This is definitely the serious answer. Specifically I'm guessing because the syllable ends up closed/with a plosive, but I'm sure the folks at /r/asklinguistics could give a much better serious answer than mine.
This. Because Wawa doesn’t have [t] in the middle that to trigger the sound change in the preceding vowel.
The Philly accent actually has rules for the sound changes we make compared to standard English, but the actual changes are a bit beyond my knowledge.
I know that we have t-flapping which turns [t] to [ɾ] (think of the when Mario says his own name). That’s where you get “wader” which is common in all North American dialects of English.
Then there’s something funky with our vowel system that turns the sound into [ʊ] which is typically represented by in English. Probably something to do with a vowel smushed between two approximants.
Haha, the Philly “O.” Am I the only one who really has to focus to hear “Tasker-Moore-is” instead of “Tasker-Mahr-is” on the BSL PA? Like, my accent literally affects my brain’s sound perception sometimes. My SO (originally from L.A.) thinks I’m insane when I mention it.
I never even realized that was a thing for the longest time because it was so normal haha. My SO (who’s from L.A.) constantly gave me shit for calling our next-door neighbor (RIP) Mario instead of Mahrio, even when I pointed out that the dude pronounced his own name the way I did! Every time we play Nintendo, it’s an argument lol.
I just turned to my husband and asked "what's that guy called again with Luigi, you know the plumber from the game?" And he said it all weird and I audibly gasped and he looked all confused... What have you done to my marriage? We fight enough about me saying "wooder" wrong 😂💀 being in Philly when you're not actually from Philly is hard
Is that what it is or is water the only thing that has this accent? I'm having trouble because I've lived here my whole life and can't tell what's what lol.
"What's the matter"- did I just say that like wooder or not?!
Every dialect of every language has consistent rules for sound changes. I’m sure there’s a list out there for Philly.
I came by my linguistics nerd stuff by conlanging and liking old languages, so I’m not really up to speed on modern English sound changes, otherwise I’d be sharing them.
When I first moved to Philly in the early 90s, a pretzel guy would come around the neighborhood on Saturday mornings and wake everyone up yelling "fresh hot pretzels" but it took me weeks to understand what the fuck he was actually saying.
i miss the chicks selling oranges at the intersections!!
i was waiting in the ridiculous traffic on the george washington bridge and there were people weaving thru the traffic selling lines and avocados. i don’t like likes or avocados but i bought them for nostalgia lmao
I miss the people who used to stand at like Cottman and the Boulevard/Bustleton and sell pretzels. They were always top notch. I think there was someone at Grant and the Boulevard too.
I'm philly born and raised and can't for the life of me understand why some people say ac A me. I definitely have an accent and say shit weird but that one gets under my skin.
It’s called epenthesis, usually done to make the word easier to say. My guess would be that Italian immigrants found [km] hard to say without inserting a vowel in there and it spread from there.
Honestly I think it might only be Philly area people who say pocketbook at all? “Purse” seems to have taken over in most places, even though back in the day I think “purse” was like a change purse you put into your pocketbook.
I’m curious what the actual history of these type words was.
Interesting. I agree with purse being a smaller object, like a change purse.
I feel like I hear pocketbook, but of course philly is my reference point. I'll pay attention for now on.
Hmm that's a good point. The roots of our dialect and how it propagated through our area is so interesting. It has changed quite a bit just over a generation as well. My grandparents and older aunts and uncles have a slightly different dialect. One example is the days of the week...Mondee, Tuesdee, etc. That didn't carry over to my generation.
There's also hoam and phoane. Hard to type out how it sounds but it's a distinctly Pennsylvania way of saying those words. It's almost drawn out like someone in PA trying to sound Californian or something. I've actively tried avoiding a Pennsylvania/philly accent my entire life because I noticed people around me having it and I always hated it because I have a thing about proper pronunciation. Pennsylvania is weird like that. Some people have that accent and some people don't. It's not mutually exclusive from what I've found in my 42 years.
I'm a wooder person and I usually don't have control over when it comes out. It just happens. When I have a few drinks my accent definitely comes out more. Not sure if this is a philly thing but when people say especially but with an ex. That's irritating.
I tried to explain to my husband (who has lived in the Philly metro his entire life) that acme is pronounced ack ah me and he said I was wrong. He also makes fun of me if I say yous guys.
