Fun Easy English: American English PronunciationHowie Hayman -english-pronunciation.htmAs set of lessons, including video clips, focusing on forty-four sounds of English. The general site is designed to provide free information and resources for students and teachers.
Antimoon Perfect Pronunciation
The Vowel MachineJohn Maidment, Department of Phonetics & Linguistics, University College London eptotd/vm/vowelmachine/vowelmachine.htmMultiple-choice listening exercise for isolated words, focusing on distinguishing vowel sounds. Uses British pronunciation.
English Pronunciationabout.com _English_Pronunciation_and_Conversation_Skills.htmCovers both British and American pronunciation. Good resources if you can put up with the advertisements.
Student Learning Centre, Flinders University, Australia -students/slc/whatweoffer/pronunciation.cfmA list of links to WWW resources especially chosen for students. Includes a link to audio files of various accents of English, male and female versions.
Resources for TeachersCommon Mistakes in English by Language BackgroundTed Power, English Language Learning and Teaching ted.power/phono.htmlCommon pronunciation errors for learners of English from 20 different language backgrounds.
Hundreds of lessons for speaking (including common phrases for conversation and role-play), grammar, vocabulary, idioms, pronunciation, reading, writing. Most lessons include audio. Hundreds of quizzes, good links to other ESOL websites, and textbook recommendations. www.eslgold.com
The English Phrase Finder is an online catalog of the meanings and origins of over 2,000 English phrases and sayings. You can either browse via an A-Z index or use their search engine. A nice resource for anyone studying how different English phrases originated. The Earth Calendar site is a good resource for world holidays and calendars other than ours. The easy-reading news stories on this site are similar to the CNN site and include supplemental interactive activities. Choose a category from the menu at the top of the screen, then choose a story. This ESL website includes and Encarta dictionary where you can click to hear pronunciations. For a wealth of information, resources, interactive activities at every level, check out this site: -chang.com/
The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary -- The Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary is a machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English that contains over 125,000 words and their transcriptions.Vowels andDiphthongs of American and British English -- (Uses AIF files and RealAudio)A sleek chart of English and British vowels and diphthongs. Clickona phonetic symbol to access and AIF audio file of the phoneme. An efficientreference chart and a helpful way of looking at the elusive Americancentral vowel before /r/.
BetterAccent -- Personal Interactive Pronunciation Coach Speak clearly, effectively and be easily understood!, Practice your American English Pronunciation!, Focus on intonation, stress and rhythm!, See and hear your pronunciation!, Identify, understand and correct your pronunciation errors!, Use the power of breakthrough speech analysis technology!Pizzaz!...TongueTwisters, by Leslie Opp-Beckman - Create, illustrate and manipulate tonguetwisters. Includes links to the main tongue twister databases. Severalstimulating activities to bring tongue twisters into the classroom.EnglishPronunciation Test - And internet incarnation of the 'English is toughstuff' poem familiar to many teachers of English pronunciation. Theunidentified author promises, "Once you've learned to correctly pronounceevery word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of thenative English speakers in the world."The CMU PronouncingDictionary - (Transcriptions; for developers) The Carnegie MellonUniversity Pronouncing Dictionary is a machine-readable pronunciationdictionary for North American English that contains over 100,000 words andtheir transcriptions. This format is particularly useful for speechrecognition and synthesis. Because IPA is not the standard here, this siteis really for the serious developer.AmericanAccent Training ( )-- includes interesting links to information about Intonation(speech music), Liaisons(word connection), Pronunciationthe sounds of American English
English phonology is the study of the phonology (i.e. the sound system) of the English language. Like all languages, spoken English has wide variation in its pronunciation both diachronically and synchronically from dialect to dialect. This variation is especially salient in English, because the language is spoken over such a wide territory, being the predominant language in Australia, Canada, the Commonwealth Caribbean, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States in addition to being spoken as a first or second language by people in countries on every continent, and notably in South Africa and India. In general the regional dialects of English are mutually intelligible.
* In General American, /tr/ and /dr/ tend to affricate, so that tree resembles "chree", and dream "jream".[4][5][6] This may be transcribed as [tʃr] and [dʒr] respectively, but the pronunciation varies and may, for example, be closer to [tʂ] and [dʐ][7] or with a fricative release similar in quality to the rhotic, ie. [tɹ̝̊ɹ̥], [dɹ̝ɹ], or [ʈʂɻ], [ɖʐɻ].
Note: A few onsets occur infrequently making it uncertain whether they are native pronunciations or merely non-assimilated borrowings, e.g. /pw/ (pueblo), /bw/ (bwana), /kv/ (kvetch), /sv/ (svelt), /sr/ (Sri Lanka), /ʃw/ (schwa), /ʃm/ (schmuck), /sθ/ (sthenics) and /sfr/ (sphragistics).
Later developments complicate the picture: whereas in Geoffrey Chaucer's time food, good, and blood all had the vowel [oː] and in William Shakespeare's time they all had the vowel [uː], in modern pronunciation good has shortened its vowel to [ʊ] and blood has shortened and lowered its vowel to [ʌ] in most accents. In Shakespeare's day (late 16th-early 17th century), many rhymes were possible that no longer hold today. For example, in his play The Taming of the Shrew, shrew rhymed with woe.[10]
æ-tensing is a phenomenon found in many varieties of American English by which the vowel /æ/ has a longer, higher, and usually diphthongal pronunciation in some environments, usually to something like [eə]. Some American accents, for example that of New York City or Philadelphia, make a marginal phonemic distinction between /æ/ and /eə/ although the two occur largely in mutually exclusive environments.
The father-bother merger is the pronunciation of the short O /ɒ/ in words such as "bother" identically to the broad A /ɑː/ of words such as "father", nearly universal in all of the United States and Canada save New England and the Maritime provinces; many American dictionaries use the same symbol for these vowels in pronunciation guides. 2ff7e9595c
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