how many vowels are there in british english
English language


aside from some accents in the South Island of New Zealand. Australian and New Zealand English stand out for their innovative vowels: many short vowels are fronted or raised, whereas many long vowels have diphthongised. Australian English also has a contrast between long and short vowels, not found in most other varieties. Australian English grammar aligns closely to British and American English; like American English, collective plural subjects take on a singular verb (as in "the government is" rather than "are"). New Zealand English uses
14843474
Vowel length


dialects of British English and is said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian English, South African English and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike other varieties of Chinese. Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically. Those that do usually distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. A very few languages distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths, such as Luiseño and Mixe. However, some languages with two vowel lengths also have words in which long vowels appear adjacent to
12748358
English language


correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are more irregular. There are many more vowel phonemes in English than there are single vowel letters ("a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "w", "y"). As a result, some "long vowels" are often indicated by combinations of letters (like the "oa" in "boat", the "ow" in "how", and the "ay" in "stay"),
14843456
Stress and vowel reduction in English


", and "kettledrum". However, in some well-established compounds the vowel of the unstressed part may be reduced, as in "postman" . Many other full unstressed vowels also derive historically from stressed vowels, due to shifts of stress over time (such as stress shifting away from the final syllable of French loan words, like "ballet" and "bureau", in British English), or the loss or change of stress in compound words or phrases (as in "óverseas vóyage" from "
20389092
Stress and vowel reduction in English


see the following section). In many rhotic dialects, an r-colored schwa, , occurs in words such as "water" and "standard." Non-rhotic dialects simply have schwa in these positions, except where the dialect has linking R. The r-colored schwa can be analyzed phonemically as . In some dialects of English there is a distinction between two vowel heights of reduced vowels: in addition to schwa, there is a distinct near-close central unrounded vowel (or equivalently ). In the British
20389083
Accent (sociolinguistics)


American accents. It is difficult to measure or predict how long it takes an accent to form. Accents from Canada, South Africa, Australia and the US for example, developed from the combinations of different accents and languages in various societies and their effect on the various pronunciations of British settlers. In many cases, the accents of non-English settlers from the British Isles affected the accents of the different colonies quite differently. Irish, Scottish and Welsh immigrants had accents which greatly affected the vowel pronunciation of certain areas of Australia
16302698
Phoneme


scientific fact, they actually reflect just one of many possible analyses, and later in the English Phonology article an alternative analysis is suggested in which some diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to either or . The transcription system for British English (RP) devised by the phonetician Geoff Lindsey and used in the CUBE pronunciation dictionary also treats diphthongs as composed of a vowel plus or . The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager and Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs
3214770
Dida language


of diphthongs, which have the same number of tonal distinctions as simple vowels. All start with the higher vowels, , and except for , both elements are either contracted or non-contracted, so the pharyngealization is here transcribed after the second element of the vowel. Examples are "bottle" (from English), "get stuck", and "little bone". Dida also has nasal vowels, but they are not common and it is not clear how many. Examples are "nothing", "chin"
13520994
History of English


", "sole" vs. "solitary". Among the more significant recent changes to the language have been the development of rhotic and non-rhotic accents (i.e. "r-dropping"); the trap-bath split in many dialects of British English; and flapping of "t" and "d" between vowels in American English and Australian English. The following table shows the principal developments in the stressed vowels, from Old English through Modern English ("C" indicates any consonant): The following chart
108822
British English


beginning with a vowel. This is called the intrusive R. This could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently. British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are diphthongised to [ɪi] and [ʊu
3755000
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


some accents of modern English. Many speakers in New Zealand merge them in favor of the vowel, while some speakers in East Anglia and South Carolina merge them in favor of the vowel. The merger is widespread in the Anglophone Caribbean, including Jamaican English. This is the merger of as many as five Middle English vowels into one vowel when historically followed by in the coda of a syllable. The merged vowel is in Received Pronunciation, and in American, Canadian, and Irish English. As a result of this merger,
11929821
Scottish vowel length rule


The Scottish vowel length rule (also known as Aitken's law after A. J. Aitken, the Scottish linguist who formulated it) describes how vowel length in Scots, Scottish English, and, to some extent, Mid-Ulster English is conditioned by the phonetic environment of the target vowel. Certain vowels are long before , voiced fricatives or a morpheme boundary. Also, vowels in word-final open syllables are long. The underlying phonemes of the Scottish vowel system are as follows: The Scottish vowel length rule affects all vowels
21830217
English language


that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. Mid and open vowels were raised, and close vowels were broken into diphthongs. For example, the word "bite" was originally pronounced as the word "beet" is today, and the second vowel in the word "about" was pronounced as the word "boot" is today. The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the
14843339
Phonological history of English close front vowels


It is not entirely clear when the vowel underwent the transition. The fact that tensing is uniformly present in South African English, Australian English, and New Zealand English implies that it was present in southern British English already at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet it is not mentioned by descriptive phoneticians until the early 20th century, and even then at first only in American English. The British phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis believes that the vowel moved from to in Britain the second quarter of the 19th century before reverting to in non
5983417
Phonological history of English vowels