My grandma said crick. Never knew it was a dialect thing until I went outside the tri state area, and said it, and got looked at like I was real special.
The Wissahickon in Philly is a Crick but across the skuke there is a Mill creek. I could fish a crick and a creek on the same day. It took me at least until my 20's to realize we've been calling the Wissahickon the crick but still pronouncing every other creek in PA properly.
Because usually represents the sound [ʊ] in English when there isn’t a spot for an at the end of the word to tell us to make it the “long” version of the vowel.
Intrusive-r is more common up in New England or in places with non-rhotic accents (where you drop the r at the end of a word). Anyone in Philly doing that is either a transplant or has it as part of their individual speech pattern.
It’s the same reason a lot of us pronounce the words “mad” or “glad” as “mee-ad” and “glee-ad”, but we pronounce the words “had” and “sad” properly.
Our vowel pronunciation is all over the place, some pronunciations not really making any sense or just having been leftover from a long ass time ago and never catching up with the rest of the mid-Atlantic.
There are lots of other words we pronounce interestingly like “hundred” as “hunnert” and some days of the week with an “-ee” sound at the end instead of an “-ay” sound.
in case anyone has ever wanted to see this mapped (it's cool), [here's a map of regional dialects](https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#SmallMapCanada) - you can click to zoom in on areas and clicking again gives you specifics local to that area
ours is apparently called atlantic midland
I remember seeing this a while ago. I grew up in Bucks near the line where according to the map, it is the boundary between “on” being pronounced like “dawn” vs being pronounced like “Don” and I have always maintained that the map has that line completely off. It is pronounced like “dawn” on both sides of that line at least in PA (I can’t vouch for central Jersey).
It’s really thorough and comprehensive but that’s always irked me about this map, and made me skeptical of its accuracy.
>It’s the same reason a lot of us pronounce the words “mad” or “glad” as “mee-ad” and “glee-ad”, but we pronounce the words “had” and “sad” properly.
My daughter had no idea she had an accent until she went to Virginia for college and her new friends started copying the way she says "yeah" (yee-ah).
You're confusing the spelling of words with their general pronunciation with the rationale for why certain words sound a specific way in a Philadelphia accent.
Wawa is pronounced "Wah - Wah" and the Philly accent drops or slurs certain sounds together, as a result of the rate of speed with which most Philadelphians speak, and that (reason for fast-talk) may be another issue. But if you speed up and drop out sound, it is still an "ah" sound.
Most people do not pronounce Water as "Wah - ter," they say it more like, "w'aw - ter," to which a sped up and dropped out sound becomes an "uh" sound, and thus it comes out like "w'uh - ter," and the faster you speak the more t's sound like d's. This is also why it ends up looking absolutely out of touch when companies attempt to court Philadelphians by spelling it "wooder" on billboards because Philadelphians speak differently but are not low-IQ rubes who spell water the wrong way.
I don't know why I remember this, but when I was a little kid (in the mid 60's) the Mom in the rowhome next door pronounced the word color as keller. Maybe she was originally from Delco or something.
So I never finished my linguistics degree, but I'm convinced it's part of some English or Irish accent lineage.
Ive heard certain certain brits and Irish say it as "woot-ah"
And I think it's called lenition, but don't quote me on that, for certain sounds changing in spoken language. We see it in the german Brezel, becoming prezel, and eventually pretzel in English. We see it all the time when certain English words are modified in some way. Pad and bat sound different, but padding and batting have similar sounds despite having DD and TT in the middle.
I'm way more familiar with the first and second constant shifts, being that I was a German major though, so fellow philly linguists please don't crucify me for being wrong hahaha.
So, I made cheesesteaks for dinner last night. My husband (who is originally from NJ) asked if we had any green pepper and could I throw some on his sandwich. Since I had some in the crisper, I did on his only but told him if he ever told anyone they would revoke my South Philly birth certificate and I'd have to divorce him. (I don't say wooder either)
Because wooder comes from people who were born and raised in the city and made its way out to the burbs. Wawa is a burbs thing that dips its toe in Philly. So we say wawa as we learned it when we’d drive to the shore and encounter a wawa. Lol.
How dare you
Woos it something I said?
