Dear Lew Bretz:

You wrote:
> As an American living in Australia I’ve become aware of using “alblum”
> with an L, despite the plain spelling of the word without that L.
>
> I thought it was something picked up from my mother, who says the same as
> do my siblings, then noticed its use by two Americans on a TV series
> concerning pop music. No reference to this pairing appears in
> bartleby.com, or in your particular site. Does anyone in your grammar
> network have an idea of whether this variant use is extensive? Thanks if
> you can help, Lew B.
>
It is an American variant you do hear on occasion. I used to hear it more when I lived in Western Pennsylvania. A lot of the colloquial language there comes from German. People were called “dumkopfs” if they did something silly, and thorns were called “jaggers.” “Blum” is a common syllable in German, so it may be more typical of people with Eastern European/German/Yiddish backgrounds.