English Accents

Read and listen to the information about these 11 English accents from around the world.

Sample Phonology Analysis

This is dialogue 31 "Weathermen" taken from "People Speaking" by Lewis, J.Windsor.



Bibliography

• Finch, Diana F., and Hector Ortiz Lira. Course in English Phonetics for Spanish Speakers. New York: Heinemann (Txt), 1982. Print.
• Gimson, A. C.. An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. 4th ed. London: Edward Arnold, 1989. Print.
• Lewis, J.Windsor. People Speaking. London: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print.
• Wells, J. C.. Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. 2nd ed. upper saddle river: Pearson Education, 2001. Print.

The IPA-SAM phonetic fonts - Now freely downloadable!

The IPA-SAM phonetic fonts are TrueType® fonts for use on IBM-compatible PCs running Windows. (They also work on Mac OSX.) With them installed, you can display phonetic symbols on the screen and print them out in any size. The IPA-SAM character set includes all the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet as currently recognized by the IPA. There are three typefaces: Doulos (similar to Times), Sophia (san serif) and Manuscript (similar to Courier, monospaced). All are available in regular, bold, italic, and bold italic.
The most useful phonetic symbols are mapped onto the keys of the ordinary keyboard. For example, if you type shift-D you get ð, while shift-C gives you ç; instead of the figure 2 you get ø and instead of the @ symbol you get a schwa. In this way you can immediately access all the symbols you need for the phonemic or broad-phonetic transcription of English, French, German, Spanish and many other languages. All the cardinal vowel symbols, primary and secondary, are here, together with a range of allophonic or general-phonetic symbols and stress marks (glottal stop, tapped r, dark l, r-coloured schwa, voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, palatalization diacritic, syllabicity mark, hacek, right arrow...). These key assignments are based on the SAM-PA recommendations.

The remaining IPA symbols -- numbering more than a hundred -- have been assigned to ANSI numbers in a logical order. They can be accessed by using the computer's numeric keypad while holding down the Alt key. All diacritics are 'floating', i.e. can be attached to any letter. There are also a number of phonetic symbols here that are seen in use from time to time although not (or no longer) recognized by the IPA.

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BBC Learning English - Pronunciation tips

The sounds of English
There is a system of symbols for writing the sounds of English. We have a guide to these symbols and also videos to show how to pronounce each of the sounds.

There are also activities to practise identifiying the difference between certain sounds which may sound similar.

Features of English
Information about different elements of English pronunciation.

There are also interactive and downloadable exercises to help you build your understanding of these areas.

Quizzes
Interactive quizzes to test your knowledge of and help you learn about English pronunciation.

Programmes
Three radio programmes from 2005 on the topic of pronunciation. You can download the full programmes along with the script and audio examples.


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The sounds of spoken Language

This site contains animated libraries of the phonetics sounds of English, German and Spanish. Available for each consonant and vowel is an animated articulatory diagram, a step-by-step decription, and video-audio of the sound spoken in context. It is intended for students of phonetics, linguistics and foreign language.


Click on the image to have a description of the different parts of the articulatory diagram.
Do you want to enlarge the interactive diagram of the articulatory anatomy?
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Type IPA phonetic symbols online!!

This page allows you to easily type phonetic transcriptions of English words in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). You can edit your text in the box and then copy it to your e-mail application, word processor, etc.

If you can't see phonetic symbols on this page, you must install a Unicode font with IPA symbols.

Warning: The full set of characters is available only in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher for Windows.

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The editor allows you to type pronunciations of English words as they appear in English dictionaries.

• After you copy text from the above box and paste it into your word processor or e-mail message, make sure you choose a Unicode font with IPA symbols in your word processor or e-mail application. Otherwise, phonetic symbols will not display correctly.
• A few rarely used symbols, such as the "flap t" symbol (the letter t with a small "v" underneath) or the syllabic l and n (l or n with a small vertical line underneath) are missing because they are not rendered correctly by presently available browsers.
• The goal of the editor is to provide a way to enter IPA-based phonemic transcriptions, therefore more arcane symbols used in "narrow" transcriptions are not included.
• The underline can be used as an alternative to the apostrophe (') to mark the stressed syllable.
• Ctrl+Z is used to type ʒ. To Undo, right-click in the text box and choose "Undo".
• For help with transcribing, refer to Antimoon's table with IPA phonetic symbols, example words, and recordings (make sure you read the footnotes).
• In addition to the symbols shown in the table, the editor provides two extra symbols:
  • The ɪ (italicized ɪ) can be used to indicate that either ɪ or ə can be pronounced, as in possible.
  • The ʊ (italicized ʊ) can be used to indicate that either ʊ or ə can be pronounced, as in education.

  You can also italicize any part of the text by clicking the appropriate button.

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