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CONTENTS ESSENTIALS OF LINGUISTICS

Chapter 2: Producing Speech Sounds

2.4 IPA SYMBOLS AND SPEECH SOUNDS

Previous: 2.3 Describing Speech Sounds: the IPA Next: 2.5 Sonority, Consonants, and Vowels
The following tables give you some sample words so you can start to learn which
IPA symbols correspond to which speech sounds. In these tables, the portion of
the English word that makes the relevant sound is indicated in boldface type, but
remember that English spelling is not always consistent, and your pronunciation
of a word might be a little di erent from someone else’s. These examples are
drawn from the pronunciation of mainstream Canadian English. To hear an audio-
recording of the sound for each IPA symbol, consult the consonant, vowel, and
diphthong charts available here.

The sounds are categorized here according to how they’re produced. You’ll learn
more about these categories in units 2.6, 2.7 and 3.2.

STOPS

[p] peach, apple, cap

[b] bill, above, rib
[t] tall, internal, light
[d] dill, adore, kid
[k] cave, ticket, luck
[ɡ] give, baggage, dig

FRICATIVES

[f] phone, ra le, leaf

[v] video, lively, love
[θ] thin, author, bath
[ð] there, leather, breathe
[s] celery, passing, bus
[z] zebra, deposit, shoes
[ʃ] shell, ocean, rush
[ʒ] genre, measure, rouge
[h] hill, ahead

AFFRICATES

[tʃ] chip, achieve, ditch

[dʒ] jump, adjoin, bridge

NASALS

[m] mill, hammer, broom

[n] nickel, sunny, spoon
[ŋ] singer, wrong

APPROXIMANTS

[l] lamb, silly, fall

[ɹ] robot, furry, star
[j] yellow, royal
[w] winter, ower

FLAP

[ɾ] butter, pedal (only between vowels when the second syllable is unstressed)

FRONT VOWELS

[i] see, neat, piece

[ɪ] pin, bit, lick

[e] say, place, rain

(in spoken Canadian English, [e] becomes [eɪ])
[ɛ] ten, said, bread
[æ] mad, cat, fan
[a] far, start

BACK VOWELS

[u] pool, blue

[ʊ] look, good, bush

[o] throw, hole, toe

(in spoken Canadian English, [o] becomes [oʊ])
[ʌ] bus, mud, lunch
[ɔ] store, more, corn
[ɑ] dog, ball, father

CENTRAL VOWELS

[ə] believe, cinnamon, surround

(in an unstressed syllable)

[ɨ] roses, wanted

(in an unstressed syllable that is a su x)

[ɚ] weather, editor

(in an unstressed syllable with an r-quality)

[ɝ] bird, fur

(in a stressed syllable with an r-quality)

DIPHTHONGS

[aɪ] y, lie, smile

[aʊ] now, frown, loud
[ɔɪ] boy, spoil, noise
[ju] cue, few

LICENSE

Essentials of Linguistics by Catherine Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License,
except where otherwise noted.

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