In the history of English phonology, there have been many diachronic sound changes affecting vowels, especially involving phonemic splits and mergers. The Great Vowel Shift was a series of chain shifts that affected historical long vowels but left short vowels largely alone. It is one of the primary causes of the idiosyncrasies in English spelling. The shortening of ante-penultimate syllables in Middle English created many long–short pairs. The result can be seen in such words as, *Earlier Modern English merged with . Tense–lax neutralization refers to
10899238
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


: . This results in a "tire"–"tar" merger, but with "tower" kept distinct. Some accents of southern British English (including many types of RP, as well as the accent of Norwich) have mergers of the vowels in words like "tire", "tar", and "tower". Thus, the triphthong of "tower" merges either with the of "tire" (both surfacing as diphthongal ) or with the of "tar". Some speakers merge all three sounds, so that
11929813
Interrogative word


The unusual pronunciation versus spelling of "who" is because the vowel was formerly /aː/, and thus it did not undergo the sound change in Old English, but in Middle English (following spelling change) the vowel changed to /uː/ and it followed the same sound change as "how" before it, but with the Middle English spelling unchanged. In "how" (Old English "hū", from Proto-Germanic "χō"), the "w" merged into the lave of the word, as it
2025941
Received Pronunciation


un"), as marginal members of the RP vowel system. He also argues against including other French vowels on the grounds that very few British speakers succeed in distinguishing the vowels in "bon" and "banc", or in "rue" and "roue". Not all reference sources use the same system of transcription. In particular: Most of these variants are used in the transcription devised by Clive Upton for the "Shorter Oxford English Dictionary" (1993) and now used in many other Oxford University Press
6653584
Glottal stop


, it occurs phonetically in nearly all dialects of English, as an allophone of in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney, Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic between vowels as in "city". In Received Pronunciation, a glottal stop is inserted before a tautosyllabic voiceless stop: sto’p, tha’t, kno’ck, wa’tch, also lea’p, soa’k, hel’p, pin’ch. In many languages that do not allow a sequence of vowels, such as Persian, the glottal stop may be used to break up
8152165
Stress and vowel reduction in English


, but in more careful enunciation it may also be pronounced as a full vowel (that of ). Compare this with the "o" in "gallon", which is never a full vowel, no matter how carefully one enunciates. Some monosyllabic English function words have a weak form with a reduced vowel, used when the word has no prosodic stress, and a phonemically distinct strong form with a full vowel, used when the word is stressed (and as the citation form or isolation form when a word is mentioned
20389111
Phonological history of English close back vowels


Most dialects of modern English have two close back vowels: the near-close near-back rounded vowel found in words like "foot", and the close back rounded vowel (realized as central in many dialects) found in words like "goose". The vowel , which historically was back, is often central as well. This article discusses the history of these vowels in various dialects of English, focusing in particular on phonemic splits and mergers involving these sounds. In the Old English vowel system, there was a
14885562
Phonological history of Old English


Modern English, see the article on the phonological history of English. A summary of the main vowel changes is presented below. Note that the spelling of Modern English largely reflects Middle English pronunciation. Note also that this table presents only the general developments. Many exceptional outcomes occurred in particular environments, e.g. vowels were often lengthened in late Old English before ; vowels changed in complex ways before , throughout the history of English; vowels were diphthongized in Middle English before ; new diphthongs arose in Middle English by the combination of vowels with
12236667
Dzongkha Braille


" is inherent in a consonant letter, and is not written explicitly. Other vowels are written after a consonant as in English Braille. When a vowel occurs at the beginning of a word, the vowel letter is carried by a null consonant ཨ : Sanskrit vowel-marking includes: as in ཀིཿ "kiḥ", ཀོྃ "koṃ". It's not clear how conjuncts are indicated. However, the conjunct ཀྵ "kṣa" in Sanskrit loans suggests that the 45 points conjoin two consonants. Digits are as in English
9972721
English language


vowel shortening causes changes in vowel quality: vowel reduction. Varieties of English vary the most in pronunciation of vowels. The best known national varieties used as standards for education in non English-speaking countries are British (BrE) and American (AmE). Countries such as Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa have their own standard varieties which are less often used as standards for education internationally. Some differences between the various dialects are shown in the table "Varieties of Standard English and their features".
14843384
Scottish Gaelic phonology


English equivalents given are approximate, and refer most closely to the Scottish pronunciation of Standard English. The vowel in English "father" is back in Southern English. The in English "late" in Scottish English is the pure vowel rather than the more general diphthong . The same is true for the in English "boat", in Scottish English, instead of the diphthong . The language uses many vowel combinations, which can be categorised into two types, depending on the status of one or more of the written vowels in
4237516
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


