To think its pronounced BATH not BARTH

[FlyRussianUnicorn]

Maybe its a northern thing. But my brother has jusy pronounced a "bath as a "barth"

Who is right?

Sorry that was to bogofeternalstench not artandco.

artandco you insert an audible rolled ""r" sound into "bath"?

I'm Irish and when I started reading mumsnet I was so confused about random "r"s being inserted in phonetic examples of pronunciation. I certainly couldn't recall lots of "r" sounds being inserted by my neighbours/colleagues. Now I realise it's a long "a" sound people mean.

Art I would say "ar" and "ah" are two very different sounds in my rhotic accent. We pronounce an r in the word similarly to the start of a word. So to me scarf sounds nothing giraffe. And dear is exactly the same as deer (whereas my toddler, attending a nice London nursery pronounces it de-ah). Interestingly my DH and I both work with lots of privately educated people from the SE (who mostly use RP) and both have our regional Irish pronunciations "corrected" not infrequently by colleagues, which I think is incredibly rude. I've made small adjustments- if I'm spelling something out for an English person I generally say "arr" instead of "orr" to make sure we understand each other but I'm not going to say bahth instead of bath as it would sound forced.

Jessie - yes an 'r' like many have been saying

Grass is grar-ss, not graah-ss here. So that's not just a long aah sound. The r is rolled. Same with many words

Right, good, that's what I thought you were saying. However I am willing to bet a large sum that that is not the sound that the OP meant when she wrote "barth". See how her choice of describing the sound is confusing?

Well where I grew up, bahth, cahstle and grahss was entirely normal. Now I live elsewhere and the norm is bath. I don't know why anyone really cares!

I'm Bath born and bred and the pronunciation really boils my piss.

Only the frightfully posh or the incomers pronounce it Baaaaath, we locals call it Bath or if you're from Twerton it's Baff, either way is fine but not Baaaath!

I have a colleague who takes the mickey at my pronunciation but as I am the local one I hitch up my judgey pants and inform him he is wrong

Us locals are a dying breed, the Bath accent needs preserving

You know, you could be Bath born and bred and also frightfully posh - and that would be as much a Bath accent as yours.

It's not a Northern/Southern thing, I'm from the South West and say bath to rhyme with Cath, as do most people I know here.