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This chart provides audio examples for phonetic vowel symbols. The symbols shown include those in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and added material. The chart is based on the official IPA vowel chart.
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 a, e, i, o, u have in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
There are a few minimal pairs contrasting /ʊə/ and /u:ə/ in conservative Received Pronunciation: dour–doer, sure–shoer and cure-queuer. Furthermore, the hurry–furry merger that occurs in most varieties of North American English results in a merger of /ʌr/ with /ɜr/, removing almost any trace of the historical foot vowel in this position.
The following are the non-pulmonic consonants.They are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).
The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association.
If you feel it is necessary to add a pronunciation respelling using another convention, then please use the conventions of Wikipedia's pronunciation respelling key. To compare the following IPA symbols with non-IPA American dictionary conventions that may be more familiar, see Pronunciation respelling for English , which lists the pronunciation ...
Square brackets are used with phonetic notation, whether broad or narrow [17] – that is, for actual pronunciation, possibly including details of the pronunciation that may not be used for distinguishing words in the language being transcribed, but which the author nonetheless wishes to document. Such phonetic notation is the primary function ...
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (abbreviated AHD) uses a phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet to transcribe the pronunciation of spoken English. It and similar respelling systems, such as those used by the Merriam-Webster and Random House dictionaries, are familiar to US schoolchildren.