The vowels offer the greatest problem, so we will start there. The vowel system of English is relatively large. Latin had five vowels, hence the five vowel letters in our Roman alphabet; a modern form of Latin, Spanish, has also only 5, Italian has 7, but English has a good twenty. Listen to the following English names and note that each has a different vowel sound: Jean, Jim, Fred, Pat, Mark, John, George, Sue, Chuck, Bert, Jane, Joe, Di, Joy, Ian, Claire. That’s 16 different vowel sounds already; then add to those, the vowel sound in words like look, loud, lure, and at the end of the word letter, and there are 20. We could also add others like the vowel sound at the end of the word coffee. And so the relatively large size of the vowel system of English can begin to be appreciated. All these different vowel sounds can be used to distinguish ordinary words too, such as peat, pit, pet, pat, part, pot, port, put, putt, pert, pout ….. and thus they have a contrastive function. By virtue of this contrastive function, we can be sure that all these vowel sounds are distinct items, or units, in the phonology of English – that is, in English pronunciation as a system. And because they are distinct, linguists need to have a separate symbol for each of them.

The phonetics of the vowel sounds – that is, the way they are pronounced – help us to classify them all into groups. There are three important groupings: the short vowels, the long vowels, and the weak vowels. Each will be dealt with in turn, beginning with the 6 short vowels.