Pronunciations of Water

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi, this is Toni. I’m from San Diego, California.

Hi, Toni. Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have two very good friends of mine, and one is from New Jersey, and the other one is born and raised here in San Diego, California.

And they use a term, wooder, for the word water.

I’ve always wondered where this came from, and since they’re from two different parts of the country, it just wasn’t lining up.

Can you guys help me with that?

Yes, we absolutely can.

Although I’m utterly mystified about the San Diegan who says, who says it’s wooder.

Am I getting that right?

Wooder?

It’s wooder.

It’s like wood, W-O-O-D, and then E-R.

Yeah.

The New Jersey one makes perfect sense.

It’s part of the country, eastern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia maybe, parts of southern New Jersey where they do say wooder.

It’s this long-time established pronunciation.

I’ve got records of it going back to at least the 60s, probably earlier than that.

But linguists didn’t really start to do these atlases in full until the middle of the last century.

In any case, so Wooter makes sense.

I can only guess that the San Diegan has some kind of family connection or school connection to that part of the country.

And that’s the reason they say it, because it is not common for people in California to say Wooter instead of water or any of the other pronunciations.

By the way, just so you know, there are about 15 pronunciations of the word water in this country.

Seriously, I kid you not.

It depends on your dialect and depends on your location and a few other factors.

But yeah, about 15.

Well, thank good for context so I know what they’re wanting.

Yeah, usually it’s not an issue.

And most of the pronunciations just kind of slip by unremarked upon.

But there’s a thing that happens.

First, we take the prestige language of the people around us.

Like anybody who’s got power or that we admire or somehow influences our life, we tend to adopt their speech habits.

And then in a region, we often have what’s called leveling, where everyone who speaks a little differently kind of modifies their speech so that everyone sounds a little more like each other.

We do this for group cohesion and a bunch of other factors.

In any case, so that’s why you can end up with something like people in southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania saying water instead of water.

And so they knowingly say it, even though the New Jerseyan is no longer in New Jersey.

He’s here in San Diego.

He will still continue and get ribbing from it.

Everyone, oh, Wooder, what’s that?

Do you say Hooder?

Do you say footer?

You know, and he’ll still say Wooder.

Yeah, and we hang on to our stuff.

Sometimes we’re proud of it.

It’s who we are.

It’s a form of identity.

Sometimes we can’t shake it, and so we just own it because we can’t really get rid of it.

We don’t know how to adopt the other pronunciation that people expect from us.

Yeah, we don’t even hear ourselves.

Yeah, sometimes we, yeah.

Sometimes I love that about sociolinguistics research when you say to someone, you say wooder.

And they’re like, no, I don’t.

No, I don’t.

I say wooder.

And you’re like, no, you do.

And you show them the tape, like the audio file where you can see the waveforms.

And they’re like, yeah, no, that’s not wooder.

And I’m like, no, that’s wooder.

So you’re saying that it came from some sort of model that we would want to pronounce these words.

Are they saying it in kingdoms?

Are they saying it in England, the East Coast?

For this particular pronunciation, I don’t have a strong connection to any particular part of the United Kingdom.

However, there are settlement patterns that heavily influence how we speak in this country, particularly on the East Coast where the settlement histories are older.

And that part of the country has a lot of Scots-Irish background.

But that’s not to say this is exactly where it came from.

Sometimes these things just occur.

People admire them or like them or adopt the pronunciations just for other reasons.

And they build and grow.

And like I said, 15 pronunciations of this word around the country.

If you know where people say water a certain way, you can often narrow their geographic origins down very precisely.

Thank you for the call.

If you find out anything more about this San Diegan who says wooder for water, send us a line, all right?

I sure will.

Thanks, you guys so much.

Love this show.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Come see us sometime in San Diego, okay?

Bye-bye.

Sounds good.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

By the way, if you are a San Diegan who says wooder for water and you’re from here, let us know.

I need more data on this.

877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.