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The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Pin–pen merger: the raising of /ɛ/ to /ɪ/ before nasal consonants in Southern American English and southwestern varieties of Hiberno-English. Horse-hoarse merger: /ɔr/ and /or/ merge in many varieties of English; Vowel mergers before intervocalic /r/ in most of North America (resistance occurs mainly on the east coast):
The distinction between the vowels of horse and hoarse is maintained in traditional non-rhotic New England accents as [hɒs] for horse (with the same vowel as cot and caught) vs. [hoəs] for hoarse, though the horse–hoarse merger is certainly on the rise in the region today. The /æ/ phoneme has highly distinct allophones before nasal consonants.
Estimates of phoneme-inventory size can differ radically between sources, occasionally by a factor of several hundred percent. For instance, Received Pronunciation of English has been claimed to have anywhere between 11 and 27 vowels, whereas West ǃXoon has been analyzed as having anywhere from 87 to 164 consonants.
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
In Scottish English, mid front /ɛːr/ and /ɛr/ are merged into /er/, paralleling the mid back vowel horse–hoarse merger, which Scottish English lacks. The vowel in fir /ɪr/ is usually distinct, but is liable to merge than /ər/ because their non-rhoticized equivalents /ɪ/ and /ə/ belong to the same phoneme; this parallels the hurry ...
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.
The Sound Pattern of English (frequently referred to as SPE) is a 1968 work on phonology (a branch of linguistics) by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. In spite of its title, it presents not only a view of the phonology of English, but also discussions of a large variety of phonological phenomena of many other languages. The index lists about 100 ...