My everyday-Engish was acquired in the USA and in Canada, and I have not heard anyone there not prounouncing the L.

Also ich habe ne Weile im Pacific NorthWest gewohnt, und dort ist Salmon ein beinahe tägliches Thema.
Ich habe nie ein "L" in Salmon gehört.
*kopfkratz

Here in Southern California the L is silent. Even my Midwestern mother, who adds an extra R to the word "wash", leaves out the L of Salmon.

Ist das wirklich eine objektiv beantwortbare Frage? Ich hab mir den MW-Audio-Link angehört und denke, es ist eine individuelle Sache, ob man ein (angedeutetes) L zu hören glaubt oder nicht. Ich kann jedenfalls beide Ansichten nachvollziehen.

Beim Sprechen scheint mir der Übergang vom "a" zum "m" irgendeinen unbestimmten Laut zwischen r und l zu fordern, sonst klingt es einfach unenglisch (etwa wie deutsch: Samen).

This was not simply the intimation of an L (which I do not here in the M-W dict. at any rate). It was a real honest-to-goodness L like in salmonella: SALmon. So yes, I do think it can be answered objectively.

er, hear not here.

Ich betone das 'L' in salmon selbstverständlich auch (steht ja auch dort), aber, zu meiner Ehrenrettung, nicht mit einem Meidlinger-L. Ich musste mir aber auch schon sagen lassen, dass man vacation und nicht wacation sagt und village statt willage ...

Selkie, I don't pronounce the "L", unless it's salmonella of course.
(And this is coming from someone who, until way into their 20s, pronounced the "w" in sword!!)

According to Merriam-Webster's pronunciation, the "L" in salmon is silent.

Main Entry:
salm·on Listen to the pronunciation of salmon
Pronunciation:
\ˈsa-mən\
Function:
noun

Middle English samoun, from Old French saumon (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/salmon)

Aha, daher das fehlende "L"
Wenn man die beiden oben genannten Varianten so ausspricht wie sie dastehen, müsste es doch etwa richtig sein mit der engl. Aussprache, oder?

So in the most cases the "L" preceding "M" is silent? Salmon, almond, palm etc.

I don't think so. Your examples have regional pronounciations where the l is clearly heard and indeed the dictonary lists them as alternatives, which it does not do for salmon.
By putting *lm* into Merriam-Webster, you can get a very long list of words containing a "lm" and a quick look at just a random few shows the l is spoken as a rule.

The l in almond is silent? I have never heard it being pronounced without the l - where do they say it like that? Or is that the standard pronunciation in the States?

However, I (BE) have never heard salmon being pronounced with an l.

If Werner has never heard anybody *not* pronouncing the l, maybe he can tell us where in Canada and the US this was.

In Irland wird das "L" mitgesprochen.

I'm from Essex, UK and it's sammun and ah-mund, no Ls!

quail, as I mentioned in some other thread, me asking for "one almond pastry please" in a bakers in Northumberland drew a complete blank with the shop assistant, and only after I pointed at the desired object did she understand "ah, the ahmond pastry!"
Incidentally, does the silent l also apply to Marc Almond?

Looking on Google, it seems that SALmon might be what they say in Texas ...?
I can't remember ever hearing an Irish person say "salmon", with or without an L. It amazes me that all these non-native speakers are so sure about how words are pronounced, when there are plenty of words I'm not sure how to pronounce in standard English, let alone up north or something :-)

I mean, how often do you actually need to say the words "salmon" or "almond"? Normally, you read the recipe in your head, go to the supermarket and read the word on the tin, bring it home, cook it and serve it up without ever having to say "almond", so you could easily be going round using the wrong pronunciation in your head the whole time without anyone knowing! I have no idea how to say "cumin" ...

If you watch cooking shows/podcasts etc. all of those come up regularly.

And while I say salmon without the l (but almond with) I have no recollection of how they were pronounced in Wisconsin/Michigan.

