NPR and the Flap (2015) (tonguesandtongues.blogspot.com)

I still have trouble reading about how to pronounce things. In this day and age, why would a post like this NOT have a recording?

With regards to "not flapping" a "flappable" phoneme, I wonder if there is a connection between learning a word from hearing it used vs having learning by first encountering it in print. I find there are such outliers in my speech. I don't remember where I first encountered most words, but I did start reading young. (I often pronounce the T in "rocketed" or "rocketing" but never the one in "often" :))

I've noticed this with native Californians.

stop and top sound the same to me, maybe in boston it's different?

This says iT was posTed in [twenny fifTeen], buD all the examples are from [Two thousand] and [Two thousand one]. Anyway, for such a deep technical analysis, the regional and demographic variations in pronunciation across 'American English' are conspicuously absenT.

> . No American English speaker in his or her right mind pronounces these words as though there's a "hard" t in them.

> This is one of the main things you should do if you're trying to sound like the British upper crust: aspirate your t's.

Oddly enough, I do this and I'm an American English speaker. This might be the reason people say I sound kind of pretentious if I'm not faking a regional accent.

> NPR is a hotbed of inconsistent nonflapping.

One thing I've noticed as a long-time NPR listener is that NPR is allowing and/or encouraging their normal reporters to use their native accents. In the past, this, I think, was more of a privilege granted to big names (Car Talk, Diane Rehm). But now a lot of reporter sound on air like they probably do IRL.

This made no sense to me until I realized that I was taught the British way and use that when trying to be clear (e.g. in lecturing or speaking on the 'phone).