The Vowels Of American English Page 9
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15if they pronounce cot and cat in the same way, people will be confused.
“Invisible /y/”
Learners sometimes have trouble knowing how to pronounce words spelled with the vowel
letters u, ue, eu, ew, or ui. In American English, these letters sometimes represent the sound
/uw/, as in the words suit (/suwt/) or true (/truw/), and sometimes /yuw/, as in the words
music (/myuwzɪk/), computer (/kəmpyuwtɚ/), and pew (/pyuw/). In some words spelled
with these letters, the vowel sound can even be pronounced either way, such as new
(/nuw/ or /nyuw/). What’s happening here?
We sometimes say that the /yuw/ pronunciation in words like this has an “invisible /y/”
because we hear a /y/ sound, but it’s not represented in spelling. We might think of /yuw/
as another diphthong, but with the glide at the beginning instead of the end.
In standard American English, invisible /y/ is not found after certain sounds: /r/, /ʤ/, and
/ʧ/, and it’s less often found after /t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /n/, and /l/, although some people do
pronounce it in words like new (/nuw/ or /nyuw/) or Tuesday (/tuwzdey/ or /tyuwzdey/).
In British English, the “invisible /y/” is much more common, with pronunciations like
/syuwt/ for suit or /tyuwb/ for tube.
The “invisible /y/” is never found in words spelled with oo or o, like food (fuwd), moon
(muwn), or move (muwv). This is true in both American and British English.
“Invisible /y/” can cause confusion if the learner’s language has words that are similar to
those in English, but without the “invisible /y/,” like German Musik (/muzik/, not
/myuzik/) or Spanish regular (/řegular/, not /řegyular/), especially in languages that are
also written with the Latin alphabet.
Vowel length
We often hear about “long vowels” and “short vowels.” When people call vowels “long” or
“short,” they do not mean that the sounds are identical except for length. We don’t want
students to think that the only difference between the vowel pairs /iy/ and /ɪ/, /ey/ and
/ɛ/, or /uw/ and /ᴜ/ is that one is longer in duration and the other is shorter. Many
students have learned this, but it just doesn’t work as a way of producing understandable
vowels.
In reality, the difference between the vowels in each of these pairs depends primarily on
two points: 1) tongue position and 2) tenseness or laxness. As we saw earlier, these factors
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