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English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association.
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. [1] The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet.
Phonemic notation commonly uses IPA symbols that are rather close to the default pronunciation of a phoneme, but for legibility often uses simple and 'familiar' letters rather than precise notation, for example /r/ and /o/ for the English [ɹʷ] and [əʊ̯] sounds, or /c, ɟ/ for [t͜ʃ, d͜ʒ] as mentioned above.
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 pronunciation with [f] was rare, and its use in current English is a historical accident resulting, according to Dobson, from the establishment of the spelling variant draft. [ 22 ] The words castle , fasten and raspberry are special cases where subsequent sound changes have altered the conditions initially responsible for lengthening.
The city of Pittsburgh shows an especially advanced subset of Western Pennsylvania English, additionally characterized by a sound change that is unique in North America: the monophthongization of /aʊ/ to [a]. This is the source of the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as "dahntahn".
Initial voicing is a process of historical sound change in which voiceless consonants become voiced at the beginning of a word. For example, modern German sagen [ˈzaːɡn̩] , Yiddish זאָגן [ˈzɔɡn̩] , and Dutch zeggen [ˈzɛɣə] (all "say") all begin with [z] , which derives from [s] in an earlier stage of Germanic, as is still ...