Connected Speech

Introduction
• In linguistics, connected speech or connected discourse is a continuous
sequence of sounds forming utterances or conversations in spoken
language. The first thing to understand about speaking English naturally is
that it is very different from speaking English clearly.
• In English, words bump into each other. We reduce words when we’re
speaking and then mash them together.
• That’s what connected speech is: it’s continuous spoken language like you
heard in a normal conversation. It’s called connected speech because the
words are all connected, with sounds from one running into the next. Now,
we will discuss the following four areas of connected speech:
1. Linking:
When a sound at the end of one word gets attached to the
beginning sound of the next word, this is what we call linking.
For example:
When native speakers say “an apple” you’ll usually hear them say,
“anapple”. The “n” in “an” gets joined with the “a” sound in “apple” and
it becomes almost like a single word.
• In some cases, the sound of the consonant sound changes when it’s
linked. For example, if I were to say “that orange” you would probably
hear me change the final consonant “t” sound to a “d” sound as in
“thadorange”.

• Here are some other examples:

• “trip over” often sounds like “tripover”
• “hang out” often sounds like “hangout”
• “clean up” often sounds like “cleanup”
2. Intonation:
Intonation is about how we say things, rather than what we say.
Without intonation, it is impossible to understand the expressions and
also makes the conversation boring. Simply put the rising and falling of
voice in a speech is called intonation.
Listen to somebody speaking without paying attention to the words;
the ‘’melody” you hear is intonation.
For example:
Intonation is particularly important in expressing questions in spoken
English. For example, take the sentence, "When does the meeting
start?" The word "start"—including the question mark—rises up.
Function of intonation is to allow speakers to express various emotions.
In intonation, by changing the pitch of the voice a same sentence
conveys different meanings like…
• My dog is naughty. (statement)
• My dog is naughty. (uncertain or unfamiliar about his/her dog.
3. Elision:
• It is a process by which a phoneme is omitted or is realized
as zero in speech context.
• Elision happens when the last sound of a word disappears.
This often happens with “t” and “d” sounds. For example:
• “next door” often gets shortened to “nexdoor”
• “most common” often gets shortened to “moscommon”
Producing elisions is something which foreign learners do
not need to learn if they are living in outer circle country but
if they are language students, it is important for them to be
aware that when native speakers of English talk to each
other, they do not pronounce a number of phonemes.
Some more examples of elision are there:
• 'I don't know' /I duno/
• cam-ra for “camera”
• dunno for “don’t know”
• kinda for “kind of”
• choc-late for “chocolate”
• asp-rin for “aspirin”
• hist-ry for “history”
• math-matics for “mathematics”
4. Assimilation:
In linguistics, assimilation is a common phonological process by which
one sound becomes more like a nearby sound. It is a type of connected
speech in which one sound influences the other sound and the sound
which is influenced is replaced. When two phonemes occur in a
sequence, and one phoneme is taken or copied by the other, the
process in called assimilation.
• In simple words we can say, Assimilation happens when sounds
blend together to make an entirely new sound.
Some examples include:
• “don’t you” gets blended into “don-chu”
• “meet you” gets blended into “mee-chu”
• “did you” gets blended into “di-djew”
• “Hand bag” gets blended into “hambag”
• “that girl” gets blended into “thakgirl”
Thank you!