Stong and Weak Forms

Question	Answer
Strong form and weak form in English conversation	English is a stress-time language which means that some words are stressed and others are not when speaking.
Generally, content words such as nouns and principal verbs are stressed, while structure words such as articles, helping verbs, etc. are not.	A number of structure words have both weak and strong pronunciation.
As a rule, structure will take the weak pronunciation which means that the vowel becomes muted.	Sometimes weak forms are easy to spot, because we use contractions in the spelling to show it:
For example:	I am French (strong form) I'm French (weak form)
But usually there is no change of spelling, only the pronunciation is different:	But strong form: /bʌt/ weak form: /bət/
Tell him to go strong forms /hɪm/ /tu:/ weak form: /tel əm tə gəʊ/	The grammatical words "him" and "to" are unstressed and have a weak form when pronounced inside a sentence.
Students who are learning English usually use only strong forms, and they sound very unnatural.	English speakers use weak forms all the time, every single sentence is full of them, and students find it difficult to understand because they are not used to them, and very often they don't even know they exist.

Resource summary

	Created by Alain Averio almost 8 years ago