The question have confused me for a long time. How to distinguish "are" and "aren't" in American accent? Usually, the pronunciations are:
- are is pronounced as /ə/ or /ɑ:r/
- aren't is pronounced as /'ɑːrənt/
According to my hearing, many Americans would omit the final /t/ in aren't, making it /'ɑːrən/, which is very close to the pronunciation of are(/ɑ:r/). In fact, I almost cannot find any difference.You can hear this sentence here. It says: These aren't the only governors touting comebacks. But for me, the aren't in the sentence is more like an are, isn't it? Can anyone tell me how to distinguish the two words? Thanks.
Best Answer
I'm from the Southeastern US. That omitting the final "t" sound is in a good many words. But when we do it, we usually pronounce the last sound a little differently than usual. I mean, it's basically the same sound, but we time it differently and such.
For example, even though we don't pronounce the "t" in "aren't", we still say "aren't" differently than we would "aren'". Same thing between "different" and "differen", or "mitigate" and "mitigae".
It's real difficult to describe the difference on paper. It's kind of like we don't say the last sound quite as long, or that we stop making the last sound very suddenly. Except that might not be 100% true, and we really slightly alter the sound into something more like a gutteral whisper, and we use something like a different, harsher tone. In this way, relatively soft sounds like "ay" and "n" are kind of hardened and are made to sound more like "ayt" or "nt". We fake the "t" sound essentially. Again it's something really hard to describe, but hopefully this helps.