In some languages, every syllable is the same length. In English, it sounds very awkward to make each syllable the same length. YouTube blocked? Click here to see the video. English is a stress-timed language.
That means some syllables will be longer, and some will be shorter. Syllables all have different lengths because important i. If a syllable isn't important, we don't need to hear it clearly and it's often 'reduced' very little. In fact, if you pronounce a syllable clearly when it should be unstressed, it sounds like you're stressing it, which will then make the word very hard to understand for an English speaker.
For example, photo graph , pho tog rapher , and photo graph ic all have different stressed syllables so if you say one of the unstressed syllables clearly, it might sound like you're saying a different word. This is a picture representing the difference between the two language types:. In English, there are two types of stress: sentence and word stress. When we say some words louder or stronger than others in a sentence, this is called ' sentence stress '.
We can also stress words by changing the pitch of our voice, making it go higher or lower. This is called 'intonation'. Here you can see an example of word stress and intonation and how it can change the meaning of the same sentence. We also always say one syllable the loudest inside one word, which is known as ' word stress '.
Sometimes more than one syllable is stressed, but there's always one that's the strongest. This syllable must have a vowel sound we can't stress only consonants in English. You can see word stress here:. In a stress-timed language like English, the distance between stressed syllables is usually similar. In other words, the stressed syllables have a regular 'beat' and happen at a similar speed.
As you can see, anything that isn't stressed has to be squashed into the space between the stressed syllables, whether there are a few syllables like in the first sentence 'to get a' or double that amount like in the second sentence 'don't you come and have a'. These groups of words will take the same amount of time. It's possible to do this because in spoken English, we often make the unstressed syllables very small, or 'reduced', allowing us to fit more in, but this doesn't happen in other languages like Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese , Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Turkish, or Spanish.
This is why English speakers might not understand you when you're speaking 'clearly' by pronouncing everything correctly. Has this ever happened to you? Keep reading! For all language learners, it's important to know about the following:. Good question. First, we'll consider what's important to remember in general, particularly if you have a syllabic-timed language background.
You can also practise syllable stress making one syllable in a word louder than the others and individual English sounds in free phone apps like SpeakAP or ProPower , as shown below. Free apps like these are helpful for practising syllable stress and individual sounds in English. You can also practise by getting a talk with a transcript, like a talk from TED. You can then read it to someone like a Study Support Teacher and get feedback.
Pop songs are also useful resources for practising pronunciation, because songs are easy for brain to catch on to and they exaggerate many of the spoken English features. Spanish, French, and Cantonese are examples of syllable-timed languages.
What Is a Stress-Timed Language? How Does Stress-Timing Work? Tags: pronunciation , schwa , stress-timed. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Comment. Enter your name or username to comment. It just means that we stress the important words and all the other words get squeezed in between those important ones.
So that these sentences:. This means that many words have strong forms when they are important and stressed and weak forms when they are not important and squeezed into the rest of the sentence.
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