Learn English – American English pronunciation: basically or “basicly”

american-accentpronunciation

Does the final "a" drop out in words like "basically", "logically", etc, or should I pronounce it?

Best Answer

I've lived in the United States my entire life. In my experience, native speakers always pronounce these words as basicly and logicly. The pronunciation basical-ly sounds distinctly foreign; in fact, in my experience, I think that the pronunciation basical-ly is the most common pronunciation mistake that I ever hear.

In slow and careful speech, I could imagine someone saying logical-ly, but the pronunciation logicly seems more common even then.

The spellings of -al, -ly, and -ally are frustratingly inconsistent. In the following list, each word is presented as adjective - standard spelling of adverb - phonetic spelling of adverb:

  • public - publicly - publicly
  • basic - basically - basicly
  • logical - logically - logicly
  • internal - internally - internally