In an article on the TV show The Middle in this week’s TV Guide, the cast answered the question “Did you guys immediately click?”


Neil [Flynn]: It’s strange. You’re barely introduced to someone, then you’re on camera and have to pretend to be in love and that you’ve known them all your life. Now we spend so much time together, we have developed relationships.

Patricia [Heaton]: Like the last shot we did yesterday. We were in the car together, and I forgot that everyone could hear us. We were talking about people who pronounce the “l” in “almond,” “palm,” “calm” … and just laughing our heads off. We concluded that you shouldn’t pronounce it, much to Neil’s chagrin, since he’s been pronouncing it all his life. That’s probably why he’s not married.

Neil: I didn’t realize how much I was turning off prospective wives. Who knew?

... Q: “What bugs you about each other?”:

Patricia: Well, Neil pronounces the “l” in “almond” …

Neil: I used to not pronounce the “l” in ‘wolf.” I was 25 when I learned about that. “The boy who cried woof.”

Patricia: My woof likes alllmonds!



This conversation puzzled me, since I pronounce the “l” in almond (and, calm and palm). And what do the cast members say? “Ah-mond?” “Aw-mond?” “Pecan?” So, I asked a couple of people to say “almond”, and they pronounced the “l”, too. Is it a regional variation?, I wondered, and if so, where are the cast members of The Middle from?

Well, a little poking around the net got me this:

http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_29.html

59.68% of those surveyed pronounce the “l”.
18.69% pronounce it “ah-mond”
5.65% pronounce it “aw-mond”
13.53% say something between “l” and nothing
2.45% say “other”, which is quite the leap from “almond” :p

Look at the map in the link. The variation isn’t regional. It looks like all versions of the pronunciation of “almond” occur all over the country. It was just Neil Flynn’s bad luck to be stuck in a car with the 18% and/or 5% who distain the twelfth letter of the alphabet. A shame, really, since he has been misled on his matrimonial failure, and “L” is one of my favorite letters.

So, how do *you* say “almond”?