https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_der_x5Zxmc
At 3:37 of this video the man says, as far as I'm concerned, "For portions of that first half we sort of dominated them".
I've slowed the audio down to be sure I'm hearing everything correctly.
I'm clearly hearing that in "portions of that" the sounds "s" and "th" are adjacent. But "s" and "th" can be adjacent in this phrase if and only if the word "of" is totally omitted.
Am I correct to say that "of" completely left out in this phrase? How dialectal and how common is it in Great Britain?
Best Answer
In the clip which the Original Poster has been watching, most of the speakers speak a Northern variety of British English. In this type of English, the word of is often pronounced just as a vowel, usually a schwa, /ə/. This is what happens in the Original Poster's example. The faster the speaker is speaking the more likely this is to happen, although some speakers of Northern Englishes may use this vowel nearly all the time. There are lots of other very interesting sounds and patterns in the speech in that clip. Beautiful.
The pronunciation of 'of' as a single vowel happens in other varieties of English too, but it doesn't happen often in Southern Standard British English.
The Original Speaker asks whether they should copy this type of speech. The answer is that if you live in the north of England, or somewhere else where they pronounce of like this, then it's up to you and how confident you feel doing it. Go for it! However, remember that not many people across the world are very familiar with English from the North of England. If you are going to be using your English in an international setting, you may want to use a more well-known variety of English as your main model.