Where You Live Might Determine How You Speak

On Monday evening, we got a notification in the newsroom of The Bob Fuller Media Center that there was an active police situation in Bedford, New Hampshire, and ran the required emergency alert of it over the air. Then a thing happened, the switchboard and our socials/emails lit up with confused callers, and eventually the Biddeford, Maine, police department.

No one was confused about why we aired an emergency alert message. They were confused as to where!

Folks in Bedford may have gotten the message right away, but the local dialect in Biddeford often pronounces the town name such that IT sounds too like "Bid-ferd" or...Bedford!

Hence the confusion.

While a police situation is no laughing matter, it is kind of funny how many of us state to state and even town to town pronounce various words and place names differently!

We thought of a few:

Some folks in towns like Madbury, Salisbury, Newburyport would pronounce the "bury" like "berry" and some "ber-rie"... similarly some of us would say Strawberry, Cranberry, Blueberry, etc., one of those two ways or the other.

How about Peabody, Massachusetts? Aunt vs. ANT? Route? Roof? Water?

Can you think of any?