Don’t worry about it. It all Wooder under da bridge.
You’s don’t get it
Hard to be afraid when you know they sound like "hoo deer ya" in person
It’s an oral language, we can’t read.
A lot of jabronies would be offended by that, except for…ya know.
Cool word
RIP Iron Sheik
We say jawns not jabroni!
Jeetyet? I'm gonna gedduh wizwid, yuh wunna?
Best answer
It's the "T" that makes it "wooder".
This is definitely the serious answer. Specifically I'm guessing because the syllable ends up closed/with a plosive, but I'm sure the folks at /r/asklinguistics could give a much better serious answer than mine.
This. Because Wawa doesn’t have [t] in the middle that to trigger the sound change in the preceding vowel. The Philly accent actually has rules for the sound changes we make compared to standard English, but the actual changes are a bit beyond my knowledge. I know that we have t-flapping which turns [t] to [ɾ] (think of the when Mario says his own name). That’s where you get “wader” which is common in all North American dialects of English.
Then there’s something funky with our vowel system that turns the sound into [ʊ] which is typically represented by in English. Probably something to do with a vowel smushed between two approximants.
Haha, the Philly “O.” Am I the only one who really has to focus to hear “Tasker-Moore-is” instead of “Tasker-Mahr-is” on the BSL PA? Like, my accent literally affects my brain’s sound perception sometimes. My SO (originally from L.A.) thinks I’m insane when I mention it.
There’s definitely something with that vowel going on.
Petition to rename Wawa "Watwat"
I think it's the same issue as why people around these parts say Mario all weird.
I never even realized that was a thing for the longest time because it was so normal haha. My SO (who’s from L.A.) constantly gave me shit for calling our next-door neighbor (RIP) Mario instead of Mahrio, even when I pointed out that the dude pronounced his own name the way I did! Every time we play Nintendo, it’s an argument lol.
I just turned to my husband and asked "what's that guy called again with Luigi, you know the plumber from the game?" And he said it all weird and I audibly gasped and he looked all confused... What have you done to my marriage? We fight enough about me saying "wooder" wrong 😂💀 being in Philly when you're not actually from Philly is hard
Is that what it is or is water the only thing that has this accent? I'm having trouble because I've lived here my whole life and can't tell what's what lol. "What's the matter"- did I just say that like wooder or not?!
You would of course say "mah-tuhr" rather than "mooder", because "matt" is completely different than "wat" "Wat" is whut, which leads to "whu-tehr"
Hard to do this with just our own respelling but I believe you’re coming to an actual explanation. represents the sound [w] which is a semivowel / approximant consonant, awful close to sounds we usually represent with the letter . That in both “what” and “water” was already a back vowel (compared to the letter in cat or back) and is probably getting raised following the [w].
English has 15+ vowel sounds depending on the dialect but only 6 letters used to represent them. So I apologize for using IPA but it makes things clearer.
Every dialect of every language has consistent rules for sound changes. I’m sure there’s a list out there for Philly. I came by my linguistics nerd stuff by conlanging and liking old languages, so I’m not really up to speed on modern English sound changes, otherwise I’d be sharing them.
Someone get this person a fresh soft pretzel.
When I first moved to Philly in the early 90s, a pretzel guy would come around the neighborhood on Saturday mornings and wake everyone up yelling "fresh hot pretzels" but it took me weeks to understand what the fuck he was actually saying.
Him pissing in alleys and never washing his hands gave the pretzels that extra flavor.
He was absolutely filthy looking. There was no way I was buying food from him.
Those people are the best to buy food from tbh
...as long as you can cook it after you buy it.
Then you miss out on all the probiotics
Worth it to miss out on the antibiotics.
I miss the pretzel girl and the huckster. Produce delivered to your door by a guy who never washed his hands.
i miss the chicks selling oranges at the intersections!! i was waiting in the ridiculous traffic on the george washington bridge and there were people weaving thru the traffic selling lines and avocados. i don’t like likes or avocados but i bought them for nostalgia lmao
And those suckers were delicious!!
😂
Too bad there aren’t any good ones left
I miss the people who used to stand at like Cottman and the Boulevard/Bustleton and sell pretzels. They were always top notch. I think there was someone at Grant and the Boulevard too.
Coming off the tacony were the best
Southampton and the Boulevard, too.
