English phonology · Lablypedia

Phonological analysis of English often concentrates on prestige or standard accents, such as Received Pronunciation for England, General American for the United States, and General Australian for Australia. Nevertheless, many other dialects of spoken English have developed, different from these standard accents, particularly regional dialects. Descriptions of standard reference accents provide only a limited guide to the phonology of other dialects of English.

Phonemes

A phoneme of a language or dialect is an abstraction of a speech sound or of a group of different sounds that are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of that particular language or dialect. For example, the English word three consists of three phonemes: the initial ⟨th⟩ sound, the ⟨r⟩ sound, and a vowel sound. The phonemes in that and many other English words do not always correspond directly to the letters used to spell them (English orthography is not as strongly phonemic as that of many other languages).

The number and distribution of phonemes in English vary from dialect to dialect, and also depend on the interpretation of the individual researcher. The number of consonant phonemes is generally put at 24 (or slightly more depending on the dialect). The number of vowels is subject to greater variation; in the system presented on this page there are 20–25 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 19–21 in Australian English. The pronunciation keys used in dictionaries generally contain a slightly greater number of symbols than this, to take account of certain sounds used in foreign words and certain noticeable distinctions that may not be – strictly speaking – phonemic.

Consonants

The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus , whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with or ), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with , see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are always unaspirated and un-glottalized, and generally partially or fully voiced. The alveolars are usually apical, i.e. pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching or approaching the roof of the mouth, though some speakers produce them laminally, i.e. with the blade of the tongue.

Consonant examples

The following table shows typical examples of the occurrence of the above consonant phonemes in words, using minimal pairs where possible.

Sonorants

The pronunciation of varies by dialect:
- Received Pronunciation has two main allophones of : the clear, or plain, (the "light L"), and the dark, or velarized, (the "dark L"). The clear variant is used before vowels when they are in the same syllable, and the dark variant when the precedes a consonant or is in syllable-final position before silence.
- In South Wales, Ireland, and the Caribbean, is usually clear, and in North Wales, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand it is usually dark.
- In General American and Canada, is generally dark, but to varying degrees: before stressed vowels it is neutral or only slightly velarized. In southern U.S. accents it is noticeably clear between vowels, and in some other positions.
- In urban accents of Southern England, as well as New Zealand and some parts of the United States, can be pronounced as an approximant or semivowel () at the end of a syllable (l-vocalization).
Depending on dialect, has at least the following allophones in varieties of English around the world (see Pronunciation of English /r/):
- postalveolar approximant (the most common realization of the phoneme, occurring in most dialects, RP and General American included)
- retroflex approximant (occurs in most Irish dialects and some American dialects)
- labiodental approximant (occurs in south-east England and some London accents; also in Singapore English among younger speakers. See r-labialization)
- alveolar flap (occurs in most Scottish, Welsh, Indian and some South African dialects, some conservative dialects in England and Ireland; not to be confused with flapping of and )
- alveolar trill (occurs in some very conservative Scottish dialects and some Indian, South African and Welsh accents)
- voiced uvular fricative (occurs in northern Northumbria, largely disappeared; known as the Northumbrian burr)
In most dialects is labialized in many positions, as in reed and tree ; in the latter case, the may be slightly labialized as well.
In some rhotic accents, such as General American, when not followed by a vowel is realized as an r-coloring of the preceding vowel or its coda: nurse , butter .
The distinctions between the nasals are neutralized in some environments. For example, before a final , or there is nearly always only one nasal sound that can appear in each case: , or respectively (as in the words limp, lint, link – note that the n of link is pronounced ). This effect can even occur across syllable or word boundaries, particularly in stressed syllables: synchrony is pronounced whereas synchronic may be pronounced with either or . For other possible syllable-final combinations, see § Coda in the Phonotactics section below.

Obstruents

In most dialects, the fortis stops and affricate have various different allophones, and are distinguished from the lenis stops and affricate by several phonetic features.

