How do you pronounce milk?

[goldenecho]

Quick pronunciation survey - what state (or country if not in the US) are you in, and how do you pronounce milk?  Is it with short i sound (rhyming with silk), or with short e sound like melk (rhyming with elk).

Thanks.

[alisoncooks]

Third option: southern/NC, almost-2-syllable pronunciation of  meee-ulk.  😂

(I rhyme it with silk, fyi.)

Edited February 26, 2023 by alisoncooks

[historically accurate]

Illinois/Wisconsin border area: milk rhymes with silk.

[Spryte]

Mid-Atlantic and Southwest. Rhymes with silk. 

[Spryte]

3 minutes ago, alisoncooks said:

Third option: southern/NC, almost-2-syllable pronunciation of  meee-ulk.  😂

(I rhyme it with silk, fyi.)

That’s the other pronunciation that came to mind here, too!

[Pawz4me]

9 minutes ago, alisoncooks said:

Third option: southern/NC, almost-2-syllable pronunciation of  meee-ulk.  😂

I think I rhyme it with silk, but I probably say it more like ^this.^ LOL

[mom31257]

I'm in GA and grew up in TN. I pronounce it rhyming with silk. My dh grew up in southern Ohio and rhymes it with silk. 

My best friend and I just had this discussion last weekend! She grew up in Chicago and moved to the south in her teen years. She rhymes it with elk. 

[MercyA]

Indiana, milk often rhymes with "elk" here.

We also say "ornch juice." 🙂 

[barnwife]

It definitely, 100% rhymes with silk. The "melk" pronunciation absolutely grates on me ears. It's worse than nails on a chalkboard for me. I know it's normal in places, but anytime I heard someone say it "melk" I absolutely correct it mentally. (Note: I'd never do so aloud.)
 

[Indigo Blue]

Southern NC. I actually pronounce it with one syllable, rhyming with silk! Lots of people say mee-ilk around here, though. 
 

Dh says bank as a two syllable word. His accent is strong. Our two sons have a milder accent. I have a medium-ish accent, but I DO say milk with one syllable. 

[Katy]

Rhymes with Silk. Grew up in rural North Florida with a thick Southern accent but my mom was from the Midwest 

[AmandaVT]

New England (have lived in both southern and northern) rhymes with silk.

[Drama Llama]

So, if someone's accent means that they pronounce milk differently, wouldn't they pronounce silk differently too?  It seems like they would still rhyme.  

[rebcoola]

PNW and it rhymes with Silk

[maize]

14 hours ago, BandH said:

So, if someone's accent means that they pronounce milk differently, wouldn't they pronounce silk differently too?  It seems like they would still rhyme.  

Not necessarily. Milk is much more of an everyday word, and those tend to be more prone to local variants and shifts. Language is primarily oral, we talk the way others around us talk. But words we don't hear often may not get pronounced with as much of the local color because they might be more familiar from print. In addition, si could trend in a different direction fro mi.

Apparently melk is becoming more common in Canada as part of an overall vowel shift trend, I found several articles calling it "the great Canadian Vowel shift." The original Great Vowel Shift was responsible for quite a lot of the poor mapping of standardized English spellings to modern pronunciation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift#:~:text=The first phase of the,%2Fiː uː%2F became diphthongs.

 

 

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by maize

[KungFuPanda]

15 minutes ago, BandH said:

So, if someone's accent means that they pronounce milk differently, wouldn't they pronounce silk differently too?  It seems like they would still rhyme.  

This is an excellent point. 

[ScoutTN]

52 minutes ago, alisoncooks said:

Third option: southern/NC, almost-2-syllable pronunciation of  meee-ulk.  😂

(I rhyme it with silk, fyi.)

This! Middle TN.

[twovetteslater]

South-central Iowa: milk rhymes with silk.

[mom2scouts]

Ohio. Probably closer to rhyming with elk here.

[Kalmia]

Maine: Milk with a short "I" rhyming with silk.

[Arcadia]

1 hour ago, alisoncooks said:

Third option: southern/NC, almost-2-syllable pronunciation of  meee-ulk.  😂

(I rhyme it with silk, fyi.)

Same way though my husband and I were from Asia. 

[Melissa Louise]

Australia, short i sound.

I think there are a couple of states here where the short i might have more of a hint of the short e.

[Harriet Vane]

1 hour ago, MercyA said:

Indiana, milk often rhymes with "elk" here.

We also say "ornch juice." 🙂 

Chicagoan here. Same. 

Remembering back to my little sister, who persisted for many, many years to call it: "nelk."

[Amethyst]

Milk rhymes with silk. Pennsylvanai

[Ann.without.an.e]

 

[Terabith]

Southwest Virginia, but grew up in West Tennessee.  Milk rhymes with silk.

[EKS]

West coast. Milk rhymes with ilk, bilk, and silk.

[eagleynne]

Southwest Indiana here. Milk rhymes with silk.

[Kidlit]

2 hours ago, Pawz4me said:

I think I rhyme it with silk, but I probably say it more like ^this.^ LOL

Two-syllable Alabamian here, though I hear it as rhyming with silk. 

