English Sound System Research Paper

THE ENGLISH SOUND SYSTEM

INTRODUCTION:

English is a widespread language, spoken all over the world. It is the mother tongue of people of different nationalities, such as: British, American, Canadian, South African, & Australian. It is the second language (language of instruction, used in administration and education) of several countries in Asia and Africa and it is learned as a foreign language in almost every country.

PHONOLOGY:

Phonology is the study of the sound systems in language; studies, being what they are, aim to provide us with methods of analysis. in this case, analysis of spoken utterances which will allow us to represent them on paper in a way that provides us with a deeper insight into how our language works.

The accent that

Phonetics can be divided into articulatory phonetics which studies the way the vocal organs are used to produce speech sounds, there is acoustic phonetics which studies the physical properties of speech sounds, and auditory phonetics which studies the way people perceive speech sounds. In this paper I concentrate mostly on the articulation of speech sounds in the English language, with little mention of their acoustic and auditory characteristics.

TYPES OF ENGLISH SOUNDS:

There are 44 sound that make up the sounds of our English language. This sound are divide in in to two major parts that is vowels and consonants.

VOWELS:

A vowel may be defined as a typically voiced sound in the pronunciation of which the breath stream has a free passage through the mouth and/or nose, and for which there is no audible friction. The 19 of the sounds we refer to as vowel sounds because they use the vowels a, e, i, o, u or make the sounds of our vowels. From the 26 letters in the English alphabet, these five letters are used to make 19 vowel sounds. The other 21 letters are used to make the 25 consonant sounds. The 19 vowel phonemes consist