The allophones of the fortes include:
- aspirated when they occur in the onset of a stressed syllable, as in potato. In clusters involving a following liquid, the aspiration typically manifests as the devoicing of this liquid. These sounds are unaspirated after within the same syllable, as in stan, span, scan, and at the ends of syllables, as in mat, map, mac. The voiceless fricatives are nearly always unaspirated, but a notable exception is English-speaking areas of Wales, where they are often aspirated. An alternative interpretation of the /s/–stop clusters is that all stops following /s/ are in fact lenis: this is the interpretation favoured by Dr Geoff Lindsey. Taking this analysis as axiomatic, stan [stan], span [span], and scan [skan] would thus be notated /sdan, sban, sgan/. Moreover, English fortis stops are not only aspirated, but often somewhat affricated; in the case of mat, map, mac therefore, the contrast between lenis and fortis is preserved through the affrication, when the stops are realised ‘fully’, rather than glottalised or otherwise reduced: .
- In many accents of English, fortis stops are glottalized in some positions. That may be heard either as a glottal stop preceding the oral closure ("pre-glottalization" or "glottal reinforcement") or as a substitution of the glottal stop for the oral stop (glottal replacement). can be only pre-glottalized. Pre-glottalization normally occurs in British and American English when the fortis consonant phoneme is followed by another consonant or when the consonant is in final position. Thus football and catching are often pronounced and , respectively. Even more frequently, glottal replacement happens in such cases involving , so that football is pronounced . In addition, however, glottal replacement is increasingly common in British English when occurs between vowels if the preceding vowel is stressed; thus better is often pronounced by younger speakers as . Such t-glottalization also occurs in many British regional accents, including Cockney, where it can also occur at the end of words, and where and are sometimes treated the same way.
- For some RP-speakers, final voiceless stops, especially , may become ejectives.
Among stops, both fortes and lenes:
- May have no audible release in the word-final position. These allophones are more common in North America than Great Britain.
- Almost always have a masked release before another plosive or affricate (as in rubbed ), i.e. the release of the first stop is made after the closure of the second stop. This also applies when the following stop is homorganic (articulated in the same place), as in top player. A notable exception is Welsh English in which stops are usually released in that environment.
- The affricates have a mandatory fricative release in all environments.
Very often in the United States and Canada and less frequently in Australia and New Zealand, both can be pronounced as a voiced flap in certain positions: when they come between a preceding stressed vowel (possibly with intervening ) and precede an unstressed vowel or syllabic . Examples include water, bottle, petal, peddle (the last two words sound alike when flapped). The flap may even appear at word boundaries, as in put it on. When the combination appears in such positions, some American speakers pronounce it as a nasalized flap that may become indistinguishable from , so winter may be pronounced similarly or identically to winner .
Yod-coalescence is a process that palatalizes the clusters , , and into , , and respectively, frequently occurring with clusters that would be considered to span a syllable boundary.
- Yod-coalescence in stressed syllables, such as in tune and dune, occurs in Australian, Cockney, Estuary English, Hiberno-English (some speakers), Newfoundland English, South African English, and to a certain extent in New Zealand English and Scottish English (many speakers). This can lead to additional homophony; for instance, dew and due come to be pronounced the same as Jew.
- In certain varieties such as Australian English, South African English, and New Zealand English, and in stressed syllables can coalesce into and , respectively. In Australian English for example, assume is pronounced by some speakers. Furthermore, some British, Canadian, American, New Zealand and Australian speakers may change the sound to before ; for example, these speakers pronounce strewn as .
The postalveolar consonants are strongly labialized: , at least in RP.
In addition to , the sequences also have affricate-like realizations in certain positions (as in cats, roads, tram, dram, eighth, behind them, cupful, obvious; see also § Onset) but usually only are considered to constitute the monophonemic affricates of English because (among other reasons) only they are found in all of morpheme-initial, -‍internal, and -‍final positions, and native speakers typically perceive them as single units.

Vowels

English, much like other Germanic languages, has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes, and in addition the vowels of English differ considerably between dialects. Consequently, corresponding vowels may be transcribed with various symbols depending on the dialect under consideration. When considering English as a whole, lexical sets are often used, each named by a word containing the vowel or vowels in question. For example, the LOT set consists of words which, like lot, have in British Received Pronunciation (RP) and in General American (GA). The "LOT vowel" then refers to the vowel that appears in those words in whichever dialect is being considered, or (at a greater level of abstraction) to a diaphoneme, which represents this interdialectal correspondence. A commonly used system of lexical sets, devised by John C. Wells, is presented below; for each set, the corresponding phonemes are given for RP and General American, using the notation that will be used on this page.

For a table that shows the pronunciations of these vowels in a wider range of English accents, see Sound correspondences between English accents.

The following tables show the vowel phonemes of three standard varieties of English. The notation system used here for Received Pronunciation (RP) is fairly standard; the others less so. The feature descriptions given here (back, open, etc.) are abstracted somewhat; the actual pronunciations of these vowels are somewhat more accurately conveyed by the IPA symbols used (see Vowel for a chart indicating the meanings of these symbols; though note also the points listed below the following tables). The symbols given in the table are traditional but redirect to their modern implementation.

