The syllable

Speakers certainly have an intuitive notion of how many syllables each word contains: for instance, speakers of English would generally agree that meadow, dangerous and antidisestablishmentarianism (allegedly the longest word in the language) have two, three and twelve syllables respectively. It is less easy for speakers to reflect consciously on the internal structure of syllables, or to decide where one stops and the next starts; but a wide variety of cross-linguistic studies have helped phonologists construct a universal template for the syllable, within which particular languages select certain options. The internal structure of the syllable, and evidence for its subparts from a range of English phonological processes .