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Survey results!
Remember those "linguistic surveys" that kept popping up here? Well, they turned out to be useful! I rounded up the results of those surveys as well as similar surveys circulated on other boards (some of which I wrote), and put all the results here: http://students.csci.unt.edu/~kun/bigsurvey.html
Feel free to comment on what you see there.
Hmm, that's interesting. The results for "Boston & NENE" fit pretty well with how I speak.
Why does it say in the example that all Florida natives claimed there was no difference in the the words "cot" and "caught", yet the chart says 20% of us make the distinction?
And forgive me, but what the hell is the bat-bath merger? They obviously sound different. Are you referring to the vowel each is said with? Also, why is it assumed you either pronounce Mary-merry-marry all the same or all different? I happen to pronounce Mary-merry the same and "marry" differently.
OK, OK, OK, so I need to change what it said at the top. I spent hours typing the thing, going through message boards, etc., etc., etc., and by the time I finished it this afternoon I wanted to forget about the whole thing for a while. I mean, this started out as a fun spare time project and turned into a nightmare of infinite boredom.
And bat-bath, yes I am referring to the vowels. I'm pretty sure I wrote that on the page. And Mary/merry/marry, most of those surveys only had that and no other option, so I just decided I would count people with your distinction (Mary=merry but not marry) as distinct. No, it's not perfect, but this wasn't supposed to be official or anything.
Alright, the introduction has now been fixed and is more detailed. If you're wondering why I "spent hours typing the thing" it's because I never used an HTML editor. That's right, I busted out the whole thing by hand! I got good at typing it fast near the end.
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