IPA symbols for English vowels

The IPA vowel symbols are typically more difficult than consonants for speakers of English to learn, since they seldom represent the sounds that the corresponding English letters (usually) do. The major vowel symbols,

, [e], [i], [o], and [u], represent the sounds that the corresponding letters do in the spelling systems of many European languages, such as Spanish and Italian or, to a lesser extent, French or German. (The symbols also correspond fairly closely to the way the letters were originally used in English orthography. But five hundred years ago in a major historical change, the Great English Vowel Shift, English speakers changed the way they pronounced many words without at the same time changing their conventional spelling.)

In order to represent all the vowels of English, we need more symbols than the five vowel letters of the Roman alphabet. The conventional names for these symbols are:

small capital I

epsilon -- a Greek letter

sometimes called upsilon

digraph a-e -- usually just "digraph"

script A

open O

caret

The vowels

		machine
		heed
		beet, beat
		sneak
		bit
		miss
		hid
		passé
		bait
		hayed
		make
		steak
		head
		bet
		many %
		had
		bat
		father
		bought %
		cot, caught %
		law %
		hoed
		boat
		low
		beau
		put
		hood
		book
		blue
		who'd
		boot
		drew
		but
		cup
		double
		I, eye
		fly
		bite
		hide
		night
		cow
		bout
		how'd
		toy
		Boyd
		noise
		banana
		enough
		Manitoba
		bird
		fur, fir
		heard, herd

Syllabic

There is a major split between English dialects where the pronunciation of the word bird contains an

sound (e.g., western Canada, central and western U.S., northern England) and those where it does not (e.g., southern England, Australian, parts of the north-east and southern U.S.). In dialects which do not use an r sound in bird, the vowel between the [b] and the [d] is traditionally transcribed as

or [

Dialects which do use an sound in bird tend to use nothing but. In normal western Canadian or American speech, the period of time between the [b] and the [d] will be entirely occupied by an sound, and there will be no other vowel in the word. The is acting as the core of the syllable in , a privilege which is usually reserved for vowels. A vertical line diacritic is used to mark those occasions where has a special vowel-like role in a syllable. The usual transcription bird is therefore . (Sometimes you'll run across the symbols or or even the sequence used instead of .)

Open O

Many dialects of English have another vowel, which is represented by the "open o" symbol,

Most dialects spoken in Canada and in the central and western U.S. pronounce the following pairs of words identically:

cot caught

pa's pause

Don Dawn

Other dialects, including British Received Pronunciation and many in the north-eastern and southern U.S., pronounce the words with different vowels:

cot caught

pa's pause

Don Dawn

Historically, all dialects had the contrast between and . The ones which now pronounce cot and caught identically have lost the contrast over the generations, merging both into . Most speakers who pronounce caught as still use a vowel very close to as the starting point of the diphthong and often also before , as in four .

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	small capital I
	epsilon -- a Greek letter
	sometimes called upsilon
	digraph a-e -- usually just "digraph"
	script A
	open O
	caret