If you want to know how Americans speak, the go-to source is the quarterly journal American Speech, published by Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society.
It’s a scholarly journal, written by experts in the study of American English, but a surprising amount of what they write is accessible to anyone. A case in point in the most recent issue (Summer 2013) is the case of Louisville, Ky.
Louisville is on the edge of the South, both politically and linguistically. Linguistically, the South is set off from the rest of the United States notably by the “ah” pronunciation for the long i that is an “ah-ee” sound in the North and West.
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. In the South, you hear the “ah” version of long i when it comes before a voiced consonant, as in wide, size, or five. You also hear an “ah” when i comes at the end of a word…