At least in the UK.

I was intrigued by a website I was looking at with tips on how to pronounce bird names. Not Sharon, or Tracey, and such, but avifauna.
For the fulmar it said that the first syllable should be pronounced to rhyme with "full" and not with "gull."

Now, I'm from Manchester, so this does not compute. They are the same to me. It's the problem with standard letters and regional accents, of course, and that's why spelling reform can never work.

Take the words "class" and "ass" - same vowel sound to me, but not to my daughters who have grown up in the south. To them it would need to be "arse." Or "drawing." The vowel's easy in that one - but what about the middle consonant? To most people in the UK, as to me, I suspect it would be an "w". But my soft southern abdab off-spring have an "r" in it! How to reconcile these differences with just 26 letters and an apostrophe (for the glottal stop, perhaps)? And whose accent should we use as a basis any way - well, mine of course.

It would be worse for my parents, and all the other poor souls who never fled Tyldesley. To them "fairy" and "furry" are pronounced the same. I gave that one up cause people kept laffing at me. (When I said them, not because I am either.) (Eether)

Phillip