![]() Here we can see more examples of how spelling is not a reliable indicator of how many vowel sounds English has. This is a reliable way to tell it apart from the STRUT vowel, which many English learners confuse it with. The one thing that remains constant is the TRAP vowel, which is always spelled with a letter A. Here’s the full list, with their relevant lexical sets below: Standard Southern British English has 19 distinct vowel phonemes. Vowels In Standard Southern British Englishįrom this point, we’ll reference lexical sets and the International Phonetic Alphabet quite a bit, so a little background or research on these topics will be helpful for following along. Finally, weak vowels are like short vowels, except they can never appear in a stressed syllable and they can end a syllable. This is especially true because our two reference accents differ on this a lot, as SSBE has lost all traces of historical R when not at the beginning of a syllable. Meanwhile, vowels before historical R have undergone many changes in the history of English, and so this is an important category to consider. Next, diphthongs are vowel phonemes that begin as one vowel sound and slide into another, but still only make up one syllable. ![]() First, the distinction between short and long vowels is pretty self-explanatory. Types Of Vowelsįrom here, we can divide English vowel sounds up into a couple of categories: short vowels, long vowels, diphthongs, vowels before historical R, and weak vowels. However, this description can also include sounds like the W in “with,” the Y in “year” and the R “red.” But these are not vowels because they lack the vital characteristic that all vowels have in common: Vowels are syllabic, meaning they can be a syllable all on their own. From there, we typically modify these sounds with our vocal cords, mouth and lips to produce distinct vowel sounds. Technically speaking, vowels are produced by releasing air from the lungs through the oral and/or nasal cavity. In order to count the number of English vowel sounds, we need to know what counts as a vowel. This makes it one of the most complex vowel systems of any language in the world. Other English accents will have a slightly different number of vowel sounds, but generally speaking, English has around 20 distinct vowel phonemes. In this article, we’ll use Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and General American English (GenAm) as our reference accents. There are many more distinct English vowel sounds (or phonemes) that can make the difference between otherwise similar words.Įxactly how many vowel phonemes English has depends on which variety of the language we’re talking about. ![]() Sometimes we count Y, too - so maybe six? While this might be true about the written language, it’s not the case for spoken English. English has five vowels, right? A, E, I, O and U. ![]()
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