English Word Stress 101

BASICS

🎀Content words are stressed. Content words are the MAIN WORDS in the sentence that give it it’s meaning: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. NEGATIVE words (like don’t won’t can’t not any) are also stressed. 

🎀If it’s not a content word, it’s a function word. They’re like connecting words: prepositions (at, for, on, to, etc), conjunctions (and, but, or, etc), articles (a, the) helping verbs (do, does, have, had, etc), variations of the BE verb (am, are, is, were, was) and pronouns (he, she, it, etc). So all these little connecting words are reduced. When they reduce, the vowel reduces to a schwa. 

🎀Example: He went to the bank on Friday. 

h’WEN’t’th’BANKonFRAIdei

^^Spelling is simplified. Stressed words are capitalized. There are apostrophes where the words are reduced. 

In this example you can see that the stressed words are WENT, BANK, and FRIDAY, so verb, noun, noun. We say stressed words louder, at a higher pitch, and we pronounce the true vowel sounds. 

The words that are reduced are HE, TO, THE, and ON which are: pronoun, preposition, article, preposition. All these words are reducing to something like the schwa, which just means you don’t open your mouth all the way and you say them a little bit faster and quieter. 

If you haven't already tried the audio pronunciation program, you can get a free mini course here to improve your English pronunciation. Or ask me about the pronunciation group class on Saturdays at 12:15pm Vietnam time.