The phonetic symbol and sound ɜ:

Often, the letters ‘ir’ make the sound / ɜ: /. For example in words such as sir, bird, first, circus, circle and birthday. However, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that other alphabet letters can also represent this sound. Here are some examples:

• The ‘or’ in word and world;
• The ‘ur’ in ‘fur’ turn and occur;
• The ‘er’ in ‘perk’ and ‘term’;
• The ‘ear’ in heard and earn;
• The ‘our’ in ‘courtesy’.

If you’ve been following the last few days of the blog, it will hopefully make sense to now show you all of these words in phonetics:

Word / wɜ:d /

World / wɜ:ld /

Fur / fɜ: /

Turn / tɜ:n /

Occur / ə'kɜ: /

Perk / pɜ:k /

Term / tɜ:m /

Heard / hɜ:d /

Earn / ɜ:n /

Courtesy / 'kɜ:təsi: /

So now, looking at all of these words, you can see where the sound / ɜ: / occurs, regardless of how the words are spelt! You may also notice that despite the use of the letter r, there is no ‘r’ sound in these words (in SSBE). You can read more about the pronunciation of the letter ‘r’ in my first blog after this phonetics series (around end Feb 2023).

You may also have noticed a new symbol ' . This is also incredibly useful, as it is used to show which syllable is stressed. It is always in front of the stressed syllable. Hence the word courtesy / 'kɜ:təsi: / has the stress on the first syllable / kɜ: /.

I hope phonetic symbols are starting to make sense and that you’re already finding them useful. If you’ve got this far and are still following, that’s great! Learning phonetic symbols and their sounds is honestly no easy task. But I hope you will find that it’s well worth it in the long run.

So, tell me -  are you finding phonetics useful? Do you have any comments or questions? If so, please use the comments box below.

See you tomorrow!