I guess I'll have to start watching cooking shows, although it's a hard choice: is it worth risking my sanity/getting high blood pressure just to learn how to say "cumin"? :-)

CM2DD #17, genau das ist mein Problem. Mein Wortschatz ist ganz ordentlich, die Grammatik sicher hier und da verbesserungsfähig, aber ich bin für meinen Bedarf zufrieden. Nur: Wie zum Geier spricht man es aus?! BE und AE und regionale Unterschiede machen es nicht leichter, aber auch innerhalb eines Sprachraums kann man sich nie darauf verlassen, daß ein Wort so ausgesprochen wird, wie eins, daß ganz ähnlich aussieht - though, through, trough...

Letztens ganz es doch eine Diskussion zu spelling bees. Bei English als Fremdspräche bräuchte man pronounciation bees.

Schiebe ein paar ;-) nach und ganz -> gab

Ich habe ein, wie ich finde, ziemlich klasse Buch. Ich kann gerade nicht nachschauen, aber ich glaube es heisst "Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations", mit fällt gerade nicht ein, wie der Autor heisst.

Gerade bei für mich 'fiesen' Wörtern hat es schon oft geholfen. Ich habe schon Kritiken gelesen, die es als bieder und altmodisch kritisieren, aber ich mag es.

CM2DD, once you've sacrificed yourself so nobly and watched some cooking shows, could you please let me know how it's pronounced, too? I could have sworn it was cju-min, stressed on the first syllable, but M-W has it like 'are you cumin or goin''?
In German it is Kumien, stressed on the second syllable - I think...(obviously shaken now after the odd "commin" - experience just now.)
Any Indians care to enlighten us as to the proper pronunciation?

You say commin', I say que-min (and someone else says ku-min). Best call it off. M-W has three alternate pronunciations, the first of which was new to me too.

I should never skim comments. I thought Werner wrote he had never heard it with an L. Now I am dying to know where he was where everyone said the L.

>>Looking on Google, it seems that SALmon might be what they say in Texas ...?

Interesting. CM2DD, could you be more specific about where you found that, and what it said? Is there a citation from DARE (Dict. of Amer. Regional English) or something, or has someone done a survey?

I ask because I was just going to report that my dad is one of those weird people. I personally have always just considered it an irritating quirk, but he also happens to be a native Texan. (Though so am I and so, almost, is my mother, and we don't say 'saLmon.')

'Almond' is more variable, though; I say it sometimes with L, sometimes without.

Maybe we should start a thread on words that we pronounce more than one way ourselves. The worst one for me is 'basil.' I thought of another one yesterday but I've forgotten it.

'Cumin' AFAIK has a short U as in 'cut,' but I imagine someone somewhere (BE?) might give it a long U as in 'cute.'

Has anyone noticed that everyone this year on the news seems to be saying 'Nevadda' (except a few cultured-sounding holdouts, among whom I would like to give honorable mention to Margaret Warner of PBS)? That short A sounds absolutely horrible to me, like fingernails on a blackboard. I think a lot of people from Brooklyn or Boston or somewhere with a strong working-class accent must have moved to Nevahda and forced everyone else who lives there to mispronounce the name of the state. It's really astonishing to me that anyone else would actually go along with them, though, because it's just so ugly. I'm absolutely certain that that particular mispronunciation wasn't so widespread 15 or 20 years ago, much less (apparently) actively insisted on by Nevada residents, who seem determined to give a low impression of their own intelligence. I would bet that most of them are anything but several-generation native Nevadans anyway, since the state has attracted so much migration from minimum-wage workers thanks to the gambling and hotel industry. (Which could actually give some credence to the imported-northeastern-accent theory.)

Agree with Werner - have never heard anyone here pronounce it saLmon either.
I live in Ontario, but we have news/reporters from the entire country

Who says saLmon?
Tony Allen (the Illinois born basketball player) does:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puMJxcmqYbg
:-)

# 25 - I couldn't find any research or anything, just a few comments on Google about people from the south/Texas which make it sound like it could be a regional thing rather than isolated people saying it wrong all over the place: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rls=GGLJ...

