Pronunciation 5: The Lazy Vowel

After all the talk of short vowels, long vowels, cowboys and R-vowels, we have one more vowel sound left: the lazy vowel. It's lazy because it's almost nothing. It's the laziest sound that anyone could make.

I'm going to say the words 'about', 'alive' and 'away'. Does the first syllable sound like an a sound or something different?



If you said 'something different', you'd be right! This is the lazy vowel, ~.
It looks like an "almost nothing" sound, and it is.

Because it's so lazy, you don't have to try very hard when you say it. In fact, if you try too hard, you will make the wrong sound. You have to imagine that you're a teenager and that you don't want to try.

The lazy vowel makes it easier for us to talk quickly. It is not associated with any particular letter. Instead, we use it to replace other unstressed vowel sounds. That's why it's lazy. We don't want to pronounce every vowel clearly. We just want to relax.

Although I've been calling it 'lazy', you mustn't think that it's a 'lazy' form of English. This is simply how to speak British English.

So when do we use it?

Well, above, I gave you three words starting with the letter 'a' but where the stress falls on the second syllable. So unstressed 'a' is pronounced as the lazy vowel, ~.

about       ~bŏt
alive        ~liyv
away       ~wae
above      ~buv

Here, we'll look at some other common examples; I'll go into more detail in later posts.

Let's think about words that end in 'er'. When it's stressed, 'er' is pronounced ūr, but most English words ending in 'er' are not stressed on the last syllable.

So, instead, we just say, ~.

teacher        teech~
jumper         jump~
better           bet~
under           und~

Words that end in 'or' do the same thing. When it's stressed, 'or' is pronounced ōr, but most English words are not stressed on the last syllable, so we just say, ~.

doctor       doct~
director     diyrect~
major        maej~

Words that end in 'ar' and 'ur', are less common, but do the same. We just say, ~.

altar          olt~
lemur        leem~

(Words don't usually end in unstressed 'ir'.)

Words that end in 'a' do the same. We just say, ~.

panda        pand~
agenda      ~jend~
idea           iydee~

Words that end in 're' do the same. We just say, ~.

metre        meet~
theatre      thee~t~
sabre        saeb~

What's a sabre? The same as a saber, of course. Words that end 're' in British English are spelt 'er' in US English, but this makes no difference to how they're pronounced.

Here are all of the words I've just mentioned:




Anyway, that's your first taste of the lazy vowel. It's not much of a vowel but it will be back again and again and again and again and again and again

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Note: Just in case you've seen it before, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, they call it the 'schwa', which is represented with an upside-down e: ə. Remember, I'm not using that system because my students don't like it, and neither do I. So, for us, it's the lazy vowel, ~.

Next: Vowel Sounds 6: The Sliders