Learn English – How to pronounce “maintenance” in an American accent

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.

English has a lot more vowels than most languages, so most learners need to re-train their ears to recognize the additional vowels. In both British English and American English, the difference between ball and bowl is small, but significant. It is easy for native speakers to recognize because their ears are trained to do so.

In ball, the vowel is a long vowel: that means that it sounds the same all the way through. The same long vowel occurs in law- /lɔː/ in BrE and /lɑː/ in AmE.

In bowl, the vowel is a diphthong, which means that there is a glide between two different sounds. The same diphthong occurs in low- /ləʊ/ in BrE and /loʊ/ in AmE.

You can see the difference clearly in this spectrogram of a British English speaker saying ball and bowl. In the first word, ball, the long vowel is the same all the way through. In the second word, bowl, the diphthong sound changes, starting at the red cursor line.

Regarding your comment about casual, fast-paced conversations: when people speak casually, and when they speak quickly, the parts that lose clarity are the function words: the little words that provide the structure for the language.

Take the word and, for example: the strong form is /ænd/, but most of the time we use the weak form /ənd/. As speech gets progressively faster and/or more casual, it becomes /ən/ and finally /n/.

Meanwhile, the important words- nouns like ball and bowl- are usually stressed, and don't soften up in the same way. The central vowel in a stressed word is about as protected as you can get.

You might get some de-stressing if the noun is preceded by an adjective (the red ball) or when it's part of a compound noun (a furball), and this might weaken the clarity a little, but not, in my opinion, enough to make it impossible to discriminate for a native listener with the same accent.