Am I hearing things? For the past few years, I could swear I've been hearing more and more people pronounce the L in the words calm and palm. Have you heard this, too? The words coming out as "callm" and "pallm" and not "com" and "pom"? I'm not positive, but I think I've also heard the L creep into the pronunciation of folk, as well, yielding "follk" and not the familiar "foke." (I think I can confidently say I've never heard yolk as anything other than "yoke.")
At first I thought this was the result of the same kind of... I guess we can call it litterization (a word I think I just coined, which means "pronouncing things they way they're spelled") that leads to the pronunciation of volatile as vo-luh-tile, which I've heard plenty of times. But where volatile is a fairly uncommon word in speech—we can easily imagine someone who hasn't encountered it in the wild—the same can't be said for calm, palm, or folk. These are everyday kinds of words, so I'm not sure what has rendered their pronunciation so unstable, if, in fact, it is.
Clearly I need a grant to study this further.
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