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A centering diphthong is one that begins with a more peripheral vowel and ends with a more central one, such as [ɪə̯], [ɛə̯], and [ʊə̯] in Received Pronunciation or [iə̯] and [uə̯] in Irish. Many centering diphthongs are also opening diphthongs ([iə̯], [uə̯]). Diphthongs may contrast in how far they open or close.
In Old English, two forms of harmonic vowel breaking occurred: breaking and retraction and back mutation.. In prehistoric Old English, breaking and retraction changed stressed short and long front vowels i, e, æ to short and long diphthongs spelled io, eo, ea when followed by h or by r, l + another consonant (short vowels only), and sometimes w (only for certain short vowels): [3]
The diphthongs /juː/ or /ɪʊ̯/ are most commonly indicated by the spellings eu, ew, uCV (where C is any consonant and V is any vowel), ue and ui, as in feud, few, mute, cue and suit, while the historical monophthong /uː/ is commonly indicated by the spellings oo and ou, as in moon and soup.
In Romanian, it represents the diphthong /e̯a/ as in beată ('drunk female'). In Irish, ea represents /a/ between a slender and a broad consonant. In Scottish Gaelic, ea represents /ʲa/, /ɛ/ or /e/ between a slender and a broad context, depending on context or dialect. In Old English, it represents the diphthong /æɑ̯/.
A simplified diagram of Canadian raising (Rogers 2000:124).Actual starting points vary. Canadian raising (also sometimes known as English diphthong raising [1]) is an allophonic rule of phonology in many varieties of North American English that changes the pronunciation of diphthongs with open-vowel starting points.
The falling diphthong /ɪw/ of due and dew changed to a rising diphthong, which became the sequence [juː]. The change did not occur in all dialects, however; see Yod-dropping. The diphthongs /əɪ/ and /əʊ/ of tide and house widened to /aɪ/ and /aʊ/, respectively. The diphthong /ʊɪ/ merged into /əɪ/ ~ /aɪ/.
Some languages do not have diphthongs, except sometimes in rapid speech, or they have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences that cannot form diphthongs and so appear in hiatus. That is the case of Japanese, Nuosu, Bantu languages like Swahili, and Lakota.
The vowels of Australian English can be divided according to length. The long vowels, which include monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to the tense vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as its centring diphthongs. The short vowels, consisting only of monophthongs, correspond to the RP lax vowels.