I'll say it (eg: Back/Bach, Mack/Mach). XD
Most of British English and also Australian English: Court: /kɔ:t/ Caught: /kɔ:t/ Cot: /kɒt/ (Lot: /lɒt/ = cloth /klɒθ/) Father /fɑ:ðə/ Cart: /kɑ:t/ Path: /pɑ:θ/ Pat: /pæt/ U.S. without the Caught/Cot merger: Court: /kɔɹt/ Caught: /kɔ:t/ or /kɒ:t/ Cot: /kɑ:t/ (Lot: /lɑ:t/ ≠ cloth /klɔ:θ/ or /klɒ:θ/) Father: /fɑ:ðɚ/ Cart: /kɑɹt/ Path: /pæθ/ Pat: /pæt/ More or less...
Basically, in British and Australian English (let's consider "="to mean "has the same vowel sound") "court"="caught", "cot"="lot"="cloth", "father"="cart"="path"≠"pat". While in American English (without the merger) "court"≠"caught"="cloth", "cloth"≠"lot"="cot"="father", "father"≠"farther", "father"≠"path"="pat".
i believe the british that don't have the merger use a different vowel sound than the americans that don't have the merger so the unmerged words will always sound different between the two countries.
I gotta love my New York accent. Words are always easy to distinguish with a handful of extra vowel sounds that a majority of the country simply doesn't use. Hence caught and cot sound different. Also the three words Mary, marry, and merry all sound different.
kmoney4u4 If everyone outside of the northeast wasn't such a prick about it, the Boston accent does have the advantage of having less R's to worry about (similar to UK English), so you're not straining your voice as much. Yet, it also doesn't have all the hard T's and other consonants to trip up on (a hazard of UK English), so it's the best of both worlds, sort of like the Transatlantic accent.
kmoney4u4 I sadly don't know anyone from Colorado, but I wouldn't doubt they're nice people. Why _wouldn't_ they be peachy when they have all that marijuana to smoke? X)
Wow! Do you really pronounce Mary, marry, and merry different?? That's cool, how do they sound then? They've always been the same for me all sort of like Mary
Aidan Calvin It's tricky to describe in writing how I pronounce each of them, but I assure you all native New Yorkers make it very easy to tell which word is which among one another. Merry uses the E sound found in words like "bed" and "Pepsi". That's the simple one. Mary uses the "a-uh" vowel sound. To make the vowel sound, read out the letter "A" as you would say the name of the letter in the alphabet. Then say "uh" as if you were called on by your teacher and don't know the answer. Now mix those two sounds into one fluid syllable "a-uh". And so that's how the "A" in "Mary" sounds. Marry is a tricky one to describe. I would say it's like the "A" sound in "apple" but you may pronounce that word differently as well. I would call it a "sharp A" sound. More like the "Ahhh!" you'd scream out when falling down a bottomless pit, unlike the "Ahh" you'd say when getting a relaxing massage.
I'm thinking the reason there's so much variation is the change infiltrates people's vocabulary word by word instead of all at once. I just discovered this channel and I am so impressed that a young person even knows what linguistics is, let alone has enough expertise to make videos about it. You are awesome!
As a French Canadian who speaks English as a second language, I find it fascinating that I pronounce them differently. I would have expected my slight Québec accent to make me merge them 🤔 But now that I think about it, I probably just got used to hearing (and saying) these two vowels differently due to watching Doctor Who too much 😂🇬🇧
Something similar happened to me in my language (Mexican Spanish). I pronounce the letters b and v the exact same way, while my parents don't. However, when speaking with Spanish speakers it always goes unnoticed. But when speaking in other languages (English or German) my friends notice immediately that I say the v and b the same way (for example, for Big and Very) even though I hear no difference.
Interesting. When I learned Spanish I was thought that b and v are always pronounced the same, didn't know that some speakers pronounce them differently
You probably already figured this out, but one of the reasons why some people are identifying seemingly "random" vowels in your survey as different may be because some of the words you chose have nasals directly preceding the vowel. This could cause nasal assimilation and make the vowel nasalized. In any case, it is incredible that you conducted research on you own volition. I hope you continue in linguistics, it is a fascinating field.
THANK YOU! I thought I was going nuts a few years back when I noticed that people were saying them the same, and wondered if we were going through another great vowel shift, but no one else seemed to be aware. Edit: I had a professor who pronounced Mary, merry, and marry differently for the class, but no one else seemed to be able to hear the difference.
I keep hearing that the south doesn't have this merger. However, I've grown up in the South and have the merger, and so do people I talk to as far as I've observed. It's weird.
+Abird Plays Same, are you from southern New England by any chance? I'm from Rhode Island and pronounce Caught as Cawt and Cot as Caht. I was surprised when Xidnaf said New England had the merger, as most of the population of southern New England (RI, Mass. and CT) pronounce the augh, sound as aw with emphasis on the w.
To me cot is pronounced like hot. Caught I pronounce like bought. My last name Carter I pronounce like Cahder and when emphasizing it I pronounce it Carder. In Rhode Island we pronounce our oo like aw. So coffee becomes cawfee. Thus for me cot and caught are pronounced wildly different.
"To me cot is pronounced like hot. Caught I pronounce like bought." See, for those with full caught / cot merger, what you said it nonsense. It's like "I pronounce it like box, not like fox". The vowel sound used on caught in those who don't merge them doesn't even exist for those with the merger.
I remember having worksheets on homophones in the 2nd grade and being confused because caught and cot were pronounced differently yet were considered the same sound. The same thing with ant and aunt.
Ant and Aunt sound very distinctly, but that makes no sense for it to get sound merged at all as they're tonally and pitch wise different as they can be.
@@MaoRatto Depends on your region. Here in eastern New England, they're pronounced differently, but most Americans pronounce "aunt" same as "ant." I don't think it's a pronunciation merger; they just say it differently. UK is another story.
This is an old video but there's a similar change in many of the regions where the merger hasn't taken place. Instead, up north around the Great Lakes, we're merging Mary-marry-merry into one vowel, but still pronouncing cot and caught differently. This is just one part of the fascinating Northern Cities Vowels Shift forming the Inland North American English accent. And just like this merger, it's extremely hard to tell INAE from GAE unless you're explicitly paying attention to it. Perhaps a topic for another video!
You labelled Southwestern England as having the cot-caught merger, and now my jimmies will never be the same again. Only Scotland and Northern Ireland have the merger in the UK. I'm English, and virtually everyone who grew up in England (or Wales) will not have the merger. At least in Yorkshire, most people pronounce "cot" as [ɒ] and "caught" as [ɒː-ɔː].
I would be sceptical of any attempt to survey linguistic trends like this in Northern ireland, their dialect has a lot going on already - mashed between british english, Gaelic, scots dialects and Hiberno -english, and bits that are often closer to old english than modern. The result is practically another language, and very frequently is not at all understood even by other Irish people, and especially not by mainland GB residents.
Your channel is a real gem! I love your videos. You deserve so much more attention, I'll try to tell people about you! Your content is really interesting and good quality. I'm learning Japanese and I stumbled across your videos by accident-I'm so glad that I did :)
Oddly, at the beginning of this video I thought I pronounce cot, and caught the same. However, by the end of it I realised that I sometimes pronounce them different, but only sometimes. Coincidentally I actually live very close to the border of where people do merge them, and don't merge them. So I think I somehow adapted both ways of doing it interchangeably XD
This is mind blowing. I just realized I'm one of those people that "think they pronounce the words the same way but actually pronounce them differently". I always thought I pronounced them the same way, but actually I say "cawt" for caught and "caht" for cot. Video was really educational.
@@Jtzkb I hear it cones highly recommended. They that once you go with black caulk, you never go back...or sit down again! Not sure what the second part has to do with anything.
English is my third language, but I dare say I speak it as well as many natives and just a couple of months ago I was arguing with an American friend of mine about this topic. I was probably more influenced by British English since I learned a lot of the language from British Rock bands from 60s and 70s and English comedy, so I've always pronounced these two differently (even though my native language is very uniform in vowels and seems to prefer consonants), whereas my friend did not see the difference between them and insisted they are supposed to be pronounced the same way.
+Bloodbath and Beyond The real question is... did you pronounce "not" like "cot" or like "caught"? To my knowledge, there's a pretty 50/50 divide (That is, of those who actually pronounce caught/cot differently), or close to it across most English-speaking countries.
