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Comment by patorjk | Hacker News Reader

I was born in southwest and moved to the east coast as a teen. I spent 30 years pronouncing pen as "pin". Even when my wife pointed it out to me, I literally couldn't hear the difference at first. She had to slowly sound it out for me. It was weird to discover I'd been pronouncing it differently from other people.

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I am a New Zealander and apparently we also say pin when we mean pen. I thought the broad NZ accent wasn't something that I was really afflicted with, but in an airline lounge in Seoul I was disavowed of this notion when the English businessman whom I was trying to borrow a pen from couldn't understand why I would expect him to have a pin (or indeed how I proposed to fill out a form using one).

As a kiwi who moved to Australia as a kid, the pin/pen and six/sex (Australians make the number six sound rather hilarious) dichotomy was a constant source of amusement to me :)

Want some chups from the fush and chup shop bro? Or I'll just pop down to the dairy instead ;)

I once was working in a deli in Ireland and I got a customer who asked me for a rep (or was it a rap?). I was seriously puzzled until one of the people who was with her told me she wanted a Wrap and she was from New Zealand.

Kiwi english is one of the most interesting english accents to me. It seems like you guys have undergone a whole new vowel shift.

I spent my formative years in the South. I went to speech therapy to rid myself of my accent.

One of the best exercises was learning to speak with different accents in different dialects. This has actually come in very handy.

Which do you pick as your default for new encounters?

A tempered Bostonian. If it is formal, Broadcast English. If I'm out and about, I'll do a mild form of the regional accent, as appropriate.

Off topic, but the missus gets a kick out of it. It's a valuable skill. I do a mean Down East accent, which is different than the rest of Maine. (I live here now.) With practice, you get an ear for the variations.

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