Social Interactions
Senior 6 · English (Languages)
Social Interactions
Lesson 3 of 4
35 min
Let's begin
English has 26 letters but, in the standard southern British accent described in most dictionaries, about 44 distinct sounds: 24 consonants and 20 vowels. That mismatch is why though, through, tough and thought sound so different. To speak clearly and to use a dictionary's pronunciation guide, you need to know the sounds themselves, written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and the pattern of stress that holds each word together.
Notes written for this lesson.
Many speakers of Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili and French find the same few areas of English pronunciation difficult, and for the same reason: their first languages organise sounds differently. Kinyarwanda, like Kiswahili, has five basic vowel qualities, while English has twelve pure vowels and eight diphthongs, so pairs such as ship and sheep, or full and fool, may sound alike at first. In Kinyarwanda, the sounds written l and r do not distinguish words from each other, so light and right need practice. Neither Kinyarwanda nor French has the sounds at the start of think and this.
The good news is that these are not faults; they are predictable differences, and predictable problems can be practised. The method is simple: hear the difference, then make it, using minimal pairs, words that differ in one sound only.
Definition
Key terms
Vowels are described by where the highest part of the tongue is: front or back, close (high) or open (low), and whether the lips are rounded. Try saying seat, sit, bed, cat: your jaw drops and your tongue lowers at each step.
| Diphthong | Example | Diphthong | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| /eɪ/ | day, rain | /aʊ/ | now, house |
| /aɪ/ | my, light | /ɪə/ | near, here |
| /ɔɪ/ | boy, voice | /eə/ | hair, there |
| /əʊ/ | go, road | /ʊə/ | pure, tour (often /ɔː/ today) |
| Manner | Voiceless | Voiced | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives (air stopped, then released) | /p/ /t/ /k/ | /b/ /d/ /ɡ/ | pin, bin; ten, den; coat, goat |
| Fricatives (air forced through a narrow gap) | /f/ /θ/ /s/ /ʃ/ /h/ | /v/ /ð/ /z/ /ʒ/ | fan, van; think, this; sip, zip; ship, measure; hat |
| Affricates (a plosive released as a fricative) | /tʃ/ | /dʒ/ | church, judge |
| Nasals (air through the nose) | none | /m/ /n/ /ŋ/ | map, nap, sing |
| Approximants (organs close, but not touching enough to cause friction) | none | /l/ /r/ /w/ /j/ | light, right, wet, yet |
Minimal pairs for practice: ship / sheep; full / fool; cat / cut; cart / cut; light / right; collect / correct; think / sink; three / tree; they / day; very / berry.
In every word of more than one syllable, one syllable is stressed: it is louder, longer and higher in pitch, and its vowel is clear. Unstressed vowels often weaken to schwa. Put the stress in the wrong place and a word can become hard to recognise, or change into another word.
| Tendency | Examples |
|---|---|
| Most two-syllable nouns and adjectives: first syllable | TA-ble, HAP-py, WEA-ther |
| Many two-syllable verbs: second syllable | be-GIN, de-CIDE, re-LAX |
| Noun and verb pairs | a RE-cord / to re-CORD; a PRE-sent / to pre-SENT; an OB-ject / to ob-JECT; a RE-bel / to re-BEL |
| Stress falls just before -tion, -sion, -ic, -ical, -ity, -ial, -ian | e-du-CA-tion, de-CI-sion, e-co-NO-mic, a-BI-li-ty, mu-SI-cian |
| -ee, -eer, -ese take the stress | em-ploy-EE, en-gi-NEER, Ja-pa-NESE |
| -ness, -ment, -ful, -less do not move it | HAP-pi-ness, de-VE-lop-ment, CARE-ful |
| Compound nouns: first part | BLACK-board, CLASS-room, FOOT-ball |
Worked example
Stress moves, and vowels change with it
Watch the first vowel: /əʊ/ when stressed, schwa /ə/ when not. Learning a word means learning its stress, and a good dictionary marks it with ˈ before the stressed syllable.
Warning
Practice
Sources and credits
