vowel pronunciations

Oh yes, I forgot - that site serves as a great resource here! Using the state results here ( http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/states.html ), and representing /ˈlɔɪɚ/ as LOY, and /ˈlɒ:jɚ/ as LAW, we have:

MIDWEST (East North Central)

Illinois: LOY 82% - LAW 14%
Indiana: LOY 67% - LAW 28%
Michigan: LOY 87% - LAW 10%
Ohio: LOY 75% - LAW 20%
Wisconsin: LOY 87% - LAW 11%

MIDWEST (West North Central)

Iowa: LOY 79% - LAW 16%
Kansas: LOY 55% - LAW 37%
Minnesota: LOY 90% - LAW 8%
Missouri: LOY 19% - LAW 77%
Nebraska: LOY 77% - LAW 17%
North Dakota: LOY 87% - LAW 11%
South Dakota: LOY 83% - LAW 13%

NORTHEAST (Middle Atlantic)

New Jersey: LOY 80% - LAW 16%
New York: LOY 80% - LAW 16%
Pennsylvania: LOY 82% - LAW 13%

NORTHEAST (New England)

Connecticut: LOY 82% - LAW 14%
Maine: LOY 73% - LAW 18%
Massachusetts: LOY 87% - LAW 9%
New Hampshire: LOY 89% - LAW 10%
Rhode Island: LOY 83% - LAW 10%
Vermont: LOY 86% - LAW 6%

SOUTH (East South Central)

Alabama: LOY 23% - LAW 69%
Kentucky: LOY 27% - LAW 67%
Mississippi: LOY 18% - LAW 77%
Tennessee: LOY 20% - LAW 71%

SOUTH (South Atlantic)

DC: LOY 62% - LAW 29%
Delaware: LOY 80% - LAW 16%
Florida: LOY 64% - LAW 30%
Georgia: LOY 35% - LAW 57%
Maryland: LOY 80% - LAW 15%
North Carolina: LOY 30% - LAW 65%
South Carolina: LOY 42% - LAW 52%
Virginia: LOY 64% - LAW 30%
West Virginia: LOY 32% - LAW 58%

SOUTH (West South Central)

Arkansas: LOY 18% - LAW 75%
Louisiana: LOY 47% - LAW 46%
Oklahoma: LOY 22% - LAW 70%
Texas: LOY 47% - LAW 45%

WEST (Mountain)

Arizona: LOY 79% - LAW 16%
Colorado: LOY 77% - LAW 18%
Idaho: LOY 74% - LAW 20%
Montana: LOY 82% - LAW 13%
Nevada: LOY 78% - LAW 19%
New Mexico: LOY 61% - LAW 31%
Utah: LOY 66% - LAW 26%
Wyoming: LOY 77% - LAW 21%

WEST (Pacific)

Alaska: LOY 75% - LAW 17%
California: LOY 82% - LAW 13%
Hawaii: LOY 62% - LAW 36%
Oregon: LOY 79% - LAW 15%
Washington: LOY 82% - LAW 13%

So I can say without exaggeration that Tennessee Native must have absolutely no clue what he or she is talking about. Not only is /ˈlɒ:jɚ/ a Southern feature (corresponding surprisingly closely to popular cultural conceptions of the South), but it demonstrates one of the starkest regional cleavages that I have ever seen. /ˈlɒ:jɚ/ is predominant in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, George, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia (in most of these cases, with over 60% or 70%), and /ˈlɔɪɚ/ is predominant everywhere else (in most cases, with over 70% or 80%). The notable cases? /ˈlɔɪɚ/ takes Virginia quite solidly, it ekes out narrow pluralities in Louisiana and Texas, and it comes quite close in South Carolina. Maybe /ˈlɔɪɚ/ is preferred in AAVE and in Cajun-influenced English, and in states that are becoming more cosmopolitan? I don't know. But I'm just astonished by the sheer wrongness of Tennessee Native here - /ˈlɒ:jɚ/ received 71% in the very state of Tennessee!

I live in one of the Southern States and I've lived in the West and the North. I think I say "Loy", but "Law" seems right to me as in "He better git himself a LAW-YER if he thinks he keeps parking that dang bass boat in my driveway."

Whoa, even my dialect is slipping.

"if he thinks he's gonna keep parking that dang bass boat..."

''Vowel inventories are a major point of distinction among accents of English: not simply in their phonetic implementation but also in their phonological arrangement. Some accents maintain contrasts between phonemes that others have lost, while other accents are splitting phonemes into to new, separate categories. Californian English is known to have the "low-back merger", whereby all words such as thought, taut, and hawk have the same vowel as words such as lot, tot, and hock. Like other accents of the West, it also typically has a centralized nucleus of the diphthongs in words such as goose and food.

Some other aspects of Californian vowel space that are in progress include the California shift and the centralization of the /ow/ vowel in words like goat and home. The figure below illustrates the distribution of vowels in phonetic space for a small sample of Californian English speakers, by plotting F2 as an analog of the front/back dimension and F1 as an analog of the low/high dimension. Speakers are placed in the same vowel space using log normalization based on Nearey 1978. ''


http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/rkennedy/phonetics.html