Weak forms

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Many of the unstressed syllables in English words have the same vowel sound – the one called schwa. In apple and comfortable, for instance, all syllables except the stressed ones (in bold) contain /ə/. This is true of isolated words, and also of many of the unstressed syllables people pronounce when speaking in English.

In connected speech, words that carry important information (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) tend to be heard quite clearly. Other words, like articles, prepositions, or auxiliary verbs, are usually unstressed and pronounced with a reduced vowel – often a schwa. This makes them difficult to hear. The word of, for example, has a strong pronunciation, used when it is stressed in a sentence, and a weak pronunciation, which is the most common one because the word is normally unstressed. Both pronunciations appear in dictionaries.




Sometimes we expect words to be pronounced in a certain way, and when they aren’t, we don’t understand. Not everybody speaks in the same way, but in general, in fast speech, a lot of unstressed vowels get reduced and become a schwa. This is why we should learn about weak forms.

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