Added words for pronunciation by TopQuark in Forvo

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Native of England, UK. We'd probably call my accent RP (received pronunciation) which is the standard across London, the home counties and the south-east of England. I defer to pronunciations given in the Oxford English Dictionary, though my Yorkshire roots are occasionally betrayed by an instinctive flat northern vowel.

What many speakers of English as second language overlook are the everyday intonations that that have produced some of the world's great poetry.

Two patterns of stress dominate spoken English. When emphasis falls on the second syllable in a two-syllable word (hell-O, be-GIN, to-DAY, ro-MANCE), the stressed vowel is usually louder and longer. This everyday pattern is captured perfectly by much of Shakespeare's output, written in what poets call the iambic pentameter (five beats to the line, where the stress is on second syllables, or the second short word of a pair), as in:
"Shall I com-PARE thee TO a SUM-mer's DAY? " (stress the word I in second place)
"I KNOW a BANK where-ON the WILD thyme BLOWS" (here, there's no stress on I as the first word).

The opposite rhythm is the trochee - the poet's term for stressing the first of two syllables: ENG-lish, MON-day, TRO-chee, PO-em, SHAKE-speare, ANG-lo SAX-on.

“Trochee trips from long to short
From long to long in solemn sort..."
... as Coleridge wrote. It is the less comfortable of these two main rhythms in English and can come to sound rather relentless when spoken at length, as in Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha:
"By the shore of Gitchie Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water..."

In longer, polysyllabic words, a general rule is to stress the third syllable counted leftwards from the end of the word: AN-i-mal, SAT-ur-day, REG-u-late, ARCH-i-techt, mag-NIF-i-cent, Minn-e-A-pol-is, INT-er-est.

A final unstressed vowel is often thrown away with a non-specific "uh" sound, as in RIV-er, NEV-er, CAP-i-tal, CAN-not, REG-u-lat-or, EX-tra, GARR-i-son, el-EC-tric-al. This neutral sound is the most common vowel in English pronunciation and is called a sheva.

It's crucial, too, to know which plural nouns end with an S sound and which with a Z, though there are no hard-and-fast rules here.

I'm afraid that all of these generalisations do have many, many exceptions - which makes English such fun.

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Sadly, six months at Forvo show that the site is stalked by one or two vindictive people whose obsessions devalue the project. May I invite those who appear to lack an understanding of the many linguistic varieties of English which differ from each other and from Standard English (which is itself a dialect) to consult this web page:
http://tinyurl.com/kv5ny3

Sex: Male

Accent/country: United Kingdom

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