This video gives you a quick overview of devoicing in English.

To recap, all sounds of English can be put into two groups: voiced sounds & unvoiced sounds. They could be anywhere in the word. However, you might have noticed that often sounds at the end of words and sentences become unvoiced. This is called devoicing.

Formerly voiced sounds, change and lose their voicing if they are followed by silence or an unvoiced sound. This process actually helps us speak faster because we don’t have to use our vocal cords to produce the sound, so it’s less effort. In the video we also discuss how we can tell the difference in minimal pairs affected by devoicing, and we discover what pre fortis clipping is – it’s not as complicated as it sounds, I promise!

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