CHAPTER 2

Vowels

Traditionally, there are five vowels in English, but in practice we have six: a, e, i, o, u, and y. The letter

y should be included among the vowels whenever possible because it is used as a vowel more often than
it is used as a consonant. At times, the letter w acts as an auxiliary vowel when it replaces the letter u.
The y (or the Greek i, as it is called in Spanish) has two vowel sounds:

(^) When the y follows a vowel, it helps form an important diphthong and does the work of the letter i.
(^) All the vowels can make more than one vowel sound. There are about twenty different vowel sounds,
and they can be spelled using over thirty vowel combinations. Often the same diphthong can be used to
produce two, or even three, different vowel sounds.
A thousand years ago, almost all English vowels were short. The long vowel sound and the diphthong
came, mostly, from imported and borrowed words. Today the majority of our words still contain these
short vowels.
To avoid confusion, any vowel sound that is not clearly a short vowel sound should be called long.
(^) When teaching reading to very small children, we often use the old rhyme, “When two vowels go
walking, the first does the talking.” The child learns that the first of the two vowels in a diphthong will
control the sound and almost always it will be a long vowel sound. Not all diphthongs follow this rule,
but a very high percentage do.