Improve Your Spanish Pronunciation – Get the Rhythm

Hopefully, you will find that your favorite Spanish guidebook or dictionary has a section on pronunciation. If that section is typical in any way, it will deal largely with the pronunciations of the individual sounds of the language. Surely it is a useful starting point to consider how to pronounce, for example, “the rolled r in Spanish” or “the vowel ‘i’ in Spanish” in isolation, or in certain example words. But your strategy for improving your pronunciation must also go beyond this letter-by-letter or sound-by-sound approach.

If you want your speech to sound as natural and intelligible as possible, the rhythm of your speech can be just as important as, for example, the quality of individual vowels. As an illustration of the importance of rhythm in speech, think in English about how you would differentiate a ‘lighthouse keeper’ from a ‘light housewife’. In this article, I will describe two important elements of rhythm and how they work in Spanish: syllabification and accent. Syllabification is the process of organizing the sounds of a word or expression into syllables, and can differ somewhat from language to language. Informally, when we clap a word or phrase, we clap once for each syllable.[1].

By ‘stress’ we mean making certain syllables stand out in relation to others around them. For example, in English, the first syllable is stressed in the words ‘Inca’ and ‘impotent’, while the second syllable is stressed in ‘incur’ and ‘important’.

1. Syllabification

One key to giving your Spanish a more natural rhythm is to understand a process called diphthong: that is, to make two vowels share a single syllable. Whenever you see an ‘i’ or ‘u’ vowel next to another vowel in Spanish, you should think about the diphthong:

(1) if the ‘i’ or ‘u’ is the stressed vowel, usually written with an accent, as in ‘María’, ‘país’ (“country”), ‘dúo’ (“duo”), or ‘owl’ (“owl”)– then the two vowels will form separate syllables: Ma.rí.a, pa.ís, dú.o, bú.(h)o (remember, the Spanish letter ‘h’ is not pronounced );
(2) otherwise the ‘i’ or ‘u’ will generally be pronounced on the same syllable as the vowel next to it: Spanish speakers would therefore pronounce ‘San Die.go’ as three syllables, not four as in English ‘San Di.e.go’; Spanish ‘u.sual’ has two syllables, compared to English ‘u.su.al’. In these cases, the ‘i’ or ‘u’ “slips” into the other vowel, a bit like a ‘y’ or ‘w’ in English. In other cases, it could “slip” from the other vowel, as in ‘au.la’ (“classroom”, “lecture room”), ‘seis’ (“six”).

Variation

Especially in some parts of Spain, there is some variation to (2): there is a greater tendency to separate syllables at the beginning of words (for example, ‘bi.ó.lo.go’, although ‘bió.lo.go’ is also possible), and where a word with clearly separated syllables has an influence on another by analogy. Thus, the word ‘ví.a’ (“path”, “route”, “path”), always pronounced in two syllables, tends to influence the pronunciation of speakers of ‘vi.a.ble’ (“viable” ); ‘rí.e’ (“he/she laughs”) tends to influence ‘ri.en.do’ (“laughing”), while on the other hand, speakers would generally pronounce ‘sien.do’ (“to be” ) as two syllables[2].

The forms and triphthongs of the verb ‘vosotros’

Note that the endings of ‘you’ verb forms always contain a diphthong. In some cases, an ‘i’ or ‘u’ vowel can occur both before and after another vowel, resulting in a triphthong: three vowels sharing one syllable. Examples include the ‘vosotros’ form of regular verbs -iar (so ‘(vosotros) cambiais’ will be pronounced in just two syllables: ‘cam.bias’) and some other words such as ‘buey’ (“ox”; ” idiot”) and ‘For.ra.guay’.

Syllable in normal speech

The patterns we have presented above apply to what we might call ‘careful’ speech: for example, the style used by a newsreader reading from the autocue. In normal, relaxed speech, diphthongization goes a couple of stages further:

(one) none two vowels side by side tend to share a syllable;
(2) even through the limits of the wordtwo vowels can share a syllable.

So, in careful speech, ‘English poet’ would be syllabified as ‘po.e.ta.ing.lés’, in five syllables, but in normal, relaxed speech it would tend to be ‘poe.taing .them’. ‘; ‘eat and drink’ would be ‘co.mei.to.ma’; ‘my friend’ would be ‘mia.mi.go’ etc. The word ‘zanahoria’ (“carrot”) is often pronounced in three syllables, ‘za.na(h)o.ria’: as mentioned before, the ‘h’ is not pronounced and does not affect the syllable.

2. Stress

In general, every word in Spanish has exactly one stressed syllable (with a couple of exceptions that we’ll consider in a moment). The “default” is stress on the penultimate syllable, and this is estimated to be the case in about 80% of words.[3]; words ending in a consonant, except in plural -s, are regularly stressed on the final syllable. When these rules do not predict the stressed syllable of a word, and even in some cases where they do, the stressed syllable is marked with a written stress, as in ‘easy’ (“easy”), ‘metric’ (” metric”). But even when applying the regular rules, subtly, we must apply the above diphthongization rules when counting syllables. Thus, in ‘monopolio’ (“monopoly”), it is the penultimate ‘o’ that is stressed: mo.no.pó.lio, since the final -lio forms a single syllable. In the word ‘continuo’, the ‘i’ is stressed, since the word is syllabified ‘con.ti.nuo’, in three syllables, not four (unlike English ‘con.ti.nu.ous’) .

A couple of exceptions to the one accent per word rule are worth mentioning. First of all, some “function words” generally do not have any stressed syllables. These include:

– possessive (‘my’, ‘you’, etc.);
– clitic pronouns (the pronouns that come before the verb: ‘me’, ‘te’, ‘se’, etc.);
– single-syllable prepositions (‘of’, ‘by’, ‘to’, etc.);
– various conjunctions when not used in a direct question (‘when’, ‘while’, ‘who’ etc).

When these unstressed words end in a vowel, they are ripe candidates for forming a diphthong with the following word in rapid speech, as in ‘my friend’ (“my friend”: mia.mi.go), ‘I hurry’ ( “I’ll hurry up”: mea.pu.ro) ‘in another way’ (“another way”: deo.tra.ma.ne.ra).

Finally, Spanish adverbs ending in -mente are the most greedy words and usually have two stressed syllables. In effect, the suffix -mente is treated as a word in its own right in terms of stress (and is actually derived from the word for ‘mind’); then, the adverb takes another accent instead of the corresponding adjective. For example, ‘fácil’ (“easy”) is stressed on the first syllable; ‘fácilmente’ (“easily”) is stressed on both the first and penultimate syllables. The word ‘frequent’ (“frequent”, “common”) is regularly stressed on the penultimate syllable (the ‘cuen’, which contains a diphthong, of course!); the adverb ‘frequently’ (“frequently”, “commonly”, “often”) in both ‘cuen’ and ‘men’.

conclusion

In this article, we present some tips to improve the rhythm of your Spanish pronunciation. If you can get into the habit of following the patterns we have presented, it will help your Spanish sound more natural and intelligible to native speakers.

Ratings
[1] This is obviously an informal, intuitively based definition of ‘syllable’. The Spanish pronunciation section of the Spanish English website gives a more formal definition.
[2] For more details and examples, see: Chitaron, I. & Hualde, JI (2007), “From hiatus to diphthong: the evolution of vowel sequences in Romance” in Fonología (24):37-35.
[3] Source: Alcoba, S. & Murillo, J. (1998), “La intonation in Spanish” in “Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages”, CUP.