Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

I am pretty sure it's a Brooklyn-Italian thing.

Haha, like "lorinauda" (law and order) or "supanover" (supernova).

Since you mentioned Alabamer, I have to wonder how, in this great country of ours, entire states can be mispronounced by so many. Cities, too. Io-way, Oh-ruh-gonn, Massa-two-sits (well, OK, that was just my old econ prof, but why?). Boise/Boy-zee/Boy-see; Pierre/Pear;Los Angeles/Las Angle-eez. Must be millions of those around, without even going to the more arcane Native American names, which have often suffered alteration of some sort. Tulare, Humptulips, Puyallup, and Seattle all come to mind.

I have lived in Portsmouth, Virginia where african-american folks pronounce the letter R as arrr-uhh. And most native Portsmouth-ians pronounce the ou sound as oo, such as aboot the hoose. Interesting that such a limited geographical area differs from the rest of the adjoining area of Hampton Roads.

Argosworks said:

I grew up in Rhode Island and pronounced idea as idear. My reasoning is that I dropped the r in words like car, yard, party, Harvard, Bar Harbor, so the r has to go somewhere. I call it the Conservation of r, like energy and matter, r can't be destroyed and is preserved and has to be used somewhere else. I don't do it as often since I moved to California, but the students we looked surprised when I said "I went to a birthday potty (party). Somehow the r just escapes from my words.

Growing up in the north east Connecticut I picked up a bit of Massachusetts accent. Primarily from the Worcester area. I often just ask people to watch there step around me because I tend to drop R's all over the place. I have to tell you I love your theory much better. Maybe with the new hadron collider in Europe they can find a way to help us re-merge our R's with our words, as with so many protons in the collider.