Short Vowels and Diphthongs in International Phonetic Alphabet

  Short Vowels in IPA

 There are six short vowel   sounds in IPA such as:

 i. ‘ɒ’: Octopus, watch, stop and hot.

 ii. ‘æ’: apple, cat and fat.

 iii. ‘e’ (‘ɛ’): red, pet, egg and head.

 iv. ‘ʌ’: Umbrella, touch, son and duck.

 v. ‘ɪ’: insect, sit, fish and pin.

 vi. ‘ʊ’: book, good, should and push.

 vii. ‘ə’: account, amount and cinema.

viii. ‘ɚ’ (‘r’ sound, only in AmE.): mother, father.

ix. ‘ɝ’ (‘r’ sound, only in AmE): girl, bird.

Diphthongs in IPA

Diphthongs are the combination of two vowel-sounds in a syllable. Diphthong is a vowel sound in which the tongue changes position to produce the sound of two vowels.

(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/diphthong)

There are eight diphthongs in English such as:

i. ‘eɪ’: they, break, great and say.

ii. ‘aɪ’: night, behind and my and bike.

iii. ‘ɔɪ’: boy, toy and choice.

iv. ‘əʊ’: go, so and joke.

v. ‘aʊ’: now, cow and lounge.

vi. ‘eəʳ’: there, chair and where.

vii. ‘ɪəʳ’: deer, dear,air, ear and beer.

viii. ‘ʊəʳ’: pure (/pjʊər/), cure.

Khaled Saifulla

University of Freiburg,Germany

English Language and Linguistics

Email: khaleds6@yahoo.com