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

This is the 169th podcast by Seattle Learning Academy, which means that you've heard me say the word Seattle at least 169 times.

Seattle is a really fun city name for me to say, and not just because I live here.

When I say Seattle, my tongue gets to move around and do some interesting things. This is because,

linguistically speaking, Seattle has a lot of things going on. Place names or names of any sort

often do not follow phonetic patterns. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have a lot of places with names

based on original Native American names that existed here prior to the settling of whites.

Some of these names have pronunciations that seem completely unrelated to their spelling.

The name Seattle also has Native American roots. The city of

Seattle is named after Chief South, a Duwamish Native American chief that was born around

1780, just south of the current city.

While the name Seattle isn't as much of a phonetic nightmare as some place names around here,

it still can be tricky for non-native English speakers.

In this little seven-letter three-syllable word we have, starting from the end of a word,

a syllabic L, a lateral aspiration, a T-sound aliphon, and adjacent vowels.

Why did I list the linguistic concepts of the word Seattle from the end of the word toward

the front?

I assure you there is a reason.

The reason is that the final sound of the word Seattle affects the sound before it.

So starting at the end of the word just makes more sense today.

Let's explore these fun linguistic features one by one.

The final sound of the word Seattle is a syllabic L. A syllabic L is an L sound that has no vowel

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