Josh asked where I was from at one point, and when I told him, he said, “Oh, General Western. So you have ‘cot-caught’ merger, and ‘Mary-merry-marry’ merger?” I evidently did, though I didn’t know what those were until he explained that some dialects use different vowels for “cot” and “caught” and for each of the “Marys.”
I wonder if there is a good book on dialects.
