English Vowels

As discussed earlier, vowels are the opposite of consonants in that they are unrestricted voiced sounds. While there are voiced and voiceless consonants, all vowels are voiced; a voiceless vowel should be silent, or at most whispered. By moving the tongue, the lips, and, to a lesser degree, the soft palate and the pharynx, the vowels are shaped by changing the resonance characteristics of the space above the vibrating vocal folds. You might imagine it somewhat like having a trumpet mouthpiece and changing the trumpet to a coronet, a flugel-horn, a bugle, French horn, a trombone, or a tuba. Each shape creates a distinctive resonance characteristic by widening or narrowing certain parts of the oral cavity.

However, there are no concrete steps in our mouths, so it’s more like the trombone than any of the other brass instruments mentioned above—we adjust our mouth shapes by ear, based on the sound we have heard all our lives. To play with these elements of the vocal tract, aka the “pink trombone”, see the voice synthesis webabb Pink Trombone at https://dood.al/pinktrombone/ .

If we begin to speak another language, we struggle to approximate its vowels, as that language’s vowels are shaped differently than ours. If we move from a place where English is spoken with one accent to another place with a different accent, we might also experience this. As we explore each vowel sound, realize that your version is personal, and reflects your own idiosyncrasies that come from the environment in which you speak, or in which you learned to speak.

I encourage you to learn the vowel symbol and its sound simultaneously. As you draw the symbol, you should repeat over and over the symbol’s name, found underneath the symbol in the upper left-hand corner of each page.

A note to those who speak other romance languages, like Italian, Spanish, or French: the sounds that many of the vowels make is the often the same as the vowel names in these foreign languages. Because the creators of the ipa were European men at the end of the nineteenth century, it made the most sense to them to use those symbols in that way. For example, the letter “i” in these languages is pronounced like the vowel at the end of bee, so the symbol of the ipa is [i] for that sound. Similarly, the ipa sounds for the symbols [a, e, o, u] are essentially the same as the names of those letters in French and Italian.

Checked, Free and Reduced Vowels

Generally speaking, there are two main types of vowels in the stressed syllables of English. These go by a number of different names used by linguists, but the names I prefer are checked and free. Checked vowels must always be “held in check” by a following consonant, and, as a result, they are always quite short. For example, here are some words with checked vowels: pit, bed, act, push, luck, stop. If we chop the final consonant sounds off those words, we’re left with half-words, not something that could function as a word on its own. If I start to say “Oh, Fu…” and cut myself off at that point, I don’t need to worry that “fu” means anything other than a “swearus interruptus.” Free vowels, on the other hand, can exist without a following consonant, and can range in length from long to short, depending on whether there is no final consonant, whether a final consonant is voiced, or whether its voiceless. Examples of words with free vowels, without a following consonant, include: see=sea, spa, law, owe, shoe, fur; with a final consonant: seat, mirage, lawn, goat, shoot, firm. If you compare sea with seat, you should notice that generally speaking, sea is longer than seat. Rather than say that Free vowels are long vowels, I like to say that they have the potential for length, as, of course, you can always force yourself to say them rapidly! However, many short, checked vowels historically align with free long vowels, as in rid – read, took – tuque, red – raid, and here you can hear the subtle length differences between the checked and free vowels even in exactly the same environments.

There is a third kind of vowel that appear in unstressed syllables, and that’s a reduced vowel, sometimes called a “weak vowel”. Of course, there are unstressed syllables whose vowels are fully articulated, quieter versions of their stressed counterpart, so the unstressed <e> in the noun CONtent has the same value as the stressed one in the adjective conTENT. These reduced vowels that I’m talking about are, in fact, the most common vowels in the English language. Due to the fact that syllables, and less important words, are de-emphasized in order to make operative, key, content words pop in a sentence, English utilizes a few short, easy to form vowels to help reduce these words when they are unstressed, mostly commonly a weak “uh” sound known as “schwa”.

All words have a dictionary form, that we have recorded in our minds as the “true” pronunciation of the word, where its syllables are fully realized. However, we also have a set of rules that we apply on the fly to reduce the unstressed syllables appropriately given the word’s context in the utterance we’re saying. For example, the verb can, when fully stressed, would be said and transcribed as [ˈkæn], such as in the phrase, yes I can. But most of the time when we speak we donʼt stress this word. Think of the phrase, I can do it. Unless you’re making a point to stress the word can, because you’re negating the idea that you can’t do it, normally you would reduce the word can. In which case, the vowel would change, or, when speaking really rapidly, it might disappear altogether, so you might pronounce it as [kn̩]. Spellings like wanna, gotta, hafta, are all evidence of our reduction of unimportant, unstressed syllables.  Words that can change in this way have what we call a strong form (s.f.), and a weak form (w.f.). Many high frequency words have multiple weak forms, with several layers of reduction added successively.

Lexical Sets

Talking about vowels in words, especially when trying to describe different accents is challenging, as there are so many spelling conventions associated with each vowel sound, and vowel sounds change, depending on the accent in question. However, within any one given accent, a group of words will share a consistent vowel sound, whose vowel quality—the precise way a particular vowel is pronounced—will be fairly consistent across the group. In the past, phoneticians and phonologists discussed the vowels in these groups of words by using broad, phonemic transcription, writing the ipa symbols between slashes, e.g. the vowel in the word slop is /ɒ/, whether you pronounce it with [ɒ], [ɑ] or [a]. John Wells, when writing his definitive book The Accents of English, came up with a series of words to label these word groups, which he named lexical sets, and the idea caught on. So instead of going back and forth between phonemic transcription and narrow, phonetic transcription—that is, comparing the concept of the vowel with the actual utterance that people use, like this /ɒ/ → [ɑ]—he merely said “this group of words sounds like this” by writing the lexical set key word, followed by a phonetic transcription, like this: lot → [ɑ]. In this way, it doesn’t matter how I might normally say lot; in this accent, it’s pronounced in this way.

As we learn each vowel symbol, I will introduce the lexical set word that is typically associated with that symbol in General Canadian speech. I will also give variants, of where the sound appears in other lexical sets, once we’ve learned all the symbols. In the past 20 years, lexical sets have become a standard way of discussing vowels in accent training for actors, so memorizing them is a helpful step in preparing to learn accents.

Note that Lexical Set keywords are always typeset in small caps, that is capital letters that are the height of lowercase letters. When typing in email or any other form of written communication where it is impossible to use small caps, people will generally just use upper case letters.

If you want to learn a lot more about Lexical Sets, please see my other eBook available in Pressbooks format, Lexical Sets for Actors. Throughout the chapters on vowels, I’ll be linking to the lexical sets material from that book for your reference, as vowel sounds can be applied to many sets. It’s important to not only grasp how a vowel sound works in your accent or in a mainstream accent, but how it might operate in all accents of the world.