can be written as ee in seem, as ea in seal, as ie in piece, as ei
in seize, as ey in key, as i...e in machine, and perhaps more.
There’s certainly not a one-to-one correspondence between
letters and sounds, and English has many more vowel sounds
than vowel letters.
For most speakers of American English, there are 14 vowel
sounds, or 15 if we include the vowel-like sound in words
like bird, her and turn. The phonemic symbols for the vowels
are shown in Box 5.1. For each sound, you’ll see at least two
symbols. This is because di"erent textbooks and authors use
di"erent versions of the phonemic alphabet, with di"erent
sets of symbols for vowels. Many American textbooks use
symbols similar to those in blue, while others use symbols
like those in green. The symbols in British textbooks are
similar, but not identical, to the symbols in green. You might
see still more variations of the symbols in addition to the
ones that are shown here. In this book, we’ll use
the symbols shown in blue.
Describing vowels is trickier than describing
consonants. The tongue is $oating freely around
the mouth, not touching other parts of the vocal
tract. This makes it harder to describe exactly
what’s happening inside the mouth. When we
describe the vowels of English, we talk about:
- Tongue position
- Lip rounding
- Tense and lax vowels
- Simple vowels, glided vowels, and diphthongs
These categories are not as precise or reliable as those we use
to describe consonants. Some of them are not even as !rmly
based on physical reality as we like to think, and they can
vary a great deal among individual speakers. Still, the
descriptions are useful in teaching, and it’s important for
teachers to know how vowels are traditionally described.
Tongue position
The way we move and shape our tongue plays a big part in
giving each vowel its own sound. When you pronounce a
vowel, even a small change in the position of your tongue
can make a big di"erence in how the vowel sounds.When we talk about tongue position, we mean:
Where is the highest, tensest, or most active
part of the tongue? The way we describe this
position is something like graphing a point in
math or !nding a location on a map. We give
two “coordinates” to describe where the point
is, like the x and y coordinates of a point on a
graph or a location on a map.515.2 The Vowels of American
English