. The phenomenon that occurs in many dialects of the United States is one of tense–lax neutralization, where the normal English distinction between tense and lax vowels is eliminated. In some cases, the quality of a vowel before is different from the quality of the vowel elsewhere. For example, in some dialects of American English the quality of the vowel in "more" typically does not occur except before , and is somewhere in between the vowels of "maw" and "mow". It is similar to the vowel
11929788
Vowel length


vowel letter is called "long" if it's pronounced the same as the letter's name and "short" otherwise. This is commonly used for educational purposes when teaching children how to read, but this system does not cover all vowels of English and the terminology is not linguistic. In phonetic transcription, "long" vowels may be marked with a macron; for example, /ā/ may be used to transcribe IPA /eɪ/. This is sometimes used in dictionaries, most notably in Merriam-Webster (see Pronunciation respelling for English
12748371
Phonological history of English open back vowels


the  merger) is a phonemic merger occurring in many English accents, where the vowel sound in words like "cot", "nod", and "stock" (the vowel), has merged with that of "caught", "gnawed", and "stalk" (the vowel). For example, with the merger, "cot" and "caught" become perfect homophones. In some London accents of English, the vowel in words such as "thought," "force," and "
1995300
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


In English, many vowel shifts only affect vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by an that has since been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve merging of vowel distinctions, so that fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions in a word. In rhotic dialects, is pronounced in most cases. In General American (GA), is pronounced as an approximant or in most positions, but after some vowels is pronounced as "r"-coloring. In Scottish English, is
11929783
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


of the latter word, but without the glide. It is important to note however that different mergers occur in different dialects. Among United States accents, the Boston, Eastern New England and New York accents have the lowest degree of pre-rhotic merging. Some have observed that rhotic North American accents are more likely to have such merging than non-rhotic accents, but this cannot be said of rhotic British accents like Scottish English, which is firmly rhotic and yet many varieties have all the same vowel contrasts before as
11929789
Middle English phonology


of Modern English largely reflects Middle English pronunciation. This table presents the general developments. Many exceptional outcomes occurred in particular environments: vowels were often lengthened in late Old English before , , ; vowels changed in complex ways before , throughout the history of English etc. Vowels were diphthongized in Middle English before , and new diphthongs arose in Middle English by the combination of vowels with Old English "w", "g"  , and "ġ" ; for more information, see the section below. The only conditional development considered
5905564
Pronunciation of English ⟨a⟩


to "fat"). Many foreign borrowed words such as "taco", "llama", "drama", "piranha", "Bahamas", "pasta", "Bach", "pecan", "pajamas" etc. vary as to whether or not they have the vowel or the vowel in various dialects in English. In Canada and Northern England, many speakers pronounce such words with the same vowel as , whereas in American, Australian and New Zealand English as well as RP, they
10904054
O


the other English vowel letters, it has associated "long" and "short" pronunciations. The "long" as in "boat" is actually most often a diphthong (realized dialectically anywhere from to ). In English there is also a "short" as in "fox", , which sounds slightly different in different dialects. In most dialects of British English, it is either an open-mid back rounded vowel or an open back rounded vowel ; in American English, it is most commonly an unrounded back
2473764
English language


most formal register. Most Caribbean varieties are based on British English and consequently, most are non-rhotic, except for formal styles of Jamaican English which are often rhotic. Jamaican English differs from RP in its vowel inventory, which has a distinction between long and short vowels rather than tense and lax vowels as in Standard English. The diphthongs and are monophthongs and or even the reverse diphthongs and (e.g. "bay" and "boat" pronounced and ). Often word-final consonant clusters are simplified so that "child
14843481
Vowel length


short vowels when they occur in pre-fortis position. In Australian English, there is contrastive vowel length in closed syllables between long and short and sometimes . The following can be minimal pairs of length for many speakers: In English spelling, vowel letters in words of the form "CVC" and "CVCe" (consonant + vowel + consonant + the letter "e") are traditionally called "short" and "long" (and actually represent single vowels or diphthongs [combinations of two vowels]). A
12748370
Great Vowel Shift


considered part of the Great Vowel Shift. Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet: Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels, . The vowels occurred in the words "bite", "meet", "meat", "mate", "boat", "boot", "out" and many more. The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from their pronunciations in Modern English. Long "i" in "bite" was pronounced as so Middle
12584345
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


the number of contrasts in this position tends to be reduced, and the tendency seems to be towards further reduction. The difference in how these reductions have been manifested represents one of the greatest sources of cross-dialect variation. Non-rhotic accents in many cases show mergers in the same positions as rhotic accents do, even though there is often no phoneme present. This results partly from mergers that occurred before the was lost, and partly from later mergers of the centering diphthongs and long vowels that resulted from the loss of
11929787
Germanic umlaut


derivational morphology of Old English since it affected so many of the Old English vowels. Of 16 basic vowels and diphthongs in Old English, only the four vowels "ǣ, ē, i, ī" were unaffected by i-mutation. Although i-mutation was originally triggered by an or in the syllable following the affected vowel, by the time of the surviving Old English texts, the or had generally changed (usually to ) or been lost entirely, with the result that i-mutation generally appears as a morphological
13358198
Phonological history of English consonants


vowel. In many accents of English, including RP, /r/ is lost altogether when not followed by a vowel – for this, see rhoticity in English (and for related phenomena, linking and intrusive R). For vowel changes before /r/, see English-language vowel changes before historic /r/. A uvular realization of /r/, the "Northumbrian burr", is used by some speakers in the far north of England. A relatively recent innovation in the southeast of England, possibly originating from Cockney, is the use of a
14309098
Vowel reduction


reduction most often involves a centralization of the vowel, that is, a reduction in the amount of movement of the tongue in pronouncing the vowel, as with the characteristic change of many unstressed vowels at the ends of English words to something approaching schwa. A well-researched type of reduction is that of the neutralization of acoustic distinctions in unstressed vowels, which occurs in many languages. The most common reduced vowel is schwa. Whereas full vowels are distinguished by height, backness, and roundness, according to , reduced unstressed vowels
17753808
American and British English pronunciation differences


Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into In the following discussion: Subscript or means that the relevant unstressed vowel is also reduced to or in AmE or BrE, respectively. For many loanwords from French where AmE has kept the original French final-syllable stress, BrE stresses an earlier syllable. French loanwords that differ in stress only are listed below. Most 2-syllable verbs ending "-ate" have first-syllable stress in AmE and second-syllable stress in BrE. This
17065024
Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩


by Middle English the vowel had become rounded, and so the /hw/ of these words was now subject to delabialization: By contrast with "how", these words changed after their spelling with had become established, and thus continue to be written with like the other interrogative words "which", "what", etc. (which were not affected by the above changes since they had unrounded vowels – the vowel of "what" became rounded at a later time). The wine–whine merger is the phonological merger
15849304
Stress and vowel reduction in English


and vowel reduction (or lack of the latter) may distinguish between meanings even within a given part of speech, with the best-known such pairs in American English being "offense" and "defense" (in each case with the first syllable accented in the context of sports and the second syllable accented in legal contexts) In some words, the reduction of a vowel depends on how quickly or carefully the speaker enunciates the word. For example, the "o" in "obscene" is commonly reduced to schwa
20389110
Stress and vowel reduction in English


Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word "(lexical stress)" and at the level of the phrase or sentence "(prosodic stress)". Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced" (or sometimes with a syllabic consonant as the syllable nucleus rather
20389076
Regional accents of English


Cantonese on the pronunciations of a few consonants and vowels, and sentence grammar and structure. Malay is the lingua franca of Malaysia, a federation of former British colonies and similar dependencies. English is a foreign language with no official status, but it is commonly learnt as a second or third language. The Malaysian accent appears to be a melding of British, Chinese, Tamil and Malay influences. Many Malaysians adopt different accents and usages depending on the situation; for example, an office worker may speak with less colloquialism and with
17531191
R-colored vowel


, after the Kiel Convention, the hook of and was adopted as a diacritic placed on the right side of the vowel symbol for r-colored vowels, e.g. [ɛ˞ o˞ ɔ˞]. The use of the superscript turned r () is still commonly seen. R-colored vowels are found in most rhotic forms of English, including General American and Irish English. The r-colored vowels of General American can be written with "vowel-r" digraphs: In words such as "start", many speakers
19389433
Vowel length


In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may have arisen from one etymologically, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most other dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many of the world's languages and dialects, for instance in Arabic, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Japanese, Old English, Scottish Gaelic and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of
12748357
Stress and vowel reduction in English


is widely used in British works for words such as "influence" , "into" . Phonologically, this vowel is an archiphoneme representing the neutralization of and . The other sounds that can serve as the peak of reduced syllables are the syllabic consonants. When these occur, there is a syllable with no vowel. The consonants that can be syllabic in English are principally , and . For example, the "le" in "cycle and "bottle may be a syllabic , the "m" in "prism may be
20389089
Vietnamese language


spoken sometime after 1600 but before the present. (This is not unlike how English orthography is based on the Chancery Standard of Late Middle English, with many spellings retained even after the Great Vowel Shift.) The Unicode character set contains all Vietnamese characters and the Vietnamese currency symbol. On systems that do not support Unicode, many 8-bit Vietnamese code pages are available such as Vietnamese Standard Code for Information Interchange (VSCII) or Windows-1258. Where ASCII must be used, Vietnamese letters are often typed using the VIQR convention, though
14163409
Schwa


any epenthetic vowel, but some languages use different epenthetic vowels (Navajo uses ). In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound. It is a reduced vowel in many unstressed syllables especially if syllabic consonants are not used. Depending on dialect, it may be written using any of the following letters: Schwa is a very short neutral vowel sound, and like all other vowels, its precise quality varies depending on the adjacent consonants. In most varieties of English, schwa occurs almost exclusively in unstressed syllables. (There
14801845
Middle English phonology


, , , . Later on, the vowels in many of these words were shortened again, giving the appearance that no lengthening happened; but evidence from the Ormulum indicates otherwise. For details see Phonological history of Old English: Vowel lengthening. Late West Saxon (the standard written form of Old English) included matched pairs of short and long vowels, including seven pairs of pure vowels (monophthongs), , and two pairs of height-harmonic diphthongs, and . Two additional pairs of diphthongs, and , existed in earlier
5905550
British English


words such as "not" (as in no interested). Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are "p", as in paer and "k" as in baer. In most areas of Britain outside Scotland and Northern Ireland, the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as non-rhoticity. In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word
3754999
English language


