Pronouncing the "N" as separate syllable at the end of words like "known" and "pattern"

Over time, I have heard people pronounce the "n" on words like "known" (NO-en) and "pattern" (PAT-r-en), as though it were a separate syllable. The instances of my hearing such have been rare ones, but I can't help but think this is a remnant of some regional dialect, or perhaps due to European roots.

Where did this pronunciation originate?

Solution 1:

I was brought up in North Essex (proper Essex, not that stuff near London they make jokes about). We always pronounced know-en as two syllables. The same goes for similar words. I still pronounce it that way, even though others look at me strangely. I think it goes back to the East Saxon dialect. I'm patriotic!

Solution 2:

This seems to be two separate phenomena, with different origins.

From the other answers, in some Irish dialects, words ending in consonant clusters such as -rn and -lm have the n and m pronounced as a separate syllable. This may be a hold-over from earlier English pronunciation. Apparently Shakespeare sometimes spelled "film" as phillum, so it appears he pronounced film this way. See the comments for this Language Log post. (Although it's possible both the one- and two-syllable pronunciations were used in Shakespeare's time, and he chose the two-syllable one for the sake of the meter).

The other phenomenon is restricted to past participles. I do it for past participles such as known, grown, thrown, mown, hewn, strewn (so mown is pronounced as in Moe 'n Larry). This is pure speculation on my part, but it's possible that this originated with German immigrants—in German, irregular verbs all have past participles that either end with 't' or 'en' (except for tun, with past participle getan). So for a German learning English, it would be natural to pronounce these past participles as if they ended with en.