English phonology

The differences between these tables can be explained as follows:

• General American lacks a phoneme corresponding to RP /ɒ/ (LOT, CLOTH), instead using /ɑ/ in the LOT words and generally /ɔ/ in the CLOTH words. In a few North American accents, namely in
  father–bother merger has not occurred) but instead merge with CLOTH/THOUGHT.^{[49][50][51][52]}
• Although the notation /ʌ/ is used for the vowel of STRUT in RP and General American, the actual pronunciation in RP may be closer to a near-open central vowel [
  trap–strut merger). In General American, /ʌ/ is invariably realized as [ʌ], whereas [ɐ] does not appear in this context.^{[53][54][55][56]}
• RP transcriptions use ⟨e⟩ rather than ⟨ɛ⟩ largely for convenience and historical tradition; it does not necessarily represent a different sound from the General American phoneme, as the DRESS vowel is generally realized as [ɛ] in modern RP.[57]
• The different notations used for the vowel of GOAT in RP and General American (/əʊ/ and /oʊ/) reflect a difference in the most common phonetic realizations of that vowel.
• The triphthongs given in the RP table are usually regarded as sequences of two phonemes (a diphthong plus /ə/); however, in RP, these sequences frequently undergo
  smoothing
  into single diphthongs or even monophthongs.
• The different notations used here for some of the Australian vowels reflect the phonetic realization of those vowels in Australian: a central [ʉː] rather than [uː] in GOOSE, a more closed [e] rather than [ɛ] in DRESS, a close-mid [oː] rather than traditional RP's [ɔː] in THOUGHT, an open-mid [ɔ] rather than traditional RP's [ɒ] in LOT, an opener [a] rather than somewhat closer [ʌ] in STRUT, a central [aː] rather a back [ɑː] in CALM and START, and somewhat different pronunciations of most of the diphthongs. Note that central [ʉː] in GOOSE, close-mid [oː] in THOUGHT and open-mid [ɔ] in LOT are standard realizations in modern RP and the difference between modern RP and Australian English in these vowels lies almost only in transcription, rather than pronunciation.^[58][44][59]
• Both Australian /eː/ and RP /ɛː/ are long monophthongs, the difference between them being in tongue height: Australian /eː/ is close-mid [eː], whereas the corresponding RP vowel is open-mid [ɛː].^[60][59]

Other points to be noted are these:

• The vowel /æ/ is coming to be pronounced more open (approaching [a]) by many modern RP speakers. In American speech, however, there is a tendency for it to become more closed, tenser and even diphthongized (to something like [eə]), particularly in certain environments, such as before a
  Canadian shift). Some American accents, for example those of New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore, make a marginal phonemic distinction between /æ/ and /eə/, although the two occur largely in mutually exclusive environments. See /æ/ raising
  .
• A significant number of words (the BATH group) have /æ/ in General American, but /ɑː/ in RP. The pronunciation varies between /æ/ and /aː/ in Australia, with speakers from South Australia using /aː/ more extensively than speakers from other regions.
• In General American and Canadian (which are
  schwa
  (sometimes called schwar) as in LETTER, and the vowel of START can be modified to make [ɑ˞] so that the word start may be transcribed [stɑ˞t]. Alternatively, the START sequence might be written [stɑɚt] to indicate an r-colored offglide. The vowel of NURSE is generally always r-colored in these dialects, and this can be written [ɚ] (or as a syllabic [ɹ̩]).
• In modern RP and other dialects, many words from the CURE group are coming to be pronounced by an increasing number of speakers with the NORTH vowel (so sure is often pronounced like shore).^[62]
• The vowels of FLEECE and GOOSE are commonly pronounced as narrow diphthongs, approaching [ɪi] and [ʊu], in RP. Near-RP speakers may have particularly marked diphthongization of the type [əi] and [əu ~ əʉ], respectively. In General American, the pronunciation varies between a monophthong and a diphthong.^[43]