The differences between these tables can be explained as follows:

RP and General American divide words among the PALM, LOT, CLOTH, and THOUGHT sets separately from one another; RP has the phonemes (PALM), (LOT and CLOTH), and (THOUGHT); whereas General American has the phonemes (LOT and PALM) and (CLOTH and THOUGHT). In a few North American accents, namely in Eastern New England (Boston) LOT words do not have the vowel of PALM (the father–bother merger has not occurred) but instead merge with CLOTH/THOUGHT.
Although the notation is used for the vowel of STRUT in RP and General American, the actual pronunciation in RP may be closer to a near-open central vowel , especially among older speakers. In Standard Southern British, this vowel is increasingly realized as to avoid the clash with the lowered variety of in the region (the trap–strut merger). In General American, is realized as .
Some RP transcriptions use ⟨⟩ rather than ⟨⟩ largely for convenience and historical tradition; it does not necessarily represent a different sound from the General American phoneme, as the DRESS vowel is generally realized as in Standard Southern British.
The different notations used for the vowel of GOAT in RP and General American ( and ) reflect a difference in the most common phonetic realizations of that vowel.
The triphthongs given in the RP table are usually regarded as sequences of two phonemes (a diphthong plus ); however, in RP, these sequences frequently undergo smoothing into single diphthongs or even monophthongs.
The different notations used here for some of the Australian vowels reflect the phonetic realization of those vowels in Australian: a central rather than in GOOSE, a more closed rather than in DRESS, a close-mid rather than traditional RP's in THOUGHT, an open-mid rather than traditional RP's in LOT, an opener rather than somewhat closer in STRUT, a central rather a back in CALM and START, and somewhat different pronunciations of most of the diphthongs. Note that central in GOOSE, close-mid in THOUGHT and open-mid in LOT are standard realizations in Standard Southern British and the difference between Standard Southern British and Australian English in these vowels lies almost only in transcription, rather than pronunciation.
Both Australian and RP are long monophthongs, the difference between them being in tongue height: Australian is close-mid , whereas the corresponding RP vowel is open-mid .

Other points to be noted are these:

The vowel is generally pronounced more open, approaching , by Standard Southern British speakers. In American speech, however, there is a tendency for it to become more closed, tenser and even diphthongized (to something like ), particularly in certain environments, such as before a nasal consonant, though younger speakers of some varieties are lowering like RP speakers (see Canadian shift). Some American accents, for example those of New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore, make a marginal phonemic distinction between and , although the two occur largely in mutually exclusive environments. See /æ/ raising.
A significant number of words (the BATH group) have in General American, but in RP. The pronunciation varies between and in Australia, with speakers from South Australia using more extensively than speakers from other regions.
In General American and Canadian (which are rhotic accents, where is pronounced in positions where it does not precede a vowel), many of the vowels can be r-colored by way of realization of a following . This is often transcribed phonetically using a vowel symbol with an added retroflexion diacritic ⟨⟩; thus the symbol has been created for an r-colored schwa (sometimes called schwar) as in LETTER, and the vowel of START can be modified to make so that the word start may be transcribed . Alternatively, the START sequence might be written to indicate an r-colored offglide. The vowel of NURSE is generally always r-colored in these dialects, and this can be written (or as a syllabic ).
In Standard Southern British and other dialects, many words from the CURE group are coming to be pronounced by an increasing number of speakers with the NORTH vowel (so sure is often pronounced like shore).
The vowels of FLEECE and GOOSE are commonly pronounced as narrow diphthongs, approaching and , in RP. Near-RP speakers may have particularly marked diphthongization of the type and , respectively. In General American, the pronunciation varies between a monophthong and a diphthong.

Allophones of vowels

Listed here are some of the significant cases of allophony of vowels found within standard English dialects.

Vowels are shortened when followed in a syllable by a voiceless (fortis) consonant. This is known as pre-fortis clipping. Thus in the following word pairs the first item has a shortened vowel while the second has a normal length vowel: 'right' – 'ride' ; 'face' – 'phase' ; 'advice' – 'advise' .
In many accents of English, tense vowels undergo breaking before , resulting in pronunciations like for peel, for pool, for pail, and for pole.
In RP, the vowel may be pronounced more back, as , before syllable-final , as in goal. In standard Australian English the vowel is similarly backed to before . A similar phenomenon occurs in Southern American English.
The vowel is often pronounced in open syllables.
The PRICE and MOUTH diphthongs may be pronounced with a less open starting point when followed by a voiceless consonant; this is chiefly a feature of Canadian speech (Canadian raising), but is also found in parts of the United States. Thus writer may be distinguished from rider even when flapping causes the and to be pronounced identically.

