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

I was raised in a typically-nomadic military family, so I'm not certain where I picked it up (I did live in California for a while, but that was the only western state I lived in), but I also used to pronounce "root" and "roof" in the same way. However, after a few kids in the Midwest poked a little fun at those pronunciations, I changed the way I pronounced the words (we all wanted to fit in as kids, after all). I still occasionally pronounce the plural "roots" in the "western" way (rhymes with "puts"), but I never pronounce the singular that way — that is, I always pronounce "root" to rhyme with "boot."

On another note, it's interesting that your teacher quantified the different vowel pronunciations, but I think 13 different vowel sounds may have been understating it. We pronounce the letter a at least five different ways, after all. But what is even more interesting about the regional differences, I think, is that we have so few distinct regional dialects in the U.S. For example, as Bill Bryson pointed out in his wonderful book Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, we have comparatively many fewer dialects and accents here than Britons have, even though the U.S. is many, many times larger than the U.K. in both area and population.

Bob Bridges said:

But here you are, tunawrites, saying (if I'm reading this right) that it's in the midwest that they made fun of you saying /rUf/ and /rUt/, which is backward from my childhood. What part of the midwest? I'd have guessed that /rUt/ came from the midwest and /rut/ from the Appalachians and eastward.

It was the Chicago area. But my relatives in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan also said both "root" and "roof" with the "standard" (I suppose) pronunciation, in which it rhymes with "boot." It was awhile ago, and it's hard for me to keep track of all the places I lived when I was young (we usually lived in one place for less than two years), and so it might've been the Southerners poking fun, but I'm almost certain it was in the Midwest that I changed my pronunciation, around the time when I was in the fifth grade. I don't think any of my north-Midwestern relatives say either "root" or "roof" in the way we're talking about.

As I had said, I grew up a little bit of everywhere, and it was quite some time ago, so I don't remember the details to the extent I'd testify to them. But I'm sure it was when I was about ten years old in Chicago that it first came to my attention.