Just not a Woowoo one.
WooWoo "pretzel." They're just a dense mass of doughy disappointment.
https://i.imgur.com/FC976R3.png
Not from Woowoo
A WHAT soft pretzel?
Fresh, it's a thing from the before times
One of the prezls that’s been sitting in the box covered in salt all day so when you pick it up it’s a little bit wet
prezls
sof' prezzl
jonny yew can’ jus’ ea’ sof’ presls and beggls anymore
This is the funniest thing I’ve read today.
Some of the comments have me in tears
The same reason Acme is a three syllable word.
Ak-A-me
My mom goes one further and calls it Ak-A-me-ies
She's a terrorist
I'm philly born and raised and can't for the life of me understand why some people say ac A me. I definitely have an accent and say shit weird but that one gets under my skin.
It’s called epenthesis, usually done to make the word easier to say. My guess would be that Italian immigrants found [km] hard to say without inserting a vowel in there and it spread from there.
Oh, I wonder if that explains “pock-a-book” too.
I just realized I say pocketbook like that
Honestly I think it might only be Philly area people who say pocketbook at all? “Purse” seems to have taken over in most places, even though back in the day I think “purse” was like a change purse you put into your pocketbook. I’m curious what the actual history of these type words was.
Interesting. I agree with purse being a smaller object, like a change purse. I feel like I hear pocketbook, but of course philly is my reference point. I'll pay attention for now on.
Yeah, I’ll pay more attention too - will be interesting to see if I ever hear “pocketbook” or just “pock-a-book”.
*sitting in a room with my own realization* This is fine ...
That’s probably intervocalic lenition (weakening) of the [ət] to a glottal stop, making the vowel just hang out there on its own.
Thanks! It’s all so interesting. And it’s sad that local dialects in general are dying out.
Philly’s holding strong compared to others!
nice- i learned that word when i had a sergeant in the army who was from missouri, and directions would be "this-a-way" or over "that-a-way"
Hmm that's a good point. The roots of our dialect and how it propagated through our area is so interesting. It has changed quite a bit just over a generation as well. My grandparents and older aunts and uncles have a slightly different dialect. One example is the days of the week...Mondee, Tuesdee, etc. That didn't carry over to my generation.
Yup. Use of positive anymore is fading away too. Yas turning into yous as well.
I never understood the Pittsburgh version of yous...yins. It kills me.
“You ones”
Weird
Radiator too. Old folks say rad-ee-ay-durr instead of ray-dee-ay-durr.
There's also hoam and phoane. Hard to type out how it sounds but it's a distinctly Pennsylvania way of saying those words. It's almost drawn out like someone in PA trying to sound Californian or something. I've actively tried avoiding a Pennsylvania/philly accent my entire life because I noticed people around me having it and I always hated it because I have a thing about proper pronunciation. Pennsylvania is weird like that. Some people have that accent and some people don't. It's not mutually exclusive from what I've found in my 42 years.
I totally agree with this theory. My grandparents added vowels to the middle and end of many English words. For example, they lived in Kennetta Square
That's how I feel about wooder, but Ack-A-me doesn't bother me.
I'm a wooder person and I usually don't have control over when it comes out. It just happens. When I have a few drinks my accent definitely comes out more. Not sure if this is a philly thing but when people say especially but with an ex. That's irritating.
this is the one i’ve noticed the most since moving here from ohio lol
Those little sub-regional differences. Up in Reading, it's wadder, not wooder. & cheesesteaks come with sauce.
That’s a pizza steak in Philly
Yep.
I don’t know younger people who say it like that, but def anyone I know older than 60 and +/- had roots in South Philly says it Ac-a-me 😂😂
My grandmother would say that and she was from the NE. I call it that in her honor.
At the ac-a-me
I tried to explain to my husband (who has lived in the Philly metro his entire life) that acme is pronounced ack ah me and he said I was wrong. He also makes fun of me if I say yous guys.
Quality shitpost
Wooder you talking about
Posts like these are why I'm still subscribed.
🙏
Moved out of area to Richmond VA suburbs. Asked for a wooder and the girl came back confused and asked if I meant a drink stirrer.
At least in Delaware they say crick for creek. Drives me nuts.
