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.

Collect your colleagues

/3 Comments/in /by

colleague_484_252A word which non-natives often pronounce differently from native speakers is colleague. The native pronunciation is stressed on the first syllable, cólleague:

Non-native learners and users of English, even very proficient ones, often put the stress on the last syllable, colléague:

The simple way to get the native pattern right is to remember that colleague isn’t a verb. (A verb is a ‘doing word’.) All of the 2-syllable coll- words with final stress are verbs. Here they are, in descending order of frequency on the web:

collect, collapse, collate, collide, collude

Each of those verbs begins with a weak syllable containing the little colourless vowel ‘schwa’, ə. The most common by far are collect and collapse: in Oxford Dictionaries transcription, /kəˈlɛkt/ and /kəˈlaps/.

2-syllable coll- words with initial stress are generally nouns (‘naming words’), and colleague conforms to this pattern. The most common are:

college, Collins, colleague, collar

(The last of these can be used informally as a verb, meaning ‘to stop someone, as if grabbing them by their collar’ – for example, he was collared by the police. In this usage collar keeps its initial stress.)

So a handy phrase for remembering this might be Colléct your cólleagues.