Formal or informal pronounciation

Pronunciation is just the noun form. Pronouncing is the verb. Both have more than one meaning.

<<Talking of pronunciation rules, I would be grateful if anybody provides me with a reference on transcription rules used in discussions here.
Thank you in advance.>>

Vera, we most often use a transcription system here called XSAMPA, which is widely and universally used to describe sounds in languages in the absence of the ability to write using the specialized characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). XSAMPA is basically the same thing as IPA except that XSAMPA may be written and seen by anyone, whereas not everyone has the ability to input and display the specialized IPA characters on their computers.

If you're unfamiliar with IPA for English, here's a good article on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_in_IPA

If you can't read the IPA on the screen, click on the word "IPA" on the message on the top right hand corner of that page saying "Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode."

If/when you're already familiar with IPA for English, here is the IPA --> XSAMPA conversion chart:

http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/studerende/thorinn/xsamchart.gif

Hope that helps! :)

Thank you, Kirk. It is of great help, indeed.

in general, speech patterns don't necessarily have a direct connection to intelligence. yet, informal, or lazy speech as it's been referred to on here, is often expected from an ignorant person. This may not be correct, right, or fair, but it's true. That's why people are usually more careful about their speech in important (formal) situations. If someone wishes to leave an impression of cleanliness and/or intelligence, they tend to use the most formal speech patterns they know, without sounding unnatural. That's why someone might be perceived as "nerdy" for using extremely formal speech patterns in an informal situation. The other end of this is that informal speech is more accepted in casual social situations. For some reason many people feel cool when they sound stupid. Hope this is hopeful in the "which situations require which speech patterns" issue.

English nouns often do this. Sacrifice/sacrificial; divine/divinity; specify/specific

There's tons of examples.

Saying stuff like "lemme" and "didja" does sound quite sloppy. There are a lot of people that do say that but I think (at least where I live at the moment) people use unreleased T's and D's more often.

When I say "let me" it comes out like /let¬ mi:/ and not like /lemi:/

The word (or whatever that is) didja sounds really southern to me, when I say "did you" it sounds like /dId¬ dzjU/ and not like /dIdz@/

I hope it helps!