My husband insists on pronouncing war like car, even though he sees in the dictionary that there is only one pronunciation and that all TV broadcasters pronounce it the same. Has anybody ever heard of this?
I will know it if I ever hear car in Iraq or Afghanistan because there will not be any 'u' sound in there howsoever, plus the almost muted 'k' sound will be in there, otherwise the 2 words are mighty close.
🙂 Interesting. Till a while ago I used to pronounce the word as your husband does, based on a false extension of what I had read years ago- that Americans mostly prefer /É‘:/ to /É”/. It was just after doing a bit of deliberation on the fact that all the occasions that I'd heard the word pronounced by native speakers, I'd heard it as 'wore', then I decided to choose what I thought to be the common variation! Now that you say it, and I check my pronunciation dictionary (which doesn't show the car-like pronunciation as a variation), I'm pretty sure that you, Americans, don't have such a preference in cases where the word is one-syllable and it ends, phonetically, with 'r'. As in for, fore, gore, door.
I know that my rule isn't comprehensive since there are words such as 'before', 'temblor'.
K the G, that pronunciation of "war" is a common dialect pronunciation. Don't put too much faith in the pronunciations in dictionaries. They're not exhaustive. They list only the most common. If they leave a pronunciation out, it doesn't mean that pronunciation is a bad one. I say this as a dictionary editor myself! For example, dictionaries often do not take into account even the widespread Southern American dialects, which are spoken by many millions of people.
I have heard this pronunciation of war, but rarely. However, I hear it more often in the compound words, like
Warfare
Warring
Warhead
Warrior
Unfortunately, I have no good explanation for this. It is simply an informal observation.