>>>No, don't listen to Alan on this one. We laugh at Canadian accents here... :o) But turn arounds fair play, more of the world laughs at us... :o)
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>>Hah! One of your most respected news anchors was a Canadian - Peter Jennings, and all the rest tried to sound like him. I know you guys think we pronounce our 'ou's funny, but that's only because Americans don't seem to be capable of pronouncing the sound at all. We pronounce it like 'ow', and you all pronounce it like 'ah'. We say 'howse' and 'abowt' and you say 'hasse' and 'abat'. ;)
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>You've given us something to think aboot.

I know that's the joke, but to be honest, I've never heard anybody pronounce it that way. When I hear somebody say "ouch!" or "owww", it uses the same phonetic as house and about. Americans have a habit of flattening the sound, so maybe that's why you hear it rounder than it really is when we speak. I don't really know, of course, but I truly have never understood where that came from. When I listen to the major American newscasts, I honestly can't tell the difference in how the anchors speak from the way the Canadian announcers speak.