pronunciation - the manner in which someone utters a word; "they are always correcting my pronunciation"

drawl - a slow speech pattern with prolonged vowels

grandness, importance - a prominent status; "a person of importance"

stress, focus - special emphasis attached to something; "the stress was more on accuracy than on speed"

non-standard speech - speech that differs from the usual accepted easily-recognizable speech of native adult members of a speech community

eye dialect - the use of misspellings to identify a colloquial or uneducated speaker

patois - a regional dialect of a language (especially French); usually considered substandard

spang, bang - leap, jerk, bang; "Bullets spanged into the trees"

forrad, forrard, forward, forwards, frontward, frontwards - at or to or toward the front; "he faced forward"; "step forward"; "she practiced sewing backward as well as frontward on her new sewing machine"; (`forrad' and `forrard' are dialectal variations)

prosody, inflection - the patterns of stress and intonation in a language

accentuation - the use or application of an accent; the relative prominence of syllables in a phrase or utterance

pitch accent, tonic accent - emphasis that results from pitch rather than loudness

word accent, word stress - the distribution of stresses within a polysyllabic word

sentence stress - the distribution of stresses within a sentence

language, linguistic communication - a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols; "he taught foreign languages"; "the language introduced is standard throughout the text"; "the speed with which a program can be executed depends on the language in which it is written"

diacritic, diacritical mark - a mark added to a letter to indicate a special pronunciation

stress mark - a mark indicating the stress on a syllable

acute, acute accent, ague - a mark (') placed above a vowel to indicate pronunciation

grave accent, grave - a mark (`) placed above a vowel to indicate pronunciation

background, play down, downplay - understate the importance or quality of; "he played down his royal ancestry"

set off, bring out - direct attention to, as if by means of contrast; "This dress accentuates your nice figure!"; "I set off these words by brackets"

re-emphasise, re-emphasize - emphasize anew; "The director re-emphasized the need for greater productivity"

bear down - pay special attention to; "The lectures bore down on the political background"

evince, express, show - give expression to; "She showed her disappointment"

topicalize - emphasize by putting have stress on or by moving to the front of the sentence; "Speakers topicalize more often than they realize"; "The object of the sentence is topicalized in what linguists call `Yiddish Movement'"

point up - emphasize, especially by identification; "This novel points up the racial problems in England"

press home, ram home, drive home - make clear by special emphasis and try to convince somebody of something; "drive home a point or an argument"; "I'm trying to drive home these basic ideas"

emphasise, underline, underscore, emphasize - give extra weight to (a communication); "Her gesture emphasized her words"

enounce, enunciate, pronounce, sound out, articulate, say - speak, pronounce, or utter in a certain way; "She pronounces French words in a funny way"; "I cannot say `zip wire'"; "Can the child sound out this complicated word?"