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I have always pronounced "yeah" as /yε/, i.e. as "yes" without the last sound.
Recently a friend told me he pronounces it /yæ/, i.e. it rhymes with "nah."
This came as a shock to me. Even worse, another friend agreed with my second friend. Is this a regionalism? I come from the American South, and the friends in question don't.
This is purely anecdotal and personal, but I think it tallies quite well with many types of ‘generic broadcast American’ (if there is such a thing).
I would pronounce yeah as @tchrist describes in his comment, with a diphthong /jɛə/. It is the neutral, spoken variant of ‘yes’, which I rarely say in colloquial speech (except for emphasis).
Yeh /jɛ(ː)/ exists for me, but it’s not something I would use often. When I do, I’d quite likely also nasalise the vowel, making it /jɛ̃/. It is a different word to me (well, no, not a different word, but it’s not quite interchangeable with yeah), but I cannot for the life of me think of a conditioning that would cause me to use yeh over yeah.
Yah /jæ(ː)/ is definitely different to me. The difference between yes/yeah and yah is the same as that between no and nah: it’s less definite, more hesitant, and gives more of a feeling that you’ve kind of thought about this for a bit, and on the whole you’ve come to the perhaps not rock-steady decision that, “Sure, why not?”.
I say /jæə/. Raised in US Midwest and East midantlantic. I have just this week been shocked to hear two young women (mid twenties) in the US Southwest pronounce it YIH, with a "short" i as in "still," but quantitatively long. Like YIIIHH.
In the UK, the commonly accepted pronunciation is /yε/ with a relatively long vowel sound, however we do treat the words yeah and yah differently. Some localised regional dialects will use the word yah in place of yeah, but they don't consider it a different pronunciation, just the use of a different word altogether.
Well, it was ᵹea in Old English. But I'm not sure how best to describe the diphthong that I have in this word, which begins substantially higer than the æ in "jæə" abd ends substantially lower than ə, and possibly a bit farther back. Not being able to climb inside and have a look while I pronounce this, about the only thing I can say for certain is that this diphthong for me doesn't begin specifically with æ, e, or ε but somewhere in between these vowels, and definitely doesn't end exactly with æ, ə, or a either, but somewhere between these vowels as well.
I've always thought it would be fun to pronounce words like head and oar with the falling/centering diphthongs they once had--and happy that at least one word (ᵹea) has survived that has managed to hold onto one of these diphthongs, more or less.
Yea, as in the verse from Psalms, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death", is usually pronounced like yay, the exclamation, a synonym for "hooray". Yea as in an affirmative vote, is pronounced the same, perhaps because of the rhyme in "yea" and "nay". I would pronounce yeah with two syllables /jæə/, but yeh or yah (variants, like yeah, of yes) with one. Cowboys are famous for saying yup. While we're at it, aye (an affirmative [vote]) or aye aye (in sailor-talk), is usually pronounced like "eye", but aye, ([for]ever), is sometimes pronounced like the name of the letter A.