London, the printing of the King James Bible and the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, and later the United States, Modern English has been spreading around the world since the 17th century. Through all types of printed and electronic media, and spurred by the emergence of the United States as a global superpower, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the "lingua franca" in many regions and professional contexts such as science, navigation and law. English is
14843319
Phonological history of English close front vowels


development is that bisyllabic may become smoothed to the diphthong in certain words, leading to pronunciations like , and for "vehicle", "theatre/theater" and "idea" respectively. This is not restricted to any one variety of English; it happens in both British English and (less noticeably or often) American English as well as other varieties; although it is far more common in the former, as many Americans do not have the phoneme . The words which have may vary depending on dialect. Dialects that have
5983397
Chicano English


also a feature of general California English. Some realizations of , , , and other long vowels are pronounced as monophthongs. That may be an effect of Spanish, but other American English dialects (Minnesota, and Wisconsin, for example) also show monophthongization of such vowels, which are more commonly diphthongs in English. Also, such vowels are underlyingly long monophthongs so the general effect thus is to simplify the system of phonetic implementation, compared to the of many other English dialects. A fair to strong degree of variation exists in
12637665
Finland Swedish


Swedish. The phoneme is more centralized and pronounced like , quite similar to how many American English speakers pronounce (as in "moon"). That should be compared to the Central Swedish , which is very close to the short vowel and is more rounded. The highly variable "sj" sound varies between and on the Finnish mainland, often close to "sh" in English "shoe". In the Åland Islands, its realization is similar to the velar (and often labialized) pronunciations of nearby parts of Sweden
2644721
Bahamian English


Bahamian English is a variety of English spoken in the Bahamas and by Bahamian diasporas. The standard for official use and education is British-based. The Bahamian accent is non-rhotic. The realization of vowels in the Bahamian English. The vowels below are named by the lexical set they belong to: There is poor distinction between the and sounds in Bahamian English. The contrast is often neutralized or merged into , or , so "village" sounds like , or . This also happens in the Vincentian, Bermudian and other
11965795
Great Vowel Shift


were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as . However, during the 16th and the 17th centuries, there were many different mergers, and some mergers can be seen in individual Modern English words like "great", which is pronounced with the vowel as in "mate" rather than the vowel as in "meat". This is a simplified picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English (late ME), Early Modern English (EModE), and today's
12584349
Phonological history of Old English


Old English "w", "g"  , and "ġ" ; etc. The only conditional development considered in detail below is Middle English open-syllable lengthening. Note that, in the column on modern spelling, "CV" means a sequence of a single consonant followed by a vowel. Note that the Modern English vowel usually spelled "au" (British , American ) does not appear in the above chart. Its main source is late Middle English /au/, which come from various sources: Old English "
12236668
Middle English phonology


in detail below is Middle English open-syllable lengthening. In the column on modern spelling, "CV" means a sequence of a single consonant followed by a vowel. The Modern English vowel usually spelled "au" (British , American ) does not appear in the above chart. Its main source is late Middle English < early and , which come from various sources: Old English "aw" and "ag" ("claw" < "clawu", "law" < "lagu"); diphthongization
5905565
Indian name


, their birth name is different from their official name; the birth name starts with a randomly selected name from the person's horoscope (based on the nakshatra or lunar mansion corresponding to the person's birth). Many children are given three names, sometimes as a part of religious teaching. When written in Latin script, Indian names may use the vowel characters to denote sounds different from conventional American or British English. Although some languages, like Kannada or Tamil may have different vowel sounds, the ones used in most major
9626128
Fronting (phonetics)


back were fronted to . This change occurred in all cases and was not triggered by a nearby front consonant or vowel. In Old English and Old Frisian, the back vowels were fronted to in certain cases. For more information, see . In many dialects of English, the vowel is fronted to or . This sound change also occurred in many dialects of Norwegian and Standard Swedish, but not in Danish. Fronting can also take place as part of a chain shift. For example, in the Northern Cities Shift, the
3372386
Kenyan English


have an educational background know some level of English. Like English in southern England, Kenyan English is non-rhotic. Major phonological features include the loss of length contrast in vowels, the lack of mid central vowels as with British English, the monophthongisation of diphthongs and the dissolving of consonant clusters. The trap-bath split does not exist in Kenyan English. Those who don't speak English as a first language and/or live in rural areas in Kenya may also participate in "code mixing," which is the process of
4118582
Pronunciation of English ⟨a⟩


