this nytimes article about american regional accents is interesting. as a louisvillian there have been times i've had people give me "where the heck are you from?" looks b/c of isolated, random words that somehow got into my pronunciation (and have since been somewhat smoothed over). off the top of my head: - "crayon": used to pronounce as "crown" - "sentence": inexplicably, used to pronounce as a very hillbilly-sounding "sint-ince" - "Iraq": not sure how people pronounce this, but I used to pronunce it as "EYE-rack" which I think is more hillbilly than the pronunciation "Ih-rack" - "Louisville": and of course everyone knows that natives pronounce this not as "Loo-ee-vill" but as "Loo-uh-vuhl".