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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 138th episode. I was recently asked if the word often, spelled, O-T-E-N has a T-Sound or not.

This is a word I hear pronounced both ways, often, no T-sound, and often with a T-sound.

The Longman pronunciation D pronunciation dictionary's 1993 preference poll

says that 78% of Americans prefer the no-tie option.

Based on that, you can choose which pronunciation you prefer,

and neither option is wrong, but the no-tie option is quite a bit

more common. If that was all I said in this episode, it would be pretty short, so I decided to

add a bit more information and talk about the pronunciation of the letter O at the beginning of the word.

If you don't distinguish between the short O sound,

ah and the A-W sound,

awe, you can use whichever sound you like.

Yes, I'm referring to the cot-caught merger.

If you want to know more about this, I will refer you to episode 67, which is all about the

AW sound.

For now, I'm going to assume that, like most Americans, you use two different sounds.

If this is true, the A-W sound is the pronunciation most often used.

Often.

The letter O frequently causes this kind of confusion.

Which sound do we use?

Luckily, there is a pattern here. If the letter O is followed by the F sound,

it is usually pronounced as the AW sound. Note, however, that this is only true when the O

...