Hi everyone I'm Jenna welcome back to Learn Academic English in today's short video I'm
going to teach you about words with silent L in American English so I'm talking about this
topic because these are words that I often hear my students mispronounce they're common words
and they are words that you should know how to pronounce correctly but as you know american
English pronunciation or English pronunciation in general is just so tricky so it's normal to
be confused but let's get the story straight how do we pronounce these words in american English
but before we get into these I'd like to remind you to please give this video a like
if you find it helpful leave a comment below and subscribe if you want more videos like this one
so let's take a look at the first category which I'm sure you know already should could would
so there's no L pronounced at all this vowel u sounds like u so we have should could would
just forget about the L we don't pronounce it at all
and I have a whole video about this vowel if you'd like to know more about how to pronounce the vowel
okay in the next one we have a L words talk chalk walk stalk so if you're not familiar
with stalk stalk can be a verb it means like to follow someone in a kind of strange way
so again with these forget about the L we don't say it at all the vowel is ah
ah and we say talk chalk walk stalk okay I have one more word in this group which is
salmon so salmon the vowel is different it's a as in cat salmon but I included it here because it's
the same spelling a L we don't pronounce this L salmon salmon is a very popular type of fish
and I often hear people mispronounce it and say salman but we say salmon okay moving on
similar words with L k but now we're going to be looking at words with the vowel o yolk folks
so there aren't very many words like this but they are pretty common yolk is the middle part or the
yellow part of an egg and folks means like people and so you can often hear people say something
like hello folks and that means hello everyone okay next we have a L again but ending with f calf
half so unlike these words where we have ah here we're going to have a as in
cat calf so calf is the lower part of your leg or calf can also be a baby horse
and half now what happens if you want to make it plural you're going to add v-e-s as in calves and
halves like two halves and again no L pronounced at all so these are common mistakes that I do hear
sometimes people will try to overcompensate by saying oh I need to pronounce everything
really clearly I'm going to pronounce the L but we don't say half it should be half or walk no L walk
okay what about this last group so this last group I put here because if you look up on
the internet what are words with silent L in English you might see these words included
but I want you to know that in most dialects of English these L are pronounced and so that's going
to be examples where the L is not silent but as I said if you look it up online you will often
see these words included with words with silent L that's because in some dialects of English
these l's are silent but in most dialects of English we do pronounce them for example almond
almond is a very popular type of nut almond can you hear the L all almond calm
palm
balm balm is like a um thick cream or an ointment that we might put on our skin
and balmy balmy describes the weather when it's very humid we might say it's a balmy evening
so in somewhere like Boston where the dialect of English is a bit different they may not pronounce
the L but for most dialects of English the L is pronounced for these words down here
okay so let me know if you have questions and if you can think of other examples of words
that have a silent L let me know in the comments below I hope to see you back here soon take care!