The central vowel /ɜː/ explained
How not to sound like a Ghanaian
The vowel /ɜː/ is one of the often mispronounced vowels in English. As a result of this, today’s newsletter will be dedicated to it.
First of all, the colon ‘:’ in front of the vowel, which is known as a diacritic indicates that this is a long vowel. This means that the vowel is a bit ‘stressed’. So, when you produce it, try to make it a bit long.
Secondly, this vowel is produced from the central part of your tongue. This means you must raise the central part of your tongue when producing it. /ɜː/ is one of the three centering vowels we have in the English language. The other two are the popular schwa /ə/ and /ʌ/. You have to be honest with yourself at this point. When you raise the front part of your tongue, it results in /e/, which is wrong. That is not how to produce the vowel /ɜː/. Except of course you are one of those Ghanaians.
How then do you produce this vowel /ɜː/? Remember when someone asked you a question and then you started hesitating whether to answer them or not—something like ‘err’—or when you have bad speech mannerism and you say something like errm errm almost all the time and you draw your speech. That’s it! So, don’t produce the consonant /m/. Yes? Try it again. Yes, you got it!
Just make the hesitation with the central part of your tongue and draw the sound. You get? Raise the central part of your tongue. Yes, that’s it and make it long, a bit stressed...voilà you got it!
/ɜː/ can be found in words that contain the letters ‘ir’, ‘ur’, ‘err’, ‘our’, ‘or’, ‘ear’ etc. Please note that there are no hard and fast rules guiding English sounds.
Examples of such words are: birth, first, nurse, curse, learn, earth, journey, burn, word, heard, err, murmur, dearth, hurt, etc.
There is something interesting that I want to write as regards this vowel /ɜː/, something I have always told my students in class. All English words from the French language that end in ‘eur’ are pronounced /ɜː/.
Examples of such words are chauffeur, entrepreneur, grandeur, voyeur, majeur etc. Besides, the stress placement falls on the final syllable.
I am sure you are going to forgive yourself for all your previous mistakes. Forgiving yourself here means that now that you have learnt the correct pronunciation of this vowel and all these words, you must ensure you do not go back to your vomit.
With love and everything English,
Francis