Your survey is actually thorough and detailed to a level of quality and clarity rarely seen in surveys. This may actually be the clearest survey I've ever heard the results of.
This is so interesting! I'm from one of the places where this merging began and I've never heard anyone pronounce those vowels differently from one another. I'm gonna ask my family and friends to see how they pronounce them. By the way thank you for your dedication for the topics in your videos! As a teenager who is extremely interested in linguistics but at the same time has no clue what they're gonna do with their life, you really inspire me to continue in pursuing linguistics. I also read that you took a break because of some difficulties you're facing, so I hope that any obstacles you're facing, you'll be able to get past them :)
I've a question... what if some of the people you interviewed would usually pronounce them the same, but said it differently because they were consciously distinguishing them?
+Earl of Narwhals This is why you research whether people will conciously adapt their behaviour to a survey that tries to differentiate two types of behaviour. And also conduct research on whether people do such a thing with linguistic surveys. And finally you have to know the art of conducting surveys that result in the least biased answers possible
Corné Vroomen Which, in the case of language surveys, is basically "ask them to say normal sentences, without revealing what exactly you are looking for." It can also include steering them towards saying certain things, though you have to be careful not to influence how they talk. Then you can go ahead and ask for the specific words, then add more sentences or conversations to see if they are differently now.
3:04 Haha this is EXACTLY my experience but with the FOOL-FALL merger. My dad picked up on the fact I said "fall" like "fool" and I was really surprised and asked my mum and my sister who all said they said them differently, even though I learnt all my English from them and I thought I spoke the same. Then I asked my friends and got mixed results too. (I'm English)
Where are you from? I have occasionally heard similar pronunciations (e.g. I misheard someone's "cool" as "call") but not often. Perhaps it's similar to the merger of poor with paw, which is now very widespread in England.
I'm so glad there's a video about this! Thanks! Your map had all of New England shaded in as exhibiting the merger, but I can attest that it is almost entirely absent from Connecticut and Rhode Island speech. I grew up in that area but now live in Newfoundland, and I always struggle to explain to people how things are pronounced without the merger. They just can't hear the difference. As well, it's also important to note that while many regions exhibit the merger, they don't always merge to the same vowel, which I find really interesting!
I went to the caught-cot wiki, and started reading some of the examples, and I am absolutely hooked on this concept. I think I have the merger, but not quite completely! I noticed in the list of words with the similar augh/o/au sounds, that while I definitely know my dad from Minnesota does NOT have any part of the merger just by knowledge of how he speaks, I NEARLY have it, but not quite. at first I thought, "yeah, I have it", but as I read, I thought "wait I just did that word differently", and as I continued, I noticed my jaw open more and my tongue went back for some words but not for others, which I gave a more pure and relaxed sound. generally the words spelled with more letters got more strained sound (wad vs waddle, for example, nearly identical BUT NOT QUITE) I'm definitely going to try this our on my mom. I'm not sure about the way she does it.
+Jtzkb In your case, because you're a rhotic speaker, you would say "caught" with an "aww" sound. Then "court" is identical. c- as in cat aww- as in "aww, look at dem puppies!" t- as in ten cawwt = caught = court. That's how we do it. It was quite enlightening to hear caught merging with cot... those two words are so different sounding in Australia I would never have imagined it. Describing how you would pronounce my 'cot' is a real challenge. This might work... c- as in cat o- as in octopus (the first "o". Stop before the "c") t- as in ten
R.F. Um, I don't know how that's possible. Like, when I say the word I'm not aware of which one I'm saying. It's like the word "rose" as in the flower and the word "rose" as in "rise," they mean different things but I couldn't even tell you which way I was pronouncing it because they have the same pronunciation.
Xidnaf Well, you did say yourself in the video that many of the people you polled think they say it one way but actually say it another way. Sounds like you're in that population, too. Listening again, the difference is very subtle and inconsistent. But when it is present, I hear "caught" as being oh so very slightly more rounded than "cot". That's the thing about vowels. They're nowhere as discrete as consonants. And speech is like penmanship. It rarely comes out precisely the same way twice unless you're being very deliberate. :) (Although I should probably listen a few more times to make sure I'm not falling for expectation bias. Listening only, without watching, might help.)
R.F. Could be that your brain is auto-correcting what you're hearing based on what you're reading. From an Australian point of view the vowels are basically the same vowel in his speech as far as I can tell, but reading the words while hearing them makes me feel they're being differentiated somehow. (We're sound-changing in different ways, so no caught/cot merger for us :P )
Yeah, that's what I meant in my most recent comment when I said "Although I should probably listen a few more times to make sure I'm not falling for expectation bias. Listening only, without watching, might help." (Stupid Google UA-cam. I don't even know how I ended up with multiple accounts.)
I think it would have been very helpful if you had at least once pronounced it the way where both words sound different. I know from the comments that British people tend to say something sounding like "court" but I have no idea how your parents or some of the people in the survey say it. I just heard "cot" a hundred times and your assertion that some people say it differently. If you literally can't make the words sound differently perhaps you could have recorded someone who does. Without it, there is no contrast in this video.
I'm from europe and i picked up my english sepaking ability's from UA-cam, which kinda made my pronunciations weird, for me words like "bomb" "cought" and etc. are pronounced with the "o" sound but i say "cot" and other words with the "a" sound, super interesting.
I'm a teenager in Maryland and I've always pronounced them the same but remember my elementary school teachers insisting they were pronounced differently and being confused.
Yours is a highly US-centric perspective here. Virtually no-one in the UK would pronounce cot and caught the same or even that similarly. We do however pronounce "court" and "caught" the same because of non-rhoticness. :-)
It's possible to be non rhotic and pronounce court and caught differently. My parents do - they don't have the horse-hoarse merger, and court is a bit like caw-uht. I have that merger partially and inconsistently, and younger people from my home town are less likely to have a distinction than older people. A bit like the cot caught merger in the US.
The problem with the way this video is described is that it makes it sound like merging these sounds is somehow inevitable. It's not. Also, there is real utility in being able to tell talk apart from tock. I think we should encourage keeping these two separate
Benjamin McLean I agree that merging them isn't inevitable, but I think it would be better if we merged them. There are almost no homophones it creates, the one I use is "caught vs cot," but since one's a verb and the other's a noun I can't see how this would ever create confusion. Also, is tock even a real word? I think the biggest thing this does is it makes English easier to learn for non-native speakers.
Tock is a real word. It refers to the sound made by a mechanical clock during every second second. Every alternate tick is a tock. (this may have more practical use when applied to discussing a metronome) Also, Tock is the name of a talking dog in The Phantom Tollboth by Norton Juster. :p
Xidnaf No it does not make English easier to learn for non-native speakers. Not at all. I'm a non-native speaker and I can say that pronouncing more words differently from how they're spelled makes things harder not easier. Most people learn a language through its writing and media like movies and music. English is very hard to learn properly because its writing system has so little to do with how it sounds. Making more words sound the same makes things worse not better. If I hear "cot" and I don't know what it means, I now have less of a chance of finding the correct word in a dictionary. The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité is terrifying to someone trying to learn English. Imagine hearing that poem and needing to write down the words without knowing any of those words.
Interesting video. I can't remember ever hearing anyone pronounce "caught" like "cot." Here in East Texas/Western N. Louisiana, the au is still "awww" (like the sound you make when you see a cute puppy.) In the past decade, however, I've noticed two changes in word-usage in American English (I'm 46): "gift" used as a verb, and "go with" without an object. I NEVER heard "gift" as a verb until the past decade or so. We "gave" people things; we didn't "gift" them something. Another expression that still seems strange to me is "go with." To me, the phrase needs an object: "go with us," or "go with me." I have to wonder if these were part of the speech patterns in other parts of the US and have simply migrated to other areas. (To not be a hypocrite, we in the South definitely have our own little idioms and expressions, too.) Anyway, keep making videos.
As a non-American it's odd. I pronounced "caught" with 'aw' sound that is more or less like the sound found in "court" while I say "cot" like one woukd say "dot. " I wouldn't ever expect them differently and only understood it when I started to slur my speech into an American accent and I understoof how the merger happened. This is as a natively English speaking South African.
Same. When I read 'cot' I pronounce it 'caught' because I actually say 'caught' and use it. If you ask me, 'something you sleep in' is called a bed. For the other words, I think I pronounce them the same, but I know better than to judge my own voice.