Middle English (the sound that often gives in modern spelling), and OE was raised and rounded to become ME (often , in modern spelling). For more details, see English historical vowel correspondences. During the Middle English period, like other short vowels, the was lengthened in open syllables. Later, with the gradual loss of unstressed endings, many such syllables ceased to be open, but the vowel remained long. For example, the word "name" originally had two syllables, the first being open,
10904022
Phonological history of English close front vowels


end of a morpheme (as in "frees" ). Many other dialects of English diphthongize , but in most of them the diphthongal realization is in a more or less free variation with the monophthong . Compare the identical development of the close back vowel. Middle English short /i/ has developed into a lax, near-close near-front unrounded vowel, , in Modern English, as found in words like "kit". (Similarly, short has become.) According to Roger Lass, this laxing occurred in the
5983399
English orthography


has no etymological justification whatsoever, only seeking to invoke Greek despite being a Gaelic word. The spelling of English continues to evolve. Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols and have in the International Phonetic Alphabet. As a result, there is a somewhat regular system of pronouncing "foreign" words in English, and some borrowed words have had their
9965188
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


were historically largely nonrhotic. The "hurry"–"furry" merger occurs when the vowel before intervocalic is merged with , particularly a feature in most dialects of North American English, although it is resisted in New York City English, Mid-Atlantic American English, older Southern American English, and some speakers of Eastern New England English. Speakers with this merger pronounce "hurry" so that it rhymes with "furry", and "turret" so that it rhymes with "stir it". British English and most other English outside of
11929791
Klingon language


In contrast to its consonants, Klingon's inventory of vowels is simple, and similar to those of many human languages, such as Spanish or Japanese. There are five vowels spaced more or less evenly around the vowel space, with two back rounded vowels, one back unrounded vowel, and two front or near-front unrounded vowels. The vowel inventory is asymmetrical in that the back rounded vowels are tense and the front vowels are lax. The two front vowels, and , represent sounds that are found in English, but
17022303
Checked and free vowels


vowel" correspond closely to the terms "lax vowel" and "tense vowel" respectively, but many linguists prefer to use the terms "checked" and "free", as there is no clearcut phonetic definition of vowel tenseness and because by most attempted definitions of tenseness and are considered lax even though they behave in American English as free vowels. "Checked vowels" is also used to refer to a kind of very short glottalized vowels found in some Zapotecan languages that contrast with laryngealized vowels. The term "checked vowel
19706052
Phonological history of English close front vowels


of England and in some northern cities (e.g. Liverpool, Newcastle). It is also becoming more common in modern RP. The lax and tense variants of the "happy" vowel may be identified with the phonemes and respectively. They may also be considered to represent a neutralization between the two phonemes, although for speakers with the tense variant, there is the possibility of contrast in such pairs as "taxis" and "taxes" (see English phonology – vowels in unstressed syllables). Modern British dictionaries represent the "
5983419
English phonology


r" sound, and a vowel sound. The phonemes in this and many other English words do not always correspond directly to the letters used to spell them (English orthography is not as strongly phonemic as that of many other languages). The number and distribution of phonemes in English vary from dialect to dialect, and also depend on the interpretation of the individual researcher. The number of consonant phonemes is generally put at 24 (or slightly more). The number of vowels is subject to greater variation; in the system
5616923
History of English


online environments (such as chat rooms, social media expressions, and apps), and the adoption of English as a worldwide lingua franca across cultures, customs, and traditions, it should not be surprising to see further shortening of words, phrases, and/or sentences. Over the last 1,200 years or so, English has undergone extensive changes in its vowel system but many fewer changes to its consonants. In the Old English period, a number of umlaut processes affected vowels in complex ways, and unstressed vowels were gradually eroded,
108817
Amtor


describes the vowel system as being simple five-vowel one which renders Amtorians unable to correctly pronounce many English vowels. As with the speakers of many Earth languages, including Spanish, Georgian, or Japanese, and based on the Amtorian placenames and personal names in the story, the vowels appear to simply be /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. Napier does explicitly exclude /ɔ/ and /ɪ/ from the vowel inventory, along with the diphthong /ei/, as he states, "The native Amtorians are unable to pronounce a long
13811422
Algonquin language


working day") is pronounced . Algonquin does have nasal vowels, but they are allophonic variants (similar to how in English vowels are sometimes nasalized before "m" and "n"). In Algonquin, vowels automatically become nasal before "nd", "ndj", "ng", "nh", "nhi", "nj" or "nz". For example, kìgònz ("fish") is pronounced , not . Word stress in Algonquin is complex but regular. Words are divided
10819133
Stress (linguistics)


syllables such as ""din"" in ""din"ner" are louder and longer. They may also have a different fundamental frequency, or other properties. The main stress within a sentence, often found on the last stressed word, is called the "nuclear stress". In many languages, such as Russian and English, vowel reduction may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstressed position. In English, unstressed vowels may reduce to schwa-like vowels, though the details vary with dialect (
7793037
Silent e


In English orthography, many words feature a silent , (single, final, non-syllabic ) most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English. In a large class of words, as a consequence of a series of historical sound changes, including the Great Vowel Shift, the presence of a suffix on the end of a word influenced the development of the preceding vowel, and in a smaller
9466994
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/


