Intonation is primarily about musicality and rhythm. There tend to be recurring musical phrasings, such as lifts at the ends of phrases, that are built into a number of accents and dialects. Here is an introduction to intonation, including a number of examples from various accents and dialects.

Part 1: Accent vs Dialect vs Idiolect
Part 2: Phonetics
Part 3: Placement
Part 4: Intonation
Part 5: Helpful Hints
Part 6: Prioritizing Learning Accents

A transcript:

Hey there, Jim Johnson for Accent Help here, and I want to talk about an intro to learning accents, talking a little bit about intonation.

So intonation means a couple of primary things. One of them being rhythm, the rhythm of speech, and the other one being the musicality of the speech. Both of those are sort of musical terms. So one of them is about sort of speech patterns more, which would be the intonation, the musicality.

American Intonation

So for example American speech tends to be in stair steps. Americans tend to like to make things stair steps in their speech. So we tend to operate within say like one or two pitches mostly maybe within a three pitch range but usually only going up one pitch or sometimes two and on rare occasions will you go further than that. So most of that intonation is sort of a stair step sensation.

British Intonation

That can be very different from RP, Standard British, for example which tends to be much more flowing. So sometimes I find it useful to think of American speech as writing in block letters and RP as being writing in cursive. That sort of a sensation of the linking together and the flow being different. That's a little bit the rhythm of it. Yes? The musicality of it is that instead of the American stair steps, you sort of deal with ramps and things in between like that.

In addition, the American pitch tends to drop off at the end. So, we come to the end of a phrase and then we're done. So, there it goes. So, the American intonation will tend to just drop right at the end.

Whereas Standard British intonation, for example, won't tend to drop off nearly as much. There tends to be much more willingness to move up and finish up even than in American speech.

Now that said, there can be some finishing down, but there tends to be with American speech, it's almost like it just stops. Whereas with RP, there tends to be a little bit of a resolution as opposed to not having a resolution, almost a clunk at the end of American speech, very commonly.

A couple of other intonation patterns that happen in RP, for example, is the idea of sort of a steady rise or sort of a steady fall where you're making your way up or you're making your way down on things. And there's also a tendency to be willing to flip. This is when we're talking about more of that classic RP, an older RP that would be appropriate for something like The Importance of Being Earnest, for example.

There's also intonation things that are a little more blatant than that.

Irish Intonation

For example, when you get into the intonation differences in Irish accents, a couple of extreme differences are the difference between the northern part of Ireland and the southern part of Ireland. So whether we're talking about something that's more Derry or County Donegal accents versus being down in Limerick accents, something like that.

So Limerick tends to be a little bit more of what we think of as the Irish stereotype intonation. That's the Irish stereotype. It's almost like a rainbow. That's the Lucky Charms accent. And that's what you'll hear much more of in Limerick. And you'll hear it overall like that.

And in the north of Ireland, you'll tend to hear something like moving up more at the end. So it tends to almost sound more like a question. And Americans are used to this as Valley Girl talk, the uptalk that'll happen. So that movement up at the end, that's a common American intonation as well. But it tends to resolve in Northern Irish as more of almost what you could think of as a flat pitch as opposed to the total lift at the end of stronger American uptalk. There tends to be just sort of like you're moving up only a third or something more of a sensation of it being a flat note as opposed to this one which is more that southern Irish. Right?

The thing that will also happen is that you'll experience even this intonation sometimes in the overall phrase or line, but you'll also experience it just in little bits of it. So there's a little bit there's a little bit of where you'll feel it there sort of on many many words, especially the operative words where you'll feel a little bit of a rainbow on those as opposed to this one where you'll tend to feel just a little bit of that dip that'll happen on some of those words that are the operative words especially.

So that's a little bit about intonation which can be about sort of pitch. Where do you go with the pitch that overall intonation pattern, and it can also have to do with sort of the tempo or the speed of it. How some can be much more fast and plosive and some can be much more sort of plotting and slow.

For example, American speech, I tend to think of as sort of boxing. We like to use a lot of operative words, whereas RP tends to use fewer operative words. And I like to think of it as more sort of centralized boxing, more like this, where you're not probably punching as many words and there's a little bit more rattling in your speech in between and a little bit more punching just on rarer occasions. Fewer operative words usually in RP than in most American speech. There you go. Brief introduction to the concept of intonation. Thanks.

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