Being a non-native English speaker I have noticed that this merge occurs more on people that are more fluent than the others. When you're learning a new language you usually try your best to pronounce it's words in the most accurate way possible, but when you start judging yourself more fluent you tend to be more successive to this changes. Also, I haven't test this theory in any ways, I'm just saying what I saw by myself in personal experience. As for myself I've noticed that I usually pronounce the words from the first block differently but I pronounce cot and caught the exact same way. Thank you for your videos they're all very interesting. You've just got a new Brazilian subscriber, congrats (?)
Our "cort" is completely inaccurate for americans though. When we say cort, that would be with a elongated vowel and no actual r sound. Americans probably read this thinking "what the fuck, why would you pronounce those with an r?". That's why writing down pronunciations doesn't help much. Australians don't pronounce r's the same way, so trying to spell out how we say it just makes things even more confusing.
welcome to brazil, where there is basically 5 names for the same thing for some reason and its close as changing the city you're in it already change the way you sound while speaking a certain word
Do you want to know something weird? My family is from Maryland; my mom, sister, and I say that "cot" and "caught" have the same vowel sounds, but my dad says they are completely different sounds.
I'm from the Appalachians and I definitely say them differently. "Caught" is pronounced sort of like it has an invisible "w," but it's very very slight, sort of like how English people say "or," but less extreme. "Cot" is pronounced with the same vowel as in "rot."
Another big shift that I have noticed recently is what I am going to call the “to-and merger”. I rarely hear people say something like “I am going to try to study”. People today tend to say “I am going to try and study”. Nearly everybody I know and nearly all UA-cam and television people that I listen to do this.
I don't think that's a merger so much as the sounds are only /tu/ and /ænd/ when said in isolation. In an actual sentence, they both, along with many other common "function" words, get reduced to a weak form, usually using /ə/ (schwa): /tə/ and /ənd/, if the schwa even gets pronounced at all. The words only serve the structure of the sentence, and so don't have as much focus resulting in getting reduced to the bare minimum to produce a syllable if even that. Pretty much the only people who _don't_ do this are those trying to pronounce every word clearly as written, which can actually backfire and turn it into a homophone.
I feel like I pronounce Cot and Caught in the same or a Similar way, except that I pronounce 'Caught' a longer (and possibly in a more Rounded way) than 'Cot'. I connect 'Cot' with the same sound as Pot, whilst 'Caught' as the 'aw' sound, or the same sound as in 'Bought'. Note: I am born to Bulgarian parents, but I am Born in Britain (Mid-South/South-Eastern England, to be Exact). Ie: I still have a Bulgarian accent, but it is majorly Britishcised
I pronounce them differently, but I'm not a native speaker. I'm German, and I learned British RP at school, so I more or less sound like a BBC newsreader with a bit of a German accent.
vowels: I’ll use “a” for “ah”, “ω” for the similar, more throated “ah”, and “Ω” for “ahw” talk - tak rock - rak small - smωl doll - dωl fall - fΩl tall - tωl clock - clak bomb - bam caught - cat cot - cat
I'm from Wisconsin, and I pronounce caught and cot the nearly identical to each other. I initially thought I pronounced them the same, but since I've learned to differentiate between the sounds between similar vowels, I noticed there was a very miniscule difference. But I pronounce all of those word samples with the same vowel.
(5:30) And that is why those who can't distinguish retroflex consonants have trouble hearing them, or those who think the voiceless velar fricative is a voiceless glottal fricative.
Hmm, interesting! I pronounce the au and o almost the same, but the au a little longer. Wonder if it has anything to do with Dutch being my first language.
I'm out from the plains of Colorado and never noticed this. I'm a theatre geek, and tried out a few dialects. Normally, British, and valspeak they're the same vowel sounds, but New York and southern are different. Looking over this, I realised I'd self-taught my British and valley dialects, but learnt my NY and southern ones from an east-coast theatre teacher. A very interesting concept.
I don't know shit's worth of Dutch, but from what my American brain can tell, jf I juust aad a buunch oof doobje voowels and raandom "j"s, then I should be fine.
Anato Hey, I was just on Duolingo! What are the odds? (Well actually, not that low considering that this is a channel about linguistics and I was commenting about linguistics, so yeah.)
+monotonehell as i Brazillian I don't know the difference between these two pronounciations hahah and with this video i discovered i'm a caught/cot merger, guess i'm a then/than merger too
Mate, i and most of my friends speak differently when we’re around strangers, family, friends and when we move out to other places our accents are bound to change therefore making our parents’ accent different to our own. E.g. my grandad has a mild welsh accent and my dad sounds fully like he’s from central London. So I fully understand how language pronunciation can change this quickly
I'm from eastern Pennsylvania and didn't think there was a difference in how the sounds are said until I did it enough to realize that the "a/au" is said with a narrower mouth and the jaw jutting forward, whereas the "o" sound is more like wide open "aww" with the jaw dropping down rather than forward
Just speak Australian English there is pretty much no sound merges happening. Seeing as Caught is pronounced couht like coffee in a New York accent. and cot is just a oh sound.
according to wikipedia weak vowel merger is one en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_high_front_vowels#Weak_vowel_merger another is the salary celery merger en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_l#Salary.E2.80.93celery_merger here is the page i got it from. if its wrong let me know =) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_English_phonology
Chikiko Saotome Oh maybe it's because I live in Sydney. Although I did live near Victoria before when I was younger. I noticed some people near Victoria say Nearly like "Nelly" but I don't think that is a merger. It's more of a pronunciation difference. I'm not sure for others. Only just a friend from Victoria says that. Maybe it is a preference
Xidnaf It's absolutely gorgeous up here right now. Hopefully that holds until you get back. More related to the video, I tested the cot-caught merger on native friends and on some friends from the midwest and I am absolutely stunned that I never noticed it before.
@Somiron Kundu You can tell. Caught, cot and court are all said differently here and some of the words you chose to compare don't have the same vowel sounds at all in my accent
+Jovial Hamster Almost every British accent makes the person sound high class and erudite until you hear them add r's to vowel sounds. Then they sound like a hick.
+Brandon Kellner Come to Scotland, that'll make you retract your statement. Also there was a study done that said that in Britain there is a distinct accent chance, on average, every 50 miles, so maybe not all British accents sound high class. However some accents, like queens English, do.
Scottish accents are a little harsh. I don't hear them too often though. I guess I was referring more to English accents except for the one they speak in Guy Ritchie movies sometimes. No idea what it's called. It sounds like the British equivalent of a Jersey accent to me.
*the other people in the room glance over towards me and see me on my phone saying “caught cot” over and over, increasingly concerned as I’m not sure if I’m saying them differently*
Children gain their accent from peers, not parents and accents are primarily about vowel pronunciation. Vowel shifts tend to happen relatively slowly, but we see the effects of some of these shifts happening today where we have multiple acceptable pronunciations of the same word (e.g. route can be pronounced to rhyme with boot or bout; the double o in root can sound like foot or boot.) and some speakers may even pronounce it differently depending on whom they are conversing with.
If you're curious how they sound unmerged, check this video out:
ua-cam.com/video/RB3NHCJDq7M/v-deo.html
Xidnaf boi you live in a town called Nederland?!? Is there a legit town called Nederland in the USA? Lol, well... greetings from the OG Nederland
it seems kinda like the difference between korean 어 and 아, but possibly a bit more subtle idk
Xidnaf I checked the video and oddly enough, I don’t have it despite me being 14 (15 in 19 days). I’m not from America, But I’m from southern Ontario Canada, like the majority of Canadians so I thought I’d have merger. However my dad is from Newfoundland where the majority of the original immigrants there where from Ireland. As a result of this the people from there (including my dad) basically have what could more or less be considered an Irish accent. Then my mom is a third generation Irish/Scottish immigrant whose parents had some English friends. I also grew up watching a lot of British television programmes so that may have affected it. I’ll test my friends on monday
Looking at second generation immigrants might be a good study too, because our parents don't speak American English at all, so our parents play little role in whether or not we acquire the merger.
Myself, I mostly don't have it, but there are a few words which I believe sound close.
Of course, I grew up in north texas, so my region doesn't have it in general.
Depends if I tried to pronounce them they're different but if it's situational they're the same
I'm a from North TX
as someone with an English accent, I pronounce 'Caught' similarly to 'court'
@Somiron Kundu what's with the K/S's instead of C's in American, pronounce, and course in your comment?
