Your Pronunciation and Diction May be too Revealing!

The way in which we speak tells a lot about us.  There are many elements of speech and voice that personalize our speech.  Today we are going to cover pronunciation and diction.  Pronunciation can indicate where we grew up like when people add the letter /r/ to warsh or say things like pak the caw.  Do you know where people live when you hear that?  Regional accents are notorious for mispronunciations of sounds.  The way you pronunciate can also indicate your level of education, personal tastes, and social background.  We develop bad speaking habits because we imitate what we hear around us.  Pronouncing words correctly or maybe I should say in a more standard way helps us sound more professional.

The acceptable pronunciation of any word is determined exclusively by it usage in the general population.  A dictionary can be a valuable tool to learn how to pronounce words.  Pronunciation in some dictionaries is represented by symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  It you are not familiar with IPA, it can be confusing.  Each symbol in the IPA stands for one sound.  This is different from our 26 letter alphabet in which one symbol stands for many sounds.  Take the /a/… it can be pronounced as  bad, bade, or ball.  Mastering the IPA system will assist you in many ways, particularly when you need to look up a word and learn to pronounce it.

Another area we often neglect is diction.  Diction is different from pronunciation.  It deals with the sharpness of sound.  Good diction doesn’t omit or reduce sounds in running speech.  Here are some common examples:

The /t/ in quality is pronounced as a /d/.

“Our” becomes “r”.  R time is up.  (Texting doesn’t help this problem because we write shortened versions of words.)

“To” sounds like “tuh”.  I’m going tuh the store.

“For” sounds like “fer”.  The phone is fer you.

“Just” sounds like “jist”.   Jist a minute, please.

“Going” becomes “gonna”or “goin”. We’re goin to the store.

“Didn’t” sounds like “dint”.  I dint know that you knew about it.

“You” sounds like “ya”.  Well, ya don’t say.

If you want to ensure that you pronounce words correctly, you can do the following:

1. Over exaggerate your mouth movements when you speak.  Watch yourself in the mirror and if you can see your teeth when you speak, you are doing a great job overarticulating.  You may have to slow your speech way down so that you can over exaggerate.

2. Be sure to put endings on all of your words.

3.  Lengthen the vowels of stressed words.  This will help you sound clearer.

Learn to speak with clearer diction and pronunciation to improve your professional image.