The vowels “A” and “I” are also English words by themselves.For example, the in cool sounds different than the in city. If we take a closer look at the pronunciation of the English alphabet, it’s also important to note that we can make a lot more than 26 sounds with these letters - in fact, there are more than 40 different ones! Furthermore, where they appear in the word will alter their pronunciation. However, the differences between American and British English go beyond the pronunciation of the ABCs. In American English, the letter is pronounced like /ziː/ (zee), whereas in British English it’s pronounced as /zɛd/ (zed). In Standard American English, that is usually pronounced.Īnother difference becomes clear with the letter “Z”. When the letter comes before a consonant or at the end of a word, then most of the time it’s not pronounced in standard British English (BE): In contrast, the pronunciation in standard British English is not rhotic, because the is not always pronounced out loud. In linguistics this is called “rhoticity”. As a rule, an American will pronounce that letter. Let’s look at a few examples more closely in order to clarify those difference:Ī central difference is apparent in the pronuncation of the letter “R”. British PronunciationĪs you’ve already seen in the table, the British and American pronunciations of certain letters (O, Q, R, Y) are different. The English alphabet and its pronunciation American Vs. In the table, you can also see the differences between the American and British pronunciations. When you’re done listening, try to pronounce the alphabet yourself, and listen to it again in case you’re not quite sure about any of the letters. You’ll hear them from a native British English speaker who works for Babbel and has recorded them for you. As such, it’s currently the most widely used pronunciation system in the world.īefore you look at the table, listen once to how the single letters in the English alphabet are pronounced. The IPA represents a collection of characters that can be used to describe almost all languages. As such, the following table shows not just the signification, but also the current pronunciation of the English alphabet according to the IPA ( International Phonetic Alphabet). And that’s not all: Within English itself, there are also differences between the British and American pronunciation. Pronouncing The English AlphabetĪlthough the letters are identical to German and many other Latin-script languages, pronunciation of the English alphabet is…different. Unlike many other languages, English doesn’t tend to have many accent marks (or diacritics). Just like in German, French or Spanish, the English alphabet contains two sets of characters, uppercase letters and lowercase letters. Back then, the so-called ampersand (“&”) counted as the 27th letter of the alphabet. Today the alphabet consists of 21 consonants and five vowels (a, e, i, o, u). However, until the 1830s there were actually 27. Let’s do it! The Alphabet In EnglishĪgain, the English alphabet is based on Latin script and today includes 26 characters. So, reason enough to give the English alphabet a closer look. The alphabet shows you the building blocks of a language, and knowing about the single letters and their pronunciation will help to improve your spelling and your overall understanding. There are good reasons to take a closer look at the alphabet if you’d like to learn English. Because of this, it’s easy for speakers of those languages to assume this aspect of the language is something they can skip. The English alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, just like German, French, Spanish and a number of others.
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