The Center for Confident American English Communication

When  American English speakers converse informally with friends and family they often use informal pronunciation patterns. Pronunciation and accent reduction books refer to this type of language as “reduced speech”. Reduced speech usually involves using the schwa vowel sound /ə/ for the vowels in reduced syllables. Here are a few examples: want to sounds like

Read more →

Non-native English speakers think that they should pronounce each word, sound and syllable clearly and distinctly but that’s not how spoken English works. Americans use reduced vowels and speech when they talk. They do not say every sound and syllable clearly and distinctly. Look at the words in the careful speech column below. If you

Read more →

I get a lot of questions from people about the reduced speech forms that they hear when they listen to American English conversations. Examples include: gonna, wanna and hafta. Here is a link to Nina Weinstein’s Voice of America episode on reduced speech. Nina is the author of the book Whaddaya Say. You can see

Read more →

Several of my students tell me that they have trouble understanding the spoken English of native speakers. This is not at all unusual. One reason that native English speakers are difficult to understand is because they often use reduced speech. When native speakers use reduced speech the words seem to run together and this can

Read more →