This is Part 3 of my series that describes why you have an accent when you speak American English.

In the past two posts I wrote about the importance of syllable stress and lengthening vowel sounds. You may want to go back and read those posts if you haven’t done that already. ☛

Today I’ll talk about the importance of using the correct sentence intonation when asking questions.

Here are 2 rules that you need to know:

1. Information questions that begin with “wh” words have falling intonation. Your pitch should rise UP and fall DOWN on the focus word (usually the last word in a sentence).

Where are you GOing? ⤵

2. Questions that can be answered with Yes or No usually have rising intonation. Your pitch should rise up and stay high on the focus word.

Are you REAdy? ⤴

Many of the people I’ve worked with in my accent reduction coaching course never learned about these 2 types of question intonation. Once they learned this pattern and started to use it, they had fewer breakdowns in communication.☝

To learn more about how to use American English intonation, click on one of the links below. There are many posts about intonation on my blog.

AND, if you learned anything new here, give me a LIKE. I really appreciate that!