Archive for category Speech

In the first part of this step, we made central vowel sounds that were between places familiar to the mouths of GenAm speakers. Today, we’re going to work on a lot of sounds that can be thought of as variations on vowel sounds that English speakers may (or may not) have in their own repertoire of vowels. This should be a playful exploration, so let’s try to have fun as we whizz through these new sounds! This post will feature lots of vowel charts from the IPA, so it may be a bit longer post than usual, because of all the images.

So far we’ve done the Close vowels: [i y] [ɨ ʉ] [ɯ u].

We’re now going to focus on the Remaining Front Vowels:
[ɪ ʏ]
[e ø]
[ɛ œ]
[æ]
[a ɶ]

Each of these pairs of sounds begins with a sound that should be familiar to most native English speakers. By referring to a Lexical Set, we should be able to get at least in the ball park of the standard sound for these vowels.

(Note that, should your personal accent be dramatically different from mine, your mileage may vary quite significantly. You may have to imagine yourself speaking with a Standardized accent in order to get the concept of this experience for yourself.)

Here are the lexical sets associated with the first vowel of each pair:
[ɪ ʏ] kit
[e ø] face (the beginning of this diphthong)
[ɛ œ] dress
[æ] trap (this front vowel doesn’t have a non-English pair)
[a ɶ] price (the beginning of this diphthong, as if you’re saying it with a Southern accent)

Here’s how to experiment with each of these sounds. Start by making the first vowel in the pair, for example kit’s [ɪ] vowel. Keeping your tongue shaped as it is for that vowel, round your lips forward into the sound pair, [ʏ]. Now try saying some kit words with the new vowel: "ship, rid, dim." This should sound like your saying those words with your lips stuck in a "kiss-like" position. Next, try saying those words without their final consonants, trying to focus on the non-English vowel at the end. Finally, drop the initial consonant off the front, and say the new non-English vowel on your own.

You’ll notice that the [æ] vowel doesn’t have a non-English pair. That’s because the International Phonetic Association says that there is no language in the world that uses a rounded equivalent. (That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to make a rounded version of it, though!) Apparently, the [æ] vowel itself is quite rare in the world’s languages, too.

On another note, I found the rounded open front vowel [ɶ] to be quite hard to make — and perhaps so do others: it’s a very rare sound in the world’s languages, appearing in some obscure dialects of Swiss German.

To wrap up the rounded front vowels, try going through all 5 of them (including the [y] sound we’ve already worked on, by anchoring your lips in a rounded position with the first sound and then gradually opening your mouth. It can help to "think" the English vowels you know as you’re making them: [y ʏ ø œ ɶ] while thinking fleece, kit, face, dress, price. I always find that this kind of exploration is much easier if you can keep the pitch the same through the exploration, so that you can hear the vowel change distinctly and not be distracted by the change in "note."

Because this post is longer than I imagined, I am going to stop here for today. If we did all three areas (Front, Central, Back) of the vowel space, this would be a mamoth post. More on this in the next part!

Next: Non-English Sound Exploration Part 3

In the last two steps of this series, Ride the Wave of the Tongue Part 1 and Part 2, we explored the action of the tongue to make vowel sounds that are not part of the English set of vowels. In this step, we'll use the same idea to find other non-English vowels. Not only does exploring non-English vowels challenge your ability to move your tongue, jaw and lips in new, unusual ways, it also makes demands on your ear, your ability to recognize, identify new sounds, and to use auditory feedback to gauge what you're doing with your mouth.(It may be more accurate to say that these are “non-standard” vowels in English, as they can be applied to English words or lexical sets, as part of regional accents that are non-standard, as you will see below.)

In the last step we explored sounds that were made in the same place in the mouth as English vowels, with variations on lip-rounding (losing it in a place where we English speakers normally have rounding [u] → [ɯ], gaining it in a place where we normally lack rounding [i] → [y].) In this step, we'll be explorinɡ a sound that is made in a place in the mouth where no General American or Standard British vowel lies (though there may be a vowel made there for other regional accents of English, like Scots for instance). To review, in the last two steps we were gliding between a front close vowel and a back close vowel, that is, with the tongue "close" to the roof of the mouth, arching forward toward the front, or arching backward toward the back. Now, we're going to try to find a vowel sound in between "front" and "back", in an area phoneticians call "central."

To find the "central" spot, we're going to go back to the gliding-between-front-and-back process and slow it down. If we slow it down enough that we don't jump between the two sounds but truly slide through the potential vowels that lie between the front and back positions, we can stop half-way and find the central position. I find that it is easiest to start this exploration with the lips rounded, as that lip position creates an intense vibration in the mouth and face, and may make it easier to feel your way through the process. So start with your tongue arched back with lips rounded intensely in an "oo" [u] vowel. Now, locking your lips into that shape, very slowly glide forward along the roof of your mouth toward the [y] vowel. Glide slowly back again to your starting place at [u], and then start again. But this time, stop halfway through. This is the central position, and the IPA symbol for this sound is [ʉ]. (This vowel is used in Scots dialect in words in the goose and foot lexical sets.) This vowel is sometimes represented in Scots writings with an alternate spelling, such as "guid" for "good."

We can switch from [ʉ] to our next "new" vowel by merely letting go of the rounding, and spreading the lips. This should make a somewhat back (i.e. central) version of the /i/ vowel. The IPA generally uses the crossbar to represent the centering principle (as in [ʉ]), so naturally the symbol for the central [i] is [ɨ]. This sound is perhaps a little less useful than the barred-u sound, as there are fewer accents that use it. I've seen people use the symbol to describe a central, unrounded version of the goose and foot lexical sets.

Oddly enough, I've appropriated the barred-i symbol for use in the pretty set in teaching IPA to actors. This usage is perhaps not "strictly ballroom," as the sound I often hear in many speakers from a variety of backgrounds is not quite so much central as it is halfway between the fleece and kit sounds, [i] and [ɪ].

In the next step, we'll look at the rest of the non-English vowels by looking at variations in rounding and centralizing the vowels we already know. Should be fun!

Next: Non-English Sound Exploration Part 2