LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "è" in Italian?
EH, with a wider, more open mouth than the closed e in the word "e" ("and"). In IPA: /ɛ/. The grave accent marks both the stress and the open vowel quality, and also visually separates this word from its unaccented look-alike e.
One syllable, just the vowel itself, no consonants at all; open and a little lower in the mouth than the closed e in the conjunction e.
Listen: è
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Sound it out
This tiny word is entirely about vowel quality, since it's just one letter: è takes Italian's open e, the lower, more relaxed cousin of the closed e used in words like nero or the conjunction e, and the accent mark is what tells you which one to use.
Hear it in a sentence
Anna è italiana.
Anna is Italian.
Listen: Anna è italiana.
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È is the third-person singular present of essere (to be), and "Anna è italiana" shows the most basic Italian sentence shape, subject + è + adjective, used throughout this word list (la mela è rossa, l'erba è verde, il vestito è bianco); once this pattern is comfortable, a huge number of simple descriptive sentences open up.
Italiana takes the feminine -a ending to agree with Anna; nationality adjectives in Italian are lowercase (unlike English, where "Italian" is always capitalized) and behave like regular descriptive adjectives, agreeing in gender and number with the person or thing they describe.
Where English speakers slip
Closing the vowel and merging è with the conjunction e is a genuine trap, since the two words are spelled almost identically and only the accent mark and vowel openness tell them apart; saying a closed e here can make a listener parse the sentence as something else entirely, since è is the entire verb in Anna è italiana.
Capitalizing italiana out of habit, carrying over English capitalization rules for nationalities and languages, is another common slip. Italian keeps these lowercase across the board (italiana, francese, inglese), a small but consistent orthographic difference from English.