UNDERSTANDING ACCENT:
Accent: An accent is a combination of three main elements: intonation, word connections, and pronunciation. It can be confused with dialects which are varieties of language differing in vocabulary, syntax, as well as pronunciation usually spoken by a group united by geography or social status.
Why is accent different when the same language is used?
When a group of people set a standard pronunciation, speakers who deviate from it are said to “speak with an accent.” People from India
People sharing an identifiable accent may be defined by a wide variety of common traits. An accent can be associated with the region in which its speaker reside, the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language, and so on.
Note: www.SoundComparisons.com is an interesting site to understand the different accents from around the world, where you can listen and compare a list of words and the way they are pronounced in different places, India
Is it easy to understand various accents?
A French guest, staying in a hotel in Edmonton
The French guest replied, “Toilette pepper!”
The examples mentioned above is not provided to make fun of the way French people or anyone else speak, but only to show that these amusing incidents happen due to misinterpretation caused by accents. The problem is faced by transcribers and editors very often.
Easy of Difficult to Understand?
Well, it’s like asking whether a classical Bharatnatyam dancer can learn Salsa. If the dancer practices, of course, he or she can!
Once you learn how people intonate, connect words, and pronounce when forming sentences, it is very easy to understand any accent provided they speak in the language that you train yourself on.
“Practice Makes Perfect.”
Note: On this site, we will only stress on understanding American accent as in Business Transcription that the accent that most people come across. We will take up each of the three elements (Intonations, Word Connections, and Pronunciation) and try to understand them in laymen terms.
Accent = Intonations + Word Connections + Pronunciation
The way American’s speak?
The main difference between the way an American talks and the way the rest of the world talks is that they don’t really move their lips. Most of the sounds are created in the throat, and using the tongue very actively. They don’t try to pronounce each and every single word. Usually, the end of one word is attached to the beginning of the next word. The same is used for initials, numbers and spelling.
Intonation: Basically, Intonation means the rise and fall of pitch made in order to convey a range of meanings, emotions or situations within the confines of standard English grammar and fixed word order.
How to Intonate?
There are basically three ways in which a person intonates.
1) The first way is to just raise the volume. Though this is not a very sophisticated way of intonating, but it definitely commands attention.
2) The second way is to stretch out the word or lengthen the word that one wants to draw the attention to.
3) The third way is to change pitch. Pausing sometimes before changing pitch is very effective, but one shouldn’t overdo it.
Some Do’s and Don’ts in American Intonation:
1) Don’t speak word by word: Garry – is – on – the – road.
Many people who learned printed English end up sounding mechanical and foreign to Americans as they speak word by word. American English is much smoother.
2) Connect words to form sound groups: Ga – rizän – the – road.
This is a bit difficult to understand, as it is completely different than what we have been thought at school. Instead of thinking of each word as a unit, you have to think of sound units, which do not match written words on a page. Americans don’t say Garry is on the road, but say Ga rizän the road. The sound units make the flow of the sentence smooth.
3) Use Staircase Intonation:
Ga | road | |||
ri | ||||
zän | ||||
the | ||||
Note: A new staircase is formed when an information needs to be emphasized, generally a noun.
Americans tend to stretch out sounds longer, so as to lengthen their vowel sounds, and hence put them on two stair-steps instead of one. Eg.: here = he – re.
Word Connections: As you might have already read, in American English words are not pronounced one by one. Most often the end of one word is attached to the beginning of the next.
To understand Word Connections, you must first know about Consonants and Vowels!
Consonants and Vowels: The English Alphabet consists of 26 Letters. These 26 letters consist of 5 vowels and 21 consonants as shown below.
Consonants | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | J | K | L | M | N | P | Q | R | S | T | V | W | X | Y | Z | ||||
Vowels | A | E | I | O | U |
Furthermore, depending on the sounds of the consonant, consonants can be divided into:
1) Voiced Consonant: A Voiced Consonant is a consonant sound that produces vibration in the vocal cord. Eg.: B, D, Z, G, R, V, etc.
2) Voiceless Consonant: A Voiceless Consonant is a consonant sound that produces no vibration in the vocal cord. Eg.: P, T, K, Q, F, S, etc.
Too Technical! Hard to understand and identify which is Voiced and which is Voiceless?
Quiet the opposite! A simple experiment that you yourself can carry on will tell you whether a consonant sound is voiced or voiceless.
