I am not sure that is precisely accurate. The “i” in “oil” is functioning as an approximant rather than a vowel. Like the “y” in “boy”. The thing is, the letter “l” also functions as an approximant, which creates an awkward situation because approximants appear adjacent to vowels, so when they are paired, a shadow vowel tends to appear between them, which is almost always a “ə”.
One does not hear the word as “oy-ill” it is typically “oy-uhl”, just like “pile” and “girl” have shadow vowels between their approximants and “vowel” often sounds like less than a two-syllable word because the “e” is just an explicit shadow vowel.
Once when I lived in North Carolina, I was talking about my car with a local man and he asked me about changing the “oll” I honestly did not understand what he was saying and had to ask him to repeat himself several times before I realized that he was saying “oil”.
While I’ve heard some people use the approximate in the word oil, making it sound like “Oi-yuhll,” I don’t know of anyone who says boy with a hard y sound at the end. I’ve only ever heard the diphthong.
There’s a way to check: say the word boy really slowly, and elongate the last sound. Is it more close than the normal “ee” sound? It isn’t for me–in fact, it’s the exact same vowel as when I say the word “me.”
It’s not necessarily an “ee” sound in all accents. But most accents have an offglide at the end of boy, where your jaw closes up more and your tongue raises after the “o” sound in order to make the “oi” sound.
My instructions are an attempt to get someone to hold out that sound, to see what it sounds like. It may sound like the ee in meet, It may sound like the i in mitt. It may be in between. Heck, in some southern accents, it starts to sound closer the the u in mutt.
The one thing I don’t think I’ve ever heard is for it sound like the y in yes. That sounds begins even more narrow (jaw closer, tongue higher) than the “ee” sound.
The “r” is an approximant, which in this case affects the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. When “o” falls at the end of a word, English speakers tend to close it off with a “-w” type sound, but when it is followed by a consonant or approximant, (other than w) it tends to lose that closure (compare a language like Italian, when -o and -i endings tend to be pure, lacking the respective -w and -y closures common in – at least American – English).
For me, in normal conversation, one syllable, and the two syllable variant sounds weird. When I use(d) NATO pronunciation, it’s definitely two syllables.
Zee-ro
Wun
Too
Tree
Foe-wer
Fife
Six
Sev-en
Ate
Niner
I think you may not be quite understanding the variety of English dialects. As noted upthread, it’s sort of 1-1/2 syllables for me. It’s pretty close to two distinct vowel sounds, oy-uhl or oy-ill. For my dialect, I think the pronunciation is closer to a two syllable word where I’m partially eliding the vowels than a dipthong that I’m stretching. “Boil” is the same, but “coin”, for example, for me is clearly a one syllable word with a dipthong.
I remember about '77, when Jimmy Carter became president, a book about how to speak southern ended up in my hands. As I recall, oil was pronounced like a pointy tool for putting holes in things (“awl”) whereas “earl” was a thing you put on the roof to get better TV reception.
Well, yeah, that was my point. You stated that you thought “some people are not quite understanding what “syllables” mean.” I think most participants in this thread understand what “syllables” means, but in some dialects of English, the word “oil” is pronounced closer to a word with two distinct vowel sounds (“syllables”) than it is to a word with a single syllable that combines two vowel sounds (“diphthong”).
Then I’m not describing it well. For me, “coin” is clearly a one syllable word which contains a diphthong. My pronunciation of the vowelling in “oil”, on the other hand, is different, and is almost but not quite two distinct syllables. I personally have a much easier time parsing the word when it is pronounced as two distinct syllables “oi-yill”, than when it is pronounced as a single syllable where the diphthong all but disappears, the Soputhern U.S. “oll” referenced upthread.
You’re assuming that I meant people with different accents to mine? Why? Unless you really want to be offended, that’s an overreach. My accent says oil the exact same way yours does, at least based on your description.
I suppose you could really fully be using two syllables. I mean, it doesn’t sound like it, it sounds like a textbook definition of a dipthong, but I have a feeling this isn’t going to be a productive discussion.
In British RP (your “accent”), “oil” is pronounced with a one-syllable diphthong. In my accent, “oil” is pronounced with a vowelling that’s something in between a one-syllable diphthong and two distinct syllables. Our accents apparently pronounce the word differently. I’m not saying that because I don’t understand what “syllables” and “diphthongs” are, I’m saying that because in my accent, “oil” is somewhere in between.
Let’s try this. For you, is “coin” a one syllable diphthong? Is it the same diphthong as “oil”? For me, those two words have slightly different vowellings. For me, in “coin”, the vowelling is a diphthong, and “coin” is a one-syllable word. Which is different than how I pronounce “oil”.
How about “goyim”? (I know, that’s Hebrew/Yiddish, not English, but I couldn’t think of an English word that illustrates the point as well). That’s clearly a two syllable word, right? I don’t pronounce “oil” with the same vowelling as “goyim”, but it’s not far off.
For me, the vowelling in “oil” is somewhere in between “coin” and “goyim”. I suspect if you recorded my casual speech, I’d occasionally drift towards the “coin” vowelling and occasionally towards the “goyim” vowelling, depending on the context.
I doubt that. A diphthong (at least in English) is normally perceived by the speaker as a single vowel sound and a single syllable. If someone says they have an extra syllable after the diphthong, I tend to believe them.
It seems much more common for people to err in the other direction by denying that they have a diphthong in a given context (where they almost certainly do, but on a text-based medium such as a message board it’s impossible to be sure). Speakers don’t generally notice that some English vowel sounds are diphthongs until it’s brought to their attention.