Unstressed syllables

Unstressed syllables in English may contain almost any vowel, but in practice vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables tend to use different inventories of phonemes. In particular, long vowels are used less often in unstressed syllables than stressed syllables. Additionally there are certain sounds – characterized by central position and weakness – that are particularly often found as the nuclei of unstressed syllables. These include:

schwa, , as in COMMA and (in non-rhotic dialects) LETTER (COMMA–LETTER merger); also in many other positions such as about, photograph, paddock, etc. This sound is essentially restricted to unstressed syllables exclusively. In the approach presented here it is identified as a phoneme , although other analyses do not have a separate phoneme for schwa and regard it as a reduction or neutralization of other vowels in syllables with the lowest degree of stress.
r-colored schwa, , as in LETTER in General American and some other rhotic dialects, which can be identified with the underlying sequence .
syllabic consonants: as in bottle, as in button, as in rhythm. These may be phonemized either as a plain consonant or as a schwa followed by a consonant; for example button may be represented as or (see above under Consonants).
, as in roses and making. This can be identified with the phoneme , although in unstressed syllables it may be pronounced more centrally, and for some speakers (particularly in Australian and New Zealand and some American English) it is merged with in these syllables (weak vowel merger). Among speakers who retain the distinction there are many cases where free variation between and is found, as in the second syllable of typical. (The OED has recently adopted the symbol ⟨ᵻ⟩ to indicate such cases.)
, as in argument, today, for which similar considerations apply as in the case of . (The symbol ⟨ᵿ⟩ is sometimes used in these cases, similarly to ⟨ᵻ⟩.) Some speakers may also have a rounded schwa, , used in words like omission .
, as in happy, coffee, in many dialects (others have in this position). The phonemic status of this is not easy to establish. Some authors consider it to correspond phonemically with a close front vowel that is neither the vowel of KIT nor that of FLEECE; it occurs chiefly in contexts where the contrast between these vowels is neutralized, implying that it represents an archiphoneme, which may be written . Many speakers, however, do have a contrast in pairs of words like studied and studded or taxis and taxes; the contrast may be vs. , vs. or vs. , and thus some authors consider that the happY-vowel should be identified phonemically either with the vowel of KIT or that of FLEECE, depending on the speaker. See also happy-tensing.
, as in influence, to each. This is the back rounded counterpart to described above; its phonemic status is treated in the same works as cited there.

Vowel reduction in unstressed syllables is a significant feature of English. Syllables of the types listed above often correspond to a syllable containing a different vowel ("full vowel") used in other forms of the same morpheme where that syllable is stressed. For example, the first o in photograph, being stressed, is pronounced with the GOAT vowel, but in photography, where it is unstressed, it is reduced to schwa. Also, certain common words (a, an, of, for, etc.) are pronounced with a schwa when they are unstressed, although they have different vowels when they are in a stressed position (see Weak and strong forms in English).

Some unstressed syllables, however, retain full (unreduced) vowels, i.e. vowels other than those listed above. Examples are the in ambition and the in finite. Some phonologists regard such syllables as not being fully unstressed (they may describe them as having tertiary stress); some dictionaries have marked such syllables as having secondary stress. However linguists such as Ladefoged and Bolinger (1986) regard this as a difference purely of vowel quality and not of stress, and thus argue that vowel reduction itself is phonemic in English. Examples of words where vowel reduction seems to be distinctive for some speakers include chickaree vs. chicory (the latter has the reduced vowel of HAPPY, whereas the former has the FLEECE vowel without reduction), and Pharaoh vs. farrow (both have the GOAT vowel, but in the latter word it may reduce to ).

5 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

Lexical stress

Lexical stress is phonemic in English. For example, the noun increase and the verb increase are distinguished by the positioning of the stress on the first syllable in the former, and on the second syllable in the latter. (See initial-stress-derived noun.) Stressed syllables in English are louder than non-stressed syllables, as well as being longer and having a higher pitch.

In traditional approaches, in any English word consisting of more than one syllable, each syllable is ascribed one of three degrees of stress: primary, secondary or unstressed. Ordinarily, in each such word there will be exactly one syllable with primary stress, possibly one syllable having secondary stress, and the remainder are unstressed (unusually-long words may have multiple syllables with secondary stress). For example, the word amazing has primary stress on the second syllable, while the first and third syllables are unstressed, whereas the word organization has primary stress on the fourth syllable, secondary stress on the first, and the second, third, and fifth unstressed. This is often shown in pronunciation keys using the IPA symbols for primary and secondary stress (which are ˈ and ˌ respectively), placed before the syllables to which they apply. The two words just given may therefore be represented as and .

Some analysts identify an additional level of stress (tertiary stress). This is generally ascribed to syllables that are pronounced with less force than those with secondary stress, but nonetheless contain a "full" or "unreduced" vowel (vowels that are considered to be reduced are listed under English phonology § Unstressed syllables above). Hence the third syllable of organization, if pronounced with as shown above (rather than being reduced to or ), might be said to have tertiary stress. (The precise identification of secondary and tertiary stress differs between analyses; dictionaries do not generally show tertiary stress, although some have taken the approach of marking all syllables with unreduced vowels as having at least secondary stress.)

