What will be covered

Because the English-speaking world contains so many diverse communities, scattered over a wide geographical area with different historical and cultural backgrounds, our basic stance is that it is not really possible to describe the phonetics of ‘English’ as such. Even in the British Isles, there is huge variability in the way that English sounds. Traditionally, British textbooks on English phonetics concentrate on Received Pronunciation (RP), a variety of English which traditionally has had high social status, but is spoken nowadays by few people. So we explore the phonetic potential of the vocal tract, and illustrate it from English; but also you, the reader, are encouraged to reflect on what is true for you and your community. Despite its being one of the most written-about languages, there are still many discoveries to make about English, and perhaps you will make one of them.

In making our observations, we will look at the way that sounds are articulated, and think about how the articulations are coordinated with one another in time. We will look at how the sounds of English can be represented using the Phonetic Alphabet of the International Phonetic Association. We will look a little at acoustic representations so that we can see speech in a different way; and we will look at speech in a number of different settings, including carefully produced tokens of words and conversational speech.