In this unit you will learn about:

• word accent/stress

• rhythms in English

• contracted forms

• strong and weak forms

• intonation.

Word Accent/Stress

The beauty of the English language lies in pronunciation. Accent/stress lends naturalness and beauty to your English. If you can't pronounce words clearly and stress properly, your English might sound like ‘Tinglish’, ‘Tamlish’ or ‘Hinglish’! In phonetics, accent/stress means expending extra breath on a particular syllable in a word. It is a matter of greater prominence and greater audibility.

Accent is very important to make your speech intelligible. For instance, look at the words career /kəriə/ and carrier /kæriə/. Looking at the transcription you can say there is a slight difference between the two in pronunciation. But you can bring out the difference between the two very clearly by accenting them on the right syllables. So in the word career /kə̍riə/ the accent is on the second syllable and in the word carrier /̍kæriə/ the accent is on the first syllable.

The mark (') on the top of a syllable in a word indicates that the particular syllable is stressed. This is known as primary stress. Primary stress indicates that the syllable is more prominent than the other syllables. There might also be a mark below on a syllable in a word. This is known as secondary stress. This indicates that this particular syllable is the next most prominent syllable. But for our speech purposes primary accent is the most important one.