How to Pronounce PEOPLE --- American English Pronunciation

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.