Phonology in the English Language

Phonology is the study of the basic sounds and speech patterns of a language.

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The English language is full of words and sounds borrowed from other languages, giving it a mixture of sound patterns.

Examples:

English word	Origin
pizza	Italian
skunk	Native American
academy	Greek
tobacco	Spanish
robot	Czech
kidnap	Danish
lottery	Dutch
mammoth	Russian
data	Latin

Vowel sounds:

There are only five vowels in the American English language.

Aa    Ee    Ii    Oo    Uu

Depending on the word and blend, these five vowels can make up about 21 unique sounds.

Vowel	Long sound	Short sound	Additional sound	Blended sounds
A	baby trade day	apple dad sad	father water ball	wheat lead train
E	teeth need green	next bed red		cried bread
I	wide like side	pick trip lip		said laid tried
O	open bone nose	olive October on	book loose	road toad crowd
U	use unicorn	under up umbrella	purple	blue true loud thought

Consonant sounds:

There are 21 consonants in the American English language. Consonants are all letters in the alphabet except for the vowels.

Bb    Cc    Dd    Ff    Gg    Hh    Jj    Kk    Ll    Mm    Nn   

Pp     Qq    Rr    Ss    Tt    Vv    Ww    Xx    Yy    Zz

Consonant	Sounds
B	ball boy
C	color city
D	dog daughter
F	fight father
G	girl giant
H	happy hard
J	jump January
K	kid king
L	long love
M	mom may
N	November nice
P	purple pink
Q	quick queen
R	row river
S	September wise
T	teacher time
V	visit vampire
W	word wife
X	x-ray extra
Y	yellow lady
Z	zipper zap

        
Note: the letters c and g can have a hard sound or a soft sound.

• When the letter c is pronounced as in cat or corner, we call it hard.
  
  
• When the letter c is pronounced as in city or center, we call it soft.
  
  
• When the letter g is pronounced as in go or get, we call it hard.
  
  
• When the letter g is pronounced as in giant or gentle, we call it soft.

The same sounds

The consonants only make 18 unique sounds individually. Some of the letters can make the same sound.

Examples:    

• city and snake 
• cake and kids    
• zip and rose

Blended consonants

Blended consonants make many more sounds. Let us look at a few examples of blended consonant sounds.

Examples:

Word	Explanation
cracker	The blended ck makes a hard K sound.
white	The blended wh makes an airy sound.
with	th blended together can make a few sounds
the
thin
rough	gh blended in this word makes an F sound
ghost	gh blended in this word makes a G sound
through	gh blended in this word makes an /oo/ sound
daughter	gh blended in this word is silent
quick	q and u work together to make a /kw/ wound
Christmas	ch blended in this word makes a hard K sound
English	sh makes a blended sound like shut

Dialects

A dialect is a form of the language that is spoken in a certain area. It may be different than the forms of the languages spoken in other areas.

In addition to the basic sounds of the American English alphabet, pronunciation of words can vary from dialect to dialect.

There are eight major identified dialects in North America and Canada.
(source: http://aschmann.net/AmEng/)

1. Canada
2. Northern New England
3. North
4. Greater New York City
5. The Midland
6. The South
7. North Central
8. The West

Examples of pronunciations by dialect:

• Calm
  some dialects pronounce the /l/ while others leave it silent.
  
  
• Pin and pen
  some pronounce both words with a short /i/ while others say each word uniquely.
  
  
• Far
  In Southern dialects far is said like father, dropping /r/.
  
  
• Cart
  In Northern dialects the /r/ is dropped so cart = cot.

This was a review of some of the basic terms and concepts in phonology of the English language.

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