In some analyses, then, the concept of lexical stress may become conflated with that of vowel reduction. An approach that attempts to separate both is provided by Peter Ladefoged, who states that it is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as unstressed syllables are phonemically distinguished for vowel reduction. In this approach, the distinction between primary and secondary stress is regarded as a phonetic or prosodic detail rather than a phonemic feature – primary stress is seen as an example of the predictable "tonic" stress that falls on the final stressed syllable of a prosodic unit. For more details of this analysis, see Stress and vowel reduction in English.

For stress as a prosodic feature (emphasis of particular words within utterances), see § Prosodic stress below.

Phonotactics

Phonotactics is the study of the sequences of phonemes that occur in languages and the sound structures that they form. In this study it is usual to represent consonants in general with the letter C and vowels with the letter V, so that a syllable such as 'be' is described as having CV structure. The IPA symbol used to show a division between syllables is the full stop ⟨⟩. Syllabification is the process of dividing continuous speech into discrete syllables, a process in which the position of a syllable division is not always easy to decide upon.

Most languages of the world syllabify and sequences as and or , with consonants preferentially acting as the onset of a syllable containing the following vowel. According to one view, English is unusual in this regard, in that stressed syllables attract following consonants, so that and syllabify as and , as long as the consonant cluster is a possible syllable coda; in addition, preferentially syllabifies with the preceding vowel even when both syllables are unstressed, so that occurs as . This is the analysis used in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. However, this view is not widely accepted, as explained in the following section.

Syllable structure

English allows clusters of up to three consonants in the syllable onset and up to four consonants in the syllable coda, giving a general syllable structure of (C)³V(C)⁴, a potential example being strengths (although this word has variant pronunciations with only 3 coda consonants, such as ). A five-consonant coda may occur in the word angsts, but this is a highly exceptional case, as the word is both infrequent and not always pronounced with five final segments (it can be analyzed as a VC⁴ syllable rather than as VC⁵ ). From the phonetic point of view, the analysis of syllable structures is a complex task: because of widespread occurrences of articulatory overlap, English speakers rarely produce an audible release of individual consonants in consonant clusters. This coarticulation can lead to articulatory gestures that seem very much like deletions or complete assimilations. For example, hundred pounds may sound like and jumped back (in slow speech, ) may sound like , but X-ray and electropalatographic studies demonstrate that inaudible and possibly weakened contacts or lingual gestures may still be made. Thus the second in hundred pounds does not entirely assimilate to a labial place of articulation, rather the labial gesture co-occurs with the alveolar one; the "missing" in jumped back may still be articulated, though not heard.

Division into syllables is a difficult area, and different theories have been proposed. A widely accepted approach is the maximal onset principle: this states that, subject to certain constraints, any consonants in between vowels should be assigned to the following syllable. Thus the word leaving should be divided rather than *, and hasty is rather than * or *. However, when such a division results in an onset cluster that is not allowed in English, the division must respect this. Thus if the word extra were divided * the resulting onset of the second syllable would be , a cluster that does not occur initially in English. The division is therefore preferred. If assigning a consonant or consonants to the following syllable would result in the preceding syllable ending in an unreduced short vowel, this is avoided. Thus the word lemma should be divided and not *, even though the latter division gives the maximal onset to the following syllable.

In some cases, no solution is completely satisfactory: for example, in British English (RP) the word hurry could be divided or , but the former would result in an analysis with a syllable-final (which is held to be non-occurring) while the latter would result in a syllable-final (which is said not to occur in this accent). Some phonologists have suggested a compromise analysis where the consonant in the middle belongs to both syllables, and is described as ambisyllabic. In this way, it is possible to suggest an analysis of hurry that comprises the syllables and , the medial being ambisyllabic. Where the division coincides with a word boundary, or the boundary between elements of a compound word, it is not usual in the case of dictionaries to insist on the maximal onset principle in a way that divides words in a counter-intuitive way; thus the word hardware would be divided by the maximal onset principle, but dictionaries prefer the division .

In the approach used by the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Wells claims that consonants syllabify with the preceding rather than following vowel when the preceding vowel is the nucleus of a more salient syllable, with stressed syllables being the most salient, reduced syllables the least, and full unstressed vowels ("secondary stress") intermediate. But there are lexical differences as well, frequently but not exclusively with compound words. For example, in dolphin and selfish, Wells argues that the stressed syllable ends in , but in shellfish, the belongs with the following syllable: → , but → , where the is a little longer and the is not reduced. Similarly, in toe-strap Wells argues that the second is a full plosive, as usual in syllable onset, whereas in toast-rack the second is in many dialects reduced to the unreleased allophone it takes in syllable codas, or even elided: → ; likewise nitrate → with a voiceless (and for some people an affricated tr as in tree), vs night-rate → with a voiced . Cues of syllable boundaries include aspiration of syllable onsets and (in the US) flapping of coda (a tease → vs. at ease → ), epenthetic stops like in syllable codas (fence → but inside → ), and r-colored vowels when the is in the coda vs. labialization when it is in the onset (key-ring → but fearing → ).

