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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.
Phoneme isolation: which requires recognizing the individual sounds in words, for example, "Tell me the first sound you hear in the word paste" (/p/). Phoneme identity: which requires recognizing the common sound in different words, for example, "Tell me the sound that is the same in bike, boy and bell" (/b/).
However, this earlier Middle English vowel /a/ is itself the merger of a number of different Anglian Old English sounds: the short vowels indicated in Old English spelling as a , æ and ea ; the long equivalents ā , ēa , and often ǣ when directly followed by two or more consonants (indicated by ā+CC, ǣ+CC, etc.);
However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones, which cannot give origin to minimal pairs) of the same phonological category, that is of the phoneme /p/. (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated [pʰ] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot , native speakers of English would still ...
The cheer–chair merger is the merger of the Early Modern English sequences [iːr] and [eːr], which is found in some accents of modern English. The fern–fir–fur merger is the merger of the Middle English vowels /ɪ, ɛ, ʊ/ into [ɜr] when historically followed by /r/ in the coda of the syllable.
After the first distinctive feature theory was created by Russian linguist Roman Jakobson in 1941, it was assumed that the distinctive features are binary and this theory about distinctive features being binary was formally adopted in "Sound Pattern of English" by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in 1968. Jakobson saw the binary approach as the ...
English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, [1] [2] allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. [3] English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and ...
Regional dialects in North America are historically the most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard, due to distinctive speech patterns of urban centers of the American East Coast like Boston, New York City, and certain Southern cities, all of these accents historically noted by their London-like r-dropping (called non-rhoticity), a feature gradually receding among younger ...