If you find yourself getting too nasal with [?], pinch your nose as you say it. Go to the practice paragraph and find the 5 [?] sounds, including [?u] as in down or out.
a
The [a] sound is a more common sound than [?]; you will find 10 such sounds in the practice paragraph. To pronounce [a], relax your tongue and drop your jaw as far down as it will go. As a matter of fact, put your hand under your chin and say [ma], [pa], [ta], [sa]. Your hand should be pushed down by your jaw as it opens. Remember, it's the sound that you make when the doctor wants to see your throat.
uh
Last is the schwa, the most common sound in American English. When you work on the practice paragraph, depending on how fast you speak, how smoothly you make liaisons, how strong your intonation is, how much you relax your sounds, you will find from 50 to 75 schwas. Spelling doesn't help identify it, because it can appear as any one of the vowels, or a combination of them. It is a neutral vowel sound, uh. It is usually in an unstressed syllable, though it can be stressed as well.
Whenever you find a vowel that can be crossed out and its absence wouldn't change the pronunciation of the word, you have probably found a schwa: photography [f'tagr'fee] (the two apostrophes show the location of the neutral vowel sounds) Green G. Quet Amerikan. - М., 1956.
Because it is so common, however, the wrong pronunciation of this one little sound can leave your speech strongly accented, even if you Americanize everything else.
Remember, some dictionaries use two different written characters, the upside down e & [^] for the neutral uh sound, but for simplicity, we are only going to use the first one.
Silent or Neutral?
A schwa is neutral, but it is not silent. By comparison, the silent E at the end of a word is a signal for pronunciation, but it is not pronounced itself: code is [kod]. The E tells you to say an [o]. If you leave the E off, you have cod, [kad]. The schwa, on the other hand, is neutral, but it is an actual sound, uh. For example, you could also write photography as phuh-tah-gruh-fee.
The schwa is a neutral sound, (no distinctive characteristics), but it is the most common sound in the English language. To make the uh sound, put your hand on your diaphragm and push until a grunt escapes. Don't move your jaw, tongue or lips, just allow the sound to flow past your vocal cords. It should sound like uh, not ah.
Once you master the two sounds [?] and uh, you will have an easier time pronouncing 'can' and 'can't'. In a sentence, the simple positive 'can' sound like [k'n]. The simple negative 'can't' sounds like [k?n(t)].
Intention Spelling Pronunciation
Positive I can do it. [I k'n do it.
Negative I can't do it. I k?n(t) do it.
Extra Positive I can do it. I k??n do it.
Extra Negative I can't do it. I k?nt do it.
When we read the works of Shakespeare or other authors from centuries past, we are often struck by the peculiar ring of their language. It is undeniably
English, yet quite removed from the English we speak today. Clearly, the language has changed in the 400 hundred plus years since Shakespeare's day. Less obvious is the fact that English continues to change. Like all living languages, English is continually changing as new words, pronunciations and grammatical structures arise and eventually supplement or replace old ones.
5.2 Another set of “Ears”…
The study of changes in pronunciation has been aided tremendously by technical innovations over the last few decades. Researchers used to gather information on pronunciation by conducting interviews in which they would ask about a particular word, listen to the response, and quickly jot down the way it was said.
The availability of high-quality, portable tape recorders has freed the researcher from needing to document pronunciations on the spot. Also, the great fidelity of the recordings and the ability to listen to a sample repeatedly has allowed linguists to document more subtle distinctions of sound. An even greater level of detail has been opened to researchers through the use of computerized spectrographic analysis.
5.2.1 Spectrography
Spectrography permits very fine- grained measurements of various parts of an acoustic signal. It allows, for example, a researcher interested in the positioning of vowels to document very slight shifts that might not be easily detected by the ear.
In American English, pronunciation is the most active arena for language change. Researchers have identified dozens of pronunciation changes underway in various parts of the country. To the casual observer it might be surprising to discover that different changes are happening within different regions. Surprising because this counters a common assumption that Americans are growing more similar in their speech as a result of greater mobility, easier communication and increased access to the mass media.