General American, words are pronounced with RP ( before a vowel) and GenAm . But these pronunciations are being replaced by other pronunciations in many English accents. In southern England English it is now common to pronounce words with , so that "moor" is often pronounced , "tour" , "poor" . The traditional form is much more common in the northern counties of England. A similar merger is encountered in many varieties of American English, where the pronunciations or ⁓ (depending on whether the accent is rhotic or
11929809
Australian English phonology


in Australia as it was in England, so many words that have the bath vowel in Southeastern England retain the trap vowel in Australia. Historically, the Australian English also had the same lengthening of before unvoiced fricatives, but, like the English accents, this has since been reversed. Australian English lacks some innovations in Cockney since the settling of Australia, such as the use of a glottal stop in many places where a would be found, th-fronting, and h-dropping. The intervocalic alveolar-flapping, which
2527943
Malaysian English


There are 6 short monophthongs in Malaysian English, compared to 7 in British English, and the vowel length tend to be the same for long and short vowels. There are, however, slight differences in pronunciation in the states in the central and southern parts of the Malay Peninsula from those in the north and the east of Malaysia. There are also some variations in its vocabulary. The grammar in Malaysian English may become simplified in the mesolectal and basilectal varieties. For example, articles and past-tense markers may sometimes be
400587
Phonological history of English close front vowels


. The merger is also commonly found in General American. In Southern American English, however, the merger is generally not present, and is also heard in some words that have schwa in RP, such as "salad". In Caribbean English schwa is often not used at all, with unreduced vowels being preferred, but if there is a schwa, then remains distinct from it. In RP, the contrast between and weak is maintained. In other accents of the British Isles behavior may be variable; in Irish English
5983411
Phonological change


. Phonemic differentiation is the phenomenon of a language maximizing the acoustic distance between its phonemes. For example, in many languages, including English, most front vowels are unrounded, while most back vowels are rounded. There are no languages in which all front vowels are rounded and all back vowels are unrounded. The most likely explanation for this is that front vowels have a higher second formant (F2) than back vowels, and unrounded vowels have a higher F2 than rounded vowels. Thus unrounded front vowels and rounded back vowels have
685603
Standard Canadian English


an alveolar flap. Thus "writer" and "rider" are distinguished solely by their vowel characteristics as determined by Canadian raising: thus, a split between "rider" as and "writer" possibly as (). When not in a raised position (before voiceless consonants), is fronted to before nasals, and low-central elsewhere. Unlike in many American English dialects, remains a low-front vowel in most environments in Canadian English. Raising along the front periphery of the vowel space is restricted to two
20353972
Vowel


" or "stable" vowels. A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is called a diphthong, and a vowel sound that glides successively through three qualities is a triphthong. All languages have monophthongs and many languages have diphthongs, but triphthongs or vowel sounds with even more target qualities are relatively rare cross-linguistically. English has all three types: the vowel sound in "hit" is a monophthong , the vowel sound in "boy" is in most dialects a diphthong , and the vowel sounds of "
14314462
Pronunciation respelling for English


centralised front to centralised back. The change in the NURSE vowel was intended as a simplification as well as a reflection that was not the only possible realisation in RP. The other alterations were intended to reflect changes that have occurred over time. The in-progress 3rd edition of the "Oxford English Dictionary" uses Upton's scheme for representing British pronunciations. For American pronunciations it uses an IPA-based scheme devised by Prof. William Kretzschmar of the University of Georgia. For many English language learners, particularly learners without easy Internet
15769697
Phonological history of English consonant clusters


is sometimes referred to as "yod", from the Hebrew letter yod(h), which has the sound . Many such clusters arose in dialects in which the falling diphthong (the product of the merger of several Middle English vowel sequences) became the rising diphthong . (For more information, see Phonological history of English high back vowels.) They were thus often found before the vowel , as in "cube" – which was in some cases modified to or before (historical) , as in "cure", or
12046267
Vocaloid


English requires 2,500. Japanese has fewer diphones because it has fewer phonemes and most syllabic sounds are open syllables ending in a vowel. In Japanese, there are basically three patterns of diphones containing a consonant: voiceless-consonant, vowel-consonant, and consonant-vowel. On the other hand, English has many closed syllables ending in a consonant, and consonant-consonant and consonant-voiceless diphones as well. Thus, more diphones need to be recorded into an English library than into a Japanese one. Due to this
12072941
Abercraf English


sequence consisting of the equivalent long vowel as the first element and the vowel, such that these words are pronounced and respectively. Abercraf English generally follows West Glamorgan lexical incidence patterns. As mentioned above, there is less assimilation and elision than in other accents, however some consonants can be elided: The vowel is not elided, thus "factory", "mandarin", "reference" always have three syllables, unlike many accents such as RP or even Port Talbot. Abercraf English is considered to have a 'sing-
17451979
Irish phonology


Ulster Irish, while in Manx, stress is attracted to long vowels and diphthongs in noninitial syllables, but under more restricted conditions than in Munster. Manx and many dialects of Scottish Gaelic share with Ulster Irish the property of not reducing unstressed to before . Irish pronunciation has had a significant influence on the features of Hiberno-English. For example, most of the vowels of Hiberno-English (with the exception of ) correspond to vowel phones of Irish. The Irish stops are common realizations of the English phonemes . Hiberno-
20787681
English-language vowel changes before historic /l/


