English Phonology

Phonology of the English Language:

• English has a wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect.
• Regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
• English phonology often uses a reference point, such as Received Pronunciation for England, General American for the United States, and General Australian for Australia.
• The number and distribution of phonemes in English vary from dialect to dialect.
• The number of consonant phonemes is generally put at 24 (or slightly more depending on the dialect).
• English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes, and the vowels of English differ considerably between dialects.
• Unstressed syllables in English may contain almost any vowel, but in practice vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables tend to use different inventories of phonemes.
• Vowel reduction in unstressed syllables is a significant feature of English.
• Lexical stress is phonemic in English.
• The syllable structure in English is (C)3V(C)5.
• The maximal onset principle states that, subject to certain constraints, any consonants in between vowels should be assigned to the following syllable.
• English speakers rarely produce an audible release of individual consonants in consonant clusters due to widespread occurrences of articulatory overlap.English Phonology: Syllable Structure, Onset, Nucleus, Coda, and Prosody

Syllable division in English follows the maximal onset principle, except when the resulting onset cluster is not allowed in English, or when assigning a consonant to the following syllable would result in the preceding syllable ending in an unreduced short vowel.

In some cases, no solution is completely satisfactory, and some phonologists have suggested a compromise analysis where the consonant in the middle belongs to both syllables, described as ambisyllabic.

English has a variety of syllable codas, even /ntr, ndr/ in words like entry and sundry, with /tr, dr/ being treated as affricates along the lines of /tʃ, dʒ/.

Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis.

English is claimed to be a stress-timed language, where stressed syllables tend to appear with a more or less regular rhythm, while non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this.

Phonological contrasts in intonation can be said to be found in three different and independent domains: tonality, tonicity, and tone.

Former pronunciations of many words are reflected in their spellings, as English orthography has generally not kept pace with phonological changes since the Middle English period.

The English consonant system has been relatively stable over time, although a number of significant changes have occurred, such as the loss of [ç] and [x] sounds still reflected by the ⟨gh⟩ in words like night and taught.

Several additional onsets occur in loan words, such as /kv/ (kvetch), /vl/ (Vladimir), and /ŋ/ (Nganasan).

The following can occur as the nucleus: short or long vowels, diphthongs, and syllabic consonants.

Most syllable codas can be extended with /s/ or /z/ representing the morpheme -s/-z, and most except those that end with /t/ or /d/ can be extended with /t/ or /d/ representing the morpheme -t/-d.

Several cues of syllable boundaries include aspiration of syllable onsets, epenthetic stops like [t] in syllable codas, and r-colored vowels when the /r/ is in the coda vs. labialization when it is in the onset.

English spoken in the West Indies, in Africa and in India are probably better characterized as syllable-timed.English Phonology

• Consonant clusters have been reduced, producing modern pronunciations of some letter combinations
• The Great Vowel Shift began around the late 14th century, changing the pronunciation of some long vowels
• Many other changes in vowels have taken place over the centuries
• Words that were formerly pronounced differently now have the same pronunciation, such as meet and meat
• The phonemic status of the velar nasal consonant [ŋ] is disputed
• English has a large number of vowel phonemes, with variations in different English dialects
• Biphonemic analyses have proposed that English has a basic set of short vowels that can be combined to form long vowels
• Trager & Smith (1951) suggest nine simple vowel phonemes to represent all the accents of American and British English
• The Sound Pattern of English proposed that English has lax and tense vowel phonemes transformed by a complex set of phonological rules
• The total number of vowel phonemes proposed falls well short of the figure of 20 often claimed as the number of English vowel phonemes
• The English vowel system has been analyzed in different ways with varying numbers of phonemes
• The vowel inventory of English RP in MacCarthy's system totals only seven phonemes