Where in the U.S. do people change the stress of umbrella, adult and TV to the first syllable?

Shifting second-syllable stress to the first syllable is characteristic of Southern (US) accents. Indeed, it's a trope, reaching #59 on the Stuff Southern People Like blog:

How to Sound Southern: Accent the First Syllable … HALLoween, THANKSgiving, TEEvee, UMbrella, and JUly

The THANKSgiving pronunciation is also covered in a Language Log post which also mentions ADult and UMbrella among others.

The association is borne out by at least one famous study, the Harvard Dialect Survey, started by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder in 2002. Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student in statistics at North Carolina State University, created a series of maps using that data that made the rounds on social media last year thanks to the New York Times. Those pronunciations all sound unusual to me, but that's because I'm SoCal through and through— in fact, not just SoCal, but downright OC.

Question 48 of the survey addresses umbrella, and while stress on the second syllable predominates throughout the U.S. (76%), the distribution of UMbrella is clearer when looking at the full results:

UMbrella occurs in the South, Appalachia, and parts of the Upper Midwest

The survey also attests to INsurance and THANKsgiving. It is seems strange, however, that not even Dixie can agree on how to pronounce the quintessentially Southern pecan.

According to Macmillan, stressing the first syllable of adult is characteristically British whereas stressing the second is American, although I do hear the first-syllable stress commonly in the U.S. as well. As with the Southerners, however, this too seems to be word-specific. The dictionaries draw no such distinction for TV.


I am from Texas and it is not uncommon to hear the first syllable given emphasis. However, I often hear the emphasis switched to the second syllable if the tone of the conversation turns sarcastic or commanding. I would be cautious of a woman puts the emphasis on the second syllable of in-deed. That is a pretty good indicator that fur is about to fly. I'd back up or vacate the area. Just sayin'..