Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation

podcast. My name is Mandy and this is our 116th episode. Today's topic originally came from the

pronunciation forums.

User Kinhow commented,

I know it's informal, but I think it's important for us to know when it's used and how it's pronounced.

I'm talking about the contraction, Ain't.

I hear it a lot in movies and in some music.

User McCola agreed that Aint would be a good podcast topic.

So here it is.

What is Aint, and how do we use it?

First, yes, ain't is a word.

It has meaning that native speakers understand and generally agree on. Some people may not like that it's a word and may not like hearing it in conversation, but that does not take it out of our

vocabulary. In order to effectively use ain't, you have to be able to pronounce it correctly. Otherwise, you'll just sound funny.

When I'm saying ain't, out of context for teaching purposes, I'm adding more of a T sound to the end

of the word than you would hear in conversation. The word ain't is pronounced as a long A, then an N sound, then either a T sound, or more commonly, a glottal stop.

A glottal stop is the sound in the word, uh-oh, and has been covered in previous podcasts that I'll link to from this show's transcripts.

I'll say ain't with a T sound, then a glottal stop.

Ain't, ain't.

Listen to ain't in a couple of sentences and notice that I'm using the glottal stop instead of the T sound.

I ain't going out there. I ain't gonna ride in that.

If you say the final T sound, you're adding formality to a very informal word. It just doesn't work very well. I'll say those sentences with a nice clear T sound.

I ain't going out there. I ain't going to ride in that.

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