Onset

The following can occur as the onset:

Notes:

Other onsets

Certain English onsets appear only in contractions: e.g. ('sblood), and or ('swounds or 'dswounds). Some, such as (pshaw), (fwoosh), or (vroom), can occur in interjections. An archaic voiceless fricative plus nasal exists, (fnese), as does an archaic (snew).

Several additional onsets occur in loan words (with varying degrees of anglicization) such as (bwana), (moiré), (noire), (zwitterion), (zwieback), (Dvorak), (kvetch), (schvartze), (Tver), (Zwickau), (Kshatriya), (Tlaloc), (Vladimir), (zloty), (Tskhinvali), (Hmong), (Khmer), and (Nganasan).

Some clusters of this type can be converted to regular English phonotactics by simplifying the cluster: e.g. (dziggetai), (Hrolf), (croissant), (Nguyen), (pfennig), (phthalic), (tsunami), (!kung), and (Xhosa).

Others can be replaced by native clusters differing only in voice: (sbirro), and (sgraffito).

Nucleus

The following can occur as the nucleus:

All vowel sounds
, and in certain situations (see below under word-level patterns)
in rhotic varieties of English (e.g. General American) in certain situations (see below under word-level patterns)

Coda

Most (in theory, all) of the following except those that end with , , , , or can be extended with or representing the morpheme -s/-z. Similarly, most (in theory, all) of the following except those that end with or can be extended with or representing the morpheme -t/-d.

Wells (1990) argues that a variety of syllable codas are possible in English, even in words like entry and sundry , with being treated as affricates along the lines of . He argues that the traditional assumption that pre-vocalic consonants form a syllable with the following vowel is due to the influence of languages like French and Latin, where syllable structure is CVC.CVC regardless of stress placement. Disregarding such contentious cases, which do not occur at the ends of words, the following sequences can occur as the coda:

Notes:

For some speakers, a fricative before is elided so that these never appear phonetically: becomes , becomes , becomes .

Syllable-level patterns

Syllables may consist of a single vowel, meaning that onset and coda are not mandatory.
The consonant does not occur in syllable-initial position (most speakers do not maintain it even in loans like Ngorongoro and Nguyen).
The consonant does not occur in syllable-final position.
Onset clusters ending in are followed by or its variants (see § Onset note e above).
Long vowels and diphthongs are not found before , except for the mimetic words boing and oink, unassimilated foreign words such as Burmese aung and proper names such as Taung, and American-type pronunciations of words like strong (which have or ). The short vowels occur before only in assimilated non-native words such as ginseng and Song (name of a Chinese dynasty) or non-finally in some dialects in words like strength and length as well as in varieties without the foot-strut split.
is rare in syllable-initial position (although in the northern half of England, is used for and is common at the start of syllables).
Stop + before (all presently or historically ) are excluded.
Sequences of + C₁ + V̆ + C₁, where both C₁'s are the same consonant and V̆ is a short vowel (e.g. *spip, *scock, *smam), are virtually nonexistent, except when C₁ is /t/ (e.g. stat, stot).

Word-level patterns

does not occur in stressed syllables, unless it is merged with another vowel as in some varieties.
does not occur in word-initial position in native English words, although it can occur syllable-initially as in luxurious in American English, and at the start of borrowed words such as genre.
, , and, in rhotic varieties, can be the syllable nucleus (i.e. a syllabic consonant) in an unstressed syllable following another consonant, especially , , or . Such syllables are often analyzed phonemically as having an underlying as the nucleus. See above under Consonants.
The short vowels are checked vowels, in that they cannot occur without a coda in a word-final stressed syllable. (This does not apply to , which does not occur in stressed syllables as mentioned above.)

Prosody

The prosodic features of English – stress, rhythm, and intonation – can be described as follows.

Prosodic stress

Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis.

According to Ladefoged's analysis (as referred to under § Lexical stress above), English normally has prosodic stress on the final stressed syllable in an intonation unit. This is said to be the origin of the distinction traditionally made at the lexical level between primary and secondary stress: when a word like admiration (traditionally transcribed as something like ) is spoken in isolation, or at the end of a sentence, the syllable ra (the final stressed syllable) is pronounced with greater force than the syllable ad, although when the word is not pronounced with this final intonation there may be no difference between the levels of stress of these two syllables.

