American English Pronunciation and Phonetics

Since English is not a phonetic language there is not always a one-on-one relationship between the letters in the English alphabet and spoken sounds. This can cause problems when you want to pronounce English words.

Correct pronunciation can sometimes be a problem even for native speakers. Often native speakers will be familiar with a word--they will know its meaning and how to spell it--but will not know how to pronounce it unless they consult a dictionary or someone tells them how to pronounce it.

The 26 letters in the English (Roman) alphabet make many different sounds in spoken American English. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, American English has 25 consonant sounds and up to 18 vowel sounds (the exact number of sounds may vary from region to region).

Let's look at some sound-spelling situations that are frequently confusing to students who are learning to speak English. We'll start with the letter "s".

When you are speaking English the letter "s" can represent several different sounds depending on its location in a word.

In the word same the "s" sounds like /s/.
In the word leisure the "s" sounds like /zh/.
In the word design the "s" sounds like /z/.

The fact that "s" has three sounds can be very confusing when you are learning to speak English from a written text!

Let's look at some English words that begin with the consonant "c".

• city
• century
• cat
• cut
• cot

The letter "c" in the words city and century sound like /s/. The letter "c" in the words cat and cut and cot sound like /k/.

Look carefully at the spelling of the five words above. Can you figure out the rule or pattern used to determine the spoken sound of the letter "c"?

The rule is that 'c' sounds like /s/ when it falls before the vowels "i" and "e".
It sounds like the /k/ when it falls before the vowels "a", "o" and "u".

You can see from the examples above that the position of a consonant within a word can change the way it sounds. This happens frequently when you are pronouncing English.

Since English is not phonetic you will need to learn some of these sound/spelling patterns you need to learn if you want to improve your American English pronunciation.