Applying Phonetics. Murray J. Munro

      4.2.6 english diphthongs

Diphthongs are produced by moving the tongue from one position to another. This means that they can be described in terms of a starting point and a target ending point. In North American English, the two possible endpoints are the high lax vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, and in all cases the tongue moves upward to reach the target. It may also move forward or backward at the same time. Table 4.6 illustrates the approximate patterns of movement. Notice that two of the diphthongs have a starting point that is not listed in our monophthong inventory: /a/, which occurs in /aɪ/ (buy) and /aʊ/ (cow). A third one, /ɔɪ/ (boy), starts at the location of /ɔ/, which as mentioned earlier does not occur as a monophthong for many speakers, but may still occur in diphthongs. The remaining two diphthongs are /eɪ/ (bait) and /oʊ/ (boat).

      For more information on dialectal differences in English, see Chapter 12.

4.3 speech sounds in other languages

      In Chapter 3, we saw that English takes advantage of only a small subset of the many consonants and vowels in the world's languages. Some of the sounds missing from our inventory are produced with airstream mechanisms that English speakers don't normally use, while others are produced at points of articulation not exploited by the English sound system.

      4.3.1 sounds using non‐english airstream mechanisms

As explained in Chapter 3, most speech sounds use a PULMONIC EGRESSIVE airstream, meaning that they are produced using air as it moves outward (egressive) from the lungs (pulmonic). The IPA Chart has a separate section giving the symbols for three types of non‐pulmonic consonants that were mentioned in Chapter 3. One type uses the glottalic mechanism—upward movement of the larynx—to push air outward and generate EJECTIVE sounds. Sounds of this type are common in the Indigenous languages of the Americas, but they also occur elsewhere around the world. Tlingit, spoken from Alaska south into British Columbia, is particularly remarkable in having a large inventory of ejectives (Maddieson, Smith, & Bessell, 2001). These include voiceless ejective stops at alveolar, velar, and UVULAR places of articulation: /t'/, /k'/, and /q'/. In addition, Tlingit has alveolar, velar, and uvular ejective fricatives, /s'/, /x'/, and /χ'/, and two ejective affricates, /ts'/ and /tʃ'/. In case you are not already impressed, it has other even more complex ejective articulations that we won't go into here!

      Chapter 3 also introduced the velaric production mechanism, which relies on two closures in the oral cavity that are released in such a way as to produce clicks . Though we don't use clicks for linguistic communication in English, you are probably familiar with some of them as non‐speech articulations, such as the click used to urge on a horse. Linguistically, this is a type of alveolar lateral click, represented by the symbol /ǁ/, and occurring as a true speech sound in Xhosa, a language of South Africa. Other places of articulation for clicks include bilabial /ʘ/, postalveolar /!/, and palato‐alveolar /ǂ/.

      You may recall that implosives entail a rapid downward movement of the larynx, which results in INGRESSIVE airflow. Most Vietnamese speakers use voiced implosives at three places of articulation: // bilabial, // alveolar, and /ɠ/ velar.

      4.3.2 non‐english places of articulation

      Many widely spoken languages use places of articulation that are not employed in English. Most of their consonants are produced farther back in the vocal tract than the majority of our sounds. Arabic, for example, has a PHARYNGEAL consonant, a voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/, and some speakers of French use a voiced uvular fricative, /ʁ/. Moving farther forward in the vocal tract, you already know that English has a palatal glide. However, unlike Welsh, it does not have a voiceless lateral fricative, /ɬ/, a rather odd‐sounding consonant for English listeners that is spelled “ll,” as in Llanelli, a town in Wales, and Llewelyn,