When we think about the alphabet we think of 5 vowels A, E, I, O, U. However, when it comes to pronunciation, there are many vowel sounds. In this video we will look at the vowel sounds from the International Alphabet.
Vowel Sounds
When we think about the alphabet we normally think of there being 5 vowels A, E, I, O, U. However, when it comes to pronunciation, there are many vowel sounds and these sounds can be spelt in different ways which can be a little inconsistent. This makes things difficult when learning English especially as in many other languages the vowels are pronounced more consistently with how they they are spelled. There are 12 sounds that we will be looking at in this video and they are the single vowels or monophthongs. The place of each symbol on the chart tells us something about how it is produced.
Remember!
Pronunciation is physical and as we go through these sounds you need to think about these three questions; Is your mouth open, closed or in the middle? What is the position of your tongue? What shape are your lips?
Examples of Vowel Sounds
For the vowel sounds on the top row the mouth is almost closed
- /i:/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/ and /u:/
For the vowel sounds on the bottom row the mouth is almost wide open.
- /æ/, /ʌ/, /ɑ:/ and /ɒ/
For the sounds on the left, our tongue is near the front teeth.
- /i:/, /e/ and /æ/
When we get to the right, it has moved back a little bit.
- /u:/, /ɔ:/ and /ɒ/
Lets look at some examples words for each vowel sound.
- /i:/, as in “me”, “these”, “need” and “be”.
- /ɪ/ as in “with”, “this”, “if” and “think”.
- /ʊ/ as in “put”, “would”, “look”, and “woman”.
- /u:/ as in “to”, “you”, “new” and “who”.
Do you see how the position on the chart relates to where the sound comes from?
On the second row the mouth is open a little more. Again the tongue should move back a little as we go through them from left to right.
- /e/ as in “get”, “when”, “well” and “very”.
- /ə/ as in “the”, “about”, “could” and “us”.
- /ɜ:/ as in “her”, “work”, “learn”, and “word”.
- /ɔ:/ as in “or”, “also”, “more”, and “call”.
Now lets look at the bottom row where our mouth should be almost wide open.
- /æ/ as in “have”, “that”, “as”, and “can”.
- /ʌ/ as in “but”, “up”, “one”, and “much”.
- /ɑ:/ as in “start”, “ask”, “large” and “after”.
- /ɒ/ as in “of”, “on”, “from” and “not”.
So that is all the single vowels. Obviously there are a lot more examples but the examples in this video are some of the most common words. The important thing to remember is that pronunciation is physical.
Well thanks for reading. I hope you found it useful.
