The Vowels Of American English Page 4
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15Vowels that are near each other in the vowel quadrant are pronounced with tongue
positions that are close to each other and their sounds are similar, so learners are more
likely to confuse them than pairs that are farther apart in the vowel quadrant. For example,
learners often confuse sheep (/iy/) and ship (/ɪ/), whose vowels are in adjacent boxes, but
they seldom confuse sheep and shop (/ɑ/), which are farther apart.
We can also use sagittal section diagrams, or “Sammy” diagrams, to show tongue
positions for vowels. The diagrams at the end of this section show tongue positions for the
vowels of English.
Lip rounding
Vowel sounds are also affected by the shape of the lips—whether they’re very rounded, just
a little rounded, relaxed, or stretched a bit wide.
In English, the back vowels, /uw/, /ᴜ/, /ow/, and /ɔ/, are pronounced with varying
degrees of lip rounding, and /r/ also has a little lip rounding, whether it’s used as a
consonant (/r/) or a vowel (/ɚ/). The front and central vowels—/iy/, /ɪ/, /ey/, /ɛ/, /æ/,
/ʌ/, /ə/, and /ɑ/—are unrounded. For the vowels /iy/ and /ɪ/, the lips may be spread or
stretched a bit wide, and some textbooks even tell students to “smile” when they say the
vowels in heat or hit. The table on the next page shows typical lip positions for American
English vowels.
In reality, however, the lip positions that native speakers use for vowel sounds vary quite a
bit. Some people don’t move their lips much, and others move their lips much more. Their
lip positions may not look just like those in the chart, but they can still produce perfectly
normal vowel sounds. Still, knowing and imitating these “standard” lip positions can help
students to pronounce vowel sounds more understandably.
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