In this American English pronunciation video,
we're going to go over the pronunciation
of the word 'people'.
[Music]
This week's Word of the Week is 'people'.
It's a two-syllable word
with stress on the first syllable.
DA-da. People.
It begins with the P consonant sound,
lips are together for that, pp-.
Then we open into the EE as in SHE vowel,
pe-, pe-. So the tongue tip is down here,
but the front part of the tongue is
stretching up towards the roof of the mouth,
pe-, pe-. Now we have the P, schwa, L sound.
This is unstressed, so it's going to be
low in pitch and very fast,
-ple, -ple, -ple. People.
So the lips will come together again
for the P. People. -ple.
Then we go into the schwa/Dark L sound.
Don't worry about making
a separate schwa sound,
just go straight
into the the Dark sound of the Dark L.
So, to make that sound,
your tongue will pull back,
so the back part of the tongue here
is shifting towards the throat a bit,
people, -le, -le.
And that's how we get that dark sound.
Now, it should be very short
because it's unstressed, people, people.
The second half of the Dark L involves
bringing the tongue tip
to the roof of the mouth. People.
But you can actually leave that out.
A lot of people will just make, people, -le,
the Dark sound to signify the Dark L
and not necessarily bring the tongue tip up.
People, people.
There are a lot of people here.
That's it, your Word of the Week.
Try it out yourself:
Make up a sentence with this word,
record it in a video,
and post it as a video response
to this video on YouTube.
If there's a word you'd like to suggest
for the Word of the Week,
put it in the comments below.
That's it, and thanks so much
for using Rachel's English.