Pronunciation Pieces are short, light articles, each one usually focusing on an English word or phrase that illustrates a feature of phonetic or linguistic interest. They originally appeared in the series ‘Words of the Week’. They cover a wide range of topics include weak forms, contractions, linking R, T-epenthesis, G-dropping, T-glottaling, compound stress, rhoticity, vowel linking, aspiration, T/D-deletion, TH-fronting, tricky word stress, numerals, tricky spellings, negative transfer, pronouncing foreign words, accents of English, numerals, intonation, accentuation, word endings, prefixes and many others.

Cooperation

/4 Comments/in /by

coopWords which non-natives rarely pronounce natively include cooperate, cooperative, cooperation and coop (also written co-operation, co-operate, co-operative and co-op).

In native pronunciation, coop- is two syllables, and the transition between them is a w type sound. We could write this in various ways depending on the accent: kəwɔp, kowɑp, etc. Dictionaries don’t generally write the w, but I think it would probably help the non-native speaker if they did. Here are native cooperate, cooperative and cooperation, each word followed by its beginning:

Non-natives typically pronounce coop- as it’s written, with a single o quality and no w. Unfortunately, this is likely to sound like corp- as pronounced in England and Wales. As a result, non-native cooperation can sound rather like native corporation:

  how much cooperation helps (non-native)


  adviser to a corporation (native)



And non-native cooperate can sound rather like native corporate:

  they could cooperate for a number of very different reasons (non-native)


  corporate interest (native)



To highlight the difference, here is Russell Brand using both corporate and cooperate, followed by corp- and coop- (slightly slowed down):

  take away corporate power, don’t cooperate (non-native)



The two syllables of kəwop or kowop can weaken towards one-syllable kwop. This means that the beginning of coop- can sound rather like the beginning of quality:




Further notes

An unrelated one-syllable word coop, rhyming with scoop, loop and troop, refers to an enclosure in which chickens or other poultry are kept.