THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (revised to 2005)

CONSONANTS (PULMONIC) © 2005 IPA

Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Post alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar j Uvular Pharyngeal 1 Glottal

Plosive
P b t d t cl c J k g q G ?
;
Nasal m n] n n Ji q n j
j

Trill B r R [ j
Tap or Flap V r r ...........
L
Fricative
♦ p f V 6 5 s z J 3 § \ 9i x Y % K h ? h fi
| Lateral
j fricative 1 fe ! 1
j Approximant u j \ j
| Lateral
1 approximant 1 I X L
Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible.

CONSONANTS (NON-PULMONIC) VOWELS

Front C e n tr a l Back
Clicks Voiced implosives Ejectives
9
O Bilabial 6 Bilabial Examples:
„J
| Dental cf D ental/alveolar T) Bilabial

| (Post)alveolar J- Palatal t D ental/alveolar

^ Palatoalveolar C j' V elar k Velar

|| A lveolar lateral Cj U vular S A lveolar fricative

OTHER SYMBOLS

AV V oiceless labial-velar fricative Q> Alveolo-palatai fricatives Where symbols appear in pairs, the one
to the right represents a rounded vowel.
W Voiced labial-velar approxim ant J V oiced alveolar lateral flap

q Voiced labial-palatal approxim ant fj Sim ultaneous J' and X SUPRASEGMENTALS

H V oiceless epiglotta! fricative

I Primary stress
c¥ Voiced epiglottal fricative
A ffricates and double articulations
, Secondary stress
can be represented by tw o symbols
jo in ed by a tie bar if necessary. .foona'tijsn
? Epiglottal plosive
I Long Cl
0
DIACRITICS Diacritics may be placed above a symbol with a descender, e.g. I ] T Half-long CT
W W
Extra-short C
o
V oiceless no d0 b a
Breathy voiced Dental t d
| Minor (foot) group
V
V oiced s t C reaky voiced b a Apical t d || Major (intonation) group
..h A spirated th dh Linguolabial t d a Laminal U . Syllable break li.aekt
} M ore rounded 0
W
Labialized tw d w Nasalized e w Linking (absence o f a break)
L ess rounded 0 J Palatalized V d> n N asal release dn
V
A dvanced
Y Ve lari zed tY dv 1 Lateral release d1 i TO N E S A N D W O R D A CCEN TS
LEV EL CO N TO U R
+
? Pharyngeal ized t* ds Extra V' -
Retracted e No audible release dn or "1 high Cor A Rising

C entralized e - V elarized o r pharyngealized

e “ 1 High e \j Falling

X X eX ~ j Mid e S\ {lifh
M id-centraiized e ?
X
Raised
<:? voiced alveolar fricative)
e - J Low e j Low
rising

. . Syllabic
i
n | T
Low ered eT
voiced bilabial approxim ant) v\
e J Extra
tow e 'i
•
Rising-
falling
N on-syllabic e ■i
A dvanced Tongue Root
%
\
i D ow nstep / G lobal rise

& ay I k t U pstep \
R hoticity
►
R etracted T ongue Root
% G lobal fall

R e p ro du ced by k in d p erm issio n o f th e In tern atio n al P h o n etic A ssociation, D e p a rtm e n t o f T heoretical an d

A pplied Linguistics, School o f E nglish, A ristotle U niversity o f Thessaloniki, T hessaloniki 54124, Greece.
1 Introduction

You probably want to know what the purpose of this course is, and what you can expect
to learn from it. An important purpose of the course is to explain how English is pro­
nounced in the accent normally chosen as the standard for people learning the English
spoken in England. If this was the only thing the course did, a more suitable title would
have been “English Pronunciation”. However, at the comparatively advanced level at which
this course is aimed, it is usual to present this information in the context of a general
theory about speech sounds and how they are used in language; this theoretical context is
called phonetics and phonology. Why is it necessary to learn this theoretical background?
A similar question arises in connection with grammar: at lower levels of study one is
concerned simply with setting out how to form grammatical sentences, but people who
are going to work with the language at an advanced level as teachers or researchers need
the deeper understanding provided by the study of grammatical theory and related areas
of linguistics. The theoretical material in the present course is necessary for anyone who
needs to understand the principles regulating the use of sounds in spoken English.

