No there is no rule.The two words have the same meaning, 'whilst' is the older version (some dictionaries list it as obsolete) and it usually appears only in formal or poetic writing. If you stick to 'while' you won't ever

No! It's not sloppy! It's actually advisable to pronounce BUTTON that way in American English, since it seems to be the most common way to pronounce the pair NT. And the same goes for similar words: sentence, mountain, cotton, etc. The T

Jim, I hadn't thought of that, but I think I have never noticed it. I definitely pronounce words like "mountain" or "sentence" with a glottal stop in the combination "TN" and I don't include a schwa in

I heard the following sentence in a film (the actor was British): "I haven't got any matches", where "got any" was pronounced as "I haven't gotney matches". I don't mean he made a glottal stop in lieu of

Ladefoged gives 22 "rules for English allophones" in the second edition of A Course in Phonetics (pp. 82-88), not all of which apply to all varieties of English. Granted. Summarizing, Selecting, 9) a glottal stop is inserted before