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A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. [1] Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant.
The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like ch , sh , th , and ng are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled th in "this" is a different consonant from the th sound in "thin".
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (the first vowel in father) is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. [i] (the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.
Mid central vowel release ̽: Mid-centralized ̝ ˔ Raised ᶿ Voiceless dental fricative release ̩ ̍: Syllabic ̞ ˕ Lowered ˣ: Voiceless velar fricative release ̯ ̑: Non-syllabic ̘ ꭪ Advanced tongue root ʼ: Ejective ˞ Rhoticity ̙ ꭫ Retracted tongue root ͡ ͜ Affricate or double articulation
The following are the non-pulmonic consonants.They are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).