1.1 H o w th e course is organised

You should keep in mind that this is a course. It is designed to be studied from begin­
ning to end, with the relevant exercises being worked on for each chapter, and it is there­
fore quite different from a reference book. Most readers are expected to be either studying
English at a university, or to be practising English language teachers. You may be working
under the supervision of a teacher, or working through the course individually; you may
be a native speaker of a language that is not English, or a native English-speaker.
Each chapter has additional sections:
• Notes on problems and further reading: this section gives you information on
how to find out more about the subject matter of the chapter.
• Notes for teachers: this gives some ideas that might be helpful to teachers using
the book to teach a class.
• Written exercises: these give you some practical work to do in the area covered
by the chapter. Answers to the exercises are given on pages 200-9.
• Audio exercises: these are recorded on the CDs supplied with this book (also
convertible to mp3 files), and there are places marked in the text when there is a
relevant exercise.

1
2 English Phonetics and Phonology

• Additional exercises: you will find more written and audio exercises, with
answers, on the book’s website.
Only some of the exercises are suitable for native speakers of English. The exercises for
Chapter 1 are mainly aimed at helping you to become familiar with the way the written
and audio exercises work.

1.2 The English Phonetics and Phonology w ebsite

If you have access to the Internet, you can find more information on the website
produced to go with this book. You can find it at www.cambridge.org/elt/peterroach.
Everything on the website is additional material - there is nothing that is essential to
using the book itself, so if you don’t have access to the Internet you should not suffer a
disadvantage.
The website contains the following things:
• Additional exercise material.
• Links to useful websites.
• A discussion site for exchanging opinions and questions about English phonetics
and phonology in the context of the study of the book.
• Recordings of talks given by Peter Roach.
• Other material associated with the book.
• A Glossary giving brief explanations of the terms and concepts found in
phonetics and phonology.

1.3 Phonemes and o th e r aspects o f pronunciation

The nature of phonetics and phonology will be explained as the course progresses, but
one or two basic ideas need to be introduced at this stage. In any language we can identify a
small number of regularly used sounds (vowels and consonants) that we call phonemes;
for example, the vowels in the words ‘pin’ and ‘pen’ are different phonemes, and so are
the consonants at the beginning of the words ‘pet’ and ‘bet’. Because of the notoriously
confusing nature of English spelling, it is particularly important to learn to think of
English pronunciation in terms of phonemes rather than letters of the alphabet; one must
be aware, for example, that the word ‘enough’ begins with the same vowel phoneme as
that at the beginning of ‘inept’ and ends with the same consonant as ‘stuff’. We often use
special symbols to represent speech sounds; with the symbols chosen for this course, the
word ‘enough’ would be written (transcribed) as inAf. The symbols are always printed in
blue type in this book to distinguish them from letters of the alphabet. A list of the sym­
bols is given on pp. x-xi, and the chart of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) on
which the symbols are based is reproduced on p. xii.
The first part of the course is mainly concerned with identifying and describing the pho­
nemes of English. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with vowels and Chapter 4 with some consonants.
After this preliminary contact with the practical business of how some English sounds are
 i Introduction 3

pronounced, Chapter 5 looks at the phoneme and at the use of symbols in a theoretical
way, while the corresponding Audio Unit revises the material of Chapters 2-4. After the
phonemes of English have been introduced, the rest of the course goes on to look at larger
units of speech such as the syllable and at aspects of speech such as stress (which could be
roughly described as the relative strength of a syllable) and intonation (the use of the pitch
of the voice to convey meaning). As an example of stress, consider the difference between
the pronunciation o f‘contract5as a noun (‘they signed a contract') and contract’ as a verb
(£it started to contract'). In the former the stress is on the first syllable, while in the latter it is
on the second syllable. A possible example of intonation would be the different pitch move­
ments on the word welT said as an exclamation and as a question: in the first case the pitch
will usually fall from high to low, while in the second it will rise from low to high.
You will have to learn a number of technical terms in studying the course: you will find
that when they are introduced in order to be defined or explained, they are printed in bold
type. This has already been done in this Introduction in the case of, for example, phoneme,
phonetics and phonology*. Another convention to remember is that when words used as
examples are given in spelling form, they are enclosed in single quotation marks - see for
example ‘pin’, pen’, etc. Double quotation marks are used where quotation marks would
normally be used - that is, for quoting something that someone has said or might say. Words
are sometimes printed in italics to mark them as specially important in a particular context.

