The Center for Confident American English Communication

Every language has vowel sounds. Some languages have as few as three vowel sounds and some languages have more than 20 vowel sounds. The English alphabet has five vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, but these vowels make 14 (or more) spoken sounds in American English. The variety of sounds is very complex and

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Continuing the discussion on the International Phonetic Alphabet, I like this IPA chart from esl-lounge.com. The 44 phoneme symbols are large and easy to read. However, there is no audio. If you are an English pronunciation teacher or graduate student who needs to type IPA symbols into your documents check out Type IPA. This is

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This week I’ve had several students ask me to explain the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. Although I am not an expert on this subject I do use IPA symbols with my students including the symbols for: the schwa vowel sound /ə/ the voiced th sound /ð/ the voiceless th sound /θ the tapped t

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