Which regional accent is it when a person says “Mon-dee” and “Tues-dee” for days of week?
I’m talking about a native speaker of English. An ultra-educated person.
Curious Regional Accent
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Opinions, art, debate
Which regional accent is it when a person says “Mon-dee” and “Tues-dee” for days of week?
I’m talking about a native speaker of English. An ultra-educated person.
Clarissa's Blog 
Reply to: Curious Regional Accent
This is the accent I grew up with, in the northeast corner of Tennessee.
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Tennessee! That makes sense.
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Which syllable is stressed? mun-DEE of MUN-dee? The second is normal American the first sounds weird and I have no idea who talks like that.
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The first syllable is accented in most words where I grew up, including these. BTW, your post is cliff arroyo. I thought you meant that the second syllable being accented is normal American, but maybe you meant your second option, MUN-dee.
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Sorry. I meant your post is ambiguous.
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Yes. It’s the first syllable that’s accented. I never heard this pronunciation before so I was curious.
This is fascinating to me.
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I think you maybe noticed that pronunciation before, it’s not really rare. Personally I say Monday etc when the word is stressed but am likely to say Mondee in the middle of a sentence.
Here are some dialect maps.
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Well, I never thought about it my entire long life until you asked the question. But when I listen closely to how I speak, the weekdays come out a bit closer to “MON-dee” than to “MON-day.”
So I guess I still have a trace of a Southern accent.
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I used to hear this in the Philly mid-Atlantic region before I moved south.
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The people I have known who say that are also from Tennessee or Kentucky. My sainted friend Bill tells the riddle of his birth: “I was born in the same house same bedroom same bed as my brother a few years later, but I was born in Tennessee and he was born in Kentucky. How does that work?”
The answer is: they moved the bed from one side of the bedroom to the other side of the bedroom -and the cabin was built on the state line .
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So did they say “Mondee” on the Tennessee side of the room, and “Monday” on the side that didn’t secede but fought for the Union?
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The pronunciation you mention -ˈmʌndi in the IPA spelling – used to be standard Received Pronunciation among British educated speakers well into the 1980s. The other pronunciation, with the -day suffix pronounced as the word “day”, used to be looked down upon as crass and vulgar. But then came the Internet and all the rest of it and the second pronunciation gained ground since it was standard American. I still stick to the educated norm of RP, as does the Queen of England: ˈmʌndi.
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I’m from California, and this is how my parents, both born there, said it. I consider saying -DAY to be something you’d do when you were trying to be very clear and formal, and upon reflection I also associate it with more recent immigrants, people who might have some bilingual relatives left, people who have non-native speakers in the family, and who only really learned the most formal way to pronounce it, or who are just pronouncing it the way it’s written.
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He says it with a heavy stress on the “dee”: Mon-DEE. I’ve never heard it anywhere else.
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Mon-DEE, in my experience, would only be something you would say for some kind of dramatic emphasis, as in, “We are going to do it Monday! Really, on Monday, not later! Mon-DEE!”
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