How to Pronounce COLLEAGUE – A Quick Fix by Heather Hansen

Hi, I’m Heather Hansen, Clear Speech Specialist at English Pronunciation Lab, and I’m here again with your Pronunciation Quick Fix.

This is where I help you correctly pronounce a commonly mispronounced word in English.

Today’s word is: COLLEAGUE.

Colleague. Colleague.
2 syllables, stress on the first syllable “col”.

The second syllable, LEAGUE, should sound the same as the normal word ‘league’ with a long E sound and a G ending.

You’ll notice that this goes against the typical word stress characteristic (see Part 6 of the free course) that says stressed syllables normally have a pure vowel sound while unstressed syllables are often reduced. We see no reduction in this case and the unstressed syllable remains a pure long E.

This is partly due to the fact that ‘colleague’ has a voiced G ending which forces us to lengthen the E sound so we can better pronounce the G. See Part 3 of the free course for further discussion of voiced consonant sounds.

If you’re really having trouble with this one, how about using ‘co-worker’ instead?

What other words do you have trouble pronouncing? Post them in the comments and I’ll highlight them in the “How to Pronounce” series.

If you’d like to learn more about clear speech and pronunciation, please visit me at http://bit.ly/free8-partproncourse and sign up for my free, 8-part pronunciation short course.

I’ll see you there!

SHARE this video with your friends!
SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel! http://www.youtube.com/user/heatherhansen

FOLLOW me on Twitter too! http://www.twitter.com/heatherhansen

Please also visit:

http://facebook.com/globalspeechacademy

http://facebook.com/englishpronunciationlab