xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.
Like the other reply said, it’s all over the place in Australia. You can easily tell a tourist—especially an American tourist—because they’ll say “can-bair-a” instead of “can-bruh”.
It’s not unusual in the UK, too. Worcester is Wost-er, Magdalen(e) is mawd-lin, and Leicester is lester.
OMG, that makes it so much worse. If someone tells you about a specific place, and you want to look it up later, you have absolutely zero chance of ever spelling it correctly. Good luck typing lester or woster in Wikipedia or Maps.
As it happens, that worked just fine:
Worcester is famous even outside the UK because of Worcestershire sauce (pronounced “woster-shuh” sauce), the condiment named after the region. And because the name is on the bottle, it’s easy for people to remember.