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Today I'm going to talk about intonation. I've touched on this subject in various other
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videos without ever explicitly defining it. And today, that's what we're going to do.
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But I'm also going to reference these other videos, and I really encourage you to go watch
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those as well. If you've seen my videos on word stress, then you've already heard me
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talk a little about pitch. Stressed syllables will be higher in pitch, and often a little
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longer and a little louder than unstressed syllables. And there are certain words that
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will have a stress within a sentence, content words. And certain words that will generally
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be unstressed, and those are function words. For information on that, I invite you to watch
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those videos. Intonation is the idea that these different pitches across a phrase form
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a pattern, and that those patterns characterize speech. In American English, statements tend
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to start higher in pitch and end lower in pitch. You know this if you've seen my video
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questions vs. statements. In that video, we learned that statements, me, go down in pitch.
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And questions, me?, go up in pitch at the end. So these pitch patterns across a phrase
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that characterize a language are little melodies. And the melodies of American English will
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be very different than, for example, the melodies of Chinese. If you haven't already seen the
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blog I did on the podcast Musical Language, I encourage you to take a look at that. It
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talks about the melody of speech. Understanding and using correct intonation is a very important
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part to sounding natural. Even if you're making the correct sounds of American English, but
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you're speaking in the speech patterns, or intonation of another language, it will still
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sound very foreign. Intonation can also convey meaning or an opinion, an attitude. Let's
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take for example the statement 'I'm dropping out of school' and the response 'Are you serious?'
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Are you serious? A question going up in pitch conveys, perhaps, an open attitude, concern
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for the person. Are you serious? But, are you serious? Down in pitch, more what you
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would expect of a statement, are you serious? The same words, but when it is intoned this
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way, it is conveying a judgement. Are you serious, a negative one. I don't agree that
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you should be dropping out of school. I'm dropping out of school. Are you serious? I'm
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dropping out of school. Are you serious? With the same words, very different meanings can
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be conveyed. So intonation is the stress pattern, the pitch pattern, of speech. The melody of
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speech. If you've read my bio on my website, you know melody is something I'm especially
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keen on, as I studied music through the master's level.
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Yes, that was yours truly, thinking a lot about melody. Now, you know that in American
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English, statements will tend to go down in pitch. Let's look at some examples. Here we
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see two short sentences. Today it's sunny. I wish I'd been there. And you can see for
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both of them, that the pitch goes down throughout the sentence. Here we have two longer sentences,
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and though there is some up and down throughout the sentences, for both sentences, the lowest
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point is at the end. I'm going to France next month to visit a friend who's studying there.
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It's finally starting to feel like spring in New York. The software I used to look at
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the pitch of those sentences is called Praat, and there's a link in the footer of my website.
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So it's at the very bottom of every page. I hope you're getting a feel for how important
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intonation is to sounding natural and native in American English. I hope you'll listen
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for this as you listen to native speakers, and that if you haven't already done so, that
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you'll go to my website and do some of those imitation exercises which loop patterns of
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speech. So you hear them several times to get the melody in your ear before you're asked
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to repeat. That's it, and thanks so much for using Rachel's English.