The MANY Sounds of English

The English alphabet has 26 letters.  But did you know that there are actually 45 American English sounds?

This is one of the things that makes English so challenging – the spelling and the sound aren’t always the same!

Let’s look at how to make learning the sounds of words a little easier.  There are 2 basic kinds of sounds:  vowels and consonants

VOWELS

English has 5 vowel letters:

a         e         i         o         u

and one letter that is sometimes a vowel,  y

(In the word ‘why’ the letter ‘y’ is a vowel)

However, there are MANY more vowel sounds.  Think about the sound of the letter ‘A’ in these words:

apple                           about                           any                           ate

Did you notice there are actually 4 different sounds here?

apple’ has the sound /æ/

‘about’ has the sound /ə/

‘any’ has the sound /ɛ/

‘ate’ has the sound /ey/

CONSONANTS

English has 21 consonant letters, but – you guessed it! – there are MANY more consonant sounds.

For example, the letter ‘T’ has a sound, and the letter ‘H’ has another sound:

/t/ in ‘tea’

/h/ in ‘here’

But if we put them together, we can get two more sounds:

the voiceless sound /θ/ like ‘think’

the voiced sound /ð/ like ‘there’

It is important to notice the real sounds of words – don’t always trust the spelling!  You need to learn the phonetic alphabet in your dictionary.  Here is a sample entry:

dictionary /dIk’ʃə-nÉ™-riy/ noun ( pl. -aries) a book that lists the words of a language…

The important part to look at is the one most people don’t understand: the phonetic spelling:  /dIk’ʃə-nÉ™-riy/

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