In the last blog, we looked at the sound / æ /, found in words such as ‘cat’ and ‘bat’. Today we’re going to focus on the sound made in words such as ‘cut’ and ‘but’, which is written as / ʌ /.
The / ʌ / sound is often confused with / æ /. However, / ʌ / is produced by dropping your jaw and making the sound around the middle of your mouth. Compare how / ʌ / and /æ / look when they’re said:
(Images reproduced from BBCLearningEnglish)
Also compare how they're written in letters and in phonetic symbols:
Cut / kʌt / Cat / kæt /
But / bʌt / Bat / bæt /
The / ʌ / symbol is also very useful because there are many words in SSBE where you would not expect there to be an / ʌ / sound at all. For example, the word 'love' is pronounced as / lʌv / and 'glove' as / glʌv /. Other examples of words where the letter 'O' is pronounced as / ʌ / include 'company', 'Monday', 'some' and 'sometimes'. You can find out more about these and other such words here.
This is further explained (because you can hear the sound, hear word examples and watch how the sound is made!) in the following BBC video:
English Pronunciation – Short Vowel - /ʌ/ - ‘strut’, ‘mud’ & ‘love’ - YouTube
Now that we’ve compared these two sounds, can you hear the difference between / ʌ / and /æ /? And can you clearly say words such as ‘bat’ and ‘but’ one after the other, making it clear which word you want to say? Is one of them easier to hear or pronounce than the other? Please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments section below. I love hearing from language learners about their experiences, and I’m sure other language learners would be interested to hear about your experiences too!
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