American English Pronunciation Intonation
Today I’m going to talk about intonation.
I’ve touched on this subject in various other
videos without ever explicitly defining it.
And today, that’s what we’re going to do.
But I’m also going to reference these other
videos, and I really encourage you to go watch
those as well. If you’ve seen my videos on
word stress, then you’ve already heard me
talk a little about pitch. Stressed syllables
will be higher in pitch, and often a little
longer and a little louder than unstressed
syllables. And there are certain words that
will have a stress within a sentence, content
words. And certain words that will generally
be unstressed, and those are function words.
For information on that, I invite you to watch
those videos. Intonation is the idea that
these different pitches across a phrase form
a pattern, and that those patterns characterize
speech. In American English, statements tend
to start higher in pitch and end lower in
pitch. You know this if you’ve seen my video
questions vs. statements. In that video, we
learned that statements, me, go down in pitch.
And questions, me?, go up in pitch at the
end. So these pitch patterns across a phrase
that characterize a language are little melodies.
And the melodies of American English will
be very different than, for example, the melodies
of Chinese. If you haven’t already seen the
blog I did on the podcast Musical Language,
I encourage you to take a look at that. It
talks about the melody of speech. Understanding
and using correct intonation is a very important
part to sounding natural. Even if you’re making
the correct sounds of American English, but
you’re speaking in the speech patterns, or
intonation of another language, it will still
sound very foreign. Intonation can also convey
meaning or an opinion, an attitude. Let’s
take for example the statement ‘I’m dropping
out of school’ and the response ‘Are you serious?’
Are you serious? A question going up in pitch
conveys, perhaps, an open attitude, concern
for the person. Are you serious? But, are
you serious? Down in pitch, more what you
would expect of a statement, are you serious?
The same words, but when it is intoned this
way, it is conveying a judgement. Are you
serious, a negative one. I don’t agree that
you should be dropping out of school. I’m
dropping out of school. Are you serious? I’m
dropping out of school. Are you serious? With
the same words, very different meanings can
be conveyed. So intonation is the stress pattern,
the pitch pattern, of speech. The melody of
speech. If you’ve read my bio on my website,
you know melody is something I’m especially
keen on, as I studied music through the master’s
level.
Yes, that was yours truly, thinking a lot
about melody. Now, you know that in American
English, statements will tend to go down in
pitch. Let’s look at some examples. Here we
see two short sentences. Today it’s sunny.
I wish I’d been there. And you can see for
both of them, that the pitch goes down throughout
the sentence. Here we have two longer sentences,
and though there is some up and down throughout
the sentences, for both sentences, the lowest
point is at the end. I’m going to France next
month to visit a friend who’s studying there.
It’s finally starting to feel like spring
in New York. The software I used to look at
the pitch of those sentences is called Praat,
and there’s a link in the footer of my website.
So it’s at the very bottom of every page.
I hope you’re getting a feel for how important
intonation is to sounding natural and native
in American English. I hope you’ll listen
for this as you listen to native speakers,
and that if you haven’t already done so, that
you’ll go to my website and do some of those
imitation exercises which loop patterns of
speech. So you hear them several times to
get the melody in your ear before you’re asked
to repeat. That’s it, and thanks so much for
using Rachel’s English.