Allophones of vowels

Listed here are some of the significant cases of

• Vowels are shortened when followed in a syllable by a voiceless (
  fortis) consonant.^[63] This is known as pre-fortis clipping
  . Thus in the following word pairs the first item has a shortened vowel while the second has a normal length vowel: 'right' /raɪt/ – 'ride' /raɪd/; 'face' /feɪs/ – 'phase' /feɪz/; 'advice' /ədvaɪs/ – 'advise' /ədvaɪz/.
• In many accents of English, tense vowels undergo breaking before /l/, resulting in pronunciations like [pʰiəɫ] for peel, [pʰuəɫ] for pool, [pʰeəɫ] for pail, and [pʰoəɫ] for pole.^{[citation needed]}
• In RP, the vowel /əʊ/ may be pronounced more back, as [ɒʊ], before syllable-final /l/, as in goal. In standard Australian English the vowel /əʉ/ is similarly backed to [ɔʊ] before /l/. A similar phenomenon may occur in Southern American English.^{[citation needed]}
• The vowel /ə/ is often pronounced [ɐ] in open syllables.^[64]
• The PRICE and MOUTH diphthongs may be pronounced with a less open starting point when followed by a
  voiceless consonant;^[65] this is chiefly a feature of Canadian speech (Canadian raising), but is also found in parts of the United States.^[66] Thus writer may be distinguished from rider even when flapping
  causes the /t/ and /d/ to be pronounced identically.

• schwa, [ə], as in COMMA and (in non-rhotic dialects) LETTER (COMMA–LETTER merger
  ); also in many other positions such as about, photograph, paddock, etc. This sound is essentially restricted to unstressed syllables exclusively. In the approach presented here it is identified as a phoneme /ə/, although other analyses do not have a separate phoneme for schwa and regard it as a reduction or neutralization of other vowels in syllables with the lowest degree of stress.
• r-colored schwa
  , [ɚ], as in LETTER in General American and some other rhotic dialects, which can be identified with the underlying sequence /ər/.
• syllabic consonants: [l̩] as in bottle, [n̩] as in button, [m̩] as in rhythm. These may be phonemized either as a plain consonant or as a schwa followed by a consonant; for example button may be represented as /ˈbʌtn̩/ or /ˈbʌtən/ (see above under Consonants).
• [ɨ̞], as in roses and making. This can be identified with the phoneme /ɪ/, although in unstressed syllables it may be pronounced more centrally, and for some speakers (particularly in Australian and New Zealand and some American English) it is merged with /ə/ in these syllables (
  OED
  has recently adopted the symbol ⟨ᵻ⟩ to indicate such cases.)
• [ʉ̞], as in argument, today, for which similar considerations apply as in the case of [ɨ̞]. (The symbol ⟨ᵿ⟩ is sometimes used in these cases, similarly to ⟨ᵻ⟩.) Some speakers may also have a rounded schwa, [ɵ̞], used in words like omission [ɵ̞ˈmɪʃən].^[67]
• [i], as in happy, coffee, in many dialects (others have [ɪ] in this position).
  happy-tensing
  .
• [u], as in influence, to each. This is the back rounded counterpart to [i] described above; its phonemic status is treated in the same works as cited there.

Some unstressed syllables, however, retain full (unreduced) vowels, i.e. vowels other than those listed above. Examples are the /æ/ in ambition and the /aɪ/ in finite. Some phonologists regard such syllables as not being fully unstressed (they may describe them as having tertiary stress); some dictionaries have marked such syllables as having secondary stress. However linguists such as Ladefoged^[73] and Bolinger (1986) regard this as a difference purely of vowel quality and not of stress,^[74] and thus argue that vowel reduction itself is phonemic in English. Examples of words where vowel reduction seems to be distinctive for some speakers^[75] include chickaree vs. chicory (the latter has the reduced vowel of HAPPY, whereas the former has the FLEECE vowel without reduction), and Pharaoh vs. farrow (both have the GOAT vowel, but in the latter word it may reduce to [ɵ]).

Lexical stress

Lexical stress is phonemic in English. For example, the noun increase and the verb increase are distinguished by the positioning of the stress on the first syllable in the former, and on the second syllable in the latter. (See initial-stress-derived noun.) Stressed syllables in English are louder than non-stressed syllables, as well as being longer and having a higher pitch.