Australian here, do the same as well.
@@salsagal Yup
what about the r
@@ArturoStojanoff In my (and most likely the original commenter's) dialect, people don't pronounce the "r" in words like "word", "fork", "swirl", and "court".
Oh god all of the teachers are CGP grey
Kyle Silver I love cgp grey
Kyle Silver oh no
XD
God
@@synovialpith how can you say "oh no" about that. . . #CGPGreyisthekingofeducationalchannels
As a handyman, my favorite part of the "cot/caught merger" is all the "caulk jokes" I can now tell!
When I tried saying "I caught a cot," it brought out two similar-sounding but still distinct vowels. I've been lying to myself the whole time, I don't have the merger.
Same
I wonder if recorded and broadcast media is having any sort of stabilizing effect on language.
It's a bit early to tell, but my guess is yes. And I'm very interested to see how that will affect things long-term.
I would not be so sure. Remember, one of the biggest changes to English (the Great Wowel Shift) happened during another major media revolution, the printing press. I can also see changes in my own native language, Slovak, for example, in old (until the 1980s) movies, characters often pronounced every "le" syllable as "ľe" = with a soft/palatal l. Nowadays, practically nobody speaks like that, maybe some people in Central Slovakia do. Ľ in general is pronounced as L in my region of Slovakia (southwest) these days, and nationwide, the ä (/æ/) phoneme has almost completely disappeared from speech, yet we were still taught it at school, but I cannot really pronounce it properly anymore as everyone pronounces it as regular e (/ɛ/). It is however true that many of these changes were likely catalyzed by mass contact with the Czech language, many TV series are shown in Czech on our channels for example, many Slovak students go to Czechia to study, some Czech students study in Slovakia, etc... and these "dying" phonemes are those that are not present in Czech. However, even Ľudovít Štúr, the main codificator of our language in the 19th century already noted some of these changes, such as the ľ-l merger, and that was long before mass Czech media influence, so these are likely native linguistic trends that have been going on for some time, just made stronger and more rapid by contact with a very, very close language that lacks those phonemes.
my guess is no because even today people still on average listen to those around them speaking way more than they hear people talking on the internet/tv/radio. i think a greater stabilizing effect is the way people move around so much more freely today than in previous generations.
Don't forget, the "progressives" who took phonics out of the education system, along with de-emphasizing American history and civics in favor of social justice/social studies/world history classes.
3 years late, but linguistic studies show that face to face communication is extremely important for language change to occur, so while it's much easier to hear and meet other people, dialect boundaries are still definitely a thing
If a man in a forest says "caught" and then "cot" but there was no one to hear it, did the words sound the same?
+HunterShows Was he deaf? He was around to hear it.
Brandon Kellner He's not objective.
He's in a superposition between not having the merger and having it.
The real question, What does the fox say?
***** Probably because it's a rhetorical joke and not something you're supposed to analyse for possible solutions and then criticise me over.
I'm from Germany, so ... yeah, there is the chance that I mix the vowels. But probably I mispronounce all vowels that do not exist in German XD
Niku
Maybe it’s because that most of the vowels in English aren’t vowels, they are diphthongs and not pure vowels.
My mother tongue is Swedish and just like German, all of the vowels aren’t diphthongs.
xD I'm from Spain but i live in Germany and some consonants like "W" i pronounce them like a B xDDDDDDD
Something I find weird is I kind of say them the same, but in the same way its different.
Whenever I say caught, I raise the ah sound so it sounds closer to the vowel sound "a:"
Whenever I say cot, I lower the ah sound so it sounds closer to the vowel sound "a"
I have asked people but their answers are mixed. So in a way its almost like Chinese as in it is the same vowel but the tone of how I say it changes the meaning of the word.
*I AM NOT FROM THE U.S.A*
I’m American, but speak Spanish as a second language, and I am 100% sure I mispronounce every vowel.
Dat Fish Boy, the only vowel in Spanish which isn't in English is [a] (near-front open unrounded vowel, if I'm not mistaken).
My pronounciation in British phonetics:
Caught: /kɔ:t/
Cot: /kɒt/
***** I have an "optional" Scottish accent I can "turn on", sort of, as I am of Scottish heritage, and while they were more similar than in my first example, they sounded different.
I'd way me too.
I’m American and pronounce it the same way
My pronunciation is the exact sound of these IPA vowel letters.
yeah... that feels accurate to how I'm trying to differentiate them. But I end up pronouncing them both as some sort of slur of the two, close to /kɔt/ (as in without any strong vowel lengthening)
I am an Italian, and so apparently the English taught to us at university is the British one because I was instructed to consider the two pronunciations in a distinctive way /ɔ/ vs /ɒ/.
yeah we don’t do this in most of the United Kingdom. In fact we have a distinction between /ɑ/, /ɒ/ and /ɔ/ whereas in America this is all one sound: /ɑ/
@@fatherfountain1906not in all of America. The older generation and many regional varieties still distinguish between ɔ and ɑ. The distinction is still present in most of the east coast, for example in new York and the south
The fact that "bomb" is on this list totally blows my mind. Some of those words I can group together and see how people would say them the same -- but bomb is a total outlier. Cot is like "cawht" and rock is like "rahk," and I can sort all the other words into one of those categories. I could also totally see myself sometimes saying "rock" like "cot." But bomb is like "baamm." It's a completely different sound. It hurts my head to think about saying "bomb" like "cot." It doesn't seem like you can fit that vowel between those consonants lmao... At least not in English. I feel like I'm speaking a foreign language when I try lol, not like I'm immigrating another American accent. Weeeeird.
and to you "cawth" and "baamm" don't have the same sound? language is weird man....
Pun intended I hope 😅😅
“Bomb blew your mind huh”
It's probably because the vowel there is nasalized
Bomb is like bawm. Same vowel as cawt.
This video would've reaaaaaally benefited from hearing the different pronunciations of the words. Explain how the people who say they differently sound, or I have absolutely no way to compare and contrast.
It'd also be interesting to hear the recordings you did.
GigaBoost unmerged you would pronounce caught exactly like court, instead of an o like in cot you'd pronounce it like the o in cork.
kiwilemonandlime
I think he was more so was wanting to have the servery be done with recordings, and for Xidnaf share them with us.
I personally would have described it differently.
Caught to me would be like Cawt, either think of it as a caw with a t at the end, or c and t sounds sandwiching awe.
While cot is more so like caht, either think of it as a cah ending in a t or c and t sounds sandwiching ah .
That being said, if ah and aw sound the same and are fully interchangeable in speech, you have the merger.
*****
Hot is a difficult word because it differs between UK and US English. (even in the dictionaries)
For the UK it is "aw", and for the US "ah". And if you look at forvo, most of the people there followed their English's correct pronunciation of the word. (They tell you where the voice clip is from)
I am from the US, so I personally prefer "ah", but sometimes it just seems better to say hot with an "aw". (especially when goofing with friends or using the non-temperature related definitions of hot)
AgentDRJ - it's not 'aw' - outside the US the 'o' in 'hot' is a short 'o' sound that has disappeared from most US accents/dialects - you just don't have that sound any more, so no combination of letters will indicate that sound from within your accent.
There’s a link in the description
Your town is called nederland? thats really cool.
+Machiel S Heh, yeah, there were a bunch of Dutch miners who worked uphill from it and came down to get supplies, so they started calling it the "lowlands" and everyone else started picking it up.
+Xidnaf Why did you stop making videos?
wyl Kan Just taking a little break to deal with some stuff. I anticipate it ending very soon.
Xidnaf What a coincidence, you replied just as I was watching your AAVE video. I love your work.
+Xidnaf it was on the Dutch tv your town :D I laughed Wenn I saw it :D
BUT WHAT DO THEY SOUND LIKE UNMERGED?
As I said to someone else, think of the vowel in, "cot" as "Ahhh, (I see!)" and the vowel in "caught" as "Aww, (that's cute!)"
That might help slightly. :P
unfortunately that will only help you if you are unmerged. but if you are merged and want to hear the differernce there is literally no written way to help tell them apart because by definition all of the examples you can give will be merged to the asker.
Ah, well I tried. :/
well i imagine you did help a good number of people just not those with the merger =)
+Natsu714 So ought and cat?
I still pronounce it as Caught - Court, but I'm British so it's not that interesting ;)
+SuperIby As an (Eastern) Aussie, I tend to say Caught/Court, like Bought, Fought, Naught, Sort/Short, Rort/Wrought, Tort/Taught, Thought, War/Wart...
