The English Alphabet

The English alphabet has 26 letters. Each letter has a lower and upper case form.
The letters A, E, I, O, U are vowels.

[ei] [en]
A a N n
[bi:] [ou]
B b O o
[si:] [pi:]
C c P p
[di:] [kju:] Become
D d Q q
[i:] [a:] a better
E e R r
[ef] [es] English
F f S s
[ i:] [ti:] Speaker
G g T t
[ju:]
H h [ei ] U u
[vi:] ::
I i [ai] V v
[d blju:] Speech
J j [ ei] W w
[eks] School
K k [kei] X x
[wai]
L l [el] Y y
[zed] or
M m [em] Z z
[AmE zi:]

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics (from the Greek word phone = sound/voice) is a fundamental branch of
Linguistics and itself has three different aspects:

 Articulatory Phonetics - describes how vowels and consonants are

produced or “articulated” in various parts of the mouth and throat;


Acoustic Phonetics - a study of how speech sounds are transmitted: when

sound travels through the air from the speaker's mouth to the hearer's ear it
does so in the form of vibrations in the air;

Auditory Phonetics - a study of how speech sounds are perceived: looks at

the way in which the hearer’s brain decodes the sound waves back into the
vowels and consonants originally intended by the speaker.

The actual sound produced, such as a simple vowel or consonant sound is

called phone.

Closely associated with Phonetics is another branch of Linguistics known

as Phonology. Phonology deals with the way speech sounds behave in particular
languages or in languages generally. This focuses on the way languages use
differences between sounds in order to convey differences of meaning between
words. All theories of phonology hold that spoken language can be broken down
into a string of sound units (phonemes). A phoneme is the smallest ‘distinctive
unit sound’ of a language. It distinguishes one word from another in a given
language. This means changing a phoneme in a word, produces another word, that
has a different meaning. In the pair of words (minimal pairs) 'cat' and 'bat', the
distinguishing sounds /c/ and /b/ are both phonemes. The phoneme is an abstract
term (a speech sound as it exists in the mind of the speaker) and it is specific to a
particular language.

A phoneme may have several allophones, related sounds that are distinct but do
not change the meaning of a word when they are interchanged. The sounds
corresponding to the letter "t" in the English words 'tea' and 'trip' are not in fact
quite the same. The position of the tongue is slightly different, which causes a
difference in sound detectable by an instrument such as a speech spectrograph.
Thus the [t] in 'tea' and the [t] in 'trip' are allophones of the phoneme /t/.

Phonology is the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics. Only by
studying both the phonetics and the phonology of English is it possible to acquire a
full understanding of the use of sounds in English speech.

English Pronunciation
We use the term ‘accents’ to refer to differences in pronunciations. Pronunciation
can vary with cultures, regions and speakers, but there are two major standard
varieties in English pronunciation: British English and American English.

Within British English and American English there are also a variety of accents.
Some of them have received more attention than others from phoneticians and
phonologists. These are Received pronunciation (RP)* and General American
(GA).

Received pronunciation is a form of pronunciation of the English language,

sometimes defined as the "educated spoken English of southeastern England". RP
is close to BBC English (the kind spoken by British newscasters) and it is
represented in the pronunciation schemes of most British dictionaries. RP is rather
a social accent than regional, associated with the educated upper classes (and/or
people who have attended public schools) in Britain.

English pronunciation is also divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic and
the non-rhotic, depending on when the phoneme /r/ is pronounced. Rhotic
speakers pronounce written "r" in all positions. They will pronounce
the "r" in stork, whereas non-rhotic speakers won't, making no distinction
between stork and stalk. Non-rhotic speakers pronounce "r" only if it is followed
by a vowel - right, rain, room, Robert, far awey, etc.

Non-rhotic accents are British Received Pronunciation and some other types of
British English, Australian, New Zealand and South African English. American
English is rhotic (the "r" is always pronounced), with the notable exception of the
Boston area and New York City. Rhotic accents can be found also in most of
Canada. SE Britain is apparently the source of non-rhotic. England is non-rhotic,
apart from the south-western England and some ever-diminishing northern areas.
Scotland and Ireland are rhotic.

* "Received" here is used in its older sense to mean "generally accepted".

The Sounds of English and Their Representation

In English, there is no one-to-one relation between the system of writing and the
system of pronunciation. The alphabet which we use to write English has 26 letters
but in (Standard British) English there are approximately 44 speach sounds. The
number of speech sounds in English varies from dialect to dialect, and any actual
tally depends greatly on the interpretation of the researcher doing the counting. To
represent the basic sound of spoken languages linguists use a set of phonetic
symbols called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The chart below
contains all of the IPA symbols used to represent the sounds of the English
language. This is the standard set of phonemic symbols for English (RP and similar
accents).

