How Do You Pronounce "Often"?

Often with a pronounced "t" is grating to my ears. I consider it bad usage. We know the 't' wasn't pronounced in Victorian England, because such pronunciation would have ruined one of W.S. Gilbert's best jokes in "The Pirates of Penzance" -- the scene in which Major General Stanley mishears "often" as "orphan."

I have always pronounced the 't'. I live in Maryland and I think most people here do... If someone says "offen" I usually notice. It just sounds wrong to me somehow. Though it is more like "off-tin" when I saw it aloud.

@SuperCrap
"i can't imagine ANYONE except some backwoods hillbillies saying it that way when asked to pronounce the word as slowly as possible..."

I guess Australians must be backwards hillbillies then. I never pronounce the 't' sound, nor do I recall any Australians doing so.

Also, we pronounce "processes" as pro-cess-es with an emphasis on the 'cess' part, the 'pro' part rhyming with 'no', and a short 'e' sound at the end.

Despite Australia being such a large country, we generally don't have regional accents. You can't tell where anybody is from by their accent, although there is a sort of continuum from urban to rural that most people's accents lie on. People living in rural Australia tend to have a bit more of what we call a "bogan" (rhymes with Paul Hogan) accent, and say things like "Hows youse gaa'n?"

twenTy or "twanny"? :D

My girlfriend and I debate this rather frequently; she pronounces the 't' while I don't. We were both caught off guard once when she was using the phrase, "more often than not" and realized that when she said this specific phrase she said often with a silent 't'. We thought that was very interesting. In my previous searches for the answer to this question, i was really fond of the answer given by the chosen "best answer."

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060706193650AAmjRiw