Let’s take two consonant sounds that are symbolically written as “S” and “Z". If you place your fingers on the voice box, i.e., the location of the Adam’s apple in the upper throat, one can feel a vibration when one pronounces “zzzz,” but not when one pronounces “ssss.”
Please Note: To produce any sound we use Lips, Tongue, Vocal Folds, and Soft Palate (Anatomy of Human Mouth showing the various articulators used to make a sound). Consonants pairs of voiced and voiceless consonants are formed that have similar position of the organs used.
Eg. : (P, B); (T, D); (K, G); (F, V); (S, Z).
It is useful for a transcriber to understand this at it helps them when listening a totally new word which they haven’t heard before and guessing by the phonetics what the correct spelling is. The website below mentioned will help you to discover these sounds.
This wonderful application on University of Iowa
To learn more about Voiced and Voiceless Consonants, listen to this Audio. The script of the audio for you to follow it is available here!
Wikipedia links to learn the Voiced and Voiceless Consonants in greater detail: Voiced and Voiceless.
Important Note: Here we are talking about sounds and not how the alphabet are spelled out, i.e., for "Z" sound would be ‘zzz', and it is spelled out as ‘zee’.
Some Rules that are followed for Word Connection:
Well, now that you have understood about voiced and voiceless consonant and vowel sounds, there are a few basic rules that one follows when forming word connections. These are:
1) When a word ends in a consonant and the following word starts with a vowel.
Eg.: Spelling: A band of boys!
Pronunciation: A ban dof boyz!
2) When a word ends in a consonant and the following word starts with the same consonant or a consonant that is in a similar position.
Eg: Spelling: It’s not the lofty sails but the unseen wind that moves the boat.
Pronunciation: It’s no[t]the lofty sails, bu[t]the unseen wind that moves the boat.
3) When a word ends in a vowel and the following word starts with a vowel sound.
Eg: Spelling: I am going to New York
Pronunciation: I[y]am going to New York
Note: The above examples will give you an idea or how Word Connections are formed, but to get more detailed information please go to this webpage of www.americanaccent.com.
Pronunciation: It refers to the way a word or language is usually spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. Pronunciation varies depending on many elements like geography, ethnicity, social class, education, et cetera. Thus American Pronunciation is different from Indian Pronunciation.
The Pronunciation of a word consists of three things: Phonemes, Syllables and Word Stress. Let’s learn what Phonetics, Syllables and Word Stress are.
Phonemes: A Phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound used to form meaningful contrasts between utterances. The phonemes charts given below will help you understand General American phonemes in more detail.
Note: This might get too technical, but is important to learn. Hence please open the following application or sites to understand how the various phonemes sound and what organs are used in producing them.
a) Anatomy: To understand where the different articulators are situated in the mouth.
b) Phonetic Sounds: To understand how each Phoneme is pronounced, and animations to show what articulators are used.
Consonant Phonemes: Consonants sounds can be divided into voiced and voiceless consonants, but it can also be divided into further sub-groups depending on the manner in which the sound is produced and the position of articulators involved in the process.
Table of Consonant phonemes:
Bilabial | Labio-dental | Dental | Alveolar | Post-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
Plosive | spin [p] bed [b] | tap [t] debt [d] | skip [k] get [g] | |||||
Affricate | chip [tʃ] jug [dʒ] | |||||||
Fricative | fan [f] van [v] | thing [θ] this [ð] | suit [s] zoo [z] | ship [ʃ] vision [ʒ] | hat[h] | |||
Nasal | man[m] | run [n] | ring [ŋ] | |||||
Lateral | loop [l] | |||||||
Approximant | room [ɹ] | yes [j] | which(ʍ) witch(w) | |||||
Position:
Bilabial: This is a consonant articulated with both lips.
Labio-dental: These are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.
Dental: These are consonants articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth.
Alveolar: These are consonants articulated with the tongue against or near the alveolar ridge.
Post-alveolar: These are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge.
Palatal: These are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate.
Velar: These are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, known also as the velum.
Glottal: These are consonants articulated with the glottis.
Manner:
Plosive: These are consonants produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract.
Affricate: These are consonants that begin as plosive, but release as a fricative.
Fricative: These are consonants that are produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together.
Nasal: These consonants are produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose.
Lateral: These consonants are pronounced with an occlusion made somewhere along the axis of the tongue, while air from the lung escapes at one side or both sides of the tongue.
Approximant: These are speech sounds that are produced by narrowing of the vocal tract, but leave enough space for air to flow without much audible turbulence.