In the history of English phonology, there have been many diachronic sound changes affecting vowels, especially involving phonemic splits and mergers. A number of these changes are specific to vowels which occur before . Diphthongization occurred since Early Modern English in certain "-al-" and "-ol-" sequences before coronal or velar consonants, or at the end of a word or morpheme. In these sequences, became and then , while became and then . Both of these merged with existing diphthongs: as in "law" and as in "throw
723120
Glottal stop


glottalization. In British English, the glottal stop is most familiar in the Cockney pronunciation of "butter" as "bu'er". Additionally, there is the glottal stop as a null onset for English, in other words, it is the non-phonemic glottal stop occurring before isolated or initial vowels (for example, representing "uh-oh!", and are phonemically identical to ). Often a glottal stop happens at the beginning of vowel phonation after a silence. Although this segment is not a phoneme in English
8152164
Germanic umlaut


, but it later became phonemic (a separate sound in its own right) when the context was lost but the variant sound remained. The following examples show how, when final "-i" was lost, the variant sound "-ȳ-" became a new phoneme in Old English: The following table surveys how Proto-Germanic vowels which later underwent i-umlaut generally appear in modern languages — though there are many exceptions to these patterns owing to other sound-changes and chance variations. The table gives two West Germanic examples
13358174
Transcription of Australian Aboriginal languages


not in English were written identically, while at the same time sounds which were allophones in Australian languages but distinct in English were written differently. Most Aboriginal words used in English follow these early conventions, and therefore do not usually give a good idea of how the word was pronounced in the original language. Writers with more linguistic knowledge sometimes employed symbols such as or for , for , macrons or circumflexes for long vowels, breves for short vowels, but these were often applied inconsistently. Linguists working with Australian languages today purposely use
21416959
English phonology


long vowels became higher: became (as in "meet"), became and later (as in "name"), became (as in "goose"), and became and later (in RP now ; as in "bone"). These shifts are responsible for the modern pronunciations of many written vowel combinations, including those involving a silent final. Many other changes in vowels have taken place over the centuries (see the separate articles on the low back, high back and high front vowels, short
5616964
Stress and vowel reduction in English


overséas" or "óverséas" plus "vóyage"). There is a tendency, though, for such vowels to become reduced over time, especially in common words. With vowels represented as and , it may be hard to ascertain whether they represent a full vowel or a reduced vowel. A word that illustrates the contrast is "chauvinism", where the first "i" may be regarded as an instance of the reduced vowel [ɨ], and the second as unreduced . In many phonological approaches, and in
20389093
Regional accents of English


within Greater London, with various accents such as Cockney, Estuary English, Multicultural London English and Received Pronunciation being found all throughout the region and the Home Counties. On 20 February 2019, the New York Times published a quiz that maps the geographical differences between British and Irish dialects. The regional accents of Scottish English generally draw on the phoneme inventory of the dialects of Modern Scots with characteristic vowel realisations due to the Scottish vowel length rule. Highland English accents are more strongly influenced by Scottish Gaelic than other forms of Scottish English
17531158
Vowel reduction


, and , with , and becoming and and merging into . In Italian, the vowels noted e and o in spelling are pronounced and in unstressed syllables. Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word "(lexical stress)" and at the level of the phrase or sentence "(prosodic stress)". Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a
17753817
Phonological history of English close back vowels


to be described as covering a vast central area from near-close to near-open . Because of the unstressed nature of the merger occurs only in unstressed syllables. Word-finally, the two vowels do not contrast in any accent of English (ME , the vowel from which was split could not occur in that position) and the vowel which occurs in that position approaches (the main allophone of in many accents), though there is some dialectal variation, with varieties such as broad Cockney using strikingly more open variants
14885575
Synaeresis


easy to understand how this term evolved historically. The term eventually becamer applied to a process in which vowels are taken or drawn together. Synaeresis often occurs with reduced vowels in English, as in Asia ( → ) and Sebastian ( → ). Synaeresis is a common process in French. For example, the French word "louer," which means ‘to praise,’ is typically pronounced as [lwe] according to transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet. That pronunciation reduces the [u] vowel to a [w
698003
Cardinal vowels


published in the 1950s and 60s, studied how trained phoneticians coped with the vowels of a dialect of Scottish Gaelic. He asked eighteen phoneticians to listen to a recording of ten words spoken by a native speaker of Gaelic and to place the vowels on a cardinal vowel quadrilateral. He then studied the degree of agreement or disagreement among the phoneticians. Ladefoged himself drew attention to the fact that the phoneticians who were trained in the British tradition established by Daniel Jones were closer to each other in their judgments than those who had not had
6815698
Phonics


of English includes the spelling patterns of many languages (Old English, Old Norse, Norman French, Classical Latin and Greek, as well as numerous modern languages) superimposed upon one another. These overlapping spelling patterns mean that in many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and the same spelling can represent different sounds. However, the spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions. In addition, the Great Vowel Shift, a historical linguistic process in which the quality of many vowels in English changed while the spelling remained as it was
19979324