I found this really interesting: The most important thing to notice about the pin-pen merger is that it only happens before nasals. This means that "pit" and "pet" are unaffected by the merger. Only "n" and "m" are really affected, since there are not many words ending in "eng".
Well... I don't find it so surprising that the home of Anglia and the Angles hasn't changed its pronunciation of Angle-land as much.
Some mercenaries (if you believe Bede) consisting of Angles from Anglia, Saxons from Lower Saxony, and Jutes from Jutland crossed the channel to fight for various Celtic rulers following the power vacuum left by the Romans leaving Britain. The mercenaries eventually took over part of it, and that part became known as Angle-land. (Of course, this is a gross oversimplification.) The descendants of the mercenaries became known as Anglo-Saxons (not enough Jutes, I guess).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Brit...
From South of Mason Dixie line and anecdata of one, but don’t pronounce pen like pin or English like Ingrid (or -ing).
// Of course the beginnings and endings make one think of big endian and little Indian.
But if I'm talking to my mom on the phone, it all comes back.
I can almost completely hide it at work if I want but I let some through bc people like a little. If I talked to my coworkers the way I talk to my siblings though it would be a disaster because of prejudice around our dialect.