What Students Need to Know About the Phonemic Script

The phonemic script is a vital collection of special symbols to show the pronunciation of English words. This article gives tips on what to explain about them, including how to make that information manageable, useful, and memorable. Another article will follow on how to present and practise the symbols and their accompanying sounds.

Categorising the phonemic script

English sounds are often divided into vowels and consonants, and sometimes then into subcategories like semi-vowels, diphthongs and unvoiced consonants. To teach the symbols that represent those sounds, you can also classify the symbols in the categories:

• symbols which are the same as the English alphabet (/e/, /p/, /b/, /f/, /v/, /t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /k/, /g/, /m/, /n/, /h/, /w/)
• ones that are based on or close to the English alphabet, but need a bit more explanation (/ɪ/, /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /ʊ/, /æ/, /ɒ/, /i:/, /u:/, /ɑ:/, /ɔ:/, /ŋ/)
• ones that look like English letters but have different meanings (/j/)
• ones that are not in the alphabet at all (/ʃ/, /θ/, /ð/, /ʒ/, /ɜ:/, /ʌ., /ə/)
• combinations of symbols to represent two sounds making up a phoneme (/ʧ/ /ʤ/ /ɔɪ/ /eə/ /ɪə/ /əʊ/ /aʊ/ /ʊə/)

Explaining phonemic symbols which are similar to the alphabet

The first category above can be used to show pronunciations without any further explanation needed, such as writing /s/ above the first sound “cell”. This is also a good time to start using those two slashes (/s/, etc) to show that you are writing how to say it, not how to spell it.

The second group of symbols above are in approximate order of how easy they are to explain, understand and remember. /ɪ/ is simply the sound of the “i” in “bin”, “hit”, etc, but with its dot removed for the reason explained below.

Once students know what /ɪ/ stands for, it should be easy for them to put the sounds /e/ and /ɪ/ together to make the vowel in “weight” and the sounds /a/ and /ɪ/ together to make vowel in “fine”. The ease of making the sounds and recognising the component parts of these two phonemic symbols makes this a good introduction to diphthongs more generally.

/ʊ/ and /æ/ are also sufficiently close to their spellings in words like “put” and “bad” to not cause too much panic. /ɒ/ also appears fairly similar to its “o” spelling in “hot” (if they don’t notice that it is an upside-down /ɑ/).

/i:/, /u:/ and /ɑ:/ can be explained by telling students that the colon /:/ shows a long single sound like the long “oo” sound in “boot”. English short and long sounds also have different mouth positions, which explains why the short and long pairs have related but not identical symbols (/ɪ/ vs /i:/, /ʊ/ vs /u:/, and /æ/ vs /ɑ:/). The same can be seen with the long sound /ɔ:/, which is sufficiently similar in shape to the letter O and the similar short sound /ɒ/ to stick in most students’ minds.

The symbol /ŋ/ is less obvious, until you point out that the /ng/ sound in “sing” is very close to the /n/ in “sin”, and that the symbol for /ng/ looks a bit like “n” plus the tail of “g”.

Explaining phonemic symbols with different meanings to the alphabet

The symbol /y/ is used in the IPA to represent a vowel sound in other languages (perhaps because it looks like the similar sounds /ʊ/ and /u:/). For the first sound of “yellow” we therefore use the letter J in the way it is used in Germanic languages such as the Swedish greeting “hej” (as seen in Ikea stores). Although J is not used with a /j/ sound in English spelling, most students will be familiar with its use in at least one common non-English word such as “Jawohl”, “Jarlsberg”, “Johan”, or “Juventus”.

Explaining phonemic symbols which aren’t in the English alphabet

The sounds for each symbol not based on the English alphabet are:

• /ʃ/ is the symbol for the “sh” in “sheep”
• /ʒ/ is the fourth/ second to last consonant sound in “television”
• /θ/ is the “th” in “thin”
• /ð/ is the “th” in “that”
• /ə/ is the weak vowel at the end of “teacher”, and in the unstressed first and last vowels in “banana”
• /ɜ:/ is the vowel sound in “fir”/ “fur”
• /ʌ/ is the vowel sound in “cup”

/ʃ/ looks and sounds similar to /s/, and the slightly similar looking /ʒ/ is the voiced version of that sound, with the same mouth position.

Most of the other symbols can also be usefully paired. /ð/ is the voiced version of /θ/, and they share both being spelled “th”, being the strangest looking of all phonemic symbols, looking slightly similar to each other with the same kind of horizontal stroke that the “t” in “th” has.

/ə/ can be made more memorable by pointing out that it has the name “schwa”, making it is the only sound/ symbol with a common name. /ɜ:/ is the closest thing to a long version of /ə/.

/ʌ/ stands alone, but very conveniently its shape is pointing in the same direction as the word “up”, which includes that sound.

Explaining combinations of symbols to make phonemes

The sounds above can be paired together into:

• /ʤ/ for the “j” and “dg” in “judge”
• /ʧ/ for the “ch” in chips
• /ɔɪ/ for the “oy” in “boy”
• /eə/ for the “air” in “chair”
• /ɪə/ for the “ear” in “near”
• /əʊ/ for the “ow” in “blow” and O in “no”
• /aʊ/ for the “ow” in “now”
• /ʊə/ for the “ure” in “pure”

/ʤ/ looks fairly similar to its “dg” spelling in “bridge”. It is also a combination of the smooth /ʒ/ sound from the middle of “visual” and the more explosive /d/ sound. /ʧ/ is a combination of the unvoiced versions of both of those sounds, and so together makes the unvoiced version of /ʤ/ (as seen in the minimal pair “cheap” and “jeep”).

As with all diphthongs, the vowel sounds above can all be made by moving quickly from the one component part of phoneme to the other, meaning that the shape of the mouth changes during the vowel. For example, in /ɔɪ/ the mouth moves from the round /ɔ/ to the more closed and not so round /ɪ/. In contrast, vowels with /:/ keep the same sound and so the same mouth shape all the way through the phoneme.

See also

• Phonemic Chart
• Interactive Phonemic Chart