In traditional approaches, in any English word consisting of more than one syllable, each syllable is ascribed one of three degrees of stress: primary, secondary or unstressed. Ordinarily, in each such word there will be exactly one syllable with primary stress, possibly one syllable having secondary stress, and the remainder are unstressed (unusually-long words may have multiple syllables with secondary stress). For example, the word amazing has primary stress on the second syllable, while the first and third syllables are unstressed, whereas the word organization has primary stress on the fourth syllable, secondary stress on the first, and the second, third, and fifth unstressed. This is often shown in pronunciation keys using the IPA symbols for primary and secondary stress (which are ˈ and ˌ respectively), placed before the syllables to which they apply. The two words just given may therefore be represented (in RP) as /əˈmeɪzɪŋ/ and /ˌɔːɡənaɪˈzeɪʃən/.

Some analysts identify an additional level of stress (tertiary stress). This is generally ascribed to syllables that are pronounced with less force than those with secondary stress, but nonetheless contain a "full" or "unreduced" vowel (vowels that are considered to be reduced are listed under English phonology § Unstressed syllables above). Hence the third syllable of organization, if pronounced with /aɪ/ as shown above (rather than being reduced to /ɪ/ or /ə/), might be said to have tertiary stress. (The precise identification of secondary and tertiary stress differs between analyses; dictionaries do not generally show tertiary stress, although some have taken the approach of marking all syllables with unreduced vowels as having at least secondary stress.)

In some analyses, then, the concept of lexical stress may become conflated with that of vowel reduction. An approach that attempts to separate both is provided by

For stress as a prosodic feature (emphasis of particular words within utterances), see § Prosodic stress below.

Phonotactics

Phonotactics is the study of the sequences of phonemes that occur in languages and the sound structures that they form. In this study it is usual to represent consonants in general with the letter C and vowels with the letter V, so that a syllable such as 'be' is described as having CV structure. The IPA symbol used to show a division between syllables is the full stop ⟨.⟩. Syllabification is the process of dividing continuous speech into discrete syllables, a process in which the position of a syllable division is not always easy to decide upon.

Most languages of the world syllabify CVCV and CVCCV sequences as /CV.CV/ and /CVC.CV/ or /CV.CCV/, with consonants preferentially acting as the onset of a syllable containing the following vowel. According to one view, English is unusual in this regard, in that stressed syllables attract following consonants, so that ˈCVCV and ˈCVCCV syllabify as /ˈCVC.V/ and /ˈCVCC.V/, as long as the consonant cluster CC is a possible syllable coda; in addition, /r/ preferentially syllabifies with the preceding vowel even when both syllables are unstressed, so that CVrV occurs as /CVr.V/. This is the analysis used in the

English allows clusters of up to three consonants in the syllable onset and up to four consonants in the syllable coda,[79]^[80] giving a general syllable structure of (C)³V(C)⁴, a potential example being strengths /strɛŋkθs/ (although this word has variant pronunciations with only 3 coda consonants, such as /strɛŋθs/). A five-consonant coda may occur in the word angsts, but this is a highly exceptional case, as the word is both infrequent and not always pronounced with five final segments^[80] (it can be analyzed as a VC⁴ syllable^[79] /æŋsts/ rather than as VC⁵ /æŋksts/). From the phonetic point of view, the analysis of syllable structures is a complex task: because of widespread occurrences of articulatory overlap, English speakers rarely produce an audible release of individual consonants in consonant clusters.^[81] This coarticulation can lead to articulatory gestures that seem very much like deletions or complete assimilations. For example, hundred pounds may sound like [hʌndɹɪb paʊndz] and jumped back (in slow speech, [dʒʌmptbæk]) may sound like [dʒʌmpbæk], but X-ray^[82] and electropalatographic^[83][84][85] studies demonstrate that inaudible and possibly weakened contacts or lingual gestures may still be made. Thus the second /d/ in hundred pounds does not entirely assimilate to a labial place of articulation, rather the labial gesture co-occurs with the alveolar one; the "missing" [t] in jumped back may still be articulated, though not heard.

