When speaking, speakers break down the continuous stream of sounds into smaller units – so-called intonation phrases. Within these intonation phrases, we find a rhythmic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables, similar to the word stress that we already saw in individual words. This chapter investigates which principles speakers follow when rhythmically grouping the speech flow. Like word stress, the rhythmic structure of utterances does not distinguish meaning in English, or it only does so in a very limited way. However, it does serve important linguistic functions. Additionally, speakers pronounce intonation phrases with specific melodic patterns. Intonation will be dealt with in detail in the subsequent chapter. Rhythm and intonation constitute the suprasegmental level. Even though the suprasegmental level plays a secondary role in the language system of English, rhythm and intonation serve several crucial functions in communicative situations.

In this chapter, we are going to ask one of the most important questions that phonology is concerned with: when are two phonetically different sounds considered variations of the same sound within the system of a language and when are they two distinct speech sounds? Instead of speech sounds, we are going to introduce the terms ‘phonemes’ and ‘allophones’ and use these from hereon. We will learn how phonemes and allophones differ in their function, their occurrence within language (called ‘distribution‘) as well as their phonetic properties. Finally, we can now understand the different interests that the two sister-sciences phonetics and phonology pursue.

Properties of speech sounds can be measured. Speech recognition systems, such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, make use of the fact that each class of sounds has its own characteristics. In this chapter, we are going to look at the most basic acoustic characteristics of speech, starting with loudness and pitch. Moreover, you will learn how you can make easy measurements with a free software that many phoneticians also use.

In this chapter, you will discover that sound-changing processes are also at work in connected speech that impact the phoneme sequence. Like allophonic variation, many of these will occur in faster speech and not in careful pronunciation, and they are also speaker-dependent. Over time, though, they may alter the pronunciation of a word, so that many of today’s pronunciations are the result of such phonological processes that occurred in the past, and current frequently occurring phonological processes will lead to the standard pronunciation of tomorrow.

In this chapter, we will look at the writing system, why the Latin alphabet used by English and many other languages is not ideal, as it does not provide letters for all sounds, and what tools phoneticians have at their disposal to accurately write down the pronunciation of words. This textbook takes a hands-on approach. Therefore, in this chapter, you will also be introduced to a free software used by many phoneticians. With this, you can listen to stretches of speech and annotate them. In a later chapter, you will also learn how to perform simple measurements with it. Finally, just like there is standard English grammar and vocabulary, there are also two main pronunciation standards for English, which will be introduced here.

This chapter introduces diphthongs as well as other English vowels that only occur in specific positions. Unlike for monophthongs, where the tongue remains in a steady position, for diphthongs the tongue performs a gliding movement during articulation. Diphthongs are an integral part of the English vowel system. Sometimes diphthongs are indicated in the spelling by a digraph, such as in they. At other times, however, they are represented by a single vowel letter, as in gave. Two classes of vowels deserve special attention, as they only occur in specific positions. Pre-rhotic vowels only occur when in spelling the vowel is followed by ‹r›. Weak vowels, on the other hand, only appear in unstressed syllables, so in syllables that are not accentuated. Finally, the chapter looks at letter-to-sound correspondences. These are more intricate, as the thirteen vowel qualities found in English can only be written with the five vowel letters of the Latin alphabet. However, they are also more regular than might be assumed.

This chapter focuses on other accents of English around the globe. As describing all varieties of English would go far beyond the scope of a single chapter and also as this is still a phonetics textbook, the aim of this chapter is rather to set you up for further studies in this field, and we are going to do so the other way round than you might expect: instead of going through different accents and describing features of their pronunciation, we are going to focus on different phonetic phenomena that you may encounter and for each one give examples of accents in which they can be observed.

Vowels are different from consonants in that the lower articulators are much farther away from the upper articulators. Vowels do not differ from one another considerably in the way they are produced, so there is no straightforward classification into several manners of articulation like for consonants. This chapter introduces the system of cardinal vowels that helps us describe different language-independent vowel qualities that can be used to classify the vowels of any language. Vowels can be subdivided into monophthongs, where the tongue remains in one stable position, and diphthongs, where the tongue performs a gliding movement during articulation. Considering the vowels of English, we focus on monophthongs in this chapter. At this point, IPA symbols become a necessity: there are many more vowels than you may initially think and there is no way to represent them in a satisfactory way orthographically.

The smallest building blocks of languages, if we set sign languages apart, are sounds. In this chapter, you are going to discover which processes are necessary to produce speech sounds. We are going to learn about the speech organs and how they function. The chapter focuses on the anatomy of the larynx and the oral cavity. This knowledge about our anatomy is helpful when trying to understand how consonants and vowels are produced.

In this chapter, we are going to discover that in each word with two or more syllables one syllable stands out from the rest. It differs in pitch, intensity or length or is marked in some other way, so we perceive this syllable as being stressed or accentuated. This phenomenon is called ‘word stress’. Word stress is an integral and essential part of the pronunciation of English words. In your transcriptions, you will have noticed that unstressed syllables often do not contain a full vowel, but that the vowel is shortened or reduced to schwa. Which syllable is stressed hence has an impact on the segmental structure of the word. Stressing another syllable may alter the pronunciation of a word in a way that makes it incomprehensible. In this chapter, we will investigate the nature of word stress in English as well as in other languages. We are going to see cases where stress placement creates a difference in meaning. A look at foreign suffixes helps to explain why related words, such as courage and courageous, may differ greatly in pronunciation.

The syllable is a unit in-between the phoneme and the word. It minimally consists of one phoneme, but usually is consists of more. While even preschool children have no trouble telling you how many syllables a word contains and can clap the syllable structure, we are going to investigate why a word has as many syllables as it does. We will discover the internal structure of syllables and which phonemes combine with one another into syllables and which do not. Finally, we will consider some principles that help us syllabify words and split them into syllables.