What do you call your mom's sister? (or your dad's)

Aunt = Ant/Antee
Drawer = Draurer
Insurance = InShurence

Here's one for ya.

There's a town right outside Austin named Manor.....only it's pronounced Maynor.

No idea why it's pronounced that way. When I see the word manor now, I always want to say maynor.

I actually said that a few weeks ago while visiting NJ. A friend lives in a developement called "The Manor" or something like that.

He looked at me really weird when I said it, and it took me awhile to figure out why.

Much like the time I searched for Houston street in NYC. A man listened to my pronunciation, puzzled, and then he snapped. "Oh, you mean Hous(hous as in louse)ton Street."

lol.....my first husbands middle name was Houston....pronounced the NYC way.

It's only in Texas that the perfectly good Scots name of Houston [say: How-stone] is mispronounced as Hewstone. My understanding is that this is due to the fact that old Sam Houston was no great scholar and would mispronounce his own name that way. Apparently no one dared to call him on it and the strange pronunciation stuck and became standard in the US. If you look at the spelling, you can see that, phonetically, the Texas pronunciation makes no sense.

Oh like the rest of the words we use all make sense.

Point taken.

When I was visiting South Carolina I was in Horry county.

I learned quickly that people get awfully upset when you pronounce the county name the way it is spelled.

How do they say it?

My family is from Yorkshire, so I had to say anti.

Drawer - Draw

Insurance - Insur'nce

i'm guessing "orry", which is the way former NBA player Robert Horry's name is pronounced...

Would Horry rhyme with "sorry" then?

I've always said "in-SUR-ance." I just asked my North Texan husband, and he says it the same way.

And drawer is pronounced "drore" here in Oklahoma.

Aunt is "ant." ("Ahnt" is considered very pretentious.)

Sounds like you're from somewhere in Maine or New Hampshire, not Yorkshire.

no, "corey"...

it is oh-REE county (with a strong accent placed on the second syllable).

I wanted to pronounce it Ahnt, but it always came out Tia.

Aunt = Ant/Antee
Drawer = Draurer
Insurance = InShurence

Ceili, I pronounce all three the same way, except for the Antee, which I never say atall.

I've always wondered why Cairo, Illinois, is pronounced Kay-row (like the old syrup brand) especially when the southern part of the state is known as Egypt, or Little Egypt. Even folks on national news channels pronounce it Karo.

Someone mentioned "awnt" as the way some pronounce "aunt", but couldn't recollect the locale. I've heard Garrison Keillor use that pronunciation on his Prairie Home Companion program which is based in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Whether that's just him, or a Minnesotan thing, I haven't a clue. He lived overseas for a number of years and perhaps he picked it up wherever he was at (which is how folks in my area commonly end sentences.)

My cellphone died repeatedly a few months ago, and in the series of calls it took to get a working one (after three duds), while waiting for one of the diagnostic tests they ran to complete itself, I got talking with the phone guy, who had a strong Indian (as in India) accent, about our repective weathers, and he told me his was hot too. I asked him where he was, and he proudly said he was in "Tuck-son", now since my folks retired south of Tucson, I know from fisthand experience that very very few Arizonans pronounce it that way, but if his cowboy fantasies were that strong, I wasn't going to disillusion him.

Don't tell John or Angelica that.

Ahnt for me as well. (South of England).

Grass is grarse, path is parth, and I say inSHUR'nce.

Also garridge (garage) and enn-velope.

There are many regional dialects over here....one worth noting is the letter g being isolated/emphasised in the north.
Draw a line across the middle of England, just south of Birmingham (burr ming-um), and the majority of people above this line emphasise the letter g in some words, eg.... singer becomes sing-guh, ringer ring-guh, bringing bring-ging-g.

Slightly further north, the oh sound becomes er.
Toast is terst, post perst.

And.... if Dionne Warwick had been born and raised here, she'd have been called Dionne Worrick.