Division into syllables is a difficult area, and different theories have been proposed. A widely accepted approach is the maximal onset principle:^[86] this states that, subject to certain constraints, any consonants in between vowels should be assigned to the following syllable. Thus the word leaving should be divided /ˈliː.vɪŋ/ rather than */ˈliːv.ɪŋ/, and hasty is /ˈheɪ.sti/ rather than */ˈheɪs.ti/ or */ˈheɪst.i/. However, when such a division results in an onset cluster that is not allowed in English, the division must respect this. Thus if the word extra were divided */ˈɛ.kstrə/ the resulting onset of the second syllable would be /kstr/, a cluster that does not occur initially in English. The division /ˈɛk.strə/ is therefore preferred. If assigning a consonant or consonants to the following syllable would result in the preceding syllable ending in an unreduced short vowel, this is avoided. Thus the word lemma should be divided /ˈlɛm.ə/ and not */ˈlɛ.mə/, even though the latter division gives the maximal onset to the following syllable.

In some cases, no solution is completely satisfactory: for example, in British English (RP) the word hurry could be divided /ˈhʌ.ri/ or /ˈhʌr.i/, but the former would result in an analysis with a syllable-final /ʌ/ (which is held to be non-occurring) while the latter would result in a syllable final /r/ (which is said not to occur in this accent). Some phonologists have suggested a compromise analysis where the consonant in the middle belongs to both syllables, and is described as

Certain English onsets appear only in contractions: e.g. /zbl/ ('sblood), and /zw/ or /dzw/ ('swounds or 'dswounds). Some, such as /pʃ/ (pshaw), /fw/ (fwoosh), or /vr/ (vroom), can occur in interjections. An archaic voiceless fricative plus nasal exists, /fn/ (fnese), as does an archaic /snj/ (snew).

Several additional onsets occur in

Some clusters of this type can be converted to regular English phonotactics by simplifying the cluster: e.g. /(d)z/ (dziggetai), /(h)r/ (Hrolf), /kr(w)/ (croissant), /(ŋ)w/ (Nguyen), /(p)f/ (pfennig), /(f)θ/ (phthalic), /(t)s/ (tsunami), /(ǃ)k/ (!kung), and /k(ǁ)/ (Xhosa).

Others can be replaced by native clusters differing only in voice: /zb ~ sp/ (sbirro), and /zɡr ~ skr/ (sgraffito).

Nucleus

The following can occur as the

• All vowel sounds
• /m/, /n/ and /l/ in certain situations (see below under word-level patterns)
• /r/ in
  General American) in certain situations (see below under word-level patterns
  )

Most (in theory, all) of the following except those that end with /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ can be extended with /s/ or /z/ representing the morpheme -s/-z. Similarly, most (in theory, all) of the following except those that end with /t/ or /d/ can be extended with /t/ or /d/ representing the morpheme -t/-d.

• Notes:

For some speakers, a fricative before /θ/ is elided so that these never appear phonetically: /fɪfθ/ becomes [fɪθ], /sɪksθ/ becomes [sɪkθ], /twɛlfθ/ becomes [twɛlθ].

Syllable-level patterns

• Syllables may consist of a single vowel, meaning that onset and coda are not mandatory.
• The consonant /ŋ/ does not occur in syllable-initial position (most speakers do not maintain it even in loans like Ngorongoro and Nguyen).
• The consonant /h/ does not occur in syllable-final position.
• Onset clusters ending in /j/ are followed by /uː/ or its variants (see § Onset note e above).
• Long vowels and diphthongs are not found before /ŋ/, except for the mimetic words boing and oink, unassimilated foreign words such as Burmese aung and proper names such as
  Song (name of a Chinese dynasty) or non-finally in some dialects in words like strength and length as well as in varieties without the foot-strut split
  .
• /ʊ/ is rare in syllable-initial position (although in the northern half of England, [ʊ] is used for /ʌ/ and is common at the start of syllables).
• Stop + /w/ before /uː, ʊ, ʌ, aʊ/ (all presently or historically /u(ː)/) are excluded.[98]
• Sequences of /s/ + C₁ + V̆ + C₁, where C₁ is a consonant other than /t/ and V̆ is a short vowel, are virtually nonexistent.^[99]

