Developing a good Italian accent depends first and foremost on getting the vowel sounds right. This is where English and Italian differ the most. Once you learn the vowel sounds you will be about two thirds of the way towards having an authentic Italian accent.
There are seven basic vowel sounds in Italian. They are listed in the first two tables below along with examples of Italian words that use the sounds. You will probably find that some of these vowel sounds are similar to English vowels while others are a little different. Unfortunately we can’t point out which ones are which because it depends on which variety of English you speak - there are many different English accents that vary significantly in the vowel sounds they use.
We recommend that you listen carefully to each sound and all the examples and work out which of your English vowels is the nearest equivalent to each Italian vowel. See if you can find an English word that contains the same vowel. This will be a good starting point for your Italian pronunciation. In order to perfect your accent you’ll need to work out how each Italian vowel sound differs from the nearest equivalent English sound (if it differs at all) and try to make that modification in your speech.
If you can’t manage to hear or reproduce the differences between all seven vowel sounds, make sure that you can produce at least five distinct sounds for the written vowels a, e, i, o and u. This is the minimum requirement if you want to make yourself understood in Italian. With time you can work on perfecting your vowel sounds and in particular you can work on creating the more subtle distinctions between the open and closed e and between the open and closed o.
To make yourself understood in Italian you need to be able to produce at least five distinct vowel sounds for the five written vowels a, e, i, o and u.
All the examples above feature a long vowel sound (the vowel sound is held for a relatively long period of time). However all seven vowel sounds can also appear as short vowels, as in the following examples.
Vowel Sound
Example
Example
Example
a
gamba
spalla
sofà
closed e
legge
spesso
finché
open e
bello
gemma
caffè
i
mille
visto
così
closed o
bomba
mosca
non
open o
stoffa
molle
lavò
u
lungo
busta
lassù
If you can’t hear the difference between the short vowels and the long vowels, don’t worry too much about it. Vowel length in Italian is governed almost entirely by the consonants following the vowel. Once you know the rules it will be much easier to both hear and reproduce the different vowel lengths. This will be covered in a later lesson.
Spelling
You might have noticed from the above examples that Italian spelling is very simple and regular, especially when it comes to vowels. An a is always pronounced the same way, with only the length varying in different words. Likewise i and u are always pronounced the same way. The only vowels that are not always pronounced the same way are e and o, which nonetheless have only two variants each. Furthermore it is only in stressed syllables that the pronunciation of e and o is ambiguous. In unstressed syllables e and o are always pronounced as closed e and closed o. Contrast this situation with English, where the same vowel can be pronounced in many different ways. Consider, for example, the letter o in the English words cow, bone, pole, pot and port.
Sometimes an Italian word will end in an accented vowel, indicating that the stress falls on that final vowel. This is the case for the words sofà, finché, caffè, così, lavò and lassù from the previous table. These accents are part of the standard spelling of a word and are never omitted. When the accent is on an e or an o, the type of accent indicates whether it is an open or closed vowel: The acute accent (é, ó) indicates a closed vowel and the grave accent (è, ò) indicates an open vowel (although in standard Italian there aren’t actually any words that end in a stressed closed o sound, so you will only see the grave accent on an o). Not all Italians observe the distinction between the two types of accents (acute and grave), so you might sometimes see, for example, a grave accent on a closed vowel. however we will always observe the distinction in this course in order to help you learn the correct pronunciation.
Conventions used in this course
If you have phonetic italian spelling enabled in your settings (registered users only) then you will see the special symbols ɛ and ɔ appear in words that have an open e or an open o. These special symbols are not part of standard Italian spelling. They are just used in this course to help you learn the correct pronunciation of words containing an e or and o in a stressed, non-final syllable (ie. the situations where you can’t work out the correct vowel quality from the standard spelling).
Exercise
Your sole aim in the following exercise is to practise pronouncing the seven different Italian vowel sounds. Remember, if you have phonetic spelling enabled then you can identify all the open e and open o sounds by grave accents over the letters (è, ò) or by the special symbols ɛ and ɔ. Don’t expect to get the pronunciations exactly right on your first day. At a minimum make sure you are producing five different vowel sounds for the letters a, e, i, o and u. It’s ok if you can’t yet make the more subtle distinctions between the closed and open e and between the closed and open o. Also don’t worry if you don’t get all the consonant sounds right - they will be covered in later lessons.