Though if I'm speaking with an accent everything's up for grabs as to how I'll say it (eg: Back/Bach, Mack/Mach). XD
+ElNeroDiablo same
Most of British English and also Australian English:
Court: /kɔ:t/
Caught: /kɔ:t/
Cot: /kɒt/ (Lot: /lɒt/ = cloth /klɒθ/)
Father /fɑ:ðə/
Cart: /kɑ:t/
Path: /pɑ:θ/
Pat: /pæt/
U.S. without the Caught/Cot merger:
Court: /kɔɹt/
Caught: /kɔ:t/ or /kɒ:t/
Cot: /kɑ:t/ (Lot: /lɑ:t/ ≠ cloth /klɔ:θ/ or /klɒ:θ/)
Father: /fɑ:ðɚ/
Cart: /kɑɹt/
Path: /pæθ/
Pat: /pæt/
More or less...
Basically, in British and Australian English (let's consider "="to mean "has the same vowel sound") "court"="caught", "cot"="lot"="cloth", "father"="cart"="path"≠"pat". While in American English (without the merger) "court"≠"caught"="cloth", "cloth"≠"lot"="cot"="father", "father"≠"farther", "father"≠"path"="pat".
i believe the british that don't have the merger use a different vowel sound than the americans that don't have the merger so the unmerged words will always sound different between the two countries.
I gotta love my New York accent. Words are always easy to distinguish with a handful of extra vowel sounds that a majority of the country simply doesn't use. Hence caught and cot sound different. Also the three words Mary, marry, and merry all sound different.
kmoney4u4 If everyone outside of the northeast wasn't such a prick about it, the Boston accent does have the advantage of having less R's to worry about (similar to UK English), so you're not straining your voice as much. Yet, it also doesn't have all the hard T's and other consonants to trip up on (a hazard of UK English), so it's the best of both worlds, sort of like the Transatlantic accent.
kmoney4u4 I sadly don't know anyone from Colorado, but I wouldn't doubt they're nice people. Why _wouldn't_ they be peachy when they have all that marijuana to smoke? X)
Wow! Do you really pronounce Mary, marry, and merry different?? That's cool, how do they sound then? They've always been the same for me all sort of like Mary
Aidan Calvin It's tricky to describe in writing how I pronounce each of them, but I assure you all native New Yorkers make it very easy to tell which word is which among one another.
Merry uses the E sound found in words like "bed" and "Pepsi". That's the simple one.
Mary uses the "a-uh" vowel sound. To make the vowel sound, read out the letter "A" as you would say the name of the letter in the alphabet. Then say "uh" as if you were called on by your teacher and don't know the answer. Now mix those two sounds into one fluid syllable "a-uh". And so that's how the "A" in "Mary" sounds.
Marry is a tricky one to describe. I would say it's like the "A" sound in "apple" but you may pronounce that word differently as well. I would call it a "sharp A" sound. More like the "Ahhh!" you'd scream out when falling down a bottomless pit, unlike the "Ahh" you'd say when getting a relaxing massage.
Interesting! Don't think I ever noticed that about the New York accent! myowncomputerstuff
I'm thinking the reason there's so much variation is the change infiltrates people's vocabulary word by word instead of all at once. I just discovered this channel and I am so impressed that a young person even knows what linguistics is, let alone has enough expertise to make videos about it. You are awesome!
Oommmgggg this was so annoying you didn't pronounce them how they pronounced them differently.
+NewLife Exactly what I missed the most.
As a non-native english speaker, I can't figure how in the world these two sounds could ever be different !!
yeah i speak english and I don't even get it!
+NewLife o in cot is like pot and augh in caught is like bought. when they are different
thats the same fucking noise!@!!
NewLife if you think so then youre already a part of the merger
As a French Canadian who speaks English as a second language, I find it fascinating that I pronounce them differently. I would have expected my slight Québec accent to make me merge them 🤔
But now that I think about it, I probably just got used to hearing (and saying) these two vowels differently due to watching Doctor Who too much 😂🇬🇧
Something similar happened to me in my language (Mexican Spanish). I pronounce the letters b and v the exact same way, while my parents don't. However, when speaking with Spanish speakers it always goes unnoticed. But when speaking in other languages (English or German) my friends notice immediately that I say the v and b the same way (for example, for Big and Very) even though I hear no difference.
The b/v merger took place in Spanish centuries before it left Europe for the first time.
Interesting. When I learned Spanish I was thought that b and v are always pronounced the same, didn't know that some speakers pronounce them differently
You probably already figured this out, but one of the reasons why some people are identifying seemingly "random" vowels in your survey as different may be because some of the words you chose have nasals directly preceding the vowel. This could cause nasal assimilation and make the vowel nasalized. In any case, it is incredible that you conducted research on you own volition. I hope you continue in linguistics, it is a fascinating field.
Interesting. Greetings from the real Nederland in Europe.
+Luca Pearson In dutch it is actually Nederlands (English loves to change nation names)
+Nosirrbro and pronounce things wrong, such as Bangkok, it's quite funny.
Je heeft een kleine lul :)
The English 'th' in Netherland preserves the pre-High Germanic Consonant Shift version of nether, meaning low.
+Nosirrbro So does every other language...
Test: how do you pronounce caught and cot.
Me: duck.
zanturo vahjul a higher he hog if og og og og og
THANK YOU! I thought I was going nuts a few years back when I noticed that people were saying them the same, and wondered if we were going through another great vowel shift, but no one else seemed to be aware.
Edit: I had a professor who pronounced Mary, merry, and marry differently for the class, but no one else seemed to be able to hear the difference.
I keep hearing that the south doesn't have this merger. However, I've grown up in the South and have the merger, and so do people I talk to as far as I've observed. It's weird.
same.
The merger is more common among the younger generation
Keep uploading these brilliant videos Xidnaf, thank you for making quality educational videos in a field that is so untapped on UA-cam.
To me Cot =/= Caught.
To me au = aw
So I pronounce Caught as "Cawt"
+Abird Plays Same, are you from southern New England by any chance? I'm from Rhode Island and pronounce Caught as Cawt and Cot as Caht. I was surprised when Xidnaf said New England had the merger, as most of the population of southern New England (RI, Mass. and CT) pronounce the augh, sound as aw with emphasis on the w.
+Evan Carter I keep seeing this 'caht' example for 'cot'. 'Caht' is different again surely? Like 'cart' basically, no..? o.O
To me cot is pronounced like hot. Caught I pronounce like bought. My last name Carter I pronounce like Cahder and when emphasizing it I pronounce it Carder. In Rhode Island we pronounce our oo like aw. So coffee becomes cawfee. Thus for me cot and caught are pronounced wildly different.
"To me cot is pronounced like hot. Caught I pronounce like bought."
See, for those with full caught / cot merger, what you said it nonsense. It's like "I pronounce it like box, not like fox". The vowel sound used on caught in those who don't merge them doesn't even exist for those with the merger.
@@FoxrosePettipaw I'm Aussie but same
/kɑt/
2 years ago and no comments and only 7 likes, wow
I remember having worksheets on homophones in the 2nd grade and being confused because caught and cot were pronounced differently yet were considered the same sound. The same thing with ant and aunt.
Ant and Aunt sound very distinctly, but that makes no sense for it to get sound merged at all as they're tonally and pitch wise different as they can be.
@@MaoRatto Depends on your region. Here in eastern New England, they're pronounced differently, but most Americans pronounce "aunt" same as "ant." I don't think it's a pronunciation merger; they just say it differently. UK is another story.
This is an old video but there's a similar change in many of the regions where the merger hasn't taken place. Instead, up north around the Great Lakes, we're merging Mary-marry-merry into one vowel, but still pronouncing cot and caught differently. This is just one part of the fascinating Northern Cities Vowels Shift forming the Inland North American English accent. And just like this merger, it's extremely hard to tell INAE from GAE unless you're explicitly paying attention to it. Perhaps a topic for another video!
You labelled Southwestern England as having the cot-caught merger, and now my jimmies will never be the same again. Only Scotland and Northern Ireland have the merger in the UK.
I'm English, and virtually everyone who grew up in England (or Wales) will not have the merger. At least in Yorkshire, most people pronounce "cot" as [ɒ] and "caught" as [ɒː-ɔː].
Good lad.