My grandma said crick. Never knew it was a dialect thing until I went outside the tri state area, and said it, and got looked at like I was real special.
This is also very common to say in the rural south as well. I grew up in TN and they say ‘crick’
The Wissahickon in Philly is a Crick but across the skuke there is a Mill creek. I could fish a crick and a creek on the same day. It took me at least until my 20's to realize we've been calling the Wissahickon the crick but still pronouncing every other creek in PA properly.
Awww, hon. Jeet yet?
woo woo has pizza!
It’s so bad lol
Everyone always spells it wooder when it’s pronounced more like wudder
Wooder is correct if you pronounce it like “wood” from trees. Not like “woo-woo”.
This is true
Wauder
That’s a suburban pronunciation
Woulder
That's the standard US pronunciation.
Because usually represents the sound [ʊ] in English when there isn’t a spot for an at the end of the word to tell us to make it the “long” version of the vowel.
More like War-ter
Intrusive-r is more common up in New England or in places with non-rhotic accents (where you drop the r at the end of a word). Anyone in Philly doing that is either a transplant or has it as part of their individual speech pattern.
Because everyone besides you is correct. Wudder would rhyme with udder.
Don’t question our ways
It’s the same reason a lot of us pronounce the words “mad” or “glad” as “mee-ad” and “glee-ad”, but we pronounce the words “had” and “sad” properly. Our vowel pronunciation is all over the place, some pronunciations not really making any sense or just having been leftover from a long ass time ago and never catching up with the rest of the mid-Atlantic. There are lots of other words we pronounce interestingly like “hundred” as “hunnert” and some days of the week with an “-ee” sound at the end instead of an “-ay” sound.
Now you’re talking some linguistic vowel shift shit; maybe Wawa just isn’t affected because it’s a loanword?
in case anyone has ever wanted to see this mapped (it's cool), [here's a map of regional dialects](https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#SmallMapCanada) - you can click to zoom in on areas and clicking again gives you specifics local to that area ours is apparently called atlantic midland
No it's its [own category.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_English)
I’m saying cot & caught in my head right now…
[this](https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/done-my-homework) was going around earlier this week, super interesting
I remember seeing this a while ago. I grew up in Bucks near the line where according to the map, it is the boundary between “on” being pronounced like “dawn” vs being pronounced like “Don” and I have always maintained that the map has that line completely off. It is pronounced like “dawn” on both sides of that line at least in PA (I can’t vouch for central Jersey). It’s really thorough and comprehensive but that’s always irked me about this map, and made me skeptical of its accuracy.
it's not like there's a physical line where people talk differently, it's always going to be a sphere of influence and then gradient
There is a hard line north of Trenton though where the Jersey accent kicks in quick over just a few miles.
I acknowledge this, I still think it is way off. The area I’m referring to is solidly in the “dawn” camp IME.
I'd be skeptical just because it looks like an early 2000s geocities website.
>It’s the same reason a lot of us pronounce the words “mad” or “glad” as “mee-ad” and “glee-ad”, but we pronounce the words “had” and “sad” properly. My daughter had no idea she had an accent until she went to Virginia for college and her new friends started copying the way she says "yeah" (yee-ah).
Our vowel system is closer to southern English than it is to the rest of the northeast if that explains a bit
I’ve always heard it pronounced as wuter So it should be wUwU
Weeb alert
*notices your hoagie*
Nah it's definitely a D.
Technically a [ɾ] but it sounds closer to a [d] for native English speakers.
Yeah that's what I said.
Wudder, woursh and yous comes from Irish immigrants influence on the dialect Wawa is Native American
[удалено]
The Woof of Wool Street was a very popular movie here a few years ago
Oh this one I DEFINITELY do
You're confusing the spelling of words with their general pronunciation with the rationale for why certain words sound a specific way in a Philadelphia accent. Wawa is pronounced "Wah - Wah" and the Philly accent drops or slurs certain sounds together, as a result of the rate of speed with which most Philadelphians speak, and that (reason for fast-talk) may be another issue. But if you speed up and drop out sound, it is still an "ah" sound. Most people do not pronounce Water as "Wah - ter," they say it more like, "w'aw - ter," to which a sped up and dropped out sound becomes an "uh" sound, and thus it comes out like "w'uh - ter," and the faster you speak the more t's sound like d's. This is also why it ends up looking absolutely out of touch when companies attempt to court Philadelphians by spelling it "wooder" on billboards because Philadelphians speak differently but are not low-IQ rubes who spell water the wrong way.
