Pronunciation of "height" as "hate"

A pet peeve of mine is that a colleague at work keeps pronouncing "height" the same as the word "hate" whenever he speaks English. I corrected him once, but he keeps using his pronunciation. We have been working together for years now and it's a funny little thing that I keep to myself because I don't want to be obnoxious.

Now recently I saw someone on TV pronouncing the word as "hate" as well, so that got me thinking: Is there a native dialect in the English language that pronounces the word "height" as "hate" or very closely to that? I'm explicitly not looking for non-native speakers' accents.

Edit: To clarify, we are both Germans and need to switch to English for certain meetings. This question is not about me trying to correct my colleague's language but rather for me to find out whether there are actually native speakers pronouncing that word as part of their local dialect.

Solution 1:

As a native speaker, I would interpret meaning by context as much as sound. If I heard somebody (apparently) say "The hate of the tower is 300 metres", I would know that they were saying "height". That pronunciation sounds, to me, a southern English/RP speaker, like Irish (particularly Northern Irish), Scottish, or perhaps Newcastle ("Geordie") regional pronunciation. There is no single "correct" way to pronounce vowels in English, and attempts to "correct" people's speech are likely to cause resentment.