A mouthful of English

Many of the unstressed syllables in English words have the same vowel sound – the one called schwa . In a pple and com fortable , 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 ever...

The stressed syllables in ta ble, pen cil, fa mous, and to day are pronounced correctly by most learners . When it comes to the unstressed syllables, however, some find it difficult to believe that they all contain the same vowel – represented by / ə / in the transcriptions /'te І b ə l/, /'pens ə l/, /'fe І m ə s/, and /t ə 'de І /. The most common vowel sound in English is called schwa , and knowing about it may help improve both pronunciation and understanding of spoken English. It is an unstressed central vowel, often described as weak, short, and neutral. We hear it all the time, although the spelling of English doesn’t help us know where it is. For example, not all the vowels in ba na na and pas ta sound the same – we say /b ə' n ɑ :n ə / and / ' p ɑ :st ə /. Schwa never occurs in stressed syllables, but it is very frequently found in unstressed ones, no matter what letters are used in writing. Many pronunciation mistakes we make...