Vowel Sounds

Jul 17

🚧🚧 UNDER CONSTRUCTION

〰️

🚧🚧 UNDER CONSTRUCTION 〰️

Let’s start with a landing page for all English vowels. A catch-all where you then navigate to the individual vowel sounds you might want to learn more about later.

This page will talk more generally about vowels as a whole category of sounds rather than the specifics. Again, vowel sounds may not be consistently represented by the same vowel letter. As a result, i will be careful with my wording to indicate vowel SOUND versus vowel LETTER.

This is already an issue I’ve raised with different consonants in English.

Well, English vowels can be worse with their inconsistencies.

In English, the written representation of vowels falls into A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y.

6 letters. But, each vowel doesn’t always make the same sound.

For example:

women, woman, cool - the O letter does not make the same sound.

Ill, I’ll, lollipop - the uppercase I letter does not make the same sound.

So, it is still 100% important to LISTEN when you are practicing your English pronunciation for the sound more than you trust the spelling.

When talking about vowels, there are 3 features that people use to describe the pronunciation.

The main descriptors that vary between vowels are as follows:

tongue height (vertical dimension),
tongue backness (horizontal dimension)
and roundedness (lip articulation)

There are additional features as well such as nasality but these are the main 3 to focus on.

This conception of vowel articulation has been known to be inaccurate since 1928. So it 100% is not the greatest method or actually correct in all situations but it is a good starting point because of how abstract the concept is. Per Wikipedia, “Peter Ladefoged has said that "early phoneticians... thought they were describing the highest point of the tongue, but they were not. They were actually describing formant frequencies." Now, formants are based on measurable data that you can analyze on a graph, but become again, becomes an extremely arbitrary concept to your average person (See here for more information if you’re interested.)

So as a next best thing with no other better model, we're using the vowel quadrilateral. Just remember, it is not a direct mapping of tongue position and is an abstraction.

IPA: Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i y	ɨ ʉ	ɯ u
Near-close	ɪ ʏ		ʊ
Close-mid	e ø	ɘ ɵ	ɤ o
Mid	e̞ ø̞	ə	ɤ̞ o̞
Open-mid	ɛ œ	ɜ ɞ	ʌ ɔ
Near-open	æ	ɐ
Open	a ɶ	ä	ɑ ɒ

Here are some key differences with vowels as compared with consonants.

Vowels are Open In Nature
Unlike your consonants, which can have obstruction or have turbulent airflow, vowels are much more open and allow for smoother airflow.
Vowels Are Mostly Oral Sounds

Vowels are sounds that are primarily oral. Yes, there can be some nasality to them but unlike nasal consonants where 100% of the air flows through the nose, a majority of the sound still comes out orally for vowels. At least English-spoken vowels. Haven’t dug into other languages or lesser known languages.

Ultimately, vowels make up in my mind the most salient difference between native English speakers and non-native English speakers. This is the largest chunk of time and effort that I would spend on English pronunciation so it is a super important section. Practice each vowel a bunch and I’ll try to give good examples, practice tips and homework along the way!

I’m breaking down every single sound down for you so that you can learn how to produce each sound in English accurately. Sometimes, we’ll have easier sounds and sometimes we’ll have harder sounds.

If you’ve grasped this sound, then great! But if you’ve got a tip that might work for others, or you took a while to produce this sound correct but something clicked for you, let me know down below in the comments. My goal is to have a community know what to do when they’re stuck!