In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and [b], pronounced with the lips; and [d], pronounced with the front of the tongue; and [g], pronounced with the back of the tongue;, pronounced throughout the vocal tract;, [v], and, pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and, which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Most consonants are pulmonic, using air pressure from the lungs to generate a sound. Very few natural languages are non-pulmonic, making use of ejectives, implosives, and clicks. Contrasting with consonants are vowels.
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this massive vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels altered. Some consonant sounds also changed, specifically becoming silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is occasionally used to include these consonantal changes.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.
A diphthong, also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most varieties of English, the phrase "no highway cowboy" has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable.
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a nucleus with optional sounds before or after that nucleus. In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.
Kyrgyz is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia. Kyrgyz is the official language of Kyrgyzstan and a significant minority language in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China and in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan. There is a very high level of mutual intelligibility between Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and Altay. A dialect of Kyrgyz known as Pamiri Kyrgyz is spoken in north-eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Kyrgyz is also spoken by many ethnic Kyrgyz through the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Turkey, parts of northern Pakistan, and Russia.
Estuary English is an English accent, continuum of accents, or continuum of accent features associated with the area along the River Thames and its estuary, including London, since the late 20th century. Phonetician John C. Wells proposed a definition of Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England". He views Estuary English as an emerging standard accent of England, while also acknowledging that it is a social construct rather than a technically well-defined linguistic phenomenon. He describes it as "intermediate" between the 20th-century higher-class non-regional standard accent, Received Pronunciation (RP), and the 20th-century lower-class local London accent, Cockney. There is much debate among linguists as to where Cockney and RP end and where Estuary English begins, or whether Estuary English is even a single cohesive accent.
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut is a system of apophony in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
A mora is a smallest unit of timing, equal to or shorter than a syllable, that theoretically or perceptually exists in some spoken languages in which phonetic length matters significantly. For example, in the Japanese language, the name of the city Ōsaka (おおさか) consists of three syllables (O-sa-ka) but four morae, since the first syllable, Ō, is pronounced with a long vowel. Thus, a short vowel contains one mora and is called monomoraic, while a long vowel contains two and is called bimoraic. Extra-long syllables with three morae (trimoraic) are relatively rare. Such metrics based on syllables are also referred to as syllable weight. In Japanese, certain consonants also stand on their own as individual morae and thus are monomoraic.
Palauan is a Malayo-Polynesian language native to the Republic of Palau, where it is one of the two official languages, alongside English. It is widely used in day-to-day life in the country. Palauan is not closely related to other Malayo-Polynesian languages and its exact classification within the branch is unclear.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
The Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) is the official system for rendering Thai words in the Latin alphabet. It was published by the Royal Institute of Thailand in early 1917, when Thailand was called Siam.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages, some Finno-Ugric languages, Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan, and Xhosa. Some languages in the past likely had the distinction even though their descendants do not, with an example being Latin and its descendent Romance languages.
In phonology, tenseness or tensing is, most broadly, the pronunciation of a sound with greater muscular effort or constriction than is typical. More specifically, tenseness is the pronunciation of a vowel with less centralization, longer duration, and narrower mouth width compared with another vowel. The opposite quality to tenseness is known as laxness or laxing: the pronunciation of a vowel with relatively more centralization, shorter duration, and more widening.
California English is the collection of English dialects native to California, largely classified under Western American English. Most Californians speak with a General American accent; alternatively viewed, possibly due to unconscious linguistic prestige, California accents may themselves be serving as a baseline to define the accents that are perceived as "General American". In fact, several vowel features first reported in the 1980s in urban coastal California—including the California Vowel Shift—are becoming common among younger generations across the nation, according to 21st century research.
In historical linguistics, metaphony is a class of sound change in which one vowel in a word is influenced by another in a process of assimilation. The sound change is normally "long-distance" in that the vowel triggering the change may be separated from the affected vowel by several consonants, or sometimes even by several syllables.
In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions, so fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions of a word.
Australian English (AuE) is a non-rhotic variety of English spoken by most native-born Australians. Phonologically, it is one of the most regionally homogeneous language varieties in the world. Australian English is notable for vowel length contrasts which are absent from many English dialects.
The phonology of the Ojibwe language varies from dialect to dialect, but all varieties share common features. Ojibwe is an indigenous language of the Algonquian language family spoken in Canada and the United States in the areas surrounding the Great Lakes, and westward onto the northern plains in both countries, as well as in northeastern Ontario and northwestern Quebec. The article on Ojibwe dialects discusses linguistic variation in more detail, and contains links to separate articles on each dialect. There is no standard language and no dialect that is accepted as representing a standard. Ojibwe words in this article are written in the practical orthography commonly known as the Double vowel system.