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At rest, Italian speakers hold the jaw loosely closed with relaxed lips, but as soon as speech begins, the lips and jaw become quite active and expressive, especially rounding forward for vowels like 'o' and 'u'. The tongue tends to sit toward the front of the mouth.
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Italian is syllable-timed, so each syllable takes roughly the same amount of time and keeps its full vowel sound, unlike English, which stretches stressed syllables and shrinks unstressed ones into a quick schwa. This even, syllable-by-syllable beat gives Italian its rolling, musical rhythm, but it can clash with English's stress-timed pattern when the habit carries over.
At rest, Italian speakers hold the jaw loosely closed with relaxed lips, but as soon as speech begins, the lips and jaw become quite active and expressive, especially rounding forward for vowels like 'o' and 'u'. The tongue tends to sit toward the front of the mouth. Because Italian vowels never reduce to a mumbled schwa the way English ones often do, speakers keep full, clear vowel quality in every syllable, which calls for more precise, energetic mouth movement throughout a sentence. This gives Italian speech a lively, forward, melodic feel. When speaking English, this habit of giving every vowel full value can make unstressed English syllables sound too clear and disrupt English's natural rise-and-fall rhythm.
Standard Italian (based on educated Tuscan/broadcast norms); notes apply broadly, though Northern and Southern regional accents vary in vowel quality and intonation contours