Caw-fee
<<I don't say cawffee, cawpy :p
I believe coffee (cawffee) is some kind of regional pronunciation (East&South) [General American normally excludes these regions :))>>
Actually, Arizona HQ, probably more than half the country does not merge "cot-caught" and those who don't pronounce then say "coffee" with a different vowel than "cot." Traditionally, General American has been "cot-caught" non-merged altho GenAm is a hazy concept to begin with, since no one speaks it 100%. You and I being from the western US (I'm from California) things may seem very skewed towards the "cot-caught" merged accents as being norm since that's what we say and hear all around us. However, about 50-60% of the US actually does distinguish "cot-caught" which is of course a sizable percentage.
But I do agree that there are many "cot-caught" merged Americans who speak what would generally be popularly perceived as educated, General American speech, even if that traditionally hasn't been a GenAm feature. The thing is, since no one speaks 100% GenAm, everyone is going to have some features that happen to be GenAm as well as others which don't fall into such a category. One of our non-GenAm features just happens to be "cot-caught" merging even tho you could just as easily find many other features of western US speech which in fact do happen to correspond to GenAm.
I do have to say that it is rather annoying when individuals claim that "cot"-"caught" is somehow "standard" in the US. That said, I don't think that it is the best of ideas to analyze the English in the US in isolation, as it is in a clear dialect continuum with the English spoken in practically all of English-speaking North America, Honduras and possibly Maritime Canada aside. English dialects in the northern US do share features with those in Canada, and there are very few sharp divisions between the English in the US and the English in Canada, probably one of the very few cases of such being the dialect division between Detriot, MIchigan and Windsor, Ontario.
Hence, I don't think it's a good idea to even really speak of any kind of spoken "standard" language in the context of the US, as it gives a misleading picture of the linguistic situation of English in North America as a whole. For example, if one just considers the US, English dialects in the northern US would appear to have significant local innovations along a band stretching from western New York to Washington state, yet if one includes Canada in the picture, such then is clearly just a gradual transition zone between the English dialects in Canada and those in more southerly portions of the US rather than any area with any significant local innovation in many regards.
One example of this is my own dialect, which when compared with just other English dialects in the US seems either quite innovative or quite conservative in certain aspects, but when one takes the English dialects in Canada into account, such seem no longer to be locally innovative or conservative features at all. Examples of this that have already been mentioned are /"kOfi/ for "coffee", /"sori/ for "sorry", and the general use of [or\] instead of [Or\], which are just features that happen to tend more towards Canadian patterns rather than American patterns rather than any real kind of local innovation or conservation.
<<I do have to say that it is rather annoying when individuals claim that "cot"-"caught" is somehow "standard" in the US.>>
Well, I wouldn't find it annoying, as it's merely an assumption based on their own speech and life experiences. Since great swaths of the country are indeed "cot-caught" merged, it does seem completely normal if that's the environment you're surrounded with. I only found out that in fact some people didn't merge the two after I started getting interested in linguistics, and that's a pretty small percentage of the population which would actively seek out such information. Based on the fact that I can go probably a thousand miles in any direction from here and still not come across a "cot-caught" nonmerger, it seems perfectly normal to merge them as that's basically all I ever hear. If I want to hear a "cot-caught' nonmerged accent, that usually entails listening to a national news broadcast (with reporters originally from nonmerged areas) on TV or radio, but it's still quite removed from me personally as I don't typically encounter such accents in my daily life (my professor from Brooklyn being a very recent and interesting exception!).
Altho of course from an objective linguistic standpoint I know many (and maybe even the majority) in the US don't merge them, my emotions and subjective linguistic impressions based on my experiences remind me that deep down I still consider "cot-caught" merging "normal" while non-merged speech sounds distinctly "other" ("non-normal," if you will) to me. But I do know how to separate my subjective impressions from objective linguistic fact.
What I *would* find annoying, however, would be someone who, after already finding out that 50-60% of the US doesn't merge the two, still claims that the only "normal" way to speak in the US would be to merge the two, when it's clear a lot of people don't.
I'm from Florida and I say /kAfi/ for ''coffee''.
>>What I *would* find annoying, however, would be someone who, after already finding out that 50-60% of the US doesn't merge the two, still claims that the only "normal" way to speak in the US would be to merge the two, when it's clear a lot of people don't.<<
Which is what I am talking about here, as I have run into people on here and similar forums that claim that "cot"-"caught" merging is not only "standard" but who also dismiss "cot"-"caught" non-merging as being "dialectal" in the pejorative sense of the term or who at least claim that "most" Americans are "cot"-"caught"-merging, which is unambiguously not true in the least.
Northern American English (USA+Canada):
cot-caught merged 50 %, non-merged 50 %
CC merger is already a norm in Canadian English.
American English will follow soon :)
<<CC merger is already a norm in Canadian English.
American English will follow soon :)>>
Well, the merger has been spreading in the US thruout the years, but it's unlikely to reach all of US dialects. The way some dialects' vowels are positioned (I won't go into details here) it's unlikely they'd be susceptible to the "c-c" merger. However, for others, the shift is relatively easy to incorporate into the already existing dialect in a given area.
<<The way some dialects' vowels are positioned (I won't go into details here) it's unlikely they'd be susceptible to the "c-c" merger.>>
Yes, I think the New York accent (with its distinctively high and sometimes diphthongal "caught" vowel), and Southern accents in which the "caught" vowel gains an offglide, would be very resistant to the merger.
That's right, Lazar. Also, the NCVS dialects are resistant to it as well.
Yeah, that map seems to follow what I've read about the distribution of the merger and distinction. The distinction is common in the big urban agglomerations of the Midwest and the Northeast (up to Providence), most of the South, and San Francisco. The merger is common in New England north of Providence, southwest Pennsylvania, and most of the Western and Plains regions.
Bob: Hi "Dawn", how are you?
Dawn: My name isn't Don, you inarticulate jerk!
Don: Who's Dawn, Bawb... I mean Don?
<<The merger is common in New England north of Providence, southwest Pennsylvania, and most of the Western and Plains regions.>>
The merger is also increasingly common in the city of Charleston and Florida.
Im from New York too. Is'nt Caw-fee the normal way to say it? Kah-fee sounds kinda weird. We say power the same, just nobody pronounces the W.
<<Im from New York too. Is'nt Caw-fee the normal way to say it? Kah-fee sounds kinda weird.>>
Yes, "caw-fee" is the pronunciation that about 50-60% of Americans use. But there can be subtle regional variations in the sound represented by "aw" - a c-c unmerged "coffee" might come out, for example, as [kOfi] or [kQfi].