5 Accent, stress and rhythm

If your first language is English, you will be used to emphasising at least one sound in each word (whether or not you do this consciously). Learners of English have to study the stress pattern of each word and commit them to memory. For example, they have to learn that in the word ‘English’, it is the first sound ‘en’ which is stressed.

One of the reasons English speakers often exhibit a ‘foreign’ accent – at least during early French studies – is because they transfer the stress patterns of English words across to similar words in French. The good news here is that word stress is much more regular in French than it is in English. In French, the norm is for the emphasis to be placed at the end of words. There are of course exceptions, and it gets more complex than this, but it’s a good rule of thumb to follow when you start learning French.

This means that the rhythm of the French language feels a little more ‘monotonous’ than the rhythm of English. To demonstrate this, it’s useful to compare the pronunciation of cognate words (remember from Week 2 that cognates are words that are identical, or almost identical, in two languages) in English and French.

Play the following audio clips to compare the way the cognates are pronounced in English and French. For the English words, the main word stress is identified in the caption.