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Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "il paese (m.)" in Italian?
eel pah-EH-zeh, stress on the middle syllable. In IPA: /il paˈe.ze/. The a and e stay fully separate sounds, and the s in the middle is voiced, closer to an English z than an English s.
Three syllables, pa, e, and se, each keeping its own full vowel — the a and e do not blend into a single glided sound.
Listen: il paese (m.)
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Sound it out
Unlike tuo or mio, where an unstressed vowel glides into the next one, here both a and e are full, separately pronounced syllables sitting right next to each other. On top of that, a single s between two vowels is voiced in standard Italian, sounding closer to an English z than an English s.
Hear it in a sentence
L'Italia è un bel paese.
Italy is a beautiful country.
Listen: L'Italia è un bel paese.
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"L'Italia è un bel paese" opens with the same elision pattern seen in l'amico: la Italia would clash two vowels, so the article fuses into l'Italia. It also shows bello shortening to bel in front of a masculine singular noun starting with a consonant — the full form bell' would be used instead before a vowel, as in un bell'amico.
Paese covers both "country" in the political sense and, in other contexts, "village" or "small town," so the word's precise meaning leans on context more than English "country" typically needs to.
Where English speakers slip
Because Italian has several vowel pairs that do glide together (like the uo in scuola or the unstressed endings of tuo and mio), it's tempting to treat paese the same way and collapse the a-e sequence into something like "PYE-zeh." Here both vowels are fully stressed-adjacent and have to stay distinct, separate syllables.
The medial s also gets pronounced as a voiceless hiss, the way English treats the s in "case," when standard Italian voices a single s between two vowels, pulling it closer to a z sound.