Italian pronunciation for Anglophones

I found this nice article on the Expats In Italy website about the difficulties and some tips for english speaking people when pronouncing italian words.

A link to the original article is at the end of the post.

Well, we learned how to speak correctly, and we mastered the ci and c’è and the chi and che, but every Italian we run into sniggers at our Anglophone accent (all the while saying how charming it is, as if we sounded like Marcello Mastroianni or Sofia Loren speaking English!). Is there any way we can sound more Italian?

Yes, and all it takes is knowing how pronunciation works, what is involved, and why our vowels and consonants don’t resemble Italian ones.

Speaking involves the lungs, the epiglottis (a little flap in the throat that vibrates when we make a sound, or rather, it makes the sound for us) and the mouth parts (tongue, teeth, roof, lips) plus facial muscles and nose.

The trick is to get them in the right position and you’ll get the right sound. Let’s start with vowels, since there are only five of them, plus they don’t involve changing facial muscles or mouth positions in order to get the basic single sound.

The first thing to bear in mind is English vowels are spoken from the lungs, but Italian vowels are spoken from the throat. This makes our words breathier and deeper, whereas Italian is sharper and higher.

Try to push sound from the top of your throat instead of rolling it up from below. You can actually feel where the sound is coming from: put your hand on the lower part of your neck for English, then move it up to just under the chin for Italian.

Read the rest on www.expatsinitaly.com

Tags: italian pronunciation, learning italian, speaking italian

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at %I:%M %p and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.