A stressed syllable is part of a word which is pronounced louder and longer than the other parts of the word. The importance of word stress has been discussed in the previous 2 blog posts – Introduction to Word Stress and Unstressed Syllables. As mentioned in those posts, placing stress on the wrong syllable has the …
Anyone who is familiar with the English language will not be surprised to hear that English words are not always pronounced exactly the way that they are spelled. There are many reasons why a spelling may differ from its pronunciation – perhaps the word was borrowed from a foreign language (e.g. “ballet” is borrowed from …
One important aspect of pronunciation which is often overlooked is stress. Stress is the emphasis given to a part of a word, or to a whole word within a sentence. In this post, we’ll discuss stress within individual words, specifically stress patterns of 2 syllable nouns and verbs. A word can be broken down into …
In my work as an accent instructor, people often ask me which of two pronunciations of a certain word is correct. This confusion is very understandable. You may have encountered more than one pronunciation of a certain word – perhaps you looked it up in the dictionary and two alternate pronunciations were listed, or perhaps …
This post is the fourth in a series on the subject of differences between American and British English. For more information on this topic, please see the first three parts of the series: British Versus American “A” News About American “oo” and British “you” That You Never Knew The “oo” Sound: American Versus British …
Common Words Pronounced Differently in British versus American English Read More »
This is the third blog post in a three-part series on the relationships between the pronunciation of English words and their spellings. Follow the links for part one of the series on Silent Letters and part two on Homophones. As mentioned in the previous blog posts, it frequently happens that the spelling of an English word doesn’t match up …
This is the second blog post in a three-part series on the relationships between the pronunciation of English words and their spellings. Follow the links for part one of the series on Silent Letters and part three on the Sound System of American English. As mentioned in the previous blog post, it often happens that the spelling of an English word …
Homophones: Words that Sound the Same, but are Spelled Differently Read More »
This is the first blog post in a three-part series on the relationships between the pronunciation of English words and their spellings. Follow the links for part two of the series on Homophones and part three on the Sound System of American English. The English language is notable for having a large number of words with strange, unphonetic spelling. At times, …
As you may have noticed, people often sound like they have less of an accent (or sometimes none at all) when they sing in a foreign language. This holds true even if they have a noticeable accent when they speak in that languages, or even if they don’t know the foreign language at all. Why …
Why non-native speakers seem to “lose their accent” when singing English songs Read More »
In this video blog post, we discuss how to say the word “the”. When do you pronounce it “thuh” and when do you pronounce it “thee”? Here is how to pronounce “the” in American English: pronounce it “thuh” when the next word begins with a consonant sound, and pronounce it “thee” when the next word …