Word-level patterns

• /ə/ does not occur in stressed syllables, unless it is merged with another vowel as in some varieties.
• /ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in native English words, although it can occur syllable-initially as in luxurious /lʌɡˈʒʊəriəs/ in American English, and at the start of borrowed words such as genre.
• /m/, /n/, /l/ and, in
  rhotic varieties, /r/ can be the syllable nucleus (i.e. a syllabic consonant) in an unstressed syllable following another consonant, especially /t/, /d/, /s/ or /z/. Such syllables are often analyzed phonemically as having an underlying /ə/ as the nucleus. See above under Consonants
  .
• The short vowels are checked vowels, in that they cannot occur without a coda in a word-final stressed syllable. (This does not apply to /ə/, which does not occur in stressed syllables as mentioned above.)

Prosody

The prosodic features of English – stress, rhythm, and intonation – can be described as follows.

Prosodic stress

Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis.

According to Ladefoged's analysis (as referred to under

Prosodic stress can shift for various pragmatic functions, such as focus or contrast. For instance, in the dialogue Is it brunch tomorrow? No, it's dinner tomorrow, the extra stress shifts from the last stressed syllable of the sentence, tomorrow, to the last stressed syllable of the emphasized word, dinner.

Grammatical

Rhythm

English is claimed to be a

Phonological contrasts in intonation can be said to be found in three different and independent domains. In the work of Halliday^[104] the following names are proposed:

• Tonality for the distribution of continuous speech into tone groups.
• Tonicity for the placing of the principal accent on a particular syllable of a word, making it the tonic syllable. This is the domain also referred to as
  sentence stress
  .
• Tone for the choice of pitch movement on the tonic syllable. (The use of the term tone in this sense should not be confused with the tone of tone languages, such as Chinese.)

These terms ("the Three Ts") have been used in more recent work,^[105][106] though they have been criticized for being difficult to remember.^[107] American systems such as ToBI also identify contrasts involving boundaries between intonation phrases (Halliday's tonality), placement of pitch accent (tonicity), and choice of tone or tones associated with the pitch accent (tone).

Example of phonological contrast involving placement of intonation unit boundaries (boundary marked by comma):

Example of phonological contrast involving placement of tonic syllable (marked by capital letters):

Example of phonological contrast (British English) involving choice of tone (\ = falling tone, \/ = fall-rise tone)

There is typically a contrast involving tone between

History of English pronunciation

The pronunciation system of English has undergone many changes throughout the history of the language, from the

The development of vowels has been much more complex. One of the most notable series of changes is that known as the Great Vowel Shift, which began around the late 14th century. Here the [iː] and [uː] in words like price and mouth became diphthongized, and other long vowels became higher: [eː] became [iː] (as in meet), [aː] became [eː] and later [eɪ] (as in name), [oː] became [uː] (as in goose), and [ɔː] became [oː] and later [oʊ] (in RP now [əʊ]; as in bone). These shifts are responsible for the modern pronunciations of many written vowel combinations, including those involving a silent final ⟨e⟩.

Many other changes in vowels have taken place over the centuries (see the separate articles on the

Controversial issues

Velar nasal

The phonemic status of the velar nasal consonant [ŋ] is disputed; one analysis claims that the only nasal phonemes in English are /m/ and /n/, while [ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ found before velar consonants. Evidence in support of this analysis is found in accents of the north-west Midlands of England where [ŋ] is found only before /k/ or /ɡ/, with sung being pronounced as [sʌŋɡ]. However, in most other accents of English sung is pronounced [sʌŋ], producing a three-way phonemic contrast sum – sun – sung /sʌm sʌn sʌŋ/ and supporting the analysis of the phonemic status of /ŋ/. In support of treating the velar nasal as an allophone of /n/, Sapir (1925) claims on psychological grounds that [ŋ] did not form part of a series of three nasal consonants: "no naïve English-speaking person can be made to feel in his bones that it belongs to a single series with m and n. ... It still feels like ƞg."^[110] More recent writers have indicated that analyses of [ŋ] as an allophone of /n/ may still have merit, even though [ŋ] may appear both with and without a following velar consonant; in such analyses, an underlying /ɡ/ that is deleted by a phonological rule would account for occurrences of [ŋ] not followed by a velar consonant.^{[111][112][113]} Thus the phonemic representation of sing would be /sɪnɡ/ and that of singer is /sɪnɡə/; in order to reach the phonetic form [sɪŋ] and [sɪŋə], it is necessary to apply a rule that changes /n/ to [ŋ] before /k/ or /ɡ/, then a second rule that deletes /ɡ/ when it follows [ŋ].

