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If I were reading this phrase I would read "next" "stop", but when people talks it seems to me they say something like "nextop". Is this a sort of shortening like "acopotee" instead of "a cup of tea"?

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  • The faster one speaks, the more the wordsound scrunchtogether.
    – J.R. ♦
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 22:22
  • @J.R. Is this acceptable then to say "nextop" instead of "nextstop"?
    – morgano
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 22:44
  • As @J.R states, the words do slur together. However, a railroad conductor usually goes to effort to enunciate each syllable, so says "Next[pause] stop..."
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 22:44
  • As an aside: you could add the "connected-speech" tag, since this is a question about how word pronunciation changes when words are spoken together in a sentence instead of in isolation.
    – Wim Lewis
    Commented Aug 14, 2015 at 8:04

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  1. Next stop, /nekst stɒp/

  2. Next stop, /neks stɒp/

The answer to the original poster's question is: Yes, we do say "nex stop".

In example (1) you can see an unnatural pronunciation for the phrase "next stop". It's not a mistake, but it's not the normal pronunciation we'd expect. If you say these words like this, people will probably guess that you aren't a native speaker.

If you look at the transcription for the end of the word "next" you'll see that it ends with the sounds /st/. In the spelling there's an 'X', but the sound is /st/. The transcription of the sound looks like this: /nekst/

However, you don't need to pronounce the /t/ in this word. In English there's a rule that when we have the sequence /st/ at the end of a syllable, then if the next word begins with a consonant, we can drop the /t/. But in some very common words - words that we use with high frequency - we can often drop the /t/ anyway. For these words it isn't important if the next word begins with a consonant. The word next is one of these words.

So, native English speakers usually say /neks wi:k/ and /neks stɒp/ not /nekst wi:k/ or /nekst stɒp/. However, this is just what we generally do. Sometimes we pronounce the /t/ and sometimes we don't. It is never a mistake to pronounce the /t/. It's never a mistake to drop it either.

Hope this is helpful!

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