Canton

Since Victor recently spent 1100 words on various people's "best approximations of how they think they are saying 'Canton'", "expressed in common spelling" (not a phonetic alphabet)", and has resisted requests to provide audio, I thought I'd provide some examples of how a local resident pronounces the city's name. As I've explained many times, I don't think that IPA transcriptions are an effective way of representing how people actually talk, and this case will continue to support that view.

I used the YouTube video "Living in Canton Ohio", which starts this way:

Are you wondering more about what Canton Ohio is all about?

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Zeroing in on Canton:

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The residue of the /t/ is a glottalized region about 80 milliseconds into the nasalized (and raised) /ae/ vowel, leading into the second syllable which has a brief []-like region followed by 80 milliseconds of nasal murmur.

Playing the first and second syllables separately makes what's happening a bit clearer:

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The next Canton in that video:

Everything you can imagine I'm gonna try to go over it for you and give you a truer idea of what Canton is all about

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Zeroing in again, we see the same thing as before:

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Is the third time the charm?:

First up is what I'm onna talk about is when it comes to living in Canton

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It sounds similar to the first two. But zeroing in, we see what looks more like a glottal fricative followed by a syllabic nasal (though again, an IPA transcription wouldn't really tell us what's happening):

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There more Cantons in that video, and we'd need to look at more of them to get a better sense of the full range of this guy's pronunciations. Victor's informants may well have even more variation — but I don't think that it's very helpful to learn how people try to apply their intuitions about standard English orthography to describe how they talk, unless we also have some recordings to tell us what they're describing.