Syllable Stress

Mastering the American Accent » Syllable Stress

SYLLABLE STRESS

A syllable is a small unit of speech that consists of a vowel, or a vowel and one or more consonants. Stressed and unstressed syllables form the basis of the rhythmic pattern of English words.

Many languages place the same amount of stress on each syllable. For example, in many languages the word banana is pronounced as:
ba na na (All three syllables are stressed equally.)

In English, we pronounce the word as:
ba na na (The second syllable is stressed.)

The vowel within the stressed syllable is longer, louder and higher in pitch. The vowel within the unstressed syllable is reduced and becomes a neutral, short vowel called the “schwa” and is pronounced as /ə/. It can be spelled with a, e, i, o, or u. All of the five vowels can sound the same if they are part of a reduced syllable. As you can see, it is more important to know which syllable is stressed than how the word is spelled. If people don’t understand a particular word you are saying, chances are you stressing the wrong syllable.

Note: Phonetically, banana looks like this: /bəʹnænə/. The small accent symbol in front of the /n/ indicates that the syllable that follows is stressed. Your dictionary may have different stress markers.

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