Can anyone from Philly or Jersey or Mass. actually explain this with IPA or something?
The rest of us are genuinely baffled as to how ya'll are doing this.
Don't make me post the Pam 'they're the same' meme.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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~~Geoff Lindsey on YouTube might have a video on the topic. He's great at explaining phonetics of modern English.~~ Lindsey mentions the merger here, but only very briefly.
I'm from NJ and these are all different sounds to me. This short shows the difference: https://youtube.com/shorts/S3EaMZUXQYs
Ok so not native speaker but lived in Rhode Island for a long while. Here's what I hear:
ˈmeəɹi, ˈmæɹi, and ˈmɛɹi as in Mary, Marry, and merry. Longish a, short a, short e.
Pro-tip in case you're unsure:
- "Mary" is pronounced "Mary".
- "Merry" is pronounced "merry".
- "Marry" is pronounced "marry".
You're welcome.
- Mary rhymes with fairy.
- Merry rhymes with berry.
- Marry rhymes with carry.
Maybe this is a whoosh on my part, but for people who pronounce all the Mary’s the same, they tend to pronounce all of those words to rhyme as well.
~~So ferry rhymes with fairy?~~
Edit: Is ferry is pronounced the same as fairy?
Yes?
I meant to ask "Is ferry is pronounced the same as fairy?"
Yeah, I think it's part and parcel with the Mary merry marry merger. It's not just about those 3 words, but those 3 sounds.
Mary, Marry, Merry, and Maurry are all pronounced the same when I say them.
It really annoys Maurry. 😈
It drove me crazy when I first moved out of New Jersey and heard so many people "mispronouncing" vowels like this. See also "pen" pronounced as "pin", "Laura" and "Lara" being pronounced the same, etc. The "e" to "i" vowel shift in particular has become extremely prominent throughout much of the US.
Going to school in NJ, I had a teacher whose first name was "Dawn" and she hated it. I didn't understand, I thought it was a pretty name.
But then I grew up, left the state, and wondered why everyone referred to the morning as "don." That's when it all clicked (or, you could say, it dawned on me.) Other states don't pronounce the "aw" part, making "Dawn" and "Don" sound the same. In New Jersey, they are distinct. Now I see why having that name could be upsetting.
All three are different. I grew up in Philly and South Jersey
Can you explain ... how?
With IPA or 'sounds like' analogies?
I am genuinely baffled here, PNW accent, they're all the same.
I would pronounce all of these the same.
First syllable same as 'mare', a mature female horse.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/mare
(US pronounciation)
Although I'd say it faster and with less obvious of a 'y' sound.
Second syllable would just be... E, like the letter E, as in whee! or bee or see or sea or flee or flea.
Mehr-ee.
What are you guys doing, how do you modify this to come up with two or three distinct pronunciations for the different words?
Different vowel sounds?
???
ˈmeəɹi, ˈmæɹi, and ˈmɛɹi as in Mary, Marry, and merry. Longish a, short a, short e
Edit. O wait, you're the same dude I responded to above. Nvm.
Edit2.
Mary rhymes with airy,
Marry rhymes with carry,
Merry rhymes with very.
Woop, sorry about double posting, but I'll have to look up those IPA symbols... because again lol:
Mary Marry Merry?
Airy Carry Very?
Berry Weary Fairy Ferry Nary Hairy Larry?
... these are all the same, all perfect rhymes to me.
Ok... so, at an IPA chart...
https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/
ˈmeəɹi
Becomes Meyh-uh-ree, where ... I guess the first two vowels roll or blend? Or is there just an extra syllable in there?
This makes me think of how I would lazily/casually say mayonnaise: Meyh-uh-nayz.
If I wanted to convey being more ... proper, intentional, or perhaps demeaning, I would say: Meyh-oh-nayz.
ˈmæɹi
Is basically Mehr-ee, as I say all of these.
ˈmɛɹi
To me, this also sounds like two syllables, Meyh-uh-ree, though I can at least tell that pitch wise, it is in between the other two.
So, to my ear, if you were to say airy or very, I'd basically be hearing you add in an additional 'uh' syllable in the middle of the words, along with the pitch differences.
So I've been talking to myself for a while out loud now...
I agree with the 'uh' insertion. The word seems as if someone added a neural sound to stretch the vowel without adding another syllable though.
As for marry and merry I definitely hear a vowel color change. Merry is 'brighter' and I hear a definite 'ɛ' as in bed; and marry/Mary a neutral ʌ or ə; the vowel in Mary sounds longer, as if prolonged by inserting an 'uh' to enunciate (maybe over-) clearly.