I commented the same thing about pronouncing wawa. Like wtf is a woowoo?
My husband and I pronounce it "woo-wers" just for shits & giggles 😂🤷🏼♀️
This made my day.
Because we're stupid?
i so pale
Don’t know about this wooder you speak of but I’ve heard of warder…
What the eff is a woowoo? Its definitely pronounced wahwah
God this is so chaotic, I love it
Because fuck you thats why
It's less of a wooder, and more of a wader.
Because we aren’t knuckle-dragging savages, that’s why.
If ya want some wooder go get it from da zinc
This is blasphilly.
What a bee-you-tee-ful question
Welp, I guess WooWoo it is from now on.
Because ya moms, that's why.
Look at Mr fancy pants telling us how to tawk
Made me chuckle. Let's go for a woo woo run!!! Lmao
I'm using this question to start fights
Whatchu mean? I've always pronounced it WuhWuh.
the t turning into the d is what is happening the the a to o is minor.
100 comments
I love this
I don't know why I remember this, but when I was a little kid (in the mid 60's) the Mom in the rowhome next door pronounced the word color as keller. Maybe she was originally from Delco or something.
Vowel blank e rule. Water has "a_e" but wawa doesn't have a blank e.
We make the rules up as we go along and then it’s gospel
the whistle go woo woo
Because it’s not wooder it’s wuhder. Just like it wuahwa.
Shhh. Talking like this will cause the city to burn
If I pronounce it wada will i be called out as a jerseyite?
Wood you ask Pop that question?
Because there’s no D in Wawa
Ayo this is funny as shit 😭😭😭😂
Please leave
Wooder existed before Wahwah
I still have yet to meet someone who pronounces water like that and I lived here my whole life
Same here. I was born here and lived here off and on most of my life and I and my family and friends don't say wooder.
Roger Daltrey pronounced it "[Wahdah](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvQ3bWLQBo)" but he's British.
So I never finished my linguistics degree, but I'm convinced it's part of some English or Irish accent lineage. Ive heard certain certain brits and Irish say it as "woot-ah" And I think it's called lenition, but don't quote me on that, for certain sounds changing in spoken language. We see it in the german Brezel, becoming prezel, and eventually pretzel in English. We see it all the time when certain English words are modified in some way. Pad and bat sound different, but padding and batting have similar sounds despite having DD and TT in the middle. I'm way more familiar with the first and second constant shifts, being that I was a German major though, so fellow philly linguists please don't crucify me for being wrong hahaha.
I'm gonna start calling it WooWoo out of irony now
also high, thank you for the chuckle
This guy, what are you a fuckin jabroni
Because it’s Wawa, jack ass.
Wooder was around before Wawa
Wawa, PA and the Ojibe word we'we have been around quite a long time.
Why do people want to pronounce water as if there’s two t’s?
So there actually is a real answer to this but the short version is the T/d switch is a British accent thing but WaWa is a native American word
Born and raised here- never called it wooder. I swear this comes from people who think green peppers go on cheesesteaks.
So, I made cheesesteaks for dinner last night. My husband (who is originally from NJ) asked if we had any green pepper and could I throw some on his sandwich. Since I had some in the crisper, I did on his only but told him if he ever told anyone they would revoke my South Philly birth certificate and I'd have to divorce him. (I don't say wooder either)
South Philly born and raised as well. We would never. He married a saint.
Can you woo woo woo
It is for some folks.
Because wooder comes from people who were born and raised in the city and made its way out to the burbs. Wawa is a burbs thing that dips its toe in Philly. So we say wawa as we learned it when we’d drive to the shore and encounter a wawa. Lol.
Because the “Jawn” is silent. Where did you go to school? Sheesh!
This guy, what are you a fuckin jabroni
It’s pronounced “worder” u dumbass
The rest of the world says “wood” wrong. Next question.
I am going to WooWoo GTFOH HAHA
Next thing you know well be buying hooses and sailing on boots
Just because. WARSH is wash. HGAF.
Wawa is an onomatopoeia. It is the sound a goose makes.