Advanced Connected Speech: Linking and Blending

In Part One, we talked about the basics of connected speech, how English speakers naturally connect words in everyday conversation. We explored two of the major types of Connected Speech, like assimilation, gliding, and talked about how sounds can disappear or change when we speak quickly.

Now, we’ll go deeper. This time, we’ll focus on two advanced, but very common, features of connected speech: linking and blending. These two tools make native speech sound smooth, fast, and, at times, difficult to catch for non-native speakers.

For learners of English, understanding linking and blending helps you hear more accurately and sound more natural when speaking. You may know every individual word in a sentence, but still miss the meaning because they’re connected differently in real speech.

Here’s a sentence that uses both linking and blending:

“Did they eat it already?”

👉 Sounds more like: “Didthei-yeet-id-already?”

If you only listen for the single words “Did – they – eat – it – already?” you might miss what was said entirely.

Instead, you need to listen for the chunks and pauses.

When I say chunks, there’s a trick you can use to group words together, called ‘rebracketing’

If I wrote ‘together in trouble’, you could re-bracket it as ‘to get her in trouble’. You chunk the words differently by putting spaces in new places.

Now, most phrases are NOT like my example, where the rebracketing ends up as an actual sentence. Usually, it looks like nonsense. But, when you say it outloud, it makes more sense!

For example, did you know the word ‘apron’ used to actually be ‘napron’?

People used to say ‘a napron’ so often, it became more commonly known as ‘an apron’!

They rebracketed it because they heard it in a way that made more sense to them.

You can use this trick, too. Read that previous sentence outloud and notice how you might group ‘can’ and ‘use’ to something like ‘canuse’ as if it were one word.

That’s rebracketing!