Last week I was talking to you about rhythm in intonation and specifically how speaking
in a stress timed rhythm would help you to sound much more confident and much more at
ease speaking British English.
And as a part of the video I mentioned syllables and I said if you don’t know what a syllable
was that you should go onto Google and check it out and it would give you the answer and
I thought well maybe I should make you a video about syllables and so this is what I am doing
and I'm gonna talk about syllables and the number of syllables in words but more importantly
and more relevant how to stress those syllables in words in British English.
So here goes - what is a syllable?
A syllable is essentially a single unit of speech and that unit of speech tends to contain
a vowel sound and that may have a consonant after it or before it, it may even have what
is called a cluster of constance which means more than one constant before it or after
it.
So for instance ‘at’ is a single syllable.
It happens to be a word but it's a single syllable word; to’, ‘if’, ‘a’, so
these are single syllable words in another name for those are mono-syllabic words and
here are a few more:
at to bit can bite stack thwart click our or are
And a word that contains more than one syllable is sometimes referred to as a poly-syllabic
word or some people say multi-syllable word.
I prefer polysyllabic word.
Here are a few of those:
a.head - contains two syllables a.men.ded - contains three syllables
ra.di.at.or - contains four syllables a.bbre.vi.a.ted - contains five syllables
au.tho.ri.ta.ri.an - contains six syllables
And in polysyllabic words it's important to know which syllable is stressed.
So, for example in the word ‘ahead’, ‘HEAD’ is the stressed syllable and the ‘a’ at
the beginning is un-stressed - ‘a.HEAD’.
In ‘amended’, ‘MEN’ is the stressed syllable the ‘a’ and the ‘ded’ at
the end are unstressed - ‘a.MEN.ded’ and this is important because a lot of non-native
speakers tend to either stress too many of the syllables in those words or they stress
the wrong syllables.
Now the way in which we stress the syllable this is the important bit is that we change
the pitch of our voice and to keep things simple for now the most common way that we
do that is by increasing the pitch of our voice, not the loudness of our voice but changing
the pitch to a slightly higher note so for instance: ‘a.HEAD’, ‘a.MEN.ded’.
Can you hear that.
Here are some more examples:
RA.di.a.tor a.BBRE.vi.a.ted
au.tho.ri.TA.ri.an a.MEN.ded
WON.der.ful al.THOUGH
GE.ni.us in.CRE.di.bly
frus.TRA.ting
al.THOUGH you are a GE.ni.us you are in.CRE.di.bly frus.TRA.ting
So a syllable is a unit of speech that contains a vowel sound that may have a consonant or
cluster of consonants before or after it and there are words that are monosyllabic single
syllable words and words that are polysyllabic and stressing the right syllable in those
polysyllabic words by way of changing the pitch of your voice is the way that we would
bring attention to and stress that part of the word in British English.
So I hope you found that useful and if you are on my website and scroll down now leave
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