1.4 Accents and dialects

Languages have different accents: they are pronounced differently by people from
different geographical places, from different social classes, of different ages and different
educational backgrounds. The word accent is often confused with dialect. We use the word
dialect to refer to a variety of a language which is different from others not just in pronun­
ciation but also in such matters as vocabulary, grammar and word order. Differences of
accent, on the other hand, are pronunciation differences only.
The accent that we concentrate on and use as our model is the one that is most
often recommended for foreign learners studying British English. It has for a long time
been identified by the name Received Pronunciation (usually abbreviated to its initials,
RP), but this name is old-fashioned and misleading: the use of the word “received” to
mean “accepted” or “approved” is nowadays very rare, and the word if used in that sense
seems to imply that other accents would not be acceptable or approved of. Since it is most
familiar as the accent used by most announcers and newsreaders on BBC and British
independent television broadcasting channels, a preferable name is BBC pronunciation.
This should not be taken to mean that the BBC itself imposes an “official” accent -
individual broadcasters all have their own personal characteristics, and an increasing
number of broadcasters with Scottish, Welsh and Irish accents are employed. However, the
accent described here is typical of broadcasters with an English accent, and there is a useful
degree of consistency in the broadcast speech of these speakers.

* You will find these words in the Glossary on the website.

4 English Phonetics and Phonology

This course is not written for people who wish to study American pronunciation,
though we look briefly at American pronunciation in Chapter 20. The pronunciation of
English in North America is different from most accents found in Britain. There are excep­
tions to this - you can find accents in parts of Britain that sound American, and accents in
North America that sound English. But the pronunciation that you are likely to hear from
most Americans does sound noticeably different from BBC pronunciation.
In talking about accents of English, the foreigner should be careful about the differ­
ence between England and Britain; there are many different accents in England, but the
range becomes very much wider if the accents of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
(Scotland and Wales are included in Britain, and together with Northern Ireland form the
United Kingdom) are taken into account. Within the accents of England, the distinction
that is most frequently made by the majority of English people is between northern and
southern. This is a very rough division, and there can be endless argument over where
the boundaries lie, but most people on hearing a pronunciation typical of someone from
Lancashire, Yorkshire or other counties further north would identify it as “Northern”. This
course deals almost entirely with BBC pronunciation. There is no implication that other
accents are inferior or less pleasant-sounding; the reason is simply that BBC is the accent
that has usually been chosen by British teachers to teach to foreign learners, it is the accent
that has been most fully described, and it has been used as the basis for textbooks and
pronunciation dictionaries.
A term which is widely found nowadays is Estuary English, and many people have
been given the impression that this is a new (or newly-discovered) accent of English. In
reality there is no such accent, and the term should be used with care. The idea originates
from the sociolinguistic observation that some people in public life who would previously
have been expected to speak with a BBC (or RP) accent now find it acceptable to speak
with some characteristics of the accents of the London area (the estuary referred to is the
Thames estuary), such as glottal stops, which would in earlier times have caused comment
or disapproval.
If you are a native speaker of English and your accent is different from BBC you
should try, as you work through the course, to note what your main differences are for
purposes of comparison. I am certainly not suggesting that you should try to change your
pronunciation. If you are a learner of English you are recommended to concentrate on
BBC pronunciation initially, though as you work through the course and become familiar
with this you will probably find it an interesting exercise to listen analytically to other
accents of English, to see if you can identify the ways in which they differ from BBC and
even to learn to pronounce some different accents yourself.

Notes on problems and fu rth e r reading

The recommendation to use the name BBC pronunciation rather than RP is not univer­
sally accepted. ‘BBC pronunciation’ is used in recent editions of the Cambridge English
Pronouncing Dictionary (Jones, eds. Roach, Hartman and Setter, 2006), in Trudgill (1999)
 i Introduction 5

