Pronouncing Roof Like Ruff

Northern us accents tend toward the long foodish one southern accents tend toward the bookish one.

Pronouncing roof like ruff.

When i was in grade school we had a teacher from chicago. The teacher also said we had only 12 instead of the normal 13 american vowel sounds pronouncing cot and caught the same but my question is whether my pronunciation of root and roof is disappearing. People who pronounce the wood roof as ruff are a danger to our society. In a particular episode he says the difference is only caused by how some people make tense vowels as lax vowels.

Listen to the audio pronunciation in the cambridge english dictionary. The michigan ites and some other us americans i know pronounce roof as ruff. Don t know about nook. How to pronounce roof.

Roof was one of our spelling words. The really bizarre one and not limited to michigan is the pronunciation of wash or washington as warsh and warshington. I am from the south. Mostly the distinction is between the two different double o pronunciations the long oo in food or the short oo in book.

He says only about 10 to 15 of americans pronounce roof as rough. I now live in california and expected to hear it here after being questioned for years in the east. According to grant barret linguist and cohost of the npr radio show way with words it is particularly a regional marker.