No L in salmon or almond in my New York pronunciation. (Bronx though, not Brooklyn...) And for me, "salmon" and "almond" have the same initial vowel, whereas here in California (where they spawn and grow, respectively), "almond" has the same vowel sound as "palm". My pronunciation of "almond" is seen here as really unusual.

Also, for me, it's "Nevadda". (Sorry, hm--us!) And if it's followed by a word starting with a vowel, then it's "Nevadder", as in "Nevadder is somewhere east of here." "Nevahda" seems so lah-dee-dah...

Aus purer Neugier. Wie sprechen die gebildeten Natives die taxonomischen Familie(?) "Salmonidae" aus ? "Samonyday" to rhyme with "Sam go lie May" oder mehr wie " sell Moe tea day"?

By 'gebildet' do you mean ordinary lay people with a decent nonclassical education, or people fluent in Latin and Greek, or scientists who work with taxonomy?

If the first category counts, I would pronounce it /sæl-MONN-i-day/, with vowels and accents approximately as in 'bad holiday.' (That is, all vowels short except the last AE.) But only if someone asked me a question about it, because otherwise I would never have any reason to use the word.

I would imagine it rhymes with other things ending in -onidae that scientists in the forum have heard pronounced by a lot of native speakers.

Thanks hm, that was my question.

I agree with hm on salmonidae.

Here in Southern California most people pronounce the L in almond and the A as in palm. However, when I visited in the Central Valley where they grow them, most people I heard rhymed it with Hammond (the organ company).

Again, no L in salmon. @Dirk #4: are you pronouncing the A as in cat/bat or like ah as in Psalm/palm?

I usually hear Nevadda (but then I spend most of my day with high schoolers - I'm a teacher). In Missouri there is a town of Nevada, pronounced Nuh-VAY-duh [sorry about the approximation using AE orthography]. The town of Cairo in Missouri's Little Egypt region is pronounced KAY-roe, but the city in Egypt is KI-roe.

In another thread was a discussion of "mobile" with three different pronunciations (BE, AE, the city in Alabama).

The prophet Isaiah is i-ZAY-uh in AE but I have always heard i-ZI-uh when I've attended services in England.

By the way, the word "salmon" comes to us from French (whence the pronunciation without L) and (according to the OED) was originally often spellt without an L: variously "samoun", "samwn", "sawmon", "samon", "sammon", etc.

OED says "the spelling with l is from the Latin form.

So I would think that the pronunciation of the L is a spelling pronunciation (like the "th" of "author" and "Anthony".)

Also by the way, "salmonella" is a fairly common word. It is[\b] pronounced with L.

@#26 RES-can: Maybe you should reconsider your agreeing with Werner - he wrote "...and I have not heard anyone there not prounouncing the L"

"...the USA and Canada..." Fascinating, but a pity he could not be more precise. The US of A is...well...huge, so to speak.

oops - thanks Drake UK - I guess I read what I thought I was "hearing" - I have never heard it pronounced with the L in English Canada

The L is generally NOT pronounced, but I will not say that you will not hear it pronounced. Some people do pronounce it.

I (personally) would consider that an incorrect pronunciation to pronounce the L.

The L is generally NOT pronounced, but I will not say that you will not hear it pronounced. Some people do pronounce it.

I (personally) would consider that an incorrect pronunciation to pronounce the L.

While I agree that "Nevada" with a short "a" is rather unappealing to the ear (compared to "Nevahda,) I was born and raised in California and NEVER heard anyone pronounce it "Nevahda" until a few years ago. So to my ears, it sounds rather pretentious, as though the speaker is attempting to sound sophisticated.

That being said, "Nevahda" may very well be how it was originally pronounced....but not in my 31 year lifetime in California.

My point being, that it's certainly not due to recent immigrants to Nevada from the east coast.