English Phonology: Phonology of the English language
English is a language with many ways to pronounce things.
Pronunciation changes both through history and from dialect to dialect. Mostly, however, English has a mostly similar phonological system throughout the world. Most dialects are different from one another because they have different types of stress in syllables. Stops, affricates, and fricatives are also changed in consonants in different dialects.
There is also lots of research done on prestige(more formal) or standard(more common). These can mean Received Pronunciation for England, General American for the United States and General Australian for Australia.
Many dialects will grow independently from other dialect which make them different from others.
Consonants
Most dialects in English use the shown 24 consonants. /x/ is a little less common. There are, of course, exceptions to all of these in accents such as Hiberno English, New York, South Asian, etc.
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||||
| Plosive/ affricate | fortis | p | t | tʃ | k | |||
| lenis | b | d | dʒ | ɡ | ||||
| Fricative | fortis | f | θ | s | ʃ | xr Xhosa (such as gogga /ˈxɒxə/ 'insect'). | h | |
| lenis | v | ð | z | ʒ | ||||
| Approximant | l | r | j | w | ||||
Consonant examples
The table below shows common examples of words in English that start with these letters.
| Fortis | Lenis | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| /p/ | pit | /b/ | bit |
| /t/ | tin | /d/ | din |
| /k/ | cut | /ɡ/ | gut |
| /tʃ/ | cheap | /dʒ/ | jeep |
| /f/ | fat | /v/ | vat |
| /θ/ | thigh | /ð/ | thy |
| /s/ | sap | /z/ | zap |
| /ʃ/ | mesher | /ʒ/ | measure |
| /x/ | loch | ||
| /h/ | ham | ||
| /m/ | Tim | ||
| /n/ | tin | ||
| /ŋ/ | ting | ||
| /j/ | your | ||
| /w/ | wore | ||
| /r/ | rump | ||
| /l/ | lump | ||
Vowels
English has an unusually large number of vowels. In English, vowels in different dialects change a lot. These vowels can also be written differently throughout different dialects. For example, the vowel in LOT is /ɒ/ in Received Pronunciation but /ɑ/ in General American.
John C. Wells made a popular lexicon set that shows the pronunciation in Received Pronunciation(RP) and General American(GA). It is shown below.
| LS | RP | GA |
|---|---|---|
| PRICE | aɪ | |
| CHOICE | ɔɪ | |
| MOUTH | aʊ | |
The next three tables show the vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, General American and General Australian.
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| short | long | short | long | short | long | |
| Close | ɪ | iː | ʊ | uː | ɔː | |
| Mid | e | ɛː | ə | ɜː | ɒ | |
| Open | æ | ʌ | ɑː | |||
| Diphthongs | eɪ aɪ ɔɪ aʊ əʊ ɪə ʊə | |||||
| Triphthongs | (eɪə aɪə ɔɪə aʊə əʊə) | |||||
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| lax | tense | lax | tense | lax | tense | |
| Close | ɪ | i | ʊ | u | ||
| Mid | ɛ | eɪ | ə | (ɜ) | oʊ | |
| Open | æ | ʌ | ɑ | (ɔ) | ||
| Diphthongs | aɪ ɔɪ aʊ | |||||
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| short | long | short | long | short | long | |
| Close | ɪ | iː | ʉː | ʊ | oː | |
| Mid | e | eː | ə | ɜː | ɔ | |
| Open | æ | æː | a | aː | ||
| Diphthongs | æɪ ɑɪ oɪ æɔ əʉ ɪə (ʊə) is often omitted from descriptions of Australian, as for most speakers it has split into the long monophthong /oː/ (e.g. poor, sure) or the sequence /ʉːə/ (e.g. cure, lure). | |||||
| Short vowel | Long vowel |
|---|---|
| i (bit) | ii (beet) |
| e (bet) | |
| a (cat) | aa (cart) |
| o (cot) | oo (caught) |
| u (pull) | uu (pool) |
| ə (collect) | əə (curl) |
Some of the short vowels may also be combined with /i/ (/ei/ bay, /ai/ buy, /oi/ boy), with /u/ (/au/ bough, /ou/ beau) or with /ə/ (/iə/ peer, /eə/ pair, /uə/ poor). The vowel inventory of English RP in MacCarthy's system therefore totals only seven phonemes. Analyses such as these could also posit six vowel phonemes, if the vowel of the final syllable in comma is considered to be an unstressed allophone of that of strut. These seven vowels might be symbolized /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/, /ʌ/ and /ə/. Six or seven vowels is a figure that would put English much closer to the average number of vowel phonemes in other languages.
A radically different approach to the English vowel system was proposed by Chomsky and Halle. Their Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968) proposed that English has lax and tense vowel phonemes which are operated on by a complex set of phonological rules to transform underlying phonological forms into surface phonetic representations. This generative analysis is not easily comparable with conventional analyses, but the total number of vowel phonemes proposed falls well short of the figure of 20 often claimed as the number of English vowel phonemes.
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