AmE pronunciation of 'brief'

brief?????_??_???????

There is an online dictionary that marks the word BRIEF as having two different pronunciations. One is BrE=[bri:f] , and the other AmE=[brif], as the above link indicates .

I would like to have our American friends here verify this for me, for I strongly doubt its correctness. Thank you.

The recording sounds correct, and /brif/ looks all right. I had never noticed the Brits pronouncing the medial vowel longer than we do. Do they really?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LiuJing

brief?????_??_???????

There is an online dictionary that marks the word BRIEF as having two different pronunciations. One is BrE=[bri:f] , and the other AmE=[brif], as the above link indicates .

I would like to have our American friends here verify this for me, for I strongly doubt its correctness. Thank you.

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The BrE pronunciation on that link sounds very strange to me. The middle vowel sound isn't normally that long. I would say that the only real difference between the BrE and AmE pronunciations is, as always, the "r".

Are we supposed to pronounce the [i:] in 'brief' the same way as we do [i:] in the word ' beef' , either in BrE or AmE? I mean the length of this [i:] sound.

I find that the R in that position (initial with respect to the vowel) is not noticeably different in the two populations.

There isn't a huge difference between the "r" sounds, I agree, but there's enough that if the two words were played to me, I would know which one was the BrE and which the AmE.

And yes - I would say that the "ie" sound would be pretty much identical to the "ee" in "beef".