[Jean in Newcastle]

Milk, ilk and silk all have a short i sound. 
 

I did not grow up in the US and my parents came from different regions of the US. 

[Laura Corin]

Southern England. Silk.

[Elizabeth86]

2 hours ago, MercyA said:

Indiana, milk often rhymes with "elk" here.

We also say "ornch juice." 🙂 

Strange. We live in the south and I say milk that rhymes with silk. Dh does too even though his people are from up north. Now, for whatever reason all 4 of my kids say milk that rhymes with elk. No idea why.

[Lady Florida.]

Rhymes with silk, central Florida. 

 

[knitgrl]

2 hours ago, Ann.without.an.e said:

 

I was going to waste so much time looking this video up. Thanks for doing that for me. 😆

Edited February 26, 2023 by knitgrl

[prairiewindmomma]

I say milk/silk but most of my extended family says milk/elk. It’s a generational divide, I think, in the Plains state community I grew up in.

You can pretty much guarantee that the elk crowd will also say:

”crick” for creek, “warsh” for wash and a few other things 

There are also some distinct phrases that you can sometimes still hear in the hollers of Appalachia that tie back to older  English phrases like “of a morning” that are fairly unique to my home region.

 

[knitgrl]

WNY here. Milk rhymes with silk. But my father says "cherry" kind of more like "churry," which I suspect might be more of a generational/upbringing thing, as his parents were older when they had him. His mother pronounced it like that, too.

[fraidycat]

Canadian prairies. Short i, rhymes with silk.

[KidsHappen]

Middle TN. I say milk like silk. I have lived all over the country and I don't think I have ever noticed anyone pronouncing it any other way. I have heard young children kind of stretch out the i so it is more like miiilk.

[Ann.without.an.e]

3 hours ago, knitgrl said:

I was going to waste so much time looking this video up. Thanks for doing that for me. 😆

It’s all I could think about when I saw the title 😂

[MercyA]

.

Edited March 11, 2023 by MercyA

[maize]

Anyone who dislikes linguistic shifts and feels words should stay the same and be pronounced the "right" way should be pleased to know that "melk" is just a return to "milk"'s roots, throwing off the new-fangled short i pronunciation (such an abhorrent innovation, kids these days...at least the Dutch kept saying it properly 😁)

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by maize

[stephanier.1765]

Silk, North Florida.

[GailV]

Northern Indiana growing up, I rhyme it with "silk". Mom grew up in southern Indiana and had quite a few Appalachian throw backs, but I suspect she concentrated on getting rid of them. Lord knows I developed a habit of using subjunctive tense from her ("if I *were*"), which I imagine wasn't standard issue in rural southern Indiana. 

Dh (St Louis) also rhymes it with "silk" but his sister is die-hard "melk"

Dh's family is also likely to say "warsh", "farty"(40). I can really hear generational shifts in that family in pronunciations and usage.

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by GailV

[kirstenhill]

Minnesota.... Rhymes with elk for me.  I pronounce all the other "ilk" words like silk with the expected short i. 

[Myra]

Upstate NY:  

Milk rhyming with elk here.

pronounce all the other "ilk" words like silk with the expected short i. 

[Lady Florida.]

1 hour ago, GailV said:

I can really hear generational shifts

 

Re generational shifts in accents:

 

One of my maternal grandparents grew up in Brooklyn the other in the Bronx. Both were children of Italian immigrants. My grandfather said woik (work) and joik (jerk), my grandmother said burl for boil, winder for window. She could not pronounce the oi sound and had a friend named Joyce she called Jerce. If you've ever seen All in the Family they sounded like Archie and Edith. Those are both accents that are pretty much gone from Brooklyn and the Bronx. I don't think you hear them anymore from anyone except the very old.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Lady Florida.

[SKL]

Great lakes.

Milk rhymes with silk.

BUT, when I was a little kid, a lot of kids called it melk.  Possibly including us.  I don't know why.  Maybe we had some friends or relatives who grew up elsewhere.  Or maybe "ilk" is harder for little kids to say.

[Arcadia]

@maize my kids use the german pronunciation as well sometimes since they took German classes from kindergarten age. 

Edited February 26, 2023 by Arcadia

[SquirrellyMama]

I have lived in S. Illinois and Central Iowa. I pronounce it both ways: milk (silk) and melk. I also do this with other words.  Maybe, because I learned to read and speak in S. Illinois, but have lived most of my life in Central Iowa. There is a definite pronunciation difference between the two areas.

Kelly

[Guest]

Mid-Atlantic; short i prononciation. However, there are regional dialects that include the “melk” pronunciation. My FOO did use many of them but I changed my speech as an adult and dropped the Baltimore/Eastern Shore words. Some of these were: “warsh” for wash; “wooder” for water; and the ubiquitous exchange of a “d” sound for th - “Der” for there, “Dem” for them. I also de-regionalized “against” and “closet”. 
 

My dh’s family does not easily distinguish the sounds of short e and short i; they don’t seem to have phonemic awareness of the difference. One sibling’s name has a short i sound in it but they all (and now me by extension) pronounce it as if it were an e. So (this is not the name) but if it were Kristen and they all pronounced it like “Kresten”.