While it is true that some pronunciations associated with particular areas or dialects have been lost to larger trends, (for example, the speech of formerly isolated communities such as Ocracoke Island, N.C., Green G. Quet Amerikan. - М., 1956 is losing some of it uniqueness), new pronunciation trends are also rising up, and continue to contribute to the diversity in American speech.
A sampling of modern American pronunciation trends includes:
5.2.2 The Low-Back Merger
A “merger” describes what happens when a distinction between two (or more) sounds is lost. The sounds essentially merge into a single sound. The Low-Back Merger blends two vowel sounds that are pronounced with the tongue positioned low and back in the mouth. The vowels are the “o” sound of cot (box, lot, job, Don, etc.) and the “au” sound of caught (fought, bought, off, dawn, etc.). Many Americans use the same vowel in all of these words, so for them cot and caught as well as Don and dawn, stock and stalk, and other pairs are homophones.
This merger is well established in western Pennsylvania and in eastern New England (and also interestingly, across most of Canada and Scotland) and has been in evidence for several generations. More recently, the merger has come to characterize the speech of the West; researchers identified it as a linguistic trend among young Californians some 30 years ago. Since then it has spread well beyond the Golden State and is heard almost everywhere west of the Mississippi in the speech of people under the age of 35. This suggests that the trend will continue -- and that maintaining distinct vowel sounds in cot and caught, Don and dawn, etc. will eventually become a rarity in many parts of the U.S.
A merger describes what happens when a distinction between two (or more) sounds is lost
5.2.3 The Northern Cities Shift
When a vowel sound moves into another vowel's territory, the result may be a merger --as when the sound of caught comes to be pronounced with the tongue in the same region of the mouth as for cot. In a different pattern, the movement of one vowel spurs a reactive movement in a neighboring vowel. As with strangers in an elevator, one vowel shifts to keep its distance when another enters the space.
These coordinated movements are heard in the Northern Cities Shift, which affects six different vowels, those appearing in caught, cot, cat, bit, bet and but. In this change, caught takes on a vowel similar to that originally used for cot. The cot vowel also shifts, becoming more like the vowel of cat. The vowel of cat takes a position closer to that ordinarily heard with bit and sometimes sounds like the “ea” in idea. Words like bit are pronounced with a vowel nearer to bet or even but whereas bet words have a vowel similar to that in cat or but, and the vowel but words comes to sound more like that of caught. When these changes are plotted according to the positioning of the tongue, the connections among them are clear and the shift resembles a clockwise rotation of the vowels in the mouth.
The Northern Cities Shift: These guide words are positioned to represent where in the mouth the tongue is placed for those vowel sounds. The arrows indicate the directions of change affecting the sounds.
The Northern Cities Shift gets its name from its association with the urban centers around the Great Lakes including Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Buffalo. But pronunciations related to the shift are by no means restricted to city dwellers. The shift can be heard across a broad swath of the North from Upstate New York throughout the Great Lakes region and westward into Minnesota and the Dakotas. It's not clear when the shift got its start.
While it did not begin to attract the attention of linguists until the late 1960s, it seems to have been active at least since the 1930s, possibly spreading westward from New York. Whatever its origins, the shift today seems to be actively spreading and should continue to add a distinctive flavor to the speech of the region.
5.2.4 The Southern Shift
A very different but equally complicated pattern of vowel changes is found in the South. Dubbed the Southern Shift, these changes affect seven vowels. Probably the best known is the pronunciation of the “long i” sound as “ah,” so that sighed sounds like sod, time like Tom, etc. Another element of the Southern Shift affects the vowel of tame, which comes to sound like that of time, and the apparently related change of the team vowel to resemble that of tame. The vowels of sit and set are also affected, becoming more like see it and say it. The other pieces in the Southern shift change the vowels of boot and boat. These vowels are traditionally pronounced with the tongue placed in the back of the mouth, but here they are made with the tongue more toward the front.
Elements of the Southern Shift can be heard in an area stretching from Virginia to northern Florida, westward across much of Texas, and northward to roughly the Ohio River. The evidence suggests the changes arose in the decades after the Civil War and became widespread during the 20th century. The shift now appears to be stable and may even be receding in use in some areas, especially in large cities. The shift's future is unclear: It may eventually be lost from Southern speech although it seems more likely to survive especially if it comes to be more broadly associated with “true” Southern identity.
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