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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 141st episode. I was recently working with a student from

India on his alternative T sounds.

To review, the alternative T sounds are the quick D sound, the glottal stop, and the omitted T sound.

I've talked about them quite a bit in past podcasts, but this show is still pretty advanced.

Anyway, I corrected this student on the word recently, telling him that the T sound should be

pronounced with a glottal stop.

The glottal stop is that sound in the middle of the word, uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

It's created when we briefly close our vocal cords deep in our throat.

This student is very familiar with the T sound patterns, and when I told him that the word recently is pronounced with a glottal stop, he replied, but the T is following an N, so it should be ignored,

shouldn't it?

He was right. I had told him that the pattern for dropping the T sound is when it follows an N sound

and precedes a vowel sound, R sound, including Schwab plus R, or an L sound.

The word recently, which I just said with a regular T sound, definitely fits that pattern.

If I say it without the T sound, it would be pronounced as recently. That doesn't

sound overly strange, but it doesn't seem as common as saying it with the glottal stop.

With the glottal stop, it's pronounced recently. Recently. Then, within a few days, the glottal stop came up in our

Englishassembly.com forums. Pat asked about the weird silence in the words,

Mountain, Button, Clinton, and Curtains. Pat was hearing a glottal stop. Two of the words in question,

Mountain and Clinton, don't follow the pattern that was shown for the glottal stop in the

pronuncian.com lesson. Obviously, it was time to revisit the lesson and add not one, but two new options for the glottal stop.

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