and in Ladefoged (2004); for discussion, see the Introduction to the Longman Pronunciation
Dictionary (Wells, 2008), and to the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (Jones, eds.
Roach et al> 2006). In Jones’s original English Pronouncing Dictionary of 1917 the term
used was Public School Pronunciation (PSP). Where I quote other writers who have used the
term RP in discussion of standard accents, I have left the term unchanged. Other writers
have suggested the name GB (General British) as a term preferable to RP: I do not feel this
is satisfactory, since the accent being described belongs to England, and citizens of other
parts of Britain are understandably reluctant to accept that this accent is the standard for
countries such as Scotland and Wales. The BBC has an excellent Pronunciation Research
Unit to advise broadcasters on the pronunciation of difficult words and names, but most
people are not aware that it has no power to make broadcasters use particular pronuncia­
tions: BBC broadcasters only use it on a voluntary basis.
I feel that if we had a completely free choice of model accent for British English it
would be possible to find more suitable ones: Scottish and Irish accents, for example, have a
more straightforward relationship between spelling and sounds than does the BBC accent;
they have simpler vowel systems, and would therefore be easier for most foreign learners to
acquire. However, it seems that the majority of English teachers would be reluctant to learn
to speak in the classroom with a non-English accent, so this is not a practical possibility.
For introductory reading on the choice of English accent, see Brown (1990: 12-13);
Abercrombie (1991: 48-53); Cruttenden (2008: Chapter 7); Collins and Mees (2008: 2-6);
Roach (2004,2005). We will return to the subject of accents of English in Chapter 20.
Much of what has been written on the subject of “Estuary English” has been in minor
or ephemeral publications. However, I would recommend looking at Collins and Mees
(2008: 5-6, 206-8, 268-272); Cruttenden (2008: 87).
A problem area that has received a lot of attention is the choice of symbols for rep­
resenting English phonemes. In the past, many different conventions have been proposed
and students have often been confused by finding that the symbols used in one book are
different from the ones they have learned in another. The symbols used in this book are
in most respects those devised by A. C. Gimson for his Introduction to the Pronunciation
of English, the latest version of which is the revision by Cruttenden (Cruttenden, 2008).
These symbols are now used in almost all modern works on English pronunciation pub­
lished in Britain, and can therefore be looked on as a de facto standard. Although good
arguments can be made for some alternative symbols, the advantages of having a common
set of symbols for pronunciation teaching materials and pronunciation entries in diction­
aries are so great that it would be very regrettable to go back to the confusing diversity of
earlier years. The subject of symbolisation is returned to in Section 5.2 of Chapter 5.

Notes fo r teachers

Pronunciation teaching has not always been popular with teachers and language-teaching
theorists, and in the 1970s and 1980s it was fashionable to treat it as a rather outdated
activity. It was claimed, for example, that it attempted to make learners try to sound like
6 English Phonetics and Phonology

native speakers of Received Pronunciation, that it discouraged them through difficult and
repetitive exercises and that it failed to give importance to communication. A good exam­
ple of this attitude is to be found in Brown and Yule (1983: 26-7). The criticism was
misguided, I believe, and it is encouraging to see that in recent years there has been a sig­
nificant growth of interest in pronunciation teaching and many new publications on the
subject. There are very active groups of pronunciation teachers who meet at TESOL and
IATEFL conferences, and exchange ideas via Internet discussions.
No pronunciation course that I know has ever said that learners must try to speak
with a perfect RP accent. To claim this mixes up models with goals: the model chosen
is BBC (RP), but the goal is normally to develop the learner’s pronunciation sufficiently
to permit effective communication with native speakers. Pronunciation exercises can be
difficult, of course, but if we eliminate everything difficult from language teaching and
learning, we may end up doing very little beyond getting students to play simple com­
munication games. It is, incidentally, quite incorrect to suggest that the classic works on
pronunciation and phonetics teaching concentrated on mechanically perfecting vowels
and consonants: Jones (1956, first published 1909), for example, writes “ ‘Good’ speech
may be defined as a way of speaking which is clearly intelligible to all ordinary people.
‘Bad’ speech is a way of talking which is difficult for most people to understand ... A
person may speak with sounds very different from those of his hearers and yet be clearly
intelligible to all of them, as for instance when a Scotsman or an American addresses an
English audience with clear articulation. Their speech cannot be described as other than
good’ ” (pp. 4-5).
Much has been written recently about English as an International Language, with
a view to defining what is used in common by the millions of people around the world
who use English (Crystal, 2003; Jenkins, 2000). This is a different goal from that of this
book, which concentrates on a specific accent. The discussion of the subject in Cruttenden
(2008: Chapter 13) is recommended as a survey of the main issues, and the concept of an
International English pronunciation is discussed there.
There are many different and well-tried methods of teaching and testing pronuncia­
tion, some of which are used in this book. I do not feel that it is suitable in this book to
go into a detailed analysis of classroom methods, but there are several excellent treatments
of the subject; see, for example, Dalton and Seidlhofer (1995); Celce-Murcia et al (1996)
and Hewings (2004).

W ritte n exercises

The exercises for this chapter are simple ones aimed at making you familiar with the style
of exercises that you will work on in the rest of the course. The answers to the exercises are
given on page 200.
1 Give three different names that have been used for the accent usually used for
teaching the pronunciation of British English.
 i Introduction 7

2 What is the difference between accent and dialect?

3 Which word is used to refer to the relative strength of a syllable?
4 How many sounds (phonemes) do you think there are in the following words?
a) love b) half c) wrist d) shrink e) ought
Now look at the answers on page 200.