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I'm getting into English recently and I'm a little confused by the way people pronounce a word that starts in a vowel right after a word ending in -ing.

For example:

You have to bring it up now?

I don't know if I should pronounce it as:

  1. bring /ŋit/
  2. brin' /nit/
  3. bring /git/

Another example would be "I'm coming out".

Likewise, what about the ending -ang? For example:

We can just hang out and have a good time.

And to round it all up, what about a combination of the two? For example,

He got sick of hanging around waiting for you and went home.

I've been asking myself these questions for weeks.

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  • Some people from New York City and the surrounding areas insert a /g/ after /ŋ/ if a vowel follows—Google "Lawn Guyland" (= Long Island). The vast majority of English speakers don't do this.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Apr 10, 2013 at 20:07

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Some English accents pronounce the g on the end of words like bring (even without a word following). The BrE Birmingham/Black Country accent can do this, for example, and I’m sure there are others. In this case, bring it would be pronounced /briŋgit/.

“Standard” English pronunciation does not insert the final /g/ and would use /briŋit/.

The same applies to all words ending /ŋ/ followed by a vowel.

Where the final g is pronounced, it can be inserted in other cases too: “speaking Latin” would not have an /iŋgl/ in the middle in Standard English pronunciation but it could well do so in an accent which normally pronounces the final g.

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  • And in accents where unstressed -ing may be pronounced /ɪn/, it will be /ɪnɪt/, e.g. "giving it".
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Apr 10, 2013 at 16:52
  • Thanks. So while unstressed -ing may be pronounced /in/, how should I know if -ing should be unstressed or not? Or I can generally unstress all the words who ends with -ing? e.g. "givin' up", "sneakin' around" or "comin' out"?
    – Kewei Shang
    Commented Apr 12, 2013 at 13:31
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    No, just do Standard English: pronounce everything with the "ng" sound (sorry can't do IPA on an iPad), without making it "n" or having the intrusive hard "g". Dropping or adding the "g" is non-standard.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Commented Apr 12, 2013 at 19:23
  • That's the answer I was looking for, thank you so much @Andrew!
    – Kewei Shang
    Commented Apr 13, 2013 at 9:40

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