• 1. /n/ → [ŋ] / ____ velar consonant
• 2. /ɡ/ → ∅ / [ŋ] _____

These produce the following results:

However, these rules do not predict the following phonetic forms:

In the above cases, the /ɡ/ is not deleted. The words are all single morphemes, unlike singer and singing which are composed of two morphemes, sing plus -er or -ing. Rule 2 can be amended to include a symbol # for a morpheme boundary (including word boundary):

2. /ɡ/ → ∅ / [ŋ] ___ #

This rule then applies to sing, singer and singing but not to anger, finger, or hunger.

According to this rule, the words hangar ('shed for aircraft'), which contains no internal morpheme boundary, and hanger ('object for hanging clothes'), which comprises two morphemes, are expected to constitute a minimal pair as hangar [ˈhæŋɡə] versus hanger [ˈhæŋə]; in actuality, their pronunciations are not consistently distinguished in this manner, as hangar is frequently pronounced [ˈhæŋə].

Additionally, there are exceptions in the form of comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, where Rule 2 must be prevented from applying. The ending -ish is another possible exception.

As a result, there is, in theory, a minimal pair consisting of longer ([lɒŋɡər] 'more long') and longer ([lɒŋər] 'person who longs'), though it is doubtful that native speakers make this distinction regularly.^[114] Names of persons and places, and loanwords, are less predictable. Singapore may be pronounced with or without [ɡ]; bungalow usually has [ɡ]; and Inge may or may not have [ɡ].^[115]

Vowel system

It is often stated that English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes and that there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation,^[116] 14–16 in General American, and 20–21 in Australian English. These numbers, however, reflect just one of many possible phonological analyses. A number of "biphonemic" analyses have proposed that English has a basic set of short (sometimes called "simple" or "checked") vowels, each of which can be shown to be a phoneme and can be combined with another phoneme to form long vowels and diphthongs. One of these biphonemic analyses asserts that diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to a consonant. The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager & Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either /j/ (for which the authors use the symbol ⟨y⟩), /w/ or /h/ (plus /r/ for rhotic accents), each thus comprising two phonemes.^[117] Using this system, the word bite would be transcribed /bajt/, bout as /bawt/, bar as /bar/ and bra as /brah/. One attraction that the authors claim for this analysis is that it regularizes the distribution of the consonants /j/, /w/, and /h/ (as well as /r/ in non-rhotic accents), which would otherwise not be found in syllable-final position. Trager & Smith (1951) suggest nine simple vowel phonemes to allow them to represent all the accents of American and British English they surveyed, symbolized /i, e, æ/ (front vowels); /ᵻ, ə, a/ (central vowels); and /u, o, ɔ/ (back vowels).

The analysis from Trager & Smith (1951) came out of a desire to build an "overall system" to accommodate all English dialects, with dialectal distinctions arising from differences in the ordering of phonological rules,^[118][119] as well as in the presence or absence of such rules.^[120] Another category of biphonemic analyses of English treats long vowels and diphthongs as conjunctions of two vowels. Such analyses, as found in Sweet (1877) or Kreidler (2004) for example, are less concerned with dialectal variation. In MacCarthy (1957), for example, there are seven basic vowels and these may be doubled (geminated) to represent long vowels, as shown in the table below:

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.^[121]

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.

See also

Notes

References

Citations

Sources

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to English phonology.

• University of Glasgow Dynamic Dialects Accent Map
• IPA Phonetics Chart of English