Galen in White River, Arizona, asks: Is there really a “neutral” accent, and if so, what is it? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Is There Really a Neutral Accent?” Hi there, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Galen calling from...
The director of Common Voices Chorus, a women’s choir in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, seeks a word to denote what her group does when they get together to sing simply for the joy of singing and community-building, rather than working toward the goal of...
Listeners continue to invent names of Greek gods by pronouncing familiar words with the accent on the wrong syllable. There’s Mediocrities, god of “things that are just pretty much okay”; Lotteries, “the god of random numbers”; and that not-so-well...
Joan from Dallas, Texas, wants to know why some people are judgmental about people who speak with a glottal stop in such words as cattle, bottle, or even glottal itself. She noted a commenter on TikTok criticizing a Scottish woman for pronouncing...
Robert in Dover, Delaware, grew up hearing different ways to say aunt, from the version that sounds like ant to the same broader vowel as in haunt common in parts of the East Coast. In most of the United States, aunt rhymes with ant. The other...
A Virginian who moved to Illinois is feeling nostalgic about her old Tidewater accent. What are some tips to help you regain the accent you grew up with? Some strategies for reclaiming one’s accent: Go back home for a visit, and save some linguistic...
