The vowels we have looked at so far have been ‘monophthongs’ – i.e. one vowel sound.
Today we’re starting to look at ‘diphthongs’. This is a vowel sound during which your tongue or other mouth parts slide from one vowel to another. Sometimes you can hear the slide between the two sounds fairly obviously, other times it can almost sound like one vowel.
So let’s start with these things called diphthongs. First of all, here are all the English language diphthongs together:
(This image part of the Interactive Phonemic Chart | Pronunciation | EnglishClub.)
First on the list is the sound / ɪə /. This is found in words such as here, hear, we’re, dear and beer:
Here = / hɪə /
Hear = / hɪə /
We’re = / wɪə /
Dear = / dɪə /
Beer / bɪə /
Once again, we can see a variety of spellings for this sound, but only one phonetic symbol. You can’t see how to pronounce the words from the spellings, but once you know the phonetic symbols you can see how to pronounce the word.
An important note: In my previous blogs about phonetics, I have mentioned that you can go to websites such as Google Translate, Wordreference, toPhonetics.com and countless others to hear how a word sounds and also sometimes to see how it is written in phonetic symbols. I thoroughly recommend that you do this if you want to be sure of the pronunciation of any word – or otherwise get a ‘mother-tongue’ speaker to pronounce it.
Having said all of this, please remember that your accent does not have to be perfect – in fact there is no such thing as ‘perfect’. In any case, there are many different regional and country accents in the English language, and all are as good as each other. So don’t aim for perfection, just aim for being understood well!
Tomorrow is another day, another diphthong…
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