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  • Today I'm going to go over something I find quite interesting about American English.

  • And that is, how different the same word can sound depending on where it falls in a sentence.

  • I've been noticing recently, some of my students from certain countries have the tendency to

  • accent the last word in the sentence. And in general, American English goes down in

  • pitch throughout a sentence. So actually the words at the end of a sentence should be lower

  • in pitch, lower in volume, more unstressed than the same word would be if it came earlier

  • in the sentence. Let's take for example the word 'home' in the sentences 'I'll be home

  • by three,' 'Last night I drove the car home.' Let's hear the word 'home' in the first sentence,

  • 'I'll be home by three,' repeated on a loop a few times to get it into our ear. I'll be

  • home by three. Home, home, home, home. And now the second sentence, 'Last night I drove

  • the car home.' Last night I drove the car home. Home, home, home, home. And now let's

  • compare, switching back and forth. [Home x8] Clearly they are at two different pitches,

  • two different volumes. Here I'm using the software program Pratt to view both sentences

  • and the loops of the word 'home'. The first sentence, I'll be home by three. And the loop

  • for the word home in that sentence: home, home, home. You can see that the volume is

  • greater compared to the word home in the second sentence: home, home, home. And down here

  • we see the pitch. Both of these sentences have the downward trend, the second one ending

  • with this little dot down here, as most statements in English do. The word 'home' in the first

  • sentence, here, quite high in pitch, the word home in the second sentence, here, quite low

  • in pitch. Home. This section up here is the M, sort of just a grumble in the voice. It

  • sort of stops sounding like speech at this point, doesn't it? Home, home, home. It's

  • so low in pitch, so low in volume, so -- uhh -- far down in the throat. Yet, when you

  • hear it in the context of the sentence, you do identify it as the word 'home.' Let's listen

  • one more time to the loop, where we alternate the word 'home' from the two sentences. [Home x 8]

  • So keep this in mind when you're speaking, when you're practicing reading out loud. Make

  • sure you're not stressing the last word of a sentence by bringing it up in pitch or making

  • it louder because in English it's actually the opposite. The words at the end of the

  • sentence will be lower in pitch and also softer. The final word in a sentence can sometimes

  • be very low and very soft. That's it, and thanks so much for using Rachel's English.

Today I'm going to go over something I find quite interesting about American English.

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