Hello everybody!

I was listening some dragon shouts on an Android app I recently download (called "Skyrim Dragon Shouts"), and I noticed that the "aa" is almost always pronounced as a /É‘:/ rather than a /É’/. I decided to verify my ears weren't sending me wrong ideas by going on the Elder Scrolls' wikia, aaaaaaannd... I think you gessed it, I again heard a /É‘:/ instead of a /É’/ (but it rarely happened). But I don't know if it's the same in Skyrim's discussions.
However, I propose to add this pronunciation into the lessons.

What do you think about this?

It's a really subtle distinction - listening to the first 3 Shouts the wiki lists sounds pretty clearly like /É’/ to me.  Someone actually asked on the pronunciation of "aa" earlier so I have some extra links up my sleeves:

• "Tinvaak"
• "Aak"
• "Wahlaan"

For the sake of being thorough, I don't think it would hurt to add "sometimes /a:/" to the lesson.

Well, in my opinion, it actually sounds more like a /É‘:/ as it can be heard here than as the /É’/ heard here~

Sorry for the confusion, I am using this chart (also on Wikipedia) for IPA which lists this sound as /É’/ and the other (incorrect) one as /É”:/.

Well, the second one you write as /É”:/ is pronounced as heard here.
But I guess from where comes from the confusion: you're American, aren't you? Or, at least, your English is american. There's a difference between American pronunciation and the British one, as we can hear on your website. For example, the British pronunciation of "not" is /nÉ’t/, and the American pronunciation is /nÉ‘:t/. The same for "call" /kÉ”:l/ (Brit.) and /kÉ’l/ (Amer.) (you can check the annotations down the page).
The referent pronunciation is actually the British one (sorry for American people).

Ah, I see. So does this mean AA and AH have the same pronunciation?

It seems so, just as "u", "uu" and "oo" are pronounced /u:/. The little difference between "ah" and "aa" would be, in my opinion, that "ah" sometimes ends with a sligh expiration, and as it has already been said i rarely pronouced /É‘x/.

I know this thread has more or less been resolved, but I did want to add my two cents. :) Namely, that first IPA link you posted, paathurnax, has multiple errors and I wouldn't use it for a reference in the future. /É‘:/ and /É’/ have been thoroughly mixed up from what I can hear; the American examples for /É’/ are very, very clearly /É‘:/. (After having to transcribe both American and British English in IPA 3 days a week for several months, I'm pretty confident about this haha.) In the American example of "little," the first 'l' is clearly /l/ (alveolar lateral approximant) but the second is actually a syllabic alveolar lateral approximant which is different. Using the 't's in "getting" as an example of /t/ in American English is really inaccurate. In this context, /t/ will virtually always be pronounced as its allophone /ɾ/, even in the most standard American dialects. The audio example does use /t/ but you will never hear a native speaker of American English pronounce it that way! D:

If you need a good audio IPA chart to refer to, I would highly recommend this one. It's accurate and has a much wider range of phonemes.

Thanks Sandpiper for this precisions~ (And btw, thanks for the link, I've been searching it for a week now, but I haven't been able to find it again ^^ )