I know it's me just being a particular asshole, but I really don't like the pronunciation data... it's honestly tiresome, problematic, and outdated. It's pronounced DATA.
For his name I say data but when talking about data I say data but when I say database I say data and when I watch 1986’s Willow with Warwick Davis I say data
The first of two A's gets the "Aey" sound, the second gets the "Ah" sound.
Then, because I'm from California, the ah becomes uh.
Then, similarly, the "tuh" has a hard T at the beginning. But again because California/USA, the T becomes a D (British: butter ("buttah", hard t's), usa: budder(soft t's or d's))
I've taught statistics for over 20 years. I flipflop on this constantly, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Even more disturbing: I don't have a consistent position, at least grammatically, on whether it's singular or plural.
edit: On further thought, it only works both ways as a synonym for a highway, if I'm talking about a path more generally the root pronunciation sounds wrong.
American here, I can't speak for Canada, but I don't think I've ever heard any Americans in the US in real conversations say it differently than it is in Star Trek.
I've lived in nearly every major region of the US, so if there's a place where they still pronounce it like "dah-ta" it must be a very small regional thing. Normal working class people having actual conversions everywhere I've ever been say "day-ta".
I've read before that Patrick Stewart is the reason for that changing, but I don't know if that's true. Seems like an outsized influence for one guy to have on culture, but maybe!
American with an accent that is functionally General American here: it's day-duh, the t gets flapped. Dah-ta sounds very off to my ears, if anywhere in the US pronounces it that way, it's probably one of the weirder accents from the northeast.
Depends on the language I’m speaking, but I usually say da-ta, because data is a Portuguese word for date, and when I switch to English and keep the Portuguese pronunciation (and sometimes I even mix up both words but that’s another story)