Monday, May 16, 2005, 20:33 GMT
"/Q/ is generally not in North American English at all. Most NAE dialects merged /Q/ with /A/, the "father-bother" merger, while a few New England ones merged /Q/ with /O/. Either way, /Q/ is gone--even if it is produced by Americans somewhere it's unlikely to correspond to RP /Q/."
To be fair, I'd say a good number of UK dialects don't feature /Q/ either. In fact, I would argue that the following split is more common in British English nowadays:
"cot"=/kOt/
"caught"=/ko:t/
Also, a clarification:
There are actually many parts of the American western that merge the words as /kOt/ rather than /kAt/. Northern California, Washington State, and Utah all use this pronunciation.
To be fair, I'd say a good number of UK dialects don't feature /Q/ either. In fact, I would argue that the following split is more common in British English nowadays:
"cot"=/kOt/
"caught"=/ko:t/
Also, a clarification:
There are actually many parts of the American western that merge the words as /kOt/ rather than /kAt/. Northern California, Washington State, and Utah all use this pronunciation.