Vowel Phonemes: Vowel sounds can be divided into two categories, i.e., Monophthongs and Diphthongs.
1) Monophthongs are a sound of a single vowel.
Table showing different Monophthong phonemes:
Monophthongs | Front | Central | Back | |
plain | rhotacized | |||
Close | week [i] | drew [u] | ||
Near-close | pin [ɪ] | boot [ʊ] | ||
Close-mid | eight [e] | over [o] | ||
Mid | balloon [ə] | farmer [ɚ] | ||
Open-mid | bet [ɛ] | sun [ʌ] | herd [ɝ] | hall [ɔ] |
Near Open | glass [æ] | raw [ɑ] | ||
Open | path [a] | |||
Front: A Front Vowel is produced with a forward shift of the tongue.
Central: A Central Vowel is produced with the tongue in its neutral position.
Back: A Back Vowel is produced with the backward shift of the tongue.
Close: The tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth.
Near-close: Position of tongue is same as close, but less constricted.
Close-mid: Tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close to mid vowel.
Mid: Tongue is positioned mid-way between an open and close vowel.
Open-mid: Tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open to mid vowel.
Near-Open: Tongue is positioned similar to open vowel, but slightly more constricted.
Open: Tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth.
2) Diphthongs are two vowels produced consecutively in the same syllable by moving the articulators smoothly from one position to another.
Table for Diphthongs:
Dipthongs | Examples |
ow [oʊ] | low, bow, airflow, bestow, cargo, crow, glow, etc. |
ou [aʊ] | loud, cloud, cowed, vowed, plowed, crowd, etc. |
ie [aɪ] | lied, light, bride, side, denied, eyed, allied, tight, etc. |
a [eɪ] | lane, bane, pain, cane, train, gain, gate, etc. |
oi [ɔɪ] | foil, boy, toil, voice, enjoy, soil, coil, etc. |
eer [ɪɚ] | leer, seer, beer, gear, rear, frontier, deer, etc. |
air [ɛɚ] | lair, affair, chair, fare, snare, flare, ware, Voltaire, etc. |
ure [ʊɚ] | lure, unsure, obscure, pure, injure, insure, cure, etc. |
Note: To listen and learn about phonetic sounds of consonants and vowels, please go to this wonderful application provided by Stuff Media Interactive Education.
Syllables: A Syllable is a unit of sound made up of a syllable nucleus, which is in most cases a vowel, and the final margins (consonants) that are around the syllable nucleus.
For example, the word “enjoy” is composed of two syllables: “en” and “joy”.
In the syllable “joy”, o is the syllable nucleus, and j and y are the final margins.
A word that consists of a single syllable is called monosyllabic word. Disyllabic, trisyllabic words have two and three syllables respectively. Usually, a word containing more than one syllable is called polysyllabic word.
Monosyllabic Word | Polysyllabic Word | |
Disyllabic Word | Trisyllabic Word | |
Cat | Teach-er | Im-por-tant |
Sun | Eng-lish | Sen-ten-ces |
Got | a-bove | Pro-du-ces |
lick | Pho-to | Pho-to-graph |
Word Stress: In English, one doesn’t say each syllable with the same force or strength. In a word, you have to stress one syllable. You only say one syllable very loudly and all the other syllables quietly. This is done in all polysyllabic words: PLAStic, PRESent, CLEVer, HAPpy, etc.
There are two very important rules about word stress:
a) One word, one stress. (One word cannot have two stresses. So if you hear two stresses, you have heard two words, not one word.)
b) The stress is always on a vowel.
How does understanding word stresses and phenomes help a transcriber or editor?
Well, first and foremost, let’s take word stress into consideration. As you might have read above, the basic rule of word stress is “one word, one stress.” So when you hear an audio, if you listen to two stresses, then there are two words.
Secondly, if a transcriber or editor knows the phenomes for the consonants and vowels used for articulation in English, then it would be easy for him/her to guess the spelling of a word, he/she has never heard before.
Note: The site, www.onelook.com, comes in handy to search a totally new word. When you only partly listen to a word, you can do a wildcard search, and you will get the answer.
For example, you hear “ant-xxx-dent” The xxx part was not audible or didn’t make sense to you. Then you can do a wildcard search, “ant*dent”. And you will find options for words that start with “ant” and end with “dent”. You can use the one that is phonetically more close to the audio you are listening to, but before putting it in please do check the meaning of the word by clicking on the links provided, and check whether it makes sense in the sentence that you are putting it in. The word is “antecedent”
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