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American English pronunciation of "no highway cowboys" /noʊ ˈhaɪweɪ ˈkaʊbɔɪz/, showing five diphthongs: / oʊ, aɪ, eɪ, aʊ, ɔɪ / A diphthong (/ ˈ d ɪ f θ ɒ ŋ, ˈ d ɪ p-/ DIF-thong, DIP-; [1] from Ancient Greek δίφθογγος (díphthongos) 'two sounds', from δίς (dís) 'twice' and φθόγγος (phthóngos) 'sound'), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is ...
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.
Vowels were diphthongized in Middle English before /h/, and new diphthongs arose in Middle English by the combination of vowels with Old English w , g /ɣ/ → /w/, and ġ /j/. For more information, see the section below. The only conditional development considered in detail below is Middle English open-syllable lengthening.
But unlike French, /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/ are fully preserved. In late Middle English, the extremely rare word-initial cluster fn-became sn-(EME fnesen > LME snezen > ModE sneeze). It has been suggested that the change could be due to a misinterpretation of the uncommon initial sequence fn-as ſn-(sn-written with a long s). [18]
At some point in the Middle English period, the distinctly French vowel [y] was substituted with the English diphthong [iw]. It is unclear when exactly this happened, and may have always been the English pronunciation of French (and consequently Latin) u. Stressed open penultimate vowels were lengthened, creating the short/long contrasts:
Australian English: BahE Bahamian English: BarE Barbadian English: CaE Canadian English: CIE Channel Island English: EnE English English: FiE Fiji English: InE Indian English: IrE Irish English: JSE Jamaican English: NZE New Zealand English: PaE Palauan English: ScE Scottish English: SIE Solomon Islands English: SAE South African English: SSE ...
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]
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 for Nuosu, Bantu languages like Swahili, and Lakota. An example is Swahili eua 'purify' with three syllables.