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July 20, 2025 9:09 am
A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of American English. In that part of the United States, there’s a lot of what linguists call bag raising and beg raising, so that bag sounds more like “beg” and milk sounds like “melk.” When such pronunciations and patterns are used extensively by lots of people in a particular area, it’s not a mistake, but rather a feature of dialect. This is part of a complete episode.