In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants (stops, affricates, and fricatives).
Descriptions of standardized reference accents provide only a limited guide to the phonology of other dialects of 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.
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited.
Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are always unaspirated and un-glottalized, and generally partially or fully voiced.
[1] The following table shows typical examples of the occurrence of the above consonant phonemes in words, using minimal pairs where possible.
The differences between these tables can be explained as follows: Other points to be noted are these: Listed here are some of the significant cases of allophony of vowels found within standard English dialects.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Phonotactics is the study of the sequences of phonemes that occur in languages and the sound structures that they form.
Most languages of the world syllabify CVCV and CVCCV sequences as /CV.CV/ and /CVC.CV/ or /CV.CCV/, with consonants preferentially acting as the onset of a syllable containing the following vowel.
For example, hundred pounds may sound like [hʌndɹɪb paʊndz] and jumped back (in slow speech, [dʒʌmptbæk]) may sound like [dʒʌmpbæk], but X-ray[85] and electropalatographic[86][87][88] studies demonstrate that inaudible and possibly weakened contacts or lingual gestures may still be made.
A widely accepted approach is the maximal onset principle:[89] this states that, subject to certain constraints, any consonants in between vowels should be assigned to the following syllable.
Thus if the word extra were divided */ˈɛ.kstrə/ the resulting onset of the second syllable would be /kstr/, a cluster that does not occur initially in English.
Some phonologists have suggested a compromise analysis where the consonant in the middle belongs to both syllables, and is described as ambisyllabic.
Similarly, in toe-strap Wells argues that the second /t/ is a full plosive, as usual in syllable onset, whereas in toast-rack the second /t/ is in many dialects reduced to the unreleased allophone it takes in syllable codas, or even elided: /ˈtoʊ.stræp/, /ˈtoʊst.ræk/ → [ˈtoˑʊstɹæp, ˈtoʊs(t̚)ɹæk]; likewise nitrate /ˈnaɪtr.eɪt/ → [ˈnaɪtɹ̥eɪt] with a voiceless /r/ (and for some people an affricated tr as in tree), vs night-rate /ˈnaɪt.reɪt/ → [ˈnaɪt̚ɹeɪt] with a voiced /r/.
Several additional onsets occur in loan words (with varying degrees of anglicization) such as /bw/ (bwana), /mw/ (moiré), /nw/ (noire), /tsw/ (zwitterion), /zw/ (zwieback), /dv/ (Dvorak), /kv/ (kvetch), /ʃv/ (schvartze), /tv/ (Tver), /tsv/ (Zwickau), /kʃ/ (Kshatriya), /sɡl/ (sglods), /tl/ (Tlaloc), /vl/ (Vladimir), /zl/ (zloty), /tsk/ (Tskhinvali), /hm/ (Hmong), /km/ (Khmer), and /ŋ/ (Nganasan).
Similarly, most (in theory, all) of the following except those that end with /t/ or /d/ can be extended with /t/ or /d/ representing the morpheme -t/-d. Wells (1990) argues that a variety of syllable codas are possible in English, even /ntr, ndr/ in words like entry /ˈɛntr.i/ and sundry /ˈsʌndr.i/, with /tr, dr/ being treated as affricates along the lines of /tʃ, dʒ/.
Grammatical function words are usually prosodically unstressed, although they can acquire stress when emphasized (as in Did you find the cat?
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-⟩.
Here the [iː] and [uː] in words like price and mouth became diphthongized, and other long vowels became higher: [eː] became [iː] (as in meet), [aː] became [eː] and later [eɪ] (as in name), [oː] became [uː] (as in goose), and [ɔː] became [oː] and later [oʊ] (in RP now [əʊ]; as in bone).
These shifts are responsible for the modern pronunciations of many written vowel combinations, including those involving a silent final ⟨e⟩.
[112] For example, in Shakespeare's time, following the Great Vowel Shift, food, good and blood all had the vowel [uː], but in modern pronunciation good has been shortened to [ʊ], while blood has been shortened and lowered to [ʌ] in most accents.
In support of treating the velar nasal as an allophone of /n/, Sapir (1925) claims on psychological grounds that [ŋ] 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. ...
One attraction that the authors claim for this analysis is that it regularizes the distribution of the consonants /j/, /w/, and /h/ (as well as /r/ in non-rhotic accents), which would otherwise not be found in syllable-final position.
[124] 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.