+The Jacman West Yorkshire here aswell I just didn't want to be left out
I would be sceptical of any attempt to survey linguistic trends like this in Northern ireland, their dialect has a lot going on already - mashed between british english, Gaelic, scots dialects and Hiberno -english, and bits that are often closer to old english than modern.
The result is practically another language, and very frequently is not at all understood even by other Irish people, and especially not by mainland GB residents.
Your channel is a real gem! I love your videos. You deserve so much more attention, I'll try to tell people about you! Your content is really interesting and good quality. I'm learning Japanese and I stumbled across your videos by accident-I'm so glad that I did :)
Oddly, at the beginning of this video I thought I pronounce cot, and caught the same. However, by the end of it I realised that I sometimes pronounce them different, but only sometimes. Coincidentally I actually live very close to the border of where people do merge them, and don't merge them. So I think I somehow adapted both ways of doing it interchangeably XD
This is mind blowing. I just realized I'm one of those people that "think they pronounce the words the same way but actually pronounce them differently". I always thought I pronounced them the same way, but actually I say "cawt" for caught and "caht" for cot. Video was really educational.
As a handyman, the best part of the "cot-caught merger" is all the "caulk" jokes I get to tell.
@@Jtzkb I hear it cones highly recommended. They that once you go with black caulk, you never go back...or sit down again!
Not sure what the second part has to do with anything.
English is my third language, but I dare say I speak it as well as many natives and just a couple of months ago I was arguing with an American friend of mine about this topic. I was probably more influenced by British English since I learned a lot of the language from British Rock bands from 60s and 70s and English comedy, so I've always pronounced these two differently (even though my native language is very uniform in vowels and seems to prefer consonants), whereas my friend did not see the difference between them and insisted they are supposed to be pronounced the same way.
3:52 I'll play this every single time I seat at the table to have lunch with my family before I start to tell them about weird languages from Mars
I pronounce cot "cot."
I pronounce caught "caught."
Were they the same or not?
+Bloodbath and Beyond Would you mind if I use this comment as a poetry assignment for Language Arts?
That would be awesome! Just don't forget to send me some royalties when this poem makes you rich!
HA suuuuuure
+ＴＨＩＳ ＩＳ Ａ ＰＲＯＢＬＥＭ ＡＮＤ ＧＯＯＧＬＥ ＮＥＥＤＳ ＴＯ ＦＩＸ ＩＴ ＢＥＣＡＵＳＥ ＭＹ ＵＳＥＲＮＡＭＥ ＳＨＯＵＬＤＮＴ ＢＥ ＡＬＬＯＷＥＤ ＴＯ ＢＥ ＴＨＩＳ ＬＯＮＧ Lovely name!
+Bloodbath and Beyond The real question is... did you pronounce "not" like "cot" or like "caught"? To my knowledge, there's a pretty 50/50 divide (That is, of those who actually pronounce caught/cot differently), or close to it across most English-speaking countries.
Your survey is actually thorough and detailed to a level of quality and clarity rarely seen in surveys. This may actually be the clearest survey I've ever heard the results of.
This is so interesting! I'm from one of the places where this merging began and I've never heard anyone pronounce those vowels differently from one another. I'm gonna ask my family and friends to see how they pronounce them. By the way thank you for your dedication for the topics in your videos! As a teenager who is extremely interested in linguistics but at the same time has no clue what they're gonna do with their life, you really inspire me to continue in pursuing linguistics. I also read that you took a break because of some difficulties you're facing, so I hope that any obstacles you're facing, you'll be able to get past them :)
You live in Nederland? I live in Nederland too, but my Nederland has got a bigger name:
Het koninkrijk der Nederlanden. Haha :D
I've a question... what if some of the people you interviewed would usually pronounce them the same, but said it differently because they were consciously distinguishing them?
ROFLMAOtheNARWHAL That was why I appreciated the disclaimer. You've got to get them speaking naturally.
+Earl of Narwhals This is why you research whether people will conciously adapt their behaviour to a survey that tries to differentiate two types of behaviour. And also conduct research on whether people do such a thing with linguistic surveys. And finally you have to know the art of conducting surveys that result in the least biased answers possible
Corné Vroomen Which, in the case of language surveys, is basically "ask them to say normal sentences, without revealing what exactly you are looking for." It can also include steering them towards saying certain things, though you have to be careful not to influence how they talk.
Then you can go ahead and ask for the specific words, then add more sentences or conversations to see if they are differently now.
3:04 Haha this is EXACTLY my experience but with the FOOL-FALL merger. My dad picked up on the fact I said "fall" like "fool" and I was really surprised and asked my mum and my sister who all said they said them differently, even though I learnt all my English from them and I thought I spoke the same. Then I asked my friends and got mixed results too. (I'm English)
Where are you from? I have occasionally heard similar pronunciations (e.g. I misheard someone's "cool" as "call") but not often. Perhaps it's similar to the merger of poor with paw, which is now very widespread in England.
@@dingo137 South-West England
I'm so glad there's a video about this! Thanks! Your map had all of New England shaded in as exhibiting the merger, but I can attest that it is almost entirely absent from Connecticut and Rhode Island speech. I grew up in that area but now live in Newfoundland, and I always struggle to explain to people how things are pronounced without the merger. They just can't hear the difference. As well, it's also important to note that while many regions exhibit the merger, they don't always merge to the same vowel, which I find really interesting!
I went to the caught-cot wiki, and started reading some of the examples, and I am absolutely hooked on this concept. I think I have the merger, but not quite completely! I noticed in the list of words with the similar augh/o/au sounds, that while I definitely know my dad from Minnesota does NOT have any part of the merger just by knowledge of how he speaks, I NEARLY have it, but not quite. at first I thought, "yeah, I have it", but as I read, I thought "wait I just did that word differently", and as I continued, I noticed my jaw open more and my tongue went back for some words but not for others, which I gave a more pure and relaxed sound. generally the words spelled with more letters got more strained sound (wad vs waddle, for example, nearly identical BUT NOT QUITE)
I'm definitely going to try this our on my mom. I'm not sure about the way she does it.
I say "caught" and "court" the same way.
***** They might speak a non-rhotic dialect of English (where r's right before consonants are omitted)
+Jtzkb In your case, because you're a rhotic speaker, you would say "caught" with an "aww" sound. Then "court" is identical.
c- as in cat
aww- as in "aww, look at dem puppies!"
t- as in ten
cawwt = caught = court. That's how we do it.
It was quite enlightening to hear caught merging with cot... those two words are so different sounding in Australia I would never have imagined it.
Describing how you would pronounce my 'cot' is a real challenge. This might work...
c- as in cat
o- as in octopus (the first "o". Stop before the "c")
t- as in ten
***** Aussies have ways of differentiating things though:
court = courty
caught = caught-o
:P jk
***** no, baa-bie. Also, not shrimp, prawn.
So do I, but the 'R' is prevalent in court.
Hey, Xidnaf! To my Midwest ears, you do pronounce "caught" and "cot" slightly differently. And I definitely pronounce them distinctively.
R.F. Um, I don't know how that's possible. Like, when I say the word I'm not aware of which one I'm saying. It's like the word "rose" as in the flower and the word "rose" as in "rise," they mean different things but I couldn't even tell you which way I was pronouncing it because they have the same pronunciation.
Xidnaf Well, you did say yourself in the video that many of the people you polled think they say it one way but actually say it another way. Sounds like you're in that population, too. Listening again, the difference is very subtle and inconsistent. But when it is present, I hear "caught" as being oh so very slightly more rounded than "cot". That's the thing about vowels. They're nowhere as discrete as consonants. And speech is like penmanship. It rarely comes out precisely the same way twice unless you're being very deliberate. :)
(Although I should probably listen a few more times to make sure I'm not falling for expectation bias. Listening only, without watching, might help.)
R.F. Could be that your brain is auto-correcting what you're hearing based on what you're reading. From an Australian point of view the vowels are basically the same vowel in his speech as far as I can tell, but reading the words while hearing them makes me feel they're being differentiated somehow.
(We're sound-changing in different ways, so no caught/cot merger for us :P )
Yeah, that's what I meant in my most recent comment when I said "Although I should probably listen a few more times to make sure I'm not falling for expectation bias. Listening only, without watching, might help."
(Stupid Google UA-cam. I don't even know how I ended up with multiple accounts.)
Christian Meredith You should google the McGurk effect!