Oh and in response to the rhymes. To my ear weary does not rhyme with the rest of your examples but weary does rhyme with teary. Berry only rhymes with ferry, Larry, and Harry. And Fairy rhymes with hairy but not the others.
Ah, you bring up a good point with 'weary'.
Sort of like 'mayonnaise' for myself, I will just sometimes shift the vowel sound.
Sometimes, its 'weer-ee', sometimes its 'wehr-ee'.
'weer' being the same as in queer, 'kweer', but without q/'k', and 'wehr' again being like mare, 'mehr', but just with a 'w' instead of an 'm', so 'wehr', I guess also like werewolf, or just where.
I'm not sure if that's a weird personal quirk of mine, or a general PNW accent thing, I can just say that I grew up hearing about half of people pronounce it one way, half pronounce it the other way, so the way i 'solved' this 'problem' was to... just sometimes flip between both, trying to match whoever I was speaking with.
I would actually have to look it up to see what the dictionary correct pronunciation is, hah!
Also, it would seem that for words actually spelled *airy, you pronounce them all the same, with what I am understanding as roughly an additional -uh syllable... hey its a consistent rule and makes sense!
Then *★rry words are also all rhyming for you, which is again a consistent spelling to pronunciation rule, just with the different vowel pitch or brightness or color, that to my ear does not have an -uh insertion.
But uh ... assuming you meant 'neutral sound' not 'neural sound'... I think when two vowels are sort of rolled or blended together, this is called a 'dipthong' in phonetics.
There is some specific term for this, and I think the extent to which they are smoothly blended, vs rendered as sort of two distinct syllables... there's also some term for that.
So... what is probably happening is that you have a larger phoneme library than me, a larger set of total distinct sounds you are used to making words with, and this is basically a foreign, near incomprehensible concept to me, sort of like taking a native Japanese speaker and trying to teach them how to make a clear distinction between 'r' and 'l'.
Like uh, when I learned a bit of Spanish... I just basically cannot roll my r's.
I would have to do like, weeks to months of intentional vocal training to actually teach myself how to properly roll my r's, with all possible proceeding and subsequent vowels, I can only do it with some, and it's basically like trying to make my mouth do a trick, do a cartwheel, vs just normally walking, if that makes any sense.
Grew up in Northern PA and Jersey here, and same, all 3 are pronounced differently.
I’m from the green zone but it should be blue honestly. Where even is the blue on this map?
There's a tiny community in Wisconsin that has the Delco accent. It's there.
You can't see it because this is a photo from a book that was released back in like 2013 with a ton of various images that more better utilized the colors.
Example:
OP's image must have been stolen and reuploaded again and again and again to get us where we are today.
Not just that, there is a neat quiz that tries to predict where you are from, based on how you pronounce various words!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html
(I see that it is now behind a paywall... 😞)
Why is blue in the key when there's no blue on the map?
Probably a city that is too hard to make out with so few pixels. I would assume Boston, because it would be Boston.
Or maybe they included it because some areas have marry pronounced differently, but forgot to include one for Mary being pronounced differently.
Can confirm as someone from Massachusetts I pronounce all three differently
TIL that the greatest state in the union knows how to correctly pronounce three distinctly different words...
I think we can all agree that Ohio sucks. Pic unrelated.
His name is...
Why does one state reject homonyms?
Unpopular opinion 1: the us should invite some Brits and learn to speak regular English again.
Unpopular opinion 2: the us should split up and adopt their local version of English as their official language.
The US has one of the oldest living dialects of English. Linguists argue whether Appalachian English is a mostly preserved dialect of 16th century Elizabethan English or an unusually conservative dialect of 18th century Colonial English.
Y'ont folks ta git back ta talkin right have em talk hillbilly.
US English is , in some cases, more conservative than British English. A lot of words in the us were used by those from the UK that came. But later fell out of fashion in the UK
Even more unpopular opinion: British royals should hire Americans to relearn those unfashionable words lol
You think English in the UK hasn't evolved in the last few hundred years?
Not to mention that despite the impact of TV and radio, UK accents are wildly variant and it's pretty much a guarantee that there'll be corners that don't make distinctions between at least two of these words.
There's no such thing as "regular English" in the UK; the Thames Estuary accent is prescriptivism, not regularity.
Sure it did, I'm saying it remained regular.
the us should invite some Brits and learn to speak regular English again.
Every state has to pick a different British dialect though
Can't wait for Black Country Texas. Going to be an insane sound with that southern drawl lol