Gremma Girl here, I'm Mignon Focardy and you can think of me as your friendly guide

to the English language, writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

And today is cool stuff because I have an extra meaty middle about all the different

ways we can pronounce the T sound.

And we'll use a Taylor Swift example and you'll understand why some people learning

English get one thing wrong in a really specific way.

A few episodes ago I talked about why the T sound sometimes seems to be missing from words

like kitten or button.

The answer was that in those words many speakers use a sound known as a glottal stop.

If you listen to that episode you might remember that a glottal stop is also the sound we

make to separate the syllables in the word uh oh.

I compared this sound with aspirated T which you get in words like toy.

After you touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth just behind your front teeth and

then let it down you get a little puff of air before the vowel sound comes in.

If you're a long time listener you might also remember an episode from 2016 when I talked

about another way of pronouncing T called the avealer flap.

That's the pronunciation in most varieties of American English in words such as atom.

The word avealer refers to the avealer ridge which is the bony bump in the gums behind

your front teeth.

The confusing thing about the avealer flap is that it's also one of the ways American

English speakers can pronounce the D sound so that atom, the thing that a physicist might

study, and atom, the masculine name, sound the same.

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