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#12: The American English Pronunciation of common contractions

Learn how to understand and use these commonly spoken English contractions.
Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to Seattle Learning Academy's twelfth American English Pronunciation podcast. I have to make an apology. I was going to teach about informal contractions during this podcast, but I have changed my mind. I've decided that I would do common, or regular contractions today, and save informal contractions for next week. So I am going to save gonna and wanna for next week, and stay with the basic contractions like don't and she's today.

I'm doing this for two reasons. One, I can lay the foundation for contractions now, using words people are more familiar with, and two, it is much more important to be able to use the regular contractions before the lesser acknowledged ones.

First, our review. Since we just finished a series of four podcasts about vowels, I'd like to do a quick review of all 15 vowel sounds and their key words. If you are listening from a private place, please repeat the sound and the key word after me. Speak as accurately as possible.

long a (long a) cake
long e (long e) keep
long i (long i) bike
long o (long o) home
long u (lung u) cute
short a (short a) cat
short e (short e) bed
short i (short i) sit
short o (short o) top
short u (short u) sun
oo sound (oo sound) soon
u as in put (u sound) put
aw sound (aw sound) dog
oi sound (oi sound) join
ow sound (ow sound) down

Good. If you want specific reviews of certain sounds, go back to the previous four episodes.

All right, contractions.

A contraction is a word like don't and can't, which is a combination of two, or sometimes more words. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the use of contractions in English as well as other languages. I'll put a link up along with the transcripts this week on pronuncian.com.

Although I think most ESL classes teach contractions, few teachers emphasize the importance of using them in everyday speech. Contractions help us keep the rhythm of spoken English. English is a stress-timed language, meaning we keep about the same amount of time between stressed syllables of spoken English. This leads to things like reducing vowels, and in turn, creating things like contractions, along with other spoken English features.

Languages that are not stress-timed are usually a type of syllable-timed. It is generally considered that each syllable takes about the same amount of time in syllable-timed languages.

For some quick examples, which I am taking from Wikipedia's article on stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, the following languages are considered stress-timed: English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, and Czech. In contrast, Finnish, Slovene, French, and Spanish are commonly cited as syllable-timed languages. I'll also put the link to that article with this week's show notes for those of you that would like to learn more.

In English, the intuitive desire of a native speaker to have stressed syllables occur on beats makes it likely for us to reduce or omit some sounds, especially vowel sounds of function words. Function words are the words that serve a grammatical purpose. A content word, or a word that gives the most information about our topic, is usually stressed. I could talk about this for a long time, and I will in a future podcast. Right now I hope you will just trust me that learning to say contractions is a good thing to do. In fact, when a native speaker does not use a contraction where one is possible, it is usually going to slightly change the meaning of the sentence. For instance, in the sentence I didn't wash the car, using the contraction didn't, the important fact in the sentence is that the car wasn't washed. If I said I did not wash the car, splitting the word didn't into the words did and not, I am actually now emphasizing the word not. I would do t