How to Sound Natural in English - Part 2 - Connected Speech

In part 1 of How to Sound Natural in English,

we discussed on sentence stress using Content and Function Words.

If you haven't seen it, you can find it here.

This time, I'll show you how to improve your flow of speaking using - "Connected Speech."

So you can speak faster and wouldn't sound like a robot.

Connected speech in linguistics, is a continuous sequence of sounds forming words, phrases, and sentences.

In the English language, there are five ways to apply connected speech, and I'll show you in detail on how to do them right now!

Linking

When the end of a word is a consonant sound, and the next word starts with a vowel sound, we naturally link them together.

For example:

• this apple

• that apple (t becomes d when it comes between 2 vowels)

• this afternoon

• Is he busy? [izibizi]

• cats or dogs (Would you like the small, medium, or large Coke?)

Notice that the word - "OR" was pronounced as "er" instead.

Like I mentioned in part 1, all function words are not stressed, meaning we glide through them by not pronouncing them clearly.

Geminates

Most of the time, a doubled consonant letter means you simply pronounce one short consonant: dinner [dɪnə], happy [hapi], carry [kari].

English doesn’t have geminates in the same way as Italian and Luganda. It can have lengthened consonants, but these are limited to either:

If your native language uses geminate consonants (e.g. Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Luganda, Polish), then you may instinctively want to lengthen a consonant – so avoid the temptation!

Elision

In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. The word elision is frequently used in the linguistic description of living languages, and deletion is often used in historical linguistics for a historical sound change.

While often described as occurring in "slurred" speech, elisions are a normal speech phenomenon and come naturally to native speakers of the language in which they occur. Contractions such as can not → can't involve elision, and "dropping" of word-internal unstressed vowels (known specifically as syncope) is frequent: Mississippi → Missippi, history → histry, mathematics → mathmatics.

Intrusion (bridge)

When a word ends with a vowel sound, and the next word begins with another vowel sound, we use either a [j] or a [w] sound to bridge the gap, therefore, making it easier to pronounce.

So, instead of saying "SHE-ASKED".

We can insert the [j] sound in between, to make it sound smoother.

SHE[Y]ASKED, SHE[Y]ASKED

HE[Y]ANSWERED, HE[Y]ANSWERED

SHE[Y]ASKED ME[Y]A QUESTION, BUT HE[Y]ANSWERED INSTEAD.

This time, let's use the phrase "DO-IT" (X2) and insert the [w] sound to fill in the gap. - DO[W]IT, Just do it! (x3)

So the question is, which one do we use?

[j] or [w]?

Well, that depends on the "vowel position".

If the vowel sound starts from a wide position like [i], or [e],

out mouth will naturally shift to the [j] sound

[i] + [a] = iya = I[j]agree = I agree with you.

[i] + [e] = iye = I[j]am = I am happy.

If the vowel sound starts from a narrow position like [u], or [o],

out mouth will naturally shift to the [w] sound

[u] + [a] = uwa = you[w]are = you are the one

[u] + [e] = uwe = you[w]and = you and I

[u] + [o] = uwo = go[w]over = go over the bridge