A typical dialect of American English has about 15
distinctive vowel sounds. Here their symbols are linked to
Sun-style .au samples lifted from the ibiblio (Sunsite)
archive (where they are listed without the .au
extension).
-
The first symbol is the International Phonetic
Association (IPA) symbol for the sound. (For the
diphthongs, the American style of transcription is to use
a -y where the standard IPA uses a 'j'.)
-
The second is the Sun name for the phoneme sample (which
is in most cases the same as the symbol used by First
Byte in Monologue for Windows and its DOS forebears).
-
The third symbol is the ipa-ascii symbol (an alphabet for use
on Usenet groups and email).
-
The fourth column has the symbol that Rsynth displays in
its verbose mode.
-
The fifth column contains the SAMPA
symbol--as you can see, the differences among these
alphabets are minor.
-
Each row concludes with a key word for the sound.
Front Vowels
|
IPA
|
S u n
|
IPAascii
|
Rsynth
|
Sampa
|
KeyWord
|
h
i
g
h
l
o
w
|
|
IY
|
i
|
i
|
i
|
beet
|
|
IH
|
I
|
I
|
I
|
bit
|
|
EY
|
eI
|
eI
|
e
|
bait
|
|
EH
|
E
|
e
|
E
|
bet
|
|
AE
|
&
|
&
|
{
|
at
|
Back Vowels
|
IPA
|
S u n
|
IPAascii
|
Rsynth
|
Sampa
|
KeyWord
|
h
i
g
h
.
l
o
w
|
|
UY
|
u
|
u
|
u
|
boot
|
|
UH
|
U
|
U
|
U
|
book
|
|
OW
|
oU
|
oU
|
o
|
boat
|
|
AO
|
O
|
O
|
O
|
cause
|
|
AA
|
a/A
|
A
|
A
|
cot
1
|
Central Vowels
|
IPA
|
S u n
|
IPAascii
|
Rsynth
|
Sampa
|
KeyWord
|
|
|
AX
|
@
|
@
|
@
|
about
|
|
AH
|
V
|
V
|
V
|
but2
|
Diphthongs
|
IPA
|
S u n
|
IPAascii
|
Rsynth
|
Sampa
|
KeyWord
|
|
|
AY
|
aI
|
aI
|
aI
|
bite
|
|
OY
|
OI
|
OI
|
OI
|
boy
|
|
AW
|
AU
|
aU
|
aU
|
bough
|
Notes
Some would
list
"ju" (
use not same as
ooze
"R-colored"
or rhoticized vowels (such as those in
beard, heard,
hard are hard to discriminate and are absent in
"r-drop" or non-rhotic dialects such as those typical of
the North American South and New England region, and
Received Pronunciation in GB. In these latter dialects, the
preceding vowel is usually lengthened and often glides
toward the central schwa sound. IPA hangs a little
"r-hook"diacritic off of the symbol for an r-colored vowel.
A much higher level of
magnification can be had from the Phonological Atlas of
North America. Especially germane is the text and
illustrations of William Labov's recent
paper on acoustic analysis of data on variation,
especially key Northern cities and Southern (US) vowel
shifts. For the whole enchilada, see the
National Map
An open mouth-from the side-looks something like this, the dotted line representing the space available between the top of the tongue and the roof of the mouth for producing vowel sounds.
The tongue moves up and down (aided by similar movement of the jaws), and forward and back, to change the size and shape of the mouth cavity, which acts as a resonant chamber to produce vowel sounds.