During my accent reduction tutoring sessions I frequently see students hesitate when they come across words that are spelled with ough. And no wonder! This letter combination has many different sounds in spoken American English. Here are * examples of the most frequent sounds of ough.
/u:/ as in through (sounds like blue)
/ɔːt/ as in thought (sounds like father)
/oʊ/ as in though (sounds like no)
/ɒf/ as in cough (sounds like off)
/əf/ as in rough (sounds like stuff)
/aʊ/ as in bough (sounds like now)
How do we Americans learn these pronunciations? Well,… as native speakers we learned to speak English before we learned to read it. That means that we applied our knowledge of spoken English to the written form.
People learning to speak English from written text don’t have this advantage and find the variety of pronunciations for the same letter combination very confusing.
*examples adapted from wikipedia.org
Tags: American English Pronunciation, American English vowel sounds, learn american accent
