By Olga Smith
All people who take our elocution lessons start their speech training with this sound, it is the long [ɑː] vowel sound as in "father, car, clerk, calm". As you can see it has different spelling variations. In English, it is typical to have many spelling variations for a sound because English inherited many foreign words, they anglicised the pronunciation but left the original foreign spelling.
This exact English sound does not exist in many other languages and that is why it is absolutely essential to master it if you want to adopt RP (Received Pronunciation) or Standard British model of pronunciation.
There is a sound that is similar to the long [ɑː] sound and it exists in many languages, it is a cardinal vowel [ɑ] as in the French word "grave". Both sounds have an open jaw position. The placement of the tongue for the English sound is a slightly different, it is flat at the back of the mouth, but not quite so far back.
Foreign students often suffer from Americanisms because they learned English from American films and sitcoms. We recommend getting rid of them if you want to master RP.
Here is a list of words that are pronounced with a long [ɑː] sound in British English and with short [æ] as in "cat" in American English:
"fast, example, demand, chancellor, dance, pass, past, can't, chance, answer, last, laugh, path"
This sound often has the letter /r/ in spelling and in British English you should not pronounce it, below are a few examples:
"bar, mark, party, garden, pardon, park, dark, art, star, hard, start, chart, heart, heart, smart". In General American /r/ is pronounced.
We have a wonderful video course where we make it absolutely clear how to produce this sound and all sounds of Received Pronunciation in the mouth. Once you know the exact placement of this sound, you can practise it with the apps Get Rid of your Accent UK1, Business English Speech and Elocution Lessons.