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2.9: 2.4- IPA symbols and speech sounds

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    The following tables give you some sample words so you can start to learn which IPA symbols correspond to which speech sounds. In these tables, the portion of the English word that makes the relevant sound is indicated in boldface type, but remember that English spelling is not always consistent, and your pronunciation of a word might be a little different from someone else’s. These examples are drawn from the pronunciation of mainstream Canadian English. To hear an audio-recording of the sound for each IPA symbol, consult the consonant, vowel, and diphthong charts available here.

    The sounds are categorized here according to how they’re produced. You’ll learn more about these categories in units 2.6, 2.7 and 3.2.

    Stops

    [p] peach, apple, cap
    [b] bill, above, rib
    [t] tall, internal, light
    [d] dill, adore, kid
    [k] cave, ticket, luck
    [ɡ] give, baggage, dig

    Fricatives

    [f] phone, raffle, leaf
    [v] video, lively, love
    [θ] thin, author, bath
    [ð] there, leather, breathe
    [s] celery, passing, bus
    [z] zebra, deposit, shoes
    [ʃ] shell, ocean, rush
    [ʒ] genre, measure, rouge
    [h] hill, ahead

    Affricates

    [tʃ] chip, achieve, ditch
    [dʒ] jump, adjoin, bridge

    Nasals

    [m] mill, hammer, broom
    [n] nickel, sunny, spoon
    [ŋ] singer, wrong

    Approximants

    [l] lamb, silly, fall
    [ɹ] robot, furry, star
    [j] yellow, royal
    [w] winter, flower

    Flap

    [ɾ] butter, pedal (only between vowels when the second syllable is unstressed)

    Front Vowels

    [i] see, neat, piece
    [ɪ] pin, bit, lick
    [e] say, place, rain
    (in spoken Canadian English, [e] becomes [eɪ])
    [ɛ] ten, said, bread
    [æ] mad, cat, fan
    [a] far, start

    Back Vowels

    [u] pool, blue
    [ʊ] look, good, bush
    [o] throw, hole, toe
    (in spoken Canadian English, [o] becomes [oʊ])
    [ʌ] bus, mud, lunch
    [ɔ] store, more, corn
    [ɑ] dog, ball, father

    Central Vowels

    [ə] believe, cinnamon, surround
    (in an unstressed syllable)
    [ɨ] roses, wanted
    (in an unstressed syllable that is a suffix)
    [ɚ] weather, editor
    (in an unstressed syllable with an r-quality)
    [ɝ] bird, fur
    (in a stressed syllable with an r-quality)

    Diphthongs

    [aɪ] fly, lie, smile
    [aʊ] now, frown, loud
    [ɔɪ] boy, spoil, noise
    [ju] cue, few

    This page titled 2.9: 2.4- IPA symbols and speech sounds is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Catherine Anderson (eCampusOntario) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.