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Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress).Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel or with certain other vowels that are described as ...
More extensive L-vocalization is a notable feature of certain dialects of English, including Cockney, Estuary English, New York English, New Zealand English, Pittsburgh English, Philadelphia English and Australian English, in which an /l/ sound occurring at the end of a word (but usually not when the next word begins with a vowel and is pronounced without a pause) or before a consonant is ...
More extensive L-vocalization is a notable feature of certain dialects of English, including Cockney, Estuary English, New York English, New Zealand English, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia English, in which an /l/ sound occurring at the end of a word or before a consonant is pronounced as some sort of close back vocoid, e.g., [w], [o] or [ʊ]. The ...
In some English accents, the phoneme /l/, which is usually spelled as l or ll , is articulated as two distinct allophones: the clear [l] occurs before vowels and the consonant /j/, whereas the dark [ɫ] / [lˠ] occurs before consonants, except /j/, and at the end of words.
Many languages insert a so-called prop vowel at the end of a word, often as a result of the common sound change where vowels at the end of a word are deleted. For example, in the Gallo-Romance languages, a prop schwa /ə/ was added when final non-open vowels were dropped leaving /Cr/ clusters at the end, e.g. Latin nigrum '(shiny) black ...
For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes: the initial "th" sound, the "r" sound, and a vowel sound. The phonemes in that and many other English words do not always correspond directly to the letters used to spell them (English orthography is not as strongly phonemic as that of many other languages).
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk, half, calf, etc., the w in two and sword, gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though, daughter, night, brought, and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
The word could was never pronounced with /l/; its spelling results from analogy with the former words. Modern L-vocalization (the replacement of "dark" /l/ with a non-syllabic vowel sound, usually similar to [ʊ] or [o]) is a feature of certain accents, particularly in London English and in near-RP speech that has been influenced by it ...