Other English accents will have a slightly different number of vowel sounds, but generally speaking, English has around 20 distinct vowel phonemes. In this article, we’ll use Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and General American English (GenAm) as our reference accents. There are many more distinct English vowel sounds (or phonemes) that can make the difference between otherwise similar words.Įxactly how many vowel phonemes English has depends on which variety of the language we’re talking about. Sometimes we count Y, too - so maybe six? While this might be true about the written language, it’s not the case for spoken English. These are the symbols for long vowels with various examples to understand their pronunciation.English has five vowels, right? A, E, I, O and U. Monophthongs are also called pure vowels as they have single sound in their pronunciation.There is no shift or glide from one sound to another sound while we pronounce these vowels.The position of our tongue and mouth remains the same when we pronounce these vowel sounds.ġ2 Monophthongs are further divide in two parts Long vowels (5) and short vowels (7). Here is the answer for your questions.The five letters a,e,i,o,u are the the five vowel letters and we get 20 vowel sounds from these 5 vowel letters.Ģ0 vowels are further divided in two partsġ2 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs are 20 vowel sounds. What are those 20 vowels? This can be a genuine question in your mind. Are you surprised knowing about 20 vowels?Īs you might have heard that there are 5 vowels a,e,i,o,u. These 44 sounds consist of 20 vowels sounds and 24 consonants sounds. English language has 44 speech sounds or phonemes (smallest unit of speech sound) in its sound system. I have already discussed about the Importance of English Speech Sounds and symbols in my previous blog post. There are 26 letters in English alphabet.
There are various letters and sounds which represent different sounds or letters.
In English there is no one to one correspondence between spelling and sound. To have clear pronunciation, you should understand about all letters, speech sounds and their pronunciation. If you know how to pronounce the words and phrases correctly, your level of speech understanding is also increased. Correct and clear pronunciation is as important as listening and speaking skills. Phonetic transcription and knowledge about English speech sounds is often ignored by many English learners.
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