[ ] - small capital letter I

[ ] - 'epsilon' -- a Greek letter
[ ] - sometimes called
'upsilon'
p b t d k g [ ] - 'ash'; digraph a-e --
f v s z usually just "digraph"
[ ] - script A
m n h l r w j
[ ] - open O
[ ] - 'caret'

[ ] - 'eng' (right-tail n)
[ ] - 'eth'
[ ] - 'theta'
[ ] - 'schwa'
The colon / : / represents longer duration in pronunciation and is found in long
vowels such as / i: /, / a: /, / u: /, etc.

Vowels and Consonants (en/bg)

Classifying the Vowels Sounds of English

The classifcation of vowels is based on four major aspects:

1. Tongue height - according to the vertical position of the tongue (high

vowels, also referred to as close; low vowels, also referred to as open;
intermediate - close-mid and open-mid)
2. Frontness vs. backness of the tongue - according to the horizontal position
of the highest part of the tongue.
3. Lip rounding - whether the lips are rounded (O-shape) or spread (no
rounding) when the sound is being made.
4. Tenseness of the articulators - refers to the amount of muscular tension
around the mouth when creating vowel sounds. Tense and lax are used to
describe muscular tension.

Front vowels Central vowels Back vowels

(tongue body is pushed (tongue body is (tongue body is pulled
forward) neutral) back)
High/close
vowels / / see / / boot
(tongue body / / sit / / book
is raised)
Mid vowels
(tongue body /e/ bait* /o/ boat*
/ / sofa**, / / bird
is / / bet / / bought***
intermediate)
Low/open
vowels / / under**
/ / bat / / father, / / sock(BrE)
(tongue body
is lowered)

*In some American accents (especially Californian English), vowel sounds in

words such as bait, gate, pane and boat, coat, note are not consider diphthongs.
American phonologists often class them as tense monophthongs (/e/ and /o/).
**/ / is used in unstressed syllables, while / / is in stressed syllables. The vowel
/ / used to be a back vowel, and the symbol was chosen for this reason. This is no
longer a back vowel, but a central one.
***A considerable amount of Americans don't have the deep / / in their
vocabulary, they pronouce bought, ball, law with the deep / / sound.

See also: IPA vowels chart

According to the position of the lips:

 English front and central vowels are always unrounded.

 English back vowels / /, / , /o/, / / are rounded (/ / vowel is
unrounded).

Vowel Tenseness:

 Tense vowels (produced with a great amount of muscular tension): / /, / /,

/ /, / /, / /. Tense vowels are variable in length, and often longer than
lax vowels.
 Lax vowels (produced with very little muscular tension): / /, / /, / /, / /,
/ /, / /, / /. Lax vowels are always short.

Classifying the Consonants Sounds of English According to the Manner and

Place of Articulation

According to the manner of articulation (how the breath is used) the consonants
are: stops, also known as plosives, fricatives, affricates, nasals, laterals,
and approximants. Nasals, laterals and approximants are
always voiced; stops, fricatives and affricates can be voiced or unvoiced.

During production of these sounds, the airflow from the lungs is completely
Stops
blocked at some point, then released. In English, they are /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/,
/Plosives/
and /g/.
The flow of air is constricted, but not totally stopped or blocked. In English,
Fricatives these include /f/, /v/, / /, / /,
/s/, /z/, / /, / /, and /h/.
These sounds begin like stops, with a complete blockage of air/closure of the
Affricates vocal tract, and end with a restricted flow of air like fricatives. English has
two affricates - the / / sounds of "church" and the / / of "judge".
Nasals are sounds made with air passing through the nose. In English, these
Nasals
are /m/, /n/, and / /.
Lateral consonants allow the air to escape at the sides of the tongue. In
Laterals
English there is only one such sound - /l/
 In the production of an approximant, one articulator is close to another, but
the vocal tract is not narrowed to such an extent that a turbulent airstream is
Approximants
produced. In English, these are /j/, /w/ and /r/. Approximants /j/ and /w/ are
also referred to as semi-vowels.

According to the place of articulation (where in the mouth or throat the sound is
produced) the consonants are:

Bilabial: with both lips /p/, /b/, /m/

Labiodental: between lower lip and upper
/f/, /v/
teeth
Dental/Interdental: between the teeth / /, / /
Alveolar: the ridge behind the upper front /t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /n/,
teeth /l/, /r/
Alveo-palatal (or post-alveolar): it is the
/ /, / /, / /, /
area between
the alveolar ridge and the hard palate /
Palatal: hard palate, or 'roof' of the mouth' /j/
Velar: the soft palate or velum /k/, /g/, / /
Glottal (laryngeal): space between the vocal
/h/
cords