Prosodic stress can shift for various pragmatic functions, such as focus or contrast. For instance, in the dialogue Is it brunch tomorrow? No, it's dinner tomorrow, the extra stress shifts from the last stressed syllable of the sentence, tomorrow, to the last stressed syllable of the emphasized word, dinner.

Grammatical function words are usually prosodically unstressed, although they can acquire stress when emphasized (as in Did you find the cat? Well, I found a cat). Many English function words have distinct strong and weak pronunciations; for example, the word a in the last example is pronounced , while the more common unstressed a is pronounced . See Weak and strong forms in English.

Rhythm

English is claimed to be a stress-timed language. That is, stressed syllables tend to appear with a more or less regular rhythm, while non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this. For example, in the sentence One make of car is better than another, the syllables one, make, car, bett- and -noth- will be stressed and relatively long, while the other syllables will be considerably shorter. The theory of stress-timing predicts that each of the three unstressed syllables in between bett- and -noth- will be shorter than the syllable of between make and car, because three syllables must fit into the same amount of time as that available for of. However, it should not be assumed that all varieties of English are stress-timed in this way. The English spoken in the West Indies, in Africa and in India are probably better characterized as syllable-timed, though the lack of an agreed scientific test for categorizing an accent or language as stress-timed or syllable-timed may lead one to doubt the value of such a characterization.

Intonation

Phonological contrasts in intonation can be said to be found in three different and independent domains. In the work of Halliday the following names are proposed:

Tonality for the distribution of continuous speech into tone groups.
Tonicity for the placing of the principal accent on a particular syllable of a word, making it the tonic syllable. This is the domain also referred to as prosodic stress or sentence stress.
Tone for the choice of pitch movement on the tonic syllable. (The use of the term tone in this sense should not be confused with the tone of tone languages, such as Chinese.)

These terms ("the Three Ts") have been used in more recent work, though they have been criticized for being difficult to remember. American systems such as ToBI also identify contrasts involving boundaries between intonation phrases (Halliday's tonality), placement of pitch accent (tonicity), and choice of tone or tones associated with the pitch accent (tone).

Example of phonological contrast involving placement of intonation unit boundaries (boundary marked by comma):

Those who ran quickly, escaped. (the only people who escaped were those who ran quickly)
Those who ran, quickly escaped. (the people who ran escaped quickly)

Example of phonological contrast involving placement of tonic syllable (marked by capital letters):

I have plans to LEAVE. (= I am planning to leave)
I have PLANS to leave. (= I have some drawings to leave)

Example of phonological contrast (British English) involving choice of tone (\ = falling tone, \/ = fall-rise tone)

She didn't break the record because of the \ WIND. (= she did not break the record, because the wind held her up)
She didn't break the record because of the \/ WIND. (= she did break the record, but not because of the wind)

There is typically a contrast involving tone between wh-questions and yes/no questions, the former having a falling tone (e.g. "Where did you \PUT it?") and the latter a rising tone (e.g. "Are you going /OUT?"), though studies of spontaneous speech have shown frequent exceptions to this rule. Tag questions asking for information are said to carry rising tones (e.g. "They are coming on Tuesday, /AREN'T they?") while those asking for confirmation have falling tone (e.g. "Your name's John, \ISN'T it.").

History of English pronunciation

The pronunciation system of English has undergone many changes throughout the history of the language, from the phonological system of Old English, to that of Middle English, through to that of the present day. Variation between dialects has always been significant. Former pronunciations of many words are reflected in their spellings, as English orthography has generally not kept pace with phonological changes since the Middle English period.

The English consonant system has been relatively stable over time, although a number of significant changes have occurred. Examples include the loss (in most dialects) of the and sounds still reflected by the ⟨gh⟩ in words like night and taught, and the splitting of voiced and voiceless allophones of fricatives into separate phonemes (such as the two different phonemes represented by ⟨th⟩). There have also been many changes in consonant clusters, mostly reductions, for instance those that produced the usual modern pronunciations of such letter combinations as ⟨wr-⟩, ⟨kn-⟩ and ⟨wh-⟩.

The development of vowels has been much more complex. One of the most notable series of changes is that known as the Great Vowel Shift, which began around the late 14th century. Here the and in words like price and mouth became diphthongized, and other long vowels became higher: became (as in meet), became and later (as in name), became (as in goose), and became and later (in RP now ; as in bone). These shifts are responsible for the modern pronunciations of many written vowel combinations, including those involving a silent final ⟨e⟩.

Many other changes in vowels have taken place over the centuries (see the separate articles on the low back, high back and high front vowels, short A, and diphthongs). These various changes mean that many words that formerly rhymed (and may be expected to rhyme based on their spelling) no longer do. For example, in Shakespeare's time, following the Great Vowel Shift, food, good and blood all had the vowel , but in modern pronunciation good has been shortened to , while blood has been shortened and lowered to in most accents. In other cases, words that were formerly distinct have come to be pronounced the same – examples of such mergers include meet–meat, pane–pain and toe–tow.

