/ɑː/ and /æ/ Vowel Sounds in RP British Pronunciation

today i'm going to clear a few things up for you uh there are there's in particular one sound which can make you sound extremely british i mean like it turns you into harry potter when you pronounce this sound in words however the one issue with this sound is that it can be pronounced differently in different parts of the uk so i'm going to kind of outline the rules for this sound teach you how to pronounce it and teach you some words and sentences you can practice it in so this sound the r sound r is

what we would call an open back sound what do you think that means well look at my mouth again and see what i do open and back meaning the tongue will be pushing back which actually does cause the mouth to open more so that's why it's an open sound because the tongue is being pushed back it's imagine that movement backwards and forwards when i'm teaching pronunciation i usually explain to my students that the r sound is much like the dentist why does it remind me of the dentist well because when you go to the dentist

they tell you to open your mouth and say you guessed it ah why because you open your mouth wide to make this sound and also you push your tongue back because you're pushing your tongue back the dentist can see all of your mouth okay so just think about that when you try and pronounce this sound so most of the time this sound will appear in words like far car star apartment however and now we know that mostly i focus on southern english southern british english here now i want you to tell me first before i

talk anymore how would you pronounce this word the truth is you could pronounce it two different ways you could say bath or you could say bath and the reason why is because we have two consonants after the sound there you go there's another word after i'm full of surprises today so yes it's because there are two consonants after however this isn't always the case the problem with british pronunciation is there aren't really many rules we just have guidelines and this is a guideline sometimes it could be pronounced with an ah bath past last why well

accents change accents are different everywhere you go in the north in the south southern british english is diverse now the traditional way of pronouncing this the rp way the queen's english harry potter english as some people know it as now you would pronounce this as bath so if you want that typical british accent that everybody desires you would pronounce this as bath however in various parts of the north they will pronounce it as bath but this is one thing which no teachers explain it's also pronounced as bath amongst other words in the south i would

say bath now this is due to my upbringing my teachers uh my family it's more natural now for me to say bath which is more of an rp style this this kind of rp english however it's very very common for people in the south of england to say bath so just because people in london say bath doesn't mean that everybody in the south does so it is north and south that can pronounce it differently and this is what i want to tell you if this sound really annoys you if it really worries you don't worry

too much so i just want to try a few sentences with you now number one i can't get out of the bath let's take it slowly i can't get out of the bath however like i said people in the south people in the north they might say i can't get out of the bath number two my phone charges very fast or you might hear my phone charges very fast so the main reason i created this video is really just to let you know that you will hear different styles of british english everywhere you go maybe

sometimes you might want to say fast maybe sometimes you might want to say fast now i go into lots more detail about this kind of stuff giving you advice on what you should be pronouncing how you should be pronouncing things step by step really in my pronunciation course which you can join in the description box below at etjenglish.com it's basically a pronunciation course which shows you how to pronounce every british sound mostly focused on rp but we also touch on these little things like we did today the kind of modified rp styles of english and

if you don't know what rp is you'll also learn what that is in the course anyway thank you very much for watching it's been a pleasure as always i will see you next week cheers guys bye [Music] you