Hot or Hat? | Antimoon Forum

I ran into an interesting communication problem earlier today.

It went something along of the lines of this:

I said to a girl, "hot or cold?"

She gave me a blank look. "What?"

"Hot or cold?" I asked again.

She gave me another puzzled look. "Huh?"

"Hot or cold?"

"I'm sorry, I don't..."

"I think he said 'hot'", another woman replied.

"Oh, yeah! Hot!" the girl said. "It sounded like you were saying 'hat'".

"No, no, I said." I then said the word 'hat" for her.

"Hmm...that's interesting, it doesn't sound anything like the way I say it."

Granted, some dialects have changed significantly, but I have to chuckle at the people who still believe that all Americans will eventually speak with a version of the same dialect (General American).

The vowels in 'hat' and 'hot' sound nothing alike. How can the girl not understand you? Plus, she must've been incredibly dense not to figure out what you were asking.

Hot is pronounced like Hat in the Great Lakes Region (Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo)...

To a NYC or LA ear, Chicagoans pronouncing HOT sounds something like their HAT.

This phenomenon is called: ''Northern cities vowel shift''.
Try Meg Ryan in ''Against the ropes'' if you want to hear how it sounds...She pronounces ''New kids on the block'' like General American ''New kids on the black'', in that movie...

in the Great lakes Region, they pronounce the hot vowel /A/ with a very fronted vowel, like in French Pa^te, and many people front it even more, so it ends up sounding like General American AE /as in ''hat, black''/...
It's weird to hear ''Mam I want a pap'' (Mom, I want a pop) or ...''I''m from Winscansin''...but it's how they talk... Their HOT sounds like GeneralAmerican HAT, and their HAT sounds like a General American HATE (but without a glide)...

There is a nice video on this:
http://www.kare11.com/video/player.aspx?aid=38426&bw=

Watch the video and feel free to comment.

yes Josh, patte :)

I'm from Chicago, and no one I know pronounces hot like hat. (It's the Easterners--and others--with their caught-cot merger who are hard to differentiate.)

That, though, is the extreme case, as most people with the NCVS really do not shift historical [A] to [{] (as in General American "hat") but only to [a] (as in northern English English "hat").

But, some people, most(ly) young girls do shift it.