I think it would have been very helpful if you had at least once pronounced it the way where both words sound different. I know from the comments that British people tend to say something sounding like "court" but I have no idea how your parents or some of the people in the survey say it. I just heard "cot" a hundred times and your assertion that some people say it differently. If you literally can't make the words sound differently perhaps you could have recorded someone who does. Without it, there is no contrast in this video.
I'm from europe and i picked up my english sepaking ability's from UA-cam, which kinda made my pronunciations weird, for me words like "bomb" "cought" and etc. are pronounced with the "o" sound but i say "cot" and other words with the "a" sound, super interesting.
I have the merger so strong, I had to look in the comments to figure out how people would pronounce then differently in us accents
I wish he would give us an example of how it sounds to those who don’t have it.
@@Caidencot has the same vowel as 'got'. Caught has the same vowel as 'sort', but without the r sound. Makes sense now?
Im from maryland! I saw caught with an "aw" and cot with an "ah" :-) happily unmerged
I'm from Missouri and do the same
I’m from Maryland and pronounce them the same
I'm a teenager in Maryland and I've always pronounced them the same but remember my elementary school teachers insisting they were pronounced differently and being confused.
I am not even American and I pronounce it the same
Yours is a highly US-centric perspective here. Virtually no-one in the UK would pronounce cot and caught the same or even that similarly. We do however pronounce "court" and "caught" the same because of non-rhoticness. :-)
+Rainbow Hyphen yes, what they said, thank you
in New Zealand Caught is said like "Kort" e
and cot is said like "Kot"
It's possible to be non rhotic and pronounce court and caught differently. My parents do - they don't have the horse-hoarse merger, and court is a bit like caw-uht. I have that merger partially and inconsistently, and younger people from my home town are less likely to have a distinction than older people. A bit like the cot caught merger in the US.
The problem with the way this video is described is that it makes it sound like merging these sounds is somehow inevitable. It's not. Also, there is real utility in being able to tell talk apart from tock. I think we should encourage keeping these two separate
Benjamin McLean I agree that merging them isn't inevitable, but I think it would be better if we merged them. There are almost no homophones it creates, the one I use is "caught vs cot," but since one's a verb and the other's a noun I can't see how this would ever create confusion. Also, is tock even a real word? I think the biggest thing this does is it makes English easier to learn for non-native speakers.
Tock is a real word. It refers to the sound made by a mechanical clock during every second second. Every alternate tick is a tock. (this may have more practical use when applied to discussing a metronome) Also, Tock is the name of a talking dog in The Phantom Tollboth by Norton Juster. :p
I pronounce rock, the mineral, with an "o" sound, but I pronounce rock, the music, as RAWK!!!!!!!!!
Xidnaf No it does not make English easier to learn for non-native speakers. Not at all.
I'm a non-native speaker and I can say that pronouncing more words differently from how they're spelled makes things harder not easier.
Most people learn a language through its writing and media like movies and music.
English is very hard to learn properly because its writing system has so little to do with how it sounds.
Making more words sound the same makes things worse not better. If I hear "cot" and I don't know what it means, I now have less of a chance of finding the correct word in a dictionary.
The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité is terrifying to someone trying to learn English. Imagine hearing that poem and needing to write down the words without knowing any of those words.
That's why we start people on The Boxcar Children. What the heck is that poem?
As a Scottish person it seems to me that Americans are changing ALL vowel pronunciation to sound like "A".
Languages really do change quickly! In Korean, vowel lengths are on the way out
Interesting video. I can't remember ever hearing anyone pronounce "caught" like "cot." Here in East Texas/Western N. Louisiana, the au is still "awww" (like the sound you make when you see a cute puppy.) In the past decade, however, I've noticed two changes in word-usage in American English (I'm 46): "gift" used as a verb, and "go with" without an object. I NEVER heard "gift" as a verb until the past decade or so. We "gave" people things; we didn't "gift" them something. Another expression that still seems strange to me is "go with." To me, the phrase needs an object: "go with us," or "go with me." I have to wonder if these were part of the speech patterns in other parts of the US and have simply migrated to other areas. (To not be a hypocrite, we in the South definitely have our own little idioms and expressions, too.) Anyway, keep making videos.
How do you pronounce "cot" then? Because the way I pronounce cot has the same vowel as the cute puppy reaction.
@@ettinakitten5047like the a in father
As a non-American it's odd. I pronounced "caught" with 'aw' sound that is more or less like the sound found in "court" while I say "cot" like one woukd say "dot. " I wouldn't ever expect them differently and only understood it when I started to slur my speech into an American accent and I understoof how the merger happened.
This is as a natively English speaking South African.
i do exactly the same thing im guessing you live in britain..?
Edward Krolikowski No. I'm a mothertongue English speaking South African.
Edward Krolikowski SOUTH AFRICAN EDWARD KROLIKOWSKI
I can assure you that I pronounce Caught and Cot differently... mostly because I never use the word "cot".
Adnan Ilyas Do you pronounce it with a shot "o"?
Like cott?`
I don't speak english as my first language, and this is very interesting....
***** I don't really know what the difference sounds like. The video didn't show us. I was just trying to be clever...
What is your first language?
Adnan Ilyas German.
Same. When I read 'cot' I pronounce it 'caught' because I actually say 'caught' and use it.
If you ask me, 'something you sleep in' is called a bed.
For the other words, I think I pronounce them the same, but I know better than to judge my own voice.
Being a non-native English speaker I have noticed that this merge occurs more on people that are more fluent than the others. When you're learning a new language you usually try your best to pronounce it's words in the most accurate way possible, but when you start judging yourself more fluent you tend to be more successive to this changes.
Also, I haven't test this theory in any ways, I'm just saying what I saw by myself in personal experience. As for myself I've noticed that I usually pronounce the words from the first block differently but I pronounce cot and caught the exact same way.
Thank you for your videos they're all very interesting. You've just got a new Brazilian subscriber, congrats (?)
In UK, caught = cort, cot = cott. Very easy to tell apart.
Completely unrelated:
Ever been to the Frozen Dead Guy Race? (I think that's what it's called. Never been to Nederland from NE Colorado.)
+Diskflame Heh, yeah. I have some VERY early memories of going to that festival as a child.
+Xidnaf I didn't know there is such a merger.I pronounce them differently.I am a Filipino.
0:56 I'm guessing it might have gone down to closer to 15 years/generation because of quality of life getting worse.
Being from Australia I pronounce them completely differently, "cort" and "cott".
Ameriker...
(ノóωò)ノ ✩much-wow✩ Am-air-ee-ka
Bud Charles FUCK YEAH!!!
Our "cort" is completely inaccurate for americans though. When we say cort, that would be with a elongated vowel and no actual r sound. Americans probably read this thinking "what the fuck, why would you pronounce those with an r?".
That's why writing down pronunciations doesn't help much. Australians don't pronounce r's the same way, so trying to spell out how we say it just makes things even more confusing.
Simon Foley we do pronounce the 'r' the same, its just that we don't pronounce it at the end of words like in 'never' and 'driver'
welcome to brazil, where there is basically 5 names for the same thing for some reason and its close as changing the city you're in it already change the way you sound while speaking a certain word
Do you want to know something weird?
My family is from Maryland; my mom, sister, and I say that "cot" and "caught" have the same vowel sounds, but my dad says they are completely different sounds.
I'm from the Appalachians and I definitely say them differently.
"Caught" is pronounced sort of like it has an invisible "w," but it's very very slight, sort of like how English people say "or," but less extreme. "Cot" is pronounced with the same vowel as in "rot."
The merger probably happened because nobody has never said or heard of “Cot” in their entire life.
Legit I literally call it bed..?
u never been to a hotel?
It's not just the words "cot" and "caught". It's that most "aw" sounds are becoming "o" sounds for americans.
As a Canadian I can clearly hear American Os and OUs have become AAs. Like, about = abaat, neighbourhood = neghbarhaad, cold = cald
I can safely say that cot and caught are said different in New Zealand.
Another big shift that I have noticed recently is what I am going to call the “to-and merger”. I rarely hear people say something like “I am going to try to study”. People today tend to say “I am going to try and study”. Nearly everybody I know and nearly all UA-cam and television people that I listen to do this.
