When you look up the pronunciation of a word in a dictionary, what you’ll find is the word’s ‘citation form’. This is how the word is likely to be pronounced when uttered in isolation, for example in answer to the question, ‘What’s this word? I can’t read it’, which someone might ask while reading a handwritten text. The citation form is the guise the word adopts when it’s behaving most self-consciously, when it puts a suit on and combs its hair to have an official photo taken.

But in the rough-and-tumble of their everyday life, words are more likely to appear in more casual gear – T-shirt and jeans, for example – and you might not recognize them as they jog or skateboard past you at high speed.

For a small number of high-frequency grammatical words, dictionaries and pronunciation books give two pronunciations: strong and weak. The strong forms are the ‘official photo’ ones, and the much more frequent weak forms are the ‘rough-and-tumble’ ones.

But the small set of words which are generally recognized as having weak forms is actually only the tip of a very big iceberg. Any word – or, more accurately, any syllable – which isn’t stressed is likely to be eroded in its pronunciation. And the more familiar the word is, and the more casually it’s uttered, the more drastic the erosion is likely to be: consonants are dropped or ‘elided‘, vowels are reduced toschwa and then face the further risk of elision. Consider the word actually. In its citation form – i.e. when it’s spoken carefully and clearly – it has four syllables. But when it’s used unthinkingly in the rough-and-tumble of spontaneous speech, it’s subject to varying degrees of erosion, and very often sounds identical to the name Ashley – i.e. only two syllables. More.

See: Macmillan Dictionary Blog

Related Translation News article:

• Schwa, syllables and words in different guises – Part 1

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