British English Pronunciation | The Schwa Sound

Eat Sleep Dreamers welcome back to another lesson with me Tom. Today I've got a super

quick bit-size lesson for you. We're looking at the most important sound in English, the

schwa sound. So if you want to improve your British English accent, stay tuned.

Today we are going to look at why the schwa sound is so important for you to learn and then

we are going to look at lots of examples. So, why do we use the schwa? Well, English

is a stress-timed language and therefore we use stress to indicate the most important

information in a sentence. Within that sentence you are going to have unstressed words and

syllables. Now this is where the schwa comes in because the schwa is the sound that we

use for unstressed sounds. Commonly we'll find them in grammatical words like pronouns,

articles, prepositions. Alright, but what is the schwa sound? The sound is 'uh'. To

me it sounds like me as a teenager. You know, anyone would ask me a question and I'd be

like 'uh'. 'Tom do you want a cup of tea?' 'uh' 'Tom do you want to go to the cinema?'

'uh'. My teenage self basically. Were you like that as a teenager? Let me know! Now

we know it's the most common vowel sound in English, let's look at how it changes depending

on the stress. Take the word 'man'. The /a/ is fully pronounced 'man'. When 'man' is put

in to another word where it's not the stressed sound then it changes. So 'policeman' the

stress there has shifted to the 'ice' of police and then the 'man' has changed. There's no

stress, so we're going to use the schwa sound. Policeman. Now I said that lots of grammatical

words are unstressed like prepositions, pronouns and articles. Now this is when we use the

schwa. We call this a weak form. Take the word 'for'. Now I could say 'for' when it's

stressed. If it's in the middle of a sentence and it's not stressed then we are going to

use the schwa sound. Here's an example. 'I got this for you.' Did you hear the sound

there? It's not 'for you' f' f'you. So I'm using the schwa f'you. It's unstressed. it

makes it easier for me to say the sentence if I use the schwa as the weak form. So 'I

got this for you.' Say it after me 'I got this for you'. Alright, another example. Take

the word 'of'. Now fully pronounced 'of' ok. But when it's unstressed and in the middle

of a sentence, it's a weak form. 'Have you watched the Sound of Music?' So it's not 'Sound

of Music' it's 'Sound of Music'. So again a weak form. Now I've done a video on weak

forms, if you want to check it out, click just above. As I said before we use the schwa

for vowel sounds. So let's go through the vowel sounds and give examples. So A 'again'.

Not again, again. E, 'the'. It can be the when there is stress there but if it's not

stressed the. I, 'family'. O, 'dinosaur' not dinosaur, dinosaur. U, 'octopus'. And finally

for today, let's look at words that end in an 'r' because if a word ends in 'r' we are

going to use the schwa. That rhymes! 'If the word ends in /r/ we're going to use a schwa.

Alright, no rapping! I promise, no rapping! So take 'actor', 'doctor', 'water', 'daughter'.

So as you see there it ends in the schwa sound. I hope you enjoyed that guys, I know how much

you love pronunciation lessons. If you did enjoy it please let me know. Give me a big

thumbs up. Let me know in the comments below. As always guys, make sure you are subscribing

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I've got new videos every Tuesday and every Friday helping you take your English to the

next level. Thank you as always guys, this was Tom, the Chief Dreamer, saying goodbye!