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verbs - The pronunciation of "ate"


I was talking to some friends and I said "I ate (/et/) chocolate yesterday...". Then my friend corrected me: "you ate (/eit/) chocolate...". I repeated my sentence with the /eit/ pronunciation and we moved on.


But later at home I checked some dictionaries and online debates on the subject, and now I'd like to know if it's possible or not to pronounce ate as /et/ rather than /eit/.



Answer



That's just a regional pronunciation. It's non-standard but not completely uncommon. If I had to guess, I'd say rural midwestern America, where a lot of the different vowel sounds all get pronounced the same --although Peter Shor's comment above seems to imply it might also be a Cockney accent. (I'm not all that familiar with British accents, so I don't know which might fit best.)


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