LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "il figlio (m.)" in Italian?
eel FEEL-yoh, two quick beats. In IPA: /il ˈfiʎ.ʎo/. The gli in the middle is one soft consonant sound, not a hard g plus a separate l and i.
Two syllables, fi and glio, with the article il in front and the stress on fi.
Listen: il figlio (m.)
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Sound it out
Like famiglia, this word uses gli as a single soft, palatal sound — close to the "lli" of "million" — with the i again silent, just marking the softness. Here it's followed by o instead of a, so the ending comes out closer to "yoh" than "yah."
Hear it in a sentence
Suo figlio ha due anni.
Her son is two years old.
Listen: Suo figlio ha due anni.
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"Suo figlio ha due anni" uses suo for "her son" — Italian possessives agree with the gender of the noun they modify, figlio, not with the gender of the person doing the possessing, so suo covers both "his" and "her" equally. Context is what tells a listener which one is meant.
As with padre and madre, there's no article in front of suo figlio: figlio is another of the singular family nouns that drop il/la after a simple possessive.
Where English speakers slip
The most common error splits gli into a hard g, a separate l, and a vowel, producing something like "FIG-lee-oh." Italian never pronounces a hard g in this combination; the whole gli is one soft, single consonant.
Once learners catch that mistake, some overcorrect the other way and drop the consonant entirely, saying "FEE-oh" with no l-sound at all. The palatal "ly" is a real, audible sound in figlio, not a silent letter combination.