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Spot the Shwa
Often in English words something odd happens to vowel sounds which are not stressed. Think of the word "flavour". From the spelling alone you might expect that word to rhyme with "pour" (as in "Can I pour you some homemade lemonade?"). It doesn't though. Instead it ends with an "uh" sound (what we also call a monkey-in-the-jungle sound). This is the sound known as the shwa.
Nice people who do phonetics have come up with symbols for the different sounds of the language. The symbol for the shwa looks like this:
Although you don't really need to know that this sound is called the shwa, it should be helpful if it is pointed out for you so that you can recognise is more easily and then reproduce it yourselves more accurately. A good dictionary will have the phonetic symbols for each word telling you how they should be pronounced. Look out for the shwa to see where this sound occurs.
Audio file
Click on the wave icon to listen to the audio introduction to the shwa and to do the exercise. The words mentioned in the exercise are given below.
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Here's your chance to spot the shwa. |
Words in the exercise
- diet
- pizza
- tolerate
- teenager
- confident
- suspicious
- inadequate
- forget
- geology
- collaborate
- pioneer
- inaccurate
Click HERE to see the answers