Controversial issues

Velar nasal

The phonemic status of the velar nasal consonant is disputed; one analysis claims that the only nasal phonemes in English are and , while is an allophone of found before velar consonants. Evidence in support of this analysis is found in accents of the north-west Midlands of England where is found only before or , with sung being pronounced as . However, in most other accents of English sung is pronounced , producing a three-way phonemic contrast sum – sun – sung and supporting the analysis of the phonemic status of . In support of treating the velar nasal as an allophone of , Sapir (1925) claims on psychological grounds that did not form part of a series of three nasal consonants: "no naïve English-speaking person can be made to feel in his bones that it belongs to a single series with m and n. ... It still feels like ƞg." More recent writers have indicated that analyses of as an allophone of may still have merit, even though may appear both with and without a following velar consonant; in such analyses, an underlying that is deleted by a phonological rule would account for occurrences of not followed by a velar consonant. Thus the phonemic representation of sing would be and that of singer is ; in order to reach the phonetic form and , it is necessary to apply a rule that changes to before or , then a second rule that deletes when it follows .

1. → / ____ velar consonant
2. → ∅ / _____

These produce the following results:

However, these rules do not predict the following phonetic forms:

In the above cases, the is not deleted. The words are all single morphemes, unlike singer and singing which are composed of two morphemes, sing plus -er or -ing. Rule 2 can be amended to include a symbol # for a morpheme boundary (including word boundary):

This rule then applies to sing, singer and singing but not to anger, finger, or hunger.

According to this rule, the words hangar ('shed for aircraft'), which contains no internal morpheme boundary, and hanger ('object for hanging clothes'), which comprises two morphemes, are expected to constitute a minimal pair as hangar versus hanger ; in actuality, their pronunciations are not consistently distinguished in this manner, as hangar is frequently pronounced .

Additionally, there are exceptions in the form of comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, where Rule 2 must be prevented from applying. The ending -ish is another possible exception.

As a result, there is, in theory, a minimal pair consisting of longer ( 'more long') and longer ( 'person who longs'), though it is doubtful that native speakers make this distinction regularly. Names of persons and places, and loanwords, are less predictable. Singapore may be pronounced with or without ; bungalow usually has ; and Inge may or may not have .

Vowel system

It is often stated that English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes and that there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American, and 20–21 in Australian English. These numbers, however, reflect just one of many possible phonological analyses. A number of "biphonemic" analyses have proposed that English has a basic set of short (sometimes called "simple" or "checked") vowels, each of which can be shown to be a phoneme and can be combined with another phoneme to form long vowels and diphthongs. One of these biphonemic analyses asserts that diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to a consonant. The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager & Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either (for which the authors use the symbol ⟨y⟩), or (plus for rhotic accents), each thus comprising two phonemes. Using this system, the word bite would be transcribed , bout as , bar as and bra as . One attraction that the authors claim for this analysis is that it regularizes the distribution of the consonants , , and (as well as in non-rhotic accents), which would otherwise not be found in syllable-final position. Trager & Smith (1951) suggest nine simple vowel phonemes to allow them to represent all the accents of American and British English they surveyed, symbolized (front vowels); (central vowels); and (back vowels).

The analysis from Trager & Smith (1951) came out of a desire to build an "overall system" to accommodate all English dialects, with dialectal distinctions arising from differences in the ordering of phonological rules, as well as in the presence or absence of such rules. Another category of biphonemic analyses of English treats long vowels and diphthongs as conjunctions of two vowels. Such analyses, as found in Sweet (1877) or Kreidler (2004) for example, are less concerned with dialectal variation. In MacCarthy (1967:4, 36–37), for example, there are seven basic vowels and these may be doubled (geminated) to represent long vowels, as shown in the table below:

Some of the short vowels may also be combined with ( bay, buy, boy), with ( , beau) or with ( peer, pair, poor). The vowel inventory of English RP in MacCarthy's system therefore totals only seven phonemes. (Analyses such as these could also posit six vowel phonemes, if the vowel of the final syllable in comma is considered to be an unstressed allophone of that of strut.) These seven vowels might be symbolized , , , , , and . Six or seven vowels is a figure that would put English much closer to the average number of vowel phonemes in other languages.

A radically different approach to the English vowel system was proposed by Chomsky and Halle. Their Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968) proposed that English has lax and tense vowel phonemes, which are operated on by a complex set of phonological rules to transform underlying phonological forms into surface phonetic representations. This generative analysis is not easily comparable with conventional analyses, but the total number of vowel phonemes proposed falls well short of the figure of 20 often claimed as the number of English vowel phonemes.