Hopefully, you will find that your favorite Spanish guide or dictionary has a section on pronunciation. If that section is typical in any way, it will be largely concerned with the pronunciations of the individual sounds of the language. It is surely a useful starting point for considering how to pronounce, for example, “la r rodada en español” or “la vowel ‘i’ en español” in isolation, or in certain example words. But your strategy for improving your pronunciation must also go beyond this letter-by-letter or sound-by-sound approach.

If you want your speech to sound as natural and intelligible as possible, the pace of your speech can be just as important as, for example, the quality of individual vowels. As an illustration of the importance of rhythm in speech, think in English about how you would differentiate a ‘lighthouse keeper’ from a ‘light housewife’. In this article, I will describe two important elements of rhythm and how they work in Spanish: syllabication and accent. Syllabification is the process of arranging the sounds of a word or expression into syllables, and it can differ somewhat from language to language. Informally, when we clap a word or phrase, we clap once for each syllable.[1].

By ‘stress’ we mean making certain syllables stand out in relation to others around them. For example, in English, the first syllable is stressed in the words ‘Inca’ and ‘impotent’, while the second syllable is stressed in ‘incur’ and ‘important’.

1. Syllabication

One key to giving your Spanish a more natural rhythm is to understand a process called diphthongization: that is, make two vowels share a single syllable. Every time you see an ‘i’ or ‘u’ vowel next to another vowel in Spanish, you should think about diphthongization:

(1) if the ‘i’ or ‘u’ is the stressed vowel, usually written with an accent, as in ‘María’, ‘país’ (“country”), ‘dúo’ (“duo”) or ‘búho’ (“búho”)– then the two vowels will form separate syllables: Ma.rí.a, pa.ís, dú.o, bú.(h)o (remember, the Spanish letter ‘h’ is not pronounced );

(2) otherwise the ‘i’ or ‘u’ will usually be pronounced on the same syllable as the vowel next to it: therefore Spanish speakers would pronounce ‘San Die.go’ as three syllables, not four as in English ‘San Di.e.go’; Spanish ‘u.sual’ has two syllables, compared to English ‘u.su.al’. In these cases, the ‘i’ or ‘u’ “slips” into the other vowel, a bit like a ‘y’ or ‘w’ in English. In other cases, it could “slip” from the other vowel, as in ‘au.la’ (“classroom”, “conference room”), ‘seis’ (“six”).

Variation

Especially in some parts of Spain, there is some variation to (2): there is a greater tendency to separate syllables at the beginning of words (for example, ‘bi.ó.lo.go’, although ‘bió.lo.go’ is also possible), and where a word with clearly separated syllables influences another by analogy. Thus, the word ‘ví.a’ (“path”, “route”, “road”), always pronounced in two syllables, tends to influence the pronunciation of speakers of ‘vi.a.ble’ (“viable” ); ‘rí.e’ (“he/she laughs”) tends to influence ‘ri.en.do’ (“laughing”), while on the other hand, speakers would generally pronounce ‘sien.do’ (“to be” ) as two syllables[2].

The forms and triphthongs of the verb ‘vosotros’

Note that the endings of the ‘vosotros’ verb forms always contain a diphthong. In some cases, an ‘i’ or ‘u’ vowel can occur both before and after another vowel, resulting in a triphthong: three vowels sharing one syllable. Examples include the ‘vosotros’ form of regular -iar verbs (so ‘(vosotros) cambiáis’ will be pronounced in just two syllables: ‘cam.biáis’) and some other words like ‘buey’ (“buey”; ” idiot”) and ‘Pa.ra.guay’.

Syllabication in normal speech

The patterns we have presented above apply to what we might call ‘careful’ speech: for example, the style used by a newsreader reading from the autocue. In normal, relaxed speech, diphthongization goes a couple of stages further:

(1) none two vowels next to each other tend to share one syllable;

(2) even through the limits of the wordtwo vowels can share a syllable.

So, in careful speech, ‘English poet’ would be syllabified as ‘po.e.ta.ing.lés’, in five syllables, but in normal, relaxed speech it would tend to be ‘poe.taing .them’. ‘; ‘eat and drink’ would be ‘co.mei.to.ma’; ‘my friend’ would be ‘mia.mi.go’ etc. The word ‘carrot’ (“carrot”) is often pronounced in three syllables, ‘za.na(h)o.ria’: as mentioned before, the ‘h’ is not pronounced and does not affect syllabication.

2. Stress

In general, every word in Spanish has exactly one stressed syllable (with a couple of exceptions that we’ll consider in a moment). The “default” is for the penultimate syllable to be stressed, and this is estimated to be the case for about 80% of words.[3]; Words ending in a consonant, except in the plural -s, are regularly stressed on the final syllable. When these rules do not predict the stressed syllable of a word, and even in some cases where they do, the stressed syllable is marked with a written accent, as in ‘fácil’ (“easy”), ‘metric’ (” metric”). But even when the regular rules apply, subtly, we must apply the diphthongization rules above when counting syllables. Thus, in ‘monopolio’ (“monopoly”), it is the penultimate ‘o’ that is stressed: mo.no.pó.lio, since the final -lio forms a single syllable. In the word ‘continuous’, the ‘i’ is accented, since the word is syllabled ‘con.ti.nuo’, in three syllables, not four (unlike English ‘con.ti.nu.ous’) .

A couple of exceptions to the one accent per word rule are worth mentioning. First of all, some “function words” generally do not have any stressed syllables. These include:

– possessive (‘my’, ‘you’, etc.);

– clitic pronouns (the pronouns that come before the verb: ‘me’, ‘te’, ‘se’, etc.);

– one-syllable prepositions (‘de’, ‘por’, ‘a’, etc.);

– several conjunctions when they are not used in a direct question (‘when’, ‘while’, ‘who’ etc).

When these unstressed words end in a vowel, they are ripe candidates for forming a diphthong with the next fast-speaking word, as in ‘mi amigo’ (“mi amigo”: mia.mi.go), ‘me apuro’ ( “I’ll hurry”: mea.pu.ro) ‘another way’ (“another way”: deo.tra.ma.ne.ra).

Finally, Spanish adverbs ending in -mente are the most greedy words and generally have two stressed syllables. Indeed, the suffix -mente is treated as a word in its own right in terms of stress (and is actually derived from the word for ‘mind’); then, the adverb takes another accent instead of the corresponding adjective. For example, ‘fácil’ (“easy”) is stressed on the first syllable; ‘fácilmente’ (“easily”) is stressed on both the first and penultimate syllables. The word ‘frequente’ (“frequent”, “común”) is regularly stressed on the penultimate syllable (the ‘cuen’, which contains a diphthong, of course!); the adverb ‘frequently’ (“frequently”, “commonly”, “often”) in both ‘cuen’ and ‘men’.

Conclution

In this article, we present some tips to improve the rhythm of your pronunciation in Spanish. If you can get into the habit of following the patterns we’ve presented, it will help your Spanish sound more natural and intelligible to native speakers.

Ratings

[1] This is obviously an informal, intuitively based definition of ‘syllable’. The Spanish pronunciation section of the Spanish English website gives a more formal definition.

[2] For more details and examples, see: Chitaron, I. & Hualde, JI (2007), “From hiatus to diphthong: the evolution of vowel sequences in Romance” in Phonology (24):37-35.

[3] Source: Alcoba, S. & Murillo, J. (1998), “Intonation in Spanish” in “Entonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages”, CUP.