[Ads-l] Crayon pronounced dialectally as crown

[Ben Zimmer]

The pronunciation of "crayon" was one of the questions in the Harvard
Dialect Survey conducted by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. Here are their
results of (self-reported) responses to the question:

http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_9.html (includes map)
9. crayon
a. [æ] as in "man" (1 syllable, "cran") (14.13%)
b. [ejɑ] (2 syllables, "cray-ahn") (48.64%)
c. [ejɒ] (2 syllables, "cray-awn", where the second syllable rhymes with
"dawn") (34.53%)
d. [aw] (I pronounce this the same as "crown") (1.46%)
e. other (1.24%)
(11514 respondents)

You can also see the breakdown by state -- here's Missouri:

http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/state_MO.html
9. crayon
a. [æ] as in "man" (1 syllable, "cran") (6.99%)
b. [ejɑ] (2 syllables, "cray-ahn") (39.86%)
c. [ejɒ] (2 syllables, "cray-awn", where the second syllable rhymes with
"dawn") (47.54%)
d. [aw] (I pronounce this the same as "crown") (4.98%)
e. other (0.62%)

Joshua T. Katz later replicated Vaux and Golder's survey questions with his
own widely circulated heat maps. Here's the "crayon" map:

https://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6#americans-cant-even-agree-how-to-pronounce-crayon-4

Here's a Language Log post I wrote in 2013 when Katz's maps went viral:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4676

--bgz

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:07 PM Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at mst.edu>
wrote:

> Would anyone be familiar with the U.S. dialectal pronunciation of
>
> crayon as crown?  A colleague at my university tells me her husband
>
> was at first puzzled and then in disbelief (and mightily amused) when
>
> he first heard her refer to a crown (crayon).  She grew up in Springfield,
> Missouri
>
> (SW part of the state), as did her sister, who also says crown.  So too:
> the baby
>
> sitter who took care of her way back when.
>
>
>
> Another member of our community also says crown (crayon) and grew up
>
> in central Missouri.
>
>
>
> Can anyone share any information on this dialectal feature?
>
>
>
>

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