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

My name is Amanda and this is an updated release of our 81st episode.

Today we're going to talk about a boat. Well, we're not really going to talk about a boat, but we are

going to talk about the stressed vowel sound in the word about. That's the OW sound. And the vowel sound

in the word boat, which is the long O sound. Ow, oh, about a boat. The OW sound and long O don't get a lot of attention when it

comes to English pronunciation. The OW sound is pronounced ow as in the words cow and about.

The long O is pronounced O as in the words home and boat.

Long vowels sound like their letter name.

So if you've been listening to these podcasts for a while,

it shouldn't be a surprise that the long O sounds like the letter O.

The long O and O.W sound have two major things in common. They are both two sound vowels that end in a brief W sound, and they can both be spelled O-W.

Let's look first at their pronunciation. The O-W sound begins with the tongue very low in the mouth. The bottom teeth can be felt alongside of the tongue. The beginning of the

OW sound is pretty similar to the short O sound, ah, which I talked about in episode 78. The second part of

the OW sound is the W sound. To create the W sound, the back of the tongue rises so that it's

near the soft palate. Remember, the soft palate is the squishy top area in the back of the mouth.

The lips also need to close into a small circle for the W sound.

So, to create the entire OW sound,

ow, we start with the tongue low in the mouth,

then raise the back of the tongue at the same time as closing the lips into a circle.

Repeat the O-W sound after me. Ow. Ow. The long O begins with the body of the tongue higher in the mouth.

The beginning of the long O is more similar to a short U sound, a.

From there, the tongue moves into the W sound, just like it did for the O W sound.

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