I don't think that's a merger so much as the sounds are only /tu/ and /ænd/ when said in isolation. In an actual sentence, they both, along with many other common "function" words, get reduced to a weak form, usually using /ə/ (schwa): /tə/ and /ənd/, if the schwa even gets pronounced at all. The words only serve the structure of the sentence, and so don't have as much focus resulting in getting reduced to the bare minimum to produce a syllable if even that.
Pretty much the only people who _don't_ do this are those trying to pronounce every word clearly as written, which can actually backfire and turn it into a homophone.
I feel like I pronounce Cot and Caught in the same or a Similar way, except that I pronounce 'Caught' a longer (and possibly in a more Rounded way) than 'Cot'.
I connect 'Cot' with the same sound as Pot, whilst 'Caught' as the 'aw' sound, or the same sound as in 'Bought'.
Note: I am born to Bulgarian parents, but I am Born in Britain (Mid-South/South-Eastern England, to be Exact). Ie: I still have a Bulgarian accent, but it is majorly Britishcised
I predict that New York City will be the last place to merge
I pronounce them differently, but I'm not a native speaker. I'm German, and I learned British RP at school, so I more or less sound like a BBC newsreader with a bit of a German accent.
vowels:
I’ll use “a” for “ah”, “ω” for the similar, more throated “ah”, and “Ω” for “ahw”
talk - tak
rock - rak
small - smωl
doll - dωl
fall - fΩl
tall - tωl
clock - clak
bomb - bam
caught - cat
cot - cat
this comment section just got crazy
Your comment would make so much more sense if you used IPA. I have no idea of what sounds you're referring to.
I'm from Wisconsin, and I pronounce caught and cot the nearly identical to each other. I initially thought I pronounced them the same, but since I've learned to differentiate between the sounds between similar vowels, I noticed there was a very miniscule difference. But I pronounce all of those word samples with the same vowel.
(5:30) And that is why those who can't distinguish retroflex consonants have trouble hearing them, or those who think the voiceless velar fricative is a voiceless glottal fricative.
Caught: Cort
Cot: Cot
Ah yes. I'm British.
+UltraJordanGaming me, too.
+UltraJordanGaming interesting it's Cot and Cawt for me, no r sound :D
+UltraJordanGaming Since moving to canada 3 years ago I have rhotacised some words while keeping others nonrhotic.
+Majestic Skywhale Britain's not rhotic.
Hmm, interesting! I pronounce the au and o almost the same, but the au a little longer. Wonder if it has anything to do with Dutch being my first language.
I dunno how I say them. I'm not even a native english speaker.
Conclusion: Xidnaf is adopted.
I'm out from the plains of Colorado and never noticed this. I'm a theatre geek, and tried out a few dialects. Normally, British, and valspeak they're the same vowel sounds, but New York and southern are different. Looking over this, I realised I'd self-taught my British and valley dialects, but learnt my NY and southern ones from an east-coast theatre teacher. A very interesting concept.
Waait... I detect a fake Nederland! Commence Dutchification of this Comment section!
+Bastiaan de Bruijn jerger hinger dergen
+Bastiaan de Bruijn Ja, laat wij toet het. (I'm sorry, that's the best Dutch I can do on the spot)
I don't know shit's worth of Dutch, but from what my American brain can tell, jf I juust aad a buunch oof doobje voowels and raandom "j"s, then I should be fine.
Erik the God Eating Penguin
yeah they lengthen the vowels by doubling them, I learned from Duolingo
Anato Hey, I was just on Duolingo! What are the odds?
(Well actually, not that low considering that this is a channel about linguistics and I was commenting about linguistics, so yeah.)
for me it's Caught: (kɔ:t) Cot: (kɒt). I'm from Romania hehe
Australian English though... XD
+AcerMacIrish Australians seem to be merging A and E as in the (non)difference between 'then' and 'than'.
+monotonehell Xidnaf exhibits the "catch-up/ketchup" merger here. :P
+jjovereats I do that and my friends make fun of me for it
+monotonehell as i Brazillian I don't know the difference between these two pronounciations hahah and with this video i discovered i'm a caught/cot merger, guess i'm a then/than merger too
+monotonehell we really only merge a and e in those two words which you just said.
I have never noticed this in my life until now, and now I am impressed.
This channel is amazing!
western pennsylvania has an even greater accent... _* cough * * cough * pittsburgh..._
Pittsburgh, PA represent!
+WillyTheComposer yins
Ah, but is that prounounced:
KAW-f KAW-f
KAH-f KAH-f
Or
COW-f COW-f
2:27 Origen ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
El mistako
Sounds pretty much like “Oregon” when you pronounce it with a hard G
Mate, i and most of my friends speak differently when we’re around strangers, family, friends and when we move out to other places our accents are bound to change therefore making our parents’ accent different to our own. E.g. my grandad has a mild welsh accent and my dad sounds fully like he’s from central London. So I fully understand how language pronunciation can change this quickly
I'm from eastern Pennsylvania and didn't think there was a difference in how the sounds are said until I did it enough to realize that the "a/au" is said with a narrower mouth and the jaw jutting forward, whereas the "o" sound is more like wide open "aww" with the jaw dropping down rather than forward
Just speak Australian English there is pretty much no sound merges happening. Seeing as Caught is pronounced couht like coffee in a New York accent. and cot is just a oh sound.
actually you guys have or had a few mergers yourself, current mergers are just not as large as the american ones.
Chikiko Saotome What types of mergers have we had?
according to wikipedia
weak vowel merger is one
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_high_front_vowels#Weak_vowel_merger
another is the salary celery merger
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_l#Salary.E2.80.93celery_merger
here is the page i got it from. if its wrong let me know =)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_English_phonology
Chikiko Saotome Oh really (0.0) I usually say Salary and Celery differently though. I never noticed.
Chikiko Saotome Oh maybe it's because I live in Sydney. Although I did live near Victoria before when I was younger. I noticed some people near Victoria say Nearly like "Nelly" but I don't think that is a merger. It's more of a pronunciation difference. I'm not sure for others. Only just a friend from Victoria says that. Maybe it is a preference
Just had to rep some Ned head pride here. You still living there?
Stephen Church Nah, right now I'm in Illinois for college. I'm coming back for summer though!
Xidnaf It's absolutely gorgeous up here right now. Hopefully that holds until you get back. More related to the video, I tested the cot-caught merger on native friends and on some friends from the midwest and I am absolutely stunned that I never noticed it before.
But... How is "caught" supposed to be pronounced?
+Jack Carroll It's supposed to be pronounced like "Court".
Court in a British accent, sort of
@Somiron Kundu You can tell. Caught, cot and court are all said differently here and some of the words you chose to compare don't have the same vowel sounds at all in my accent
As an italian this is one of the most difficult channel to watch
Wait, if caught and cot and bought and bot are pronounced the same than how will we know if someone is stocking the shelves or stalking the shelves?
Caught is pronounced like Court, you philistines.
+Lizard_Buttock Hahahahahaha, no.
+Jovial Hamster Almost every British accent makes the person sound high class and erudite until you hear them add r's to vowel sounds. Then they sound like a hick.
+Brandon Kellner Come to Scotland, that'll make you retract your statement. Also there was a study done that said that in Britain there is a distinct accent chance, on average, every 50 miles, so maybe not all British accents sound high class. However some accents, like queens English, do.
Scottish accents are a little harsh. I don't hear them too often though. I guess I was referring more to English accents except for the one they speak in Guy Ritchie movies sometimes. No idea what it's called. It sounds like the British equivalent of a Jersey accent to me.
Brandon Kellner Fair enough. I think [I'm most probably wrong] the accent you are looking for is "Geordie"
Xidnaf, I have a correction for you, the merger occurs in South Florida for most people with the only exceptions being the elderly.
Raymond Puentes i live in south florida and noticed i had the merger lol. was confused because south florida wasnt highlighted
*the other people in the room glance over towards me and see me on my phone saying “caught cot” over and over, increasingly concerned as I’m not sure if I’m saying them differently*
I was like “but yeah, in Australia, I don’t say caught like cot”... but then I realised “damn, but caught sure does sound exactly like court”
This video was super interesting and made me look at language in other ways. Thanks man!
Children gain their accent from peers, not parents and accents are primarily about vowel pronunciation. Vowel shifts tend to happen relatively slowly, but we see the effects of some of these shifts happening today where we have multiple acceptable pronunciations of the same word (e.g. route can be pronounced to rhyme with boot or bout; the double o in root can sound like foot or boot.) and some speakers may even pronounce it differently depending on whom they are conversing with.