How To Pronounce Schwa In A Modern RP British English Accent

Most people who are trying to learn the standard southern British English accent or RP receive

pronunciation, struggle with the pronunciation of the schwa, and in this video, I'm going to show

you how, and also, more importantly, when, to use it in any word in English so that you sound

natural and fluent. My name is Ashley Howard. I'm a UK based voice coach, and among the many things

I help people with accent is one of them see if you can tell the difference between these words,

oppose, oppose,

forget, forget.

Other, other,

thorough, thorough. In the

second of all those pairs of words, I was using a schwa, and this is how to make it

the lips are relaxed. The tongue is central in the middle of the mouth, the jaws are relaxed open,

and the sound is very short. Copy, meme, uh,

so the main reason why people struggle with this is simply that they're pronouncing that syllable

more in the way in which it's written, more in the way that it's spelt, which is understandable.

So oppose sounds more like oppose or or pose, forget, more like forget or for, get with the R,

other, other or other, maybe, and thorough, more like thorough, possibly. And it's not wrong to

pronounce those words in that way. It's just that it's not the way that speakers of this accent

pronounce it. Now the thing to remember is that the schwa is used on the unstressed syllable of

most polysyllabic words, the unstressed syllable of most polysyllabic words, and in all of those

words, those parts were the unstressed, the weak parts of those words. Now if you don't know where

the stress is in a word, the only way to check that is in the transcription, the phonetic

transcription in a dictionary. So if you look at this, you'll see that the stressed syllable is

marked with a little line just before the stressed part the other syllables are the unstressed parts.

So that's one way to do it, but the ultimate way to do it is to use this little phonetic symbol.

And wherever you see that in a transcription, the transcription of a word, you'll know that that is

where the schwa is used. Might take a little bit of figuring out, but that's the only way

that you can do it. So here are some more words and sentences that you can practice with about

purpose. Suppose,

open, minor,

survive nature,

standard, cautious

color, autumn.

My mother likes autumn. The customer

is curious. I live in a borough in London.

I've got hundreds of words and sentences that you can practice with in the first book of my three

book series, all about this accent, which comes with audio that you can store on your phone so

it makes it easy to practice. I also have a free course that you might be interested in. All the

links to these things are in the description below. And if you